Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Oct 06, 2025 7:03 pm
This is interesting, as a starting point for those who bother to think on these levels or who are preoccupied with such concerns:
Religion is man's attempt to earn heaven.
If we do suppose that the soul has eternal existence, we might suppose that in the term of one life one could (to use your phrase) “earn heaven”.
And hence, things like the Hindu and Buddhist element of "reincarnation." Even they have a realistic sense that such a task cannot possibly be achieved in one lifetime...or even in an indefinite number. What they don't realize, however, is that it's actually impossible, no matter how many cycles of the wheel of samsara one endures, because salvation has never been about us making ourselves good.
I would say that “life offers to a man the possibility of becoming human”.
I've always found the idea that we can "become human" rather ridiculous, especially for people who believe humans are just part of the natural world. After all, lions don't need to "become lion," and hyenas don't need to "become hyenas," anymore than apes, fish or paramecia need to "become" themselves. According to nature, we already are what we are; and to mistake anything we are for something not-human would be a category error in logic, and an absurdity in fact.
But there is this much truth behind it: that unlike lions and hyenas, human beings are not what they
should be. Lions and hyenas know no "should." They just do whatever they do. But mankind knows they should be better, and should be other than the fallen state in which they find themselves, and so they cannot help but aspire to more. But how to become more than you are...that's the problem.
Hence, salvation. We need to be made, by God, to be far more than we now know ourselves to be. We experience our own insufficiency and fallenness every day; and it takes a shot of harsh realism and true self-knowledge for us to admit to ourselves that we're really never going to have the personal resources to make ourselves from what we are to what we
should be. We need to reach the "should," but cannot ever reach it apart from God.
I mean if I were to try to visualize what the person Jesus Christ would say to anyone. “Earn heaven” is more a child’s concept.
He actually called it more a
concept for Pharisees. As for children, they're often much more willing to trust than those who regard themselves as sophisticated. Hence the comments on camels and eyes-of-needles, so to speak: it's those who think they're too good to bow to God who never find their way at all.
But we all make our choices. They make theirs. Don't make it yours.
