I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts

 

There is a common misconception that Christians do not believe in ghosts. See the video clip.

No religion that denied the existence of ghosts would be worthy of attention. My own misunderstanding that Christianity did not believe in ghosts held me back from full-hearted commitment to Christianity at one point. Of course there are ghosts. People all over the world report encounters. This denial made Christianity look less like a conduit to the next world than a charade in defense of philistinism. It looked like trying not to think about the next life. It looked like whistling past the graveyard.

Gerald, the resident Christian voice in the clip, explains that there is a prohibition in the Old Testament against trying to consult with the dead.

If so, Jesus is guilty of this sin.

Matthew 17: 1-3: 

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.

The event is in three gospels, and referred to in the fourth.

What is prohibited is necromancy. That is, divination: calling upon the spirits to tell you the future. This implies a lack of trust in God, and in divine free will.

This has been cooked into a prohibition on contact with the dead by Protestant theologians who want to discourage prayer to the saints and a belief in purgatory, ultimately because this allows for indulgences, which Martin Luther saw as corrupt. So some protestant groups do not believe I ghosts. But most Christians are Catholic or Orthodox, and do.

Gerald then explains that communication with the dead is not possible: “there is no coming back.” Apart from the Transfiguration, already cited, the prophet Simon is successfully summoned from the afterlife in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 28). Not to mention Lazarus. Or, er, Jesus Christ.

Gerald cites the story of the rich man and (the other) Lazarus, as his evidence. There, he submits, it is not possible for Lazarus to return to earth to warn the rich man’s relatives. 

But this is not what the story says. 

He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Abraham’s refusal makes it clear that Lazarus could go. But it would be futile. If there were capable of ignoring the Mosaic law, they will ignore a ghost. As many do in the modern world. God gives us what we need to know; he does not pressure or bully us. Nor should we do right merely from fear of punishment.

This passage endorses Judaism as a perfectly sufficient religion. The “someone rising from the dead” is surely a reference to Jesus.

Why doesn’t the rich man go himself to war his brothers?  Asking Lazarus to go implies that he understands Lazarus is in a different position. Souls in hell cannot appear to those on earth, it seems. But souls in heaven can.

Stephen Crowder then chimes in to deny that one’s dead relatives look down on you from heaven. “Angels are not human.”

They can be. As St. Augustine points out, “angel” is not a class of being, but an office, that of messenger between heaven and earth. There are various classes of spiritual beings: seraphim, cherubim, and so forth. But there are also the spirits of the dead, and there is no reason they cannot perform this function. 

Indeed, this is the function of the saints, and to deny it happens is to deny the saints.

And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. – Revelations.

Even if they are not emissaries between earth and heaven, why wouldn’t the sainted dead continue to be interested in those they love on earth?

If heaven is the fulfilment of our desires, how could heaven be heaven for a good, unselfish man or woman if they could no longer see or know what is happening with their loved ones still in the world below, and, indeed, could not help them in some way?

Crowder avoids the problem by suggesting that everyone enters heaven at the same moment, because this is the nature of eternity. 

This is not the teaching of the Catholic Church; otherwise there would be no distinction between the particular judgement at death and the general judgement at the end of time. Nor does it work conceptually. Time is something of value: without time, there is no music, no prayer, no deeds, no games, no stories, no poetry, no art, no thought. All require duration. Therefore, heaven would be a profoundly inadequate place, not heaven at all, if there were no time. Rather, time is to heaven as space is as seen from a mountaintop—one reason why heaven is pictured as above us. You can observe any moment, past or future. Just as you can the three dimensions of space.

So a good Catholic believes in ghosts. The beings we encounter as ghosts might in any instance be angels or demons. But they might also be what they appear to be, or claim to be: the spirits of the departed, speaking to us from heaven or from purgatory.