We go to Renee in Omaha, Nebraska, listening on Spirit Catholic Radio 102.7.
Rene, you're on with Jimmy Akin. Thank you. Thank you so much for telling us about
halos, that was a beautiful question. And thank you for donating your services to
God. They are amazing, Jimmy. My question is about eternal life. Uh-huh? I
understand if you're a human being, baptized or otherwise, born or unborn, we
have been given a gift of eternal life by God. Well okay now, wait--
baptized or--okay, it depends on what you mean by eternal life, but I think I know
where you're going so go ahead. That you spend eternity somewhere. Right.
That when you die, you don't just--that's it. Correct. Okay. So we were reading the
sixth chapter of John and going through the bread of life discourse, and Jesus was
saying, "unless you eat my body and blood..." I forget the exact quote, I'm Catholic
and we don't remember that very well; but He says "Unless you eat my body and
drink my blood, you will not have life in you, and if you, do I will give you
eternal life." But I thought we already had eternal life, just because we're people.
And so here we need to distinguish between different kinds of life. On the one hand,
there's physical, or biological life, which is what we have right now while
we're alive. But then there's what you might call "existential life," where it's
just the fact you continue to exist even if you're not physically or biologically
alive. So for example, in, when Jesus is being confronted by the Sadducees in
Matthew 22, the Sadducees, you know, didn't believe that there was an afterlife, and
Jesus tells them, "Well, you don't know the the scriptures because God is described
both as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and He's not the God of the dead but of the living, and so there's some sense,
even though Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all lived, you know, 2,000 years earlier, and
therefore they're physically dead, they're not physically alive, they're
still alive in some sense, so they clearly continue to exist. And you could
call that "existential life." Then--and that would also be had by people who who are
lost, who don't go to Heaven; they would continue to exist, but it's just kind of
an existential life. Then, there's what-- there's spiritual life, which is union
with God. And that, if it continues beyond death, leads to being gloriously united
with God in Heaven. It may, you may require a little clean-up in Purgatory
first, but if you're spiritually united with God when you die--when you leave
physical life--then you're guaranteed that eternal spiritual life with God. So
we have three different kinds of life on the table: one is mere existence, one is
biological life or physical life or embodied life, and another is spiritual
life. And usually, when scripture talks about eternal life, it is using "eternal
life" to mean eternal life with God, that spiritual life that we talked about. And
so if you take the term "eternal life" in that sense, as meaning eternal life with
God, then it wouldn't apply to people who are lost, who turn their backs on God,
although they will continue to have what I just named "existential life," they'll
continue to exist.