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First, it's one thing to speak of things "separately," something else again to distinguish them. In both cases, one's point in speaking, presumably, is to deny that the things in question are simply identical, or one and the same. But it's being misled and misleading to suppose – as even the philosopher David Hume once notoriously allowed himself to do – that any things that can be distinguished can also be separated. That people in our society, sacred and secular, generally speak of life and death as distinct I, too, would take to be true. But that they thereby take them to be separate seems to me to be another, and distinct, claim for which I find no compelling evidence.

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As I see it, then, if there is a more correct way to think of life and death in Christian theology today, it is almost certainly due to theology's having allowed itself to learn from the best scientific knowledge now available to us, instead of being content simply to hand on the prescience of earlier human generations. In

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other words, it is to science, more than to theology, that we owe the corrections that some Christians and theologians, also, may have eventually learned to make in traditional Christian teaching on this whole subject.

Even so, my third point is that the ultimate justification for any such revisionary theological understanding as the questioner would presumably take to be "more correct" cannot be simply that it agrees with modern scientific understanding about the inseparability of life and death, or, if you will, of living and dying. No, this revisionary theological understanding is finally to be justified, if it is, only by the kind of properly religious, indeed, Christian, understanding of life and death to which Paul bears witness in at least some – although certainly not all! – of the things he has to say about them. I'm thinking not only of his powerful assurance in Rom 8:38 f. that "neither death, nor life," any more than "anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord"; I'm thinking, above all of what he says to the Romans in the fourteenth chapter of that same letter: "We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the LordI Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord of the dead and the living" (vss. 7 ff.).

5. So much is said about Christian forgiveness. I believe in a loving and forgiving God, but the extent and capacity of God's love is beyond human comprehension. Does God want me, a human being created in the image of God, to forgive those who have hUl't nzehurt me, continue to choose evil over good, and are unrepentant? Does God? What if I won't – or can't?

On my analysis, there are two closely related questions here. I shall take them up in order, as follows.

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