At one point in The Good Place, Eleanor and the gang find themselves in the Medium Place. Now if we think of the Bad Place as more-or-less hell and the Good Place as more-or-less heaven, then the Medium Place is whatever lies in between. It’s neither good nor bad—it just kind of is, it just exists.  And while in The Good Place the Medium Place is created for one, precisely down-the-middle person who deserved neither the Good Place nor the Bad Place, there are other versions of the Medium Place that you may have heard about.

If you have a Catholic background, for example, you’re probably familiar with the idea of purgatory. Or maybe you’ve heard that not everyone ends up in heaven or hell and that some souls end up in limbo. Or what about ideas that our existence is more than just this life and that after we die, we’re reincarnated again as someone (or something else)? These are all Medium Place ideas—concepts about the afterlife that don’t involve the Good Place or the Bad Place but are reasonably popular and worth thinking about.

So, what should we think about ideas like purgatory, limbo, and reincarnation? Are they good ideas? Is there evidence that they’re true? Do they fit within the story of Jesus? And can those following Jesus believe any of these ideas about the afterlife?  It’s addressing questions like these that make a quick stop in the Medium Place today worth our time as we continue our little series here at Conciliar Post, which I’ve dubbed The Good Place.

The past few posts, we’ve been exploring ideas about heaven, hell, and the afterlife.  So far, we’ve seen that human existence doesn’t end with death—there’s an afterlife we need to be prepared for. We’ve learned that the Bad Place—what we usually call hell—is real and that we want to avoid going there. And last post, we saw that there are three Christian views about the Bad Place: traditionalism, conditionalism, and restorationism, each of which interpret Scripture as saying different things about the purpose and length of the Bad Place.  The next few weeks we’ll look at the Good Place. But before we get there, today, we’re exploring some of the ideas that we may have heard about the Medium Place.

Guardrail #1: Don’t Make Speculative Theology Central

And as we look at these ideas, I want to foreground a couple of guardrails for thinking about these Medium Place ideas, a couple of things to keep in mind as we think about the afterlife in general, and Medium Place ideas in particular.

Our first guardrail is that we shouldn’t make speculative theology the center of what you believe. Speculative theology is a term that nerds like me use to describe a belief that’s possibly correct but is neither central to faith nor something that’s traditionally been associated with following Jesus. For example, an essential Christian idea about the afterlife is that there is an afterlife, there’s existence after death. A traditional Christian idea about the afterlife is that those who reject God in this life will be separated from Him in the next. And a speculative idea about the afterlife would be that everyone gets their own mansion in the afterlife. It’s not that “mansions in heaven” is a wrong idea, per se, it’s just that it’s speculative—there’s no clear evidence for it in Scripture.

Recognizing speculative theology as speculative is particularly important when we remember that any sort of conversation about our future in the afterlife is going to be murky. Proverbs 27.1 tells us that we should not presume to know what will happen in the future since we can’t even tell what tomorrow will bring. And experientially, that’s absolutely true. Whether we’re trying to predict the stock market, guessing who’s going to win the Super Bowl, or figuring out what the afterlife is going to be like, complexity and human fallibility are always likely to cause problems. No one actually knows what the afterlife is going to look like except God.  In the words of theologian N.T. Wright, “All language about the future… is simply a set of signposts pointing into a fog.” (xiii) This doesn’t mean that we can’t know anything about the afterlife or that any guess is as good the rest. But this should remind us to proceed with humble caution. So be wary of making speculative ideas about the afterlife central to your faith in Jesus.

Guardrail #2: Be Wary of Problematic Theology

Second, don’t make problematic theology the heart of what you believe. Problematic ideas are concepts that, while not strictly wrong, cause all kinds of difficulties for your understanding of God, the world, or humans. In Philippians 4.8, Paul speaks to this by saying that, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. That is, we don’t have free reign to just believe whatever as we follow Jesus—there are good, true, and beautiful concepts that should be the focus of our thinking.

Helpful here is what theologians have talked about for centuries as the spectrum of ideas between orthodoxy and heresy. An orthodox idea is something that is in accordance with true Christian faith and practice, like belief in the resurrection of the death and life everlasting. Next there are acceptable ideas, beliefs that are widely affirmed, such as the idea that once people die, they’re immediately in heaven or hell. In the middle, we’ve got neutral concepts, ideas for which there is no real evidence one way or another, such as an idea that someone from one of our small groups here at Arise had that maybe some of what the Bible says about judgment day and end is part of the personal experience of the afterlife. That’s intriguing, but I don’t know what to make of it, so I consider it neutral.  So far, so good—if we’re going to follow Paul’s call to think about what is true, noble, and right, it’s the orthodox, acceptable, and neutral ideas where we should be spending most of our time.

But then we come to problematic ideas, ideas which are inconsistent with biblical and traditional Christian faith.  For example, any view where everyone who is outside of your particular church will be damned to hell—well, that’s inconsistent with Scripture, but not technically heretical. But you should still stay away from that.  And finally, there are heretical ideas. Heresy isn’t just any time that someone disagrees with you on a spiritual or theological issue—it’s actual when someone improperly understands God in way that brings their relationship with God into question. For example, thinking that Satan rules the Good Place and that Jesus rules the Bad Place would be confusing, wrong, and impact your standing before God.

So, you need to avoid problematic and heretical ideas when it comes to your understanding of the afterlife. Don’t think about heaven and hell through some obscure idea that you heard once.  Years ago, I had someone in one of the classes I was teaching who was really upset about the idea of heaven because she didn’t want to be away from her pets. She couldn’t imagine a good God ever separating her from her beloved dogs, so she came up with this idea that if she died first, her dogs would need to join her in death—and she also said that if her dogs died, she would have to die soon after to be with them. It was an odd concept—but the oddest part was that she based her whole idea of the afterlife around this problematic idea: she had to be with her dogs in heaven.  Don’t do that. Stay away from making problematic theology the core of what you believe about the afterlife.

With those guardrails in mind, let’s get to some Medium Place ideas. So, hang with me as we think about these Medium Place ideas.

Purgatory

First, let’s think about purgatory. If you have a Roman Catholic background, purgatory will be familiar to you. But if you don’t have that background, here’s a quick refresher: purgatory is the state in the afterlife of those who die in God’s friendship—people who are going to end up with God someday—but who are still in need of purification before they enter heaven. A Catholic priest once explained purgatory to me like the waiting room of heaven: everyone who’s in the waiting room is eventually going to get in, but they’ve got to be purged of their sin before they can be in God’s presence. So if you make it to purgatory, you’re going to make it to the Good Place.

Now, purgatory is mostly a Roman Catholic concept (although there are some Protestants who believe in something at least very close to purgatory). And one reason for that fact is that there’s slim biblical support for this kind of place in the afterlife. If you ask a good Catholic about what Scripture says about purgatory, they will likely point you to 2 Maccabees 12.41-45. But I won’t ask you to look at that passage in your Bible because only a handful of people at Arise have a Bible that contains 2 Maccabees. This book is actually something we call the Apocrypha, because it’s a book that some Christians have in their Bibles, but many don’t. So that kind of support for purgatory isn’t helpful for us.

But there are other passages of Scripture that can be interpreted to speak about purgatory. Perhaps the strongest is 1 Corinthians 3.11-15, where Paul writes, For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.

Paul seems to be saying that your faith must be founded on King Jesus and that anything built on that foundation—what you believe, how you live, so on—must be true and good and valuable. Why? Because on judgement day, it’s going to be exposed to fire. If the faith and life you’ve built survive the fire, you’re all good. But if not—and here’s the key to purgatory—you will suffer loss but yet will be saved, even though only as on escaping through the flames. In other words, if the life you’re living isn’t truly God honoring, then when you die, you’re going get put through the fire. You’ll still make it into God’s presence, but not without some additional work.

From what Paul seems to be saying here, it’s not too hard to make an argument for purgatory as the place where this refining fire occurs. When we die, if we’re not ready to meet an ultimately holy God (and let’s be honest, who in here is ready to stand before God right this instant?), you’ll spend a hot minute being refined (pun intended), before entering God’s presence. And that’s how you arrive at the concept of purgatory.

Now, is one passage that appears in the middle of Paul talking about leadership in the church all the evidence that you need to believe in purgatory? A lot of people say, “no, this isn’t a particularly convincing argument for adding another layer of complexity to an already murky picture of what happens after we die.” But some say, “yes, this is a helpful way to make sense of what Scripture says about God’s holiness and human sinfulness when it comes to being in God’s presence after we die.”

If you’re interested in learning more about purgatory, let me suggest to you the Zondervan Counterpoints Four Views on Hell book, which contains an essay by a Protestant theologian Jerry Walls in favor of purgatory.  And for what it’s worth, I view purgatory as a neutral idea. It’s too old and too widely an accepted an idea for me to reject purgatory out of hand, although I think there are probably better ways to think about how God makes us more like Him.

Limbo

Alright, let’s think about another Medium Place idea, one known as limbo. No, not the dance where you see how low you can go.  Limbo is an intermediate state where those who deserve neither the Good Place nor the Bad Place end up. And although there are some historical precedents for limbo, most people who adhere to this idea today take it straight from Scripture. Consider Mark 16.16, where Jesus says, Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

Well, the thinking goes, what about people who aren’t given the opportunity to believe? What about children who die before they’re born? What about people who have mental disabilities who are never able to make any sort of conscious decision to either follow Jesus or reject Him? Those people can’t believe and be baptized, so they can’t get into the Good Place. But it also doesn’t seem right or just to send them to the Bad Place. So where do they end up? Limbo.  Limbo really is the closest parallel to what our clip from this morning calls the Medium Place: it’s where you send people who neither belong in the Good Place or in the Bad Place.

But the biggest problem with limbo isn’t the lack of Scriptural support—it’s what this idea says about God. The idea of limbo makes God sound like the consummate rule follower, someone who set up a reality with extremely precise rules in place who then lacks the ability to close the loopholes in the system. But that’s just not who God is. God is love. God is graceful. God wants to know you and be known by you. He’s not held captive by His own rules. He wants everyone to be with. Limbo misses God’s loving, sacrificial self-revelation and instead focuses on a logical “gotcha” moment instead. So, I find limbo to be a problematic concept, one that’s best avoided when it comes to thinking about the afterlife.

Reincarnation

Our final Medium Place idea today is reincarnation. At its root, reincarnation is the idea that once we die, our souls come back to this reality as another person or thing. In other words, the afterlife is actually another life, albeit one that you typically don’t remember once you die and move on.  Reincarnation has its roots in Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, but a growing number of Christians also believe in reincarnation. In fact, according to Pew Forum, nearly 30% of American Christians say they believe in reincarnation despite the fact that no major denomination or church professes belief in our souls returning to another living being after our death.

Traditionally, Christianity has rejected ideas about reincarnation out of hand, and no major Western religion adopts reincarnation as a realistic possibility for the afterlife. Because of this, Scripture says relatively little about the possibility of reincarnation because this just wasn’t an idea that most Jews or Christians had to wrestle with.  Yet there are a couple of Scripture indicators that reincarnation is a problematic view. The first pile of evidence is the entirety of what we’re talking about in this series. As Scripture talks about human destiny and what happens after death, the picture we see is of a Good Place and a Bad Place. But there’s no hint of anything about reincarnation. The biblical narrative and broad sweep of Western thinking just don’t view reincarnation as a possibility.

But Scripture also speaks to the singular finality of death. For example, Job 14.10-12 says this: But a man dies and is laid low; he breathes his last and is no more. As the water of a lake dries up or a riverbed becomes parched and dry, so he lies down and does not rise; till the heavens are no more, people will not awake or be roused from their sleep.  We die, Job says, and do not return until the end, that is, until judgment day. There’s no dying and reincarnating and dying and reincarnating. For those following Jesus, death is followed by resurrection, not reincarnation.

Likewise, Hebrews 9.27-28 says, Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.  Again, the expectation here is that people die once and then face judgment. There’s no cycle of reincarnation and rebirth. Of course, this passage also reveals that death is not the complete end of the story, since Jesus is going to come again and bring salvation from death. Here, we see that for followers of Jesus, death is followed by return, not reincarnation.

So reincarnation just doesn’t fit with the Story of Christianity. We live, we die, there’s no repeat. Again, death is not the end—but what’s next is resurrection and Jesus’ return, not reincarnation.

Concluding Thoughts

And it’s here that we must leave the Medium Place and continue our journey of exploring the afterlife. The Medium Place, while intriguing and perhaps less harsh than the Bad Place, doesn’t give us many solid answers. For the Christian, there’s just not a lot here—and what may be here is too speculative or outside the bounds of Scripture and Christian orthodoxy to be of much use to us. There’s just not a lot to be stake our hope for the future on.

But our next two posts will give us lots to be hopeful about. Because next up is the (actual) Good Place and then a look at what Scripture says about resurrection and Jesus’ return—where those who follow Jesus will end up forever and ever in lasting eternity. It’s to that good news that we’ll turn next time—I hope you can join us then.

This post originally appeared as a message at Arise Church.

Image courtesy of The Good Place Wiki.