Years ago, three young Ohio boys fell through the ice on the Sandusky River and drowned. What a terrible, terrible tragedy. Two of the boys were brothers.
The pastor of the church where their funeral was held said the following: (link no longer active)
A minister has told mourners that three Ohio boys who fell through ice and died together in a river are now playing together in heaven.
This statement is restated many different ways during countless Christian funerals:
- Granny is running around Heaven now with no pain!
- Gramps is in Heaven now and doesn’t need a wheelchair to get around anymore.
- Momma is in Heaven, where she has no more pain, sickness, disease, or suffering.
Here’s the problem . . .
Statements such as these are not true.
Historic, orthodox Christian doctrine teaches that when people die, they go to the grave. They are DEAD. The body remains in the grave until the resurrection. At the resurrection of the just and unjust, those who have died will receive new bodies (1 Corinthians 15).
So why is it that preachers lie about the present location of the dead? Why did I, as an Evangelical pastor, lie to numerous grieving families?
Sentimentality.
Families are grieving. They have lost a loved one. They want to believe there is a divine purpose, and they want to believe that life continues beyond the grave.
So preachers concoct grand stories about Heaven and the immediate transport of the dead from earth to the sweet-by-and-by. Never mind the fact that the Bible does not say this.
Belief in the afterlife requires faith. No one has ever come back from the dead to tell us what lies beyond the grave (if anything). Anyone who says he has is a liar.
Even Jesus himself didn’t talk about the afterlife after his resurrection from the dead. His disciples did, the apostles did, but not Jesus. He told his disciples that wherever he was, they too would be someday. He never mentioned one time any of the things commonly heard in Christian funeral sermons.
Even the notion of spending eternity in Heaven is not taught in the Bible. Search all you might, it is not there.
What IS taught in the Bible is that followers of Jesus Christ will live forever in God’s eternal kingdom (on a new earth). On this point, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are probably closer in belief to what the Bible actually teaches than many Evangelical Christians.
The same could be said about Hell. Those who are not followers of Jesus will NOT spend eternity in Hell. The Bible doesn’t teach that. The Bible DOES teach, however, that unbelievers will spend eternity in the Lake of Fire (Revelation 20:14).
Sentimentality allows preachers, who are supposed to be guardians of Christian doctrine, to ignore what the Bible teaches in favor of telling stories to comfort grieving families.
I understand WHY they do it, but let me be clear: Preacher, if you can’t tell the truth when it really matters the most, how can you expect people to believe anything you say? If sentimentality allows you to ignore what the Bible teaches about Heaven (and Hell), how do we know that you are telling the truth any other time? Not telling the truth in hard circumstances results in a loss of credibility.
As an atheist, I have serious reservations about the notion of an afterlife. At this point in life, I lack the requisite faith necessary to believe that there’s life after death. I am of the opinion that each of us had best get to living this present life because it is the only one we have. That said, if you are a Christian, you are bound by what the Bible teaches. As a preacher, you are obligated to tell the truth. In fact, you owe it to your congregants to tell them the truth, even when it is hard to do so.
Of course, remove sentimentality from the equation and the Christian gospel and the promise of eternal life lose their luster. Telling grieving family members that Grandma — who attended church for 70 years and gave vast sums of money to the church — is lying in a grave, rotting until Jesus resurrects her a day, a hundred years, or twenty millennia from now doesn’t have as much appeal as Grandma is in Heaven right now, in perfect health, praising Jesus day after day. She can’t wait for you to die and join her in Heaven, so the family circle will be unbroken.
Evangelicalism preaches a deferred payout. Yes, Jesus saves sinners, but the Christian life is no picnic. Life is filled with pain, heartache, and suffering. Preachers know they can’t fool their congregants about their lives. The evidence is clear: life is hard, and then you die. So, they make promises of a blissful, pain-free afterlife. The payout is immediate. Draw your last breath on earth, and draw your next breath in Heaven (or Hell). Preachers have no evidence for these promises, so they tell flowery, sentimental lies, hoping people will buy what they sell. They aim to get sinners to close the eternal life deal without reading the fine print. The fine print — which is found in the Bible — tells the purchaser that all promised rewards happen sometime in the distant future. Until then, your worm-eaten, rotting corpse will remain in the grave. Evangelical preachers have been making eternal life promises for centuries. These preachers come and go, live and die, and much like those to whom they promised eternal life, they lie decomposing in their graves. There they shall remain until Jesus returns to earth and resurrects them from their graves. Given the fact that Jesus promised to return in the first century, I think we can safely conclude that he, too, is lying in a grave, never to arise again from the dead.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I remember attending the service for the wife if a colleague, who was an active Pentecostal, and virtually the first thing the preacher said was that “she’s in heaven now, married to Jesus” – and this statement was accepted by her grieving husband.
Some other religions include versions of the afterlife that, in some cases, resemble the Heaven (or Hell) of clergy members’ tales. I wonder whether those ideas, which aren’t in the Bible, were co-opted by early Christianity in order to appeal to “pagans.”
I grew up Catholic. That church has another layer of afterlife—purgatory—that was not part of the cosmology of the Evangelical church to which I later belonged.
Go to any Christian funeral and you’re bound to hear people say they know the deceased is looking down on them from heaven. It’s all such bullshit which is of course never challenged by anybody. Even if you believe in heaven how is your existence blissful when you are always looking down at the pain and suffering of your loved ones, helpless to do anything?
Thank you again Bruce, and hope you may be having a “decent” day with your health.
Thank you for this piece. Once again you expose the hypocrisy of faith based religons. I find the Western version (King James Edition) and all subsequent modifications, and all the subsequent Hell Fire and Brimestone interpretations, courtesy of “John” secluded on his Island, (probably stewing up some really good mushrooms when he wrote his bizarre fable) as being what it is.
A THREAT to all those that oppose the Cult. A SCARE TACTIC to intimidate the shit out of people.
I hope you will consider offering your readers a more in depth piece on revelation and all that entails.
Myself I have used Bart Ehrman as a guide to negotiate this insane minefield of a topic / the book of Revelation.
I’m a bit off topic, and will get back on now. Yes, I have gone to church services for the deceased (quite a cottage industry for the church btw, sending the dead to Elysuim). And yes, how many times have all of us heard “They are with Jesus now”.
Personally speaking, I have chosen the “Lake of Fire” upon death. But let me be specific – My dead body will go through a cremation furnace. Having come from a family with a Grandfather and Uncles that ran three funeral homes, it will indeed be a “Cold Day in Hell” before they put my dead body in a coffin.
I have also given instruction that no ‘Shaman” preside, speak or have anything to do with my ashes, or send off.
My instructions are to use my modest death ins. to have a private get togther, enjoy a good meal and spirits, and under no circumstances have ANYTHING religous related, to do with it.
Actually, I find more comfort in just ending than in some sort of afterlife. Perhaps I would feel differently had I not grown up in a section of Christianity in which admitting one is a sinner, repenting for being a sinner, praying to the deity admitting sin, asking forgiveness, accepting a story of the deity becoming human, dying for our sins, resurrecting, and offering salvation from eternal conscious torment if one BELIEVES and ACCEPTS. It was never clear if one was going through the proper process – there were warnings that you WILL KNOW FOR SURE, that DOUBT meant you weren’t saved, and that you would BECOME NEW. Like, heck if I could point to enough evidence to KNOW WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT (as the preachers said) that I was saved. I thougoughly, methodically, and analytically went through the process in my head several times, just to cover all bases. But that kind of belief system isn’t conducive to looking forward to an afterlife that could end in eternal conscious torment with no chance of reversal. Not comforting!
I recently read a physician’s writings about his hobby documenting near death experiences which, (if it can be believed), tend to have consistent similarities. Inquiries into this phenomena involve comparing the (reported) near death experiences with whatever religion was practiced by the subject. Did they see Jesus or Buddha, etc? I’d hesitate to say they didn’t see what they report. If the brain is an electrical device and if thousands of thousands of transistors can fit onto a chip the size of my pinky fingernail, then there’s likely lots more going on inside the brain than we understand, at least for now. Given these experience are real,, it’s not evidence of afterlife. If these experiences could be verified some way, they would be evidence only that the person had perceptions, perhaps hallucinations, and not evidence for the existence of anything perceived.
I think the idea that the spirits of ancestors are still with us is a very old one. How people explain this, and explained it in the past, varies by culture and background. Having them hanging with Jesus in Heaven is just the modern Christian version (and may have been part of folk Christianity all along).
My devoutly Christian mom-in-law, raised in an Evangelical tradition, insists on having experienced the presence of a beloved sibling at their deaths not once, but twice. The timing of these experiences came hours before she learned that those sibs had actually died. I, an atheist/humanist/scientist will not try to dispute those experiences, even though they might only be constructed memories. Our brains are fiercely complicated beasts, that work in some unexplained ways. Meanwhile, it can be comforting to think of our beloved dead as not being so, and also not suffering.
As regards the corpse rotting in the grave, I get the visceral revulsion, but we are part of the biomass of this very complicated, living planet. Our bodies, at least, don’t escape that upon our deaths, and decay is a very essential part of the process of recycling our organic components. Thinking of it as “pushing up daisies” is actually a positive way of doing so. I want my body cremated and the ashes scattered on private wildland, but I admit that after I’m dead, I won’t care. While I’m alive, I intend to appreciate the interconnectedness of living things.
I dunno.
I suspect, without knowing, that God has a special love for those who lie because of love.
Just as I suspect, without knowing, that God respects the integrity of those who refuse to submit their non-belief to wishful thinking or fear of divine retribution.
Even before becoming a Christian, I had to get around the dilemma you quite rightly point out.
Years ago, a very close and beloved teenage family member, a Christian, lost a dear friend to a brutal, sadistic murder.
I did not dwell on my own skepticism. We talked only of her strong beliefs.
As she wept, I asked her what she anticipated after the resurrection.
What did would she want to say to her friend?
What did she think her friend would tell her of fear, her death, and her later experience?
The tears dried as we talked.
She seemed to take comfort in her own belief in an eventual rising from the dead.
I hoped so.
After giving it some thought, I can’t remember a single funeral that I’ve attended where the pastor declared that the dearly departed were presently writhing in fire for all eternity. Sentimentality could be the reason as afore mentioned. Or maybe these particular pastors had enough presence of mind to understand that a funeral is not the best time to talk about eternal conscious torment to grieving survivors.
Good thing the preacher didn’t address Heaven and Hell at my Father’s funeral. That could have been a roast. If Hell were real, my Father would have had a lot of explaining to do. Who knows, maybe his suffering during his life was mitigation for the suffering he inflicted on others. Maybe the abuse heaped on him by his Father (and probably by that Priest he despised) earned him probation with credit for punishment received and/or time served. Ah yes, if it weren’t all just imaginary, huh? My Father didn’t believe in life after death. His experience with religion erased any credibility religious ideas might have had with him.