Heaven and Earth will pass away…

Excerpts from Heaven or Heat Death:

It’s pretty well established, then, that in about five billion more years our Sun’s core will have gone through its supply of nuclear fuel. When the core can no longer produce energy, it will cool off and contract; then the mass of gases above the core will come crashing down onto it, bounce, and puff themselves out into a cool, dull-red cloud that (judging from the size of the “red-giant” stars we can see near by) will almost certainly envelop the Earth itself. That will certainly end all life, on Earth at least.

Or will it? What does traditional Christianity say about the end of the universe? Less than you might think. Or, maybe, more than you might think. Depends on what you think.

The key tool borrowed from Greek and medieval philosophy which seems to be needed to make this existence-without-a-physical-universe to work, is the concept of a “soul.” But what do we really mean by soul?

Perhaps in some sense the centre of human identity – call it, if you wish, the soul – can maintain a hypothetical existence even in the absence of a particular physical manifestation, in the same way that the idea of a song or a poem can live on even after every copy of it has been destroyed.

Jesus himself, before his death and resurrection, put it simply and directly. “Heaven and Earth will pass away,” he said, “but my words will never pass away.”