questions from a newbie is life a pass fail course and does god grade on a curve i m new here and only vaguely religious but i want to know what some of you people think specifically are there an infinite number of heavens and a person goes to the one that he she deserves or is it simply heaven or nothing hell also are we graded by those around us or has there always been some unchanging method is the person s childhood taken into account i m sure these must sound like over simplifications to most of you but i figure that you re the experts quinn eschatology is an area on which christians do not agree i suspect that s because our primary source of information is prophets and visionaries and their writings tend to be highly symbolic however both jesus teachings in the gospels and books such as the revelation to john talk primarily about the difference between eternal life and eternal death on a number of occasions jesus does say things that imply some sort of differentiation e g lk and a number of similar passages where jesus says things like even xxx will be better off than you in the judgement also i cor talks about someone who gets into heaven but by the skin of his teeth as it were but these passages are not normally interpreted as suggesting separate heavens so much as differing levels of prestige or punishment in heaven or hell and not all christians would even go as far as that the only christian group i know of that believes in multiple heavens is the mormons and they are very far from mainstream christianity far enough that many of our readers would not call them christian their ideas in this area involve specific mormon revelations in addition to the bible and holy tradition of a more generic christian sort note that many christians will cringe at the very thought of associating grading with god the whole point of christ was to free us from the results of a test that we couldn t possibly pass if you like test analogies god grades on a very strict and unbending scale but he also cheats he replaces our test papers with an exam that was prepared by the teacher before actually doing the grading because some people end up in heaven and others in hell it s easy to see why you d be inclined to think of it as grading while there are differences among branches of christianity on details i think we all agree that in one way or another god cheats i am personally very sceptical about anyone who claims to know exactly how far god s cheating extends will he accept people who don t explicitly acknowledge christ but somehow still follow him in their hearts many christians believe that this is possible at least in principle but certainly not all do jesus provided us with a clear description of how to be saved but it s not clear to me that he provided an exact description of how he s going to place the dividing line certainly he made it clear that we can t expect to know whether other individuals are saved or not clh
