The final Cafe Online – we discuss heaven and hell with Ali Macintosh – the children’s leader at St Thomas’s. Is the world coming to an end? How do we teach children about these heavy subjects? What should we teach them? These are vital and essential subjects.
Here are a couple of the quotes we used:
‘Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought
I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?What’s happened to the world?’
‘A great Shadow has departed,’ said Gandalf, and then he
laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in
a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to
Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of
merriment, for days upon days without count
Lord of the Rings
No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave … all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.
Bertrand Russell
He shall come from heaven with glory, accompanied by His angelic host, when also He shall raise the bodies of all men who have lived, and shall clothe those of the worthy
with immortality, and shall send those of the wicked, endued with eternal sensibility, into everlasting fire with the wicked devils.
Justin Martyr
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the
angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly
glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats … Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.
Jesus Christ (Matt. 25:31-32, 46)
‘There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.’
C S Lewis
Cafe Online 8 – Jesus’s Church
A.S.K 19 – The Certainty of Heaven – How Can I Know I Will Go There?