Religion & Spirituality
Last time we looked at the idea of the Kingdom of God as being a country or an institution to which people can belong. In this episode we will consider the Kingdom of God as heaven or the afterlife. When we die, only the good people get into the kingdom and will spend eternal life there. The kingdom as being heaven in the afterlife is the opposite, even a rejection, of the kingdom as an earthly institution. People who take this approach often point to the politics and corruption of earthly institutions, saying that any human organization eventually falls into these problems. How could the true kingdom suffer such things? So the kingdom must be found only in the afterlife, not in earthly life. Each of these two approaches has a very different understadning of salvation, this earthly life and God's relation to this world. We explore the differences between these two understandings of the kingdom. Is there some middle position between these two views? We will look at that in the next episode. To see more about books I have written on this and other topics, go to craigowen.net