The Aether

Perhaps you have heard the word aether at some point.  This enigmatic word has scarcely been used in my experience, and it is also scarcely defined.  Aether refers to a particular type of dimension very much unlike the one we inhabit.  It is sometimes used as a label for a hypothetical place where only the immaterial exists.  Imagine space without matter, consciousnesses without bodies, and (of course!) the omnipresent laws of logic being the only things that exist--a realm with only these things is the aether.  There is no matter, no physical thing whatsoever, in this realm.  There is only the immaterial in the aether.

An error that some Christians might embrace, even unknowingly, is the belief that when the Bible talks about the afterlife it details an aether of sorts.  But the ultimate afterlife of Scripture does not involve human spirits without bodies [1] and space without matter.  Whether one investigates heaven or hell, an objective reading of the the New Testament plainly affirms something quite different than the aether.

The afterlife described by the Bible--both the New Jerusalem that awaits the saved and the hell that consumes the unsaved until they cease to exist--is not the aether.  It is far from it!  In both cases, the afterlife destinations of every human are very physical places.  The Bible describes New Jerusalem as having gates, a tree, a throne, and a river (Revelation 21-22); in the case of hell, it describes fire (Matthew 18:8), worms (Mark 9:43-49), and the destruction of not just the soul but the body (Matthew 10:28).  Never does the Bible teach that the nonphysical will totally supercede the physical.  Instead, both will persist together.

Although the passages about New Jerusalem pertain to future events, they can affect the way Christians live in the present.  There is no greater reason to celebrate our bodies than the realization that we were not meant to be just minds and God created matter and called it very good (Genesis 1:1, 1:31).  God never intended for humans to be beings with no physical bodies, but to be a combination of both consciousness and corporeal substance.

Sometimes an aether-like understanding of heaven might be mistaken for the Biblical one.  Whenever this misrepresentation appears, Christians can remember that the heaven of Scripture is both a spiritual and physical place, not a region containing only unembodied consciousnesses, the abstract laws of logic, and space devoid of matter.  New Jerusalem is more than the aether.  Matter, which God created and called good, will not be abolished; it will exist into the eternal future.


[1].  I say ultimate afterlife because the concepts I am referring to here do not exclude the possibility of disembodied human spirits existing between the death of the body and the resurrections of the saved and unsaved predicted in the New Testament.