Passing through Nature into Eternity - A Review of Chapter Five of Love Wins

All that lives must die
passing through nature into eternity.
Hamlet Act I Scene ii

A few days ago my children and I had a discussion about the differences between the “Disneyfied”  version and the original versions of various fairy tales.  “The original stories,” I told them “are all about death.  All of them.  Cinderella.  Goldilocks. Sleeping  Beauty.  Beauty and the Beast.  They’re all death.”

I may have been exaggerating slightly for comedic effect, but there is a smidge of truth there.  It’s all about death.  And it’s all about life. It’s all about resurrection. These themes are Universal.  They are everywhere.  .  The universe, it seems, is designed to show us this progression from life through death to life. Rob Bell notes this in his newest book, Love Wins

This death-and-life mystery, this mechanism, this process is built into the very fabric of creation.  The cells in our bodies are dying at a rate of millions a second, only to be replaced at a similar rate of millions a second.  Our skin is constantly flaking off and our body is continually replacing the skin cells with new ones; we have entirely new skin every week or so. (Love Wins pg. 131).

The atoms and molecules that form our body were once part of stars.  We live because a star burned out. We live because something has died. 

Hamlet – A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king,
            and a cat of the fish that hat fed of that worm.

Claudius – What doest you mean by this?

Hamlet – Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
            progress through the guts of a beggar.

Hamlet Act IV Scene iii

We live because something has died.  The fruits and vegetables we eat to keep us alive and healthy once lived themselves.  The meat we eat once lived.  But now we live because of it.

It’s all about death.  It’s all about life.  It’s all about resurrection.

Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.
C.S. Lewis – The Weight of Glory

A seed has to be buried in the ground – it has to die – before it can grow.

And when it comes to Christianity it’s about Dying to Live.  Bell writes about some of the ways that this is understood in the bible – and there are several different and overlapping ways of understanding the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

“Motivation of fear, motivation of love
one of these is hell, but it gets the job done”

Dighayzoos

Some are better than others, but no one metaphor can fully encapsulate the cosmic scope of that resurrection life.  And those descriptions that make Christianity merely an eternal fire-insurance policy are especially inadequate.  There is much, much, so much more to it than the avoidance of hell.