More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 12, 2018 - January 22, 2019
Death is not the way it is supposed to be.
As one writer puts it, “The fact of death is the great human repression, the universal ‘complex.’
Epicurus and others spoke of permanent nonconsciousness as nothing to fear, but indeed it is. It means the end of love.
Above all, the things that make life meaningful are love relationships. Death removes them
one more reason that we fear death.
The death-is-natural approach assumes that after death there is nothing—no existence or consciousness. But that cannot be proven, and to be certain of it requires a leap of faith.
“What men fear,” wrote Epicurus, “is not the fact that death is annihilati...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
T. S. Eliot to me: “Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death, / We fear, we fear.”
He answered that he had no idea, but he couldn’t understand how his secular friends could be so completely sure that there was simple nonexistence.
“They mock people for betting their lives on the existence of God by sheer faith, but then they bet the ranch that afterwards there will be nothing, no judgment, nada. How can they be sure of that?”
if you are driving toward death without the ability to see what is coming, it will also make you afraid.
what is the Christian hope, which not only explains why we feel death is so unnatural but also gives us the ability to face and even triumph over it?
it is significant that he could be angry at death without being angry at himself.
Death was not part of God’s original design.
through death he broke its power, in order to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14–15).
as our “champion.” “[God] made the champion of their salvation
just as a creditor’s power over us is broken when someone pays our debt fully, so death’s claim and power over us was broken when Jesus died in our place, paying our penalty.
That is why Jesus’s death destroys the power of death.
Hamlet was wrong. There is one traveler who has returned from death, the undiscovered country.
All death can now do to Christians is to make their lives infinitely better.
popular misunderstandings about the character of Christian hope.
several ways in which the Christian understanding is distinct, even unique.
because only persons can love.
Love between persons is the heart and core of the Christian hope, and this is the reason that heaven is not a bribe.
an understanding of heaven as consumer paradise, where all the pleasures and comforts you sought to buy on earth are now free for the asking.
Christian hope not to be in abstractions such as radiance and immortality but in relationship.
Imagine a water pipe that is almost completely clogged with clay and mud, so that only a tiny amount of polluted water comes through. That is what all human experience of love is like.
But in heaven love flows unspeakably more fully and cleanly.
But in heaven all love will be “answerable” and perfectly mutual.
Our tongues and voices will utter our love in perfect expression,
we don’t love God or others for their own sakes, to serve them and their joy. Rather we love others for our sake, to serve us,
But in heaven “love is a pure flame” where all will “love God for his own sake, and each other for God’s sake . . . [for] the image of God that is upon them.
The happier we are, the happier we will make each other. And that means that in heaven our joy and glory will multiply exponentially forever, “with inconceivable ardor of heart.”61
we will never again fear separation from those we love. Disrupted love, the greatest sadness that earthly life contains, will be gone forever.
There is nothing more transforming than when someone makes a powerful declaration and expression of love toward us.
every person in heaven will become “a note in a concert of music which sweetly harmonizes with every other note . . . and so all helping one another to their utmost to express their love and . . . to pour back love into the fountain of love, whence they are supplied and filled with love and with glory. And thus they will live and thus reign in love, and in that godlike joy which is the blessed fruit of it, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath ever entered into the heart of any in this world to conceive” (1 Corinthians 2:9).64
the risen Christ was both the same and yet different, so that his disciples did not at first recognize him yet did so eventually
An analogy would be knowing a ten-year-old girl and then not meeting her again until she was a beautiful, intelligent woman of twenty-five. You would not likely recognize her at first, but it would become clear that it was still her. Our future, glorified selves will be continuous with who we are now, but the growth into wisdom, goodness, and power will be infinitely greater.
the yearning that Christianity fulfills “is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world. . . . It is not for some other world but for this world.”66
unique aspects of the Christian hope.
renew this material world, so that evil, suffering, aging, disease, poverty, injustice, and pain are removed forever
not merely look forward to the redemption of their souls but also of their bodies
No other religion even claims to hold out hope for the salvation of this world along with our souls and bodies.67
look toward the restoration of the life we wanted but never had.
You will not simply get your life back, but you will get the life you always longed for
You will not miss out on anything, because this is not just a consolation but a restoration.
to love this world that much, to want to see it as all that it was created to be, is not selfish.
we believe in the Resurrection as a historical fact, then real justice will be done on the earth someday. All wrongs will be made right.
the Resurrection
made an opening in the barrier between the ide...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
