Reflections on the Schema

Reflections on the Schema

of interpretations

about God, the world, mankind, and religion

Sixth Part

11.2. The Bible and immortality

The doctrine of immortality belongs more to the New Testament than to the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, human life is a temporary life. Man was created for this world: Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on earth (Genesis 1.28). This is the human destiny and, after that, death, and the body goes to the grave, sometimes the Sheol. The New Testament has a different view: there is everlasting life.

Of course the Bible doesn't talk about a spark of the divine using these words, but it could use similar ones; some sayings of the New Testament could be interpreted that way. When John says that we shall be like God, (1 John 3.1), we might wonder which is, and where is, the root of this similarity with God; the spark is a possibility.

The Vatican is opposed to "the spark" in New Age writings, but New Age inclines also toward an impersonal God, which makes its position farther from Christian teachings. What about the spark under a personal interpretation of God?

In order to be relevant the sayings of the Bible shouldn't be "dead" sayings, written in stone, but living ones; they must be actualized and reinterpreted in every generation. The sayings of the Bible might be a starting point, not a dead end. Hagiographists (the writers of the Bible) didn't have to use the word spark in order to imply this idea.

Let's look at a few sayings of the Bible which might contain, implicitly, the image of a divine spark in human beings.

11.2.1. Genesis, we were created in the image of God

Genesis says that man was created in the image of God: Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. So God created man in his own image (Genesis 1.26, 27). According to this, man is a carrier of the image of God.

11.2.2. Peter, we are partakers in the divine nature

Peter says that God has given us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1.4). Peter is talking here about the greatest and most precious gift God could give us: sharing his divine nature.

11.2.3. John, the preacher of eternal life

The gospel and letters of John are filled with the clearest sayings regarding the gift of grace, the divine spark or eternal life, as he calls it. If you are familiar with John, we don't need to quote him many times here.

One way of saying it is when he calls men sons of God. Children have the same nature of the father. We are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is (1 John 3.2). According to this, we have the same nature of God, and we'll be, forever, like him. This is more than a spark, it seems to me.