1. Kessie says:

    Giving people permission to fantasize about Heaven and the next world is like giving them permission to use their imaginations. It’s amazing how people refuse to use their imaginations for fear of being thought heretical.
     
    I see this a lot in the dinosaur-artist circles. Nobody dares dream fantastic things about dinosaurs and the pre-flood world because It’s Not Allowed by the Authorities.  People like Bob Bakker, who dare say that maybe dinosaurs lived in different habitats, and maybe certain kinds hunted in packs, are shunned and looked at askance by their colleagues.
     
    Christians do the same thing, sadly. What, you’re writing a book with aliens in it? There are no aliens in the Bible! You’re either fallen away, worldly, or deceived by Satan.
     
    Nevermind that it’s FICTION.

  2. Hallo, Kessie! Glad you enjoyed the interview. I might highly recommend, also, that you check out Alcorn’s nonfiction book Heaven, which is mostly about the New Earth and what Scripture does say about it.

    So In a sense, I suggest that we don’t even need to excuse “fantasizing” about the New Earth because what Scripture already tells us about it — but which we bypass in favor of “heavenly” notions — is already fantastic.

    Giving people permission to fantasize about Heaven and the next world is like giving them permission to use their imaginations. It’s amazing how people refuse to use their imaginations for fear of being thought heretical.

    I think that this results because people have already adopted what Alcorn calls “Christoplatonic” ideas about what Christians’ eternal home will be like. They assume that things like eating, drinking, not knowing things, and even the passage of time and physical matter itself, are somehow evil. But they weren’t evil in the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve sinned, and they aren’t evil now.

    Scripture is already clear enough — before we even get to the fantasizing and imagination parts! — that we don’t need to think of the After-world as a fuzzy, “spiritoid” type place. I even blanche when Christians uncertainly venture, Maybe we’ll be able to go to other planets, as if they aren’t quite sure whether they’re going too far. I would not object to this first by saying, “You need to set your imagination free!”, although that is also certainly true. I would first ask, “Do you somehow suspect Heaven — that is, the New Earth — will be too ‘spiritual’ for things like space exploration or journeying to other planets for the glory of our King? Is that really what the Bible says?”

    I see this a lot in the dinosaur-artist circles. Nobody dares dream fantastic things about dinosaurs and the pre-flood world because It’s Not Allowed by the Authorities.

    People like Bob Bakker, who dare say that maybe dinosaurs lived in different habitats, and maybe certain kinds hunted in packs, are shunned and looked at askance by their colleagues.

    That is a circle about which I’m not very familiar. I’d be interested to hear more on this.

    By the way, I can recommend Douglas Hirt, author of The Cradleland Chronicles, as one example of someone who attempted Biblical fidelity while also being free to explore with imagination what the pre-Flood, intelligent world could’ve been like.

    Christians do the same thing, sadly. What, you’re writing a book with aliens in it? There are no aliens in the Bible! You’re either fallen away, worldly, or deceived by Satan.
     
    Nevermind that it’s FICTION.

    Rebecca Miller has done some great work here, recently, about how fiction should be based on truth. I suggest it should be based on the most important truths. I would indeed call someone un-Biblical who wrote a novel with a Godlike character, who acted and spoke like the Biblical God, but who needed to be overthrown by humans. However, suggesting an alternate universe in which aliens did exist and either the Biblical God is simply “ignored,” or else decided to act differently in that way, in this imaginary world, but still maintain His attributes per Scripture’s unbreakable truths — that’s different!

    I also appreciate, in Heaven, Alcorn suggests that God may create new creatures, even on other planets, in the redeemed New-Earth universe. Scripture doesn’t say He will, but we do know about His character: He is a Creator. And we can ask: would He stop creating?

What do you think?