An Affirmation of Life
At the beginning go each day, as part of our morning prayer, Brenda and I recite the Apostle’s Creed which includes the affirmation:
I believe in the Holy Spirit. . . .
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen
I refer to this as an affirmation, and so it is, but it is also something far deeper. The word “creed,” or “credo,” from which the phrase “I believe” comes, can be understood, when its Latin root is considered, as meaning, “I give my heart to.” It does not, therefore, suggest a highly literal and rigid intellectual agreement or mental assent with the statements made, but a commitment of all that we are and all that we can become, our will, our intellect, our depth of feeling, our spiritual passion to everything sacred and precious that has God as its true source. The English “I believe” is itself something more like “beloving.” So, we “belove” God the Creator and Christ the Redeemer and the Holy Spirit, the Comforter; and, all those things God loves, approves, and wills––justice, compassion, joy, peace, and life.
When Brenda and I pray that next to the last line of the Apostle’s Creed we do not know precisely what the resurrection of the body means––evidently the Apostle Paul didn’t either because he wrote this explanation to the Corinthian Christians:
But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed. . . . So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15:35-44).
And Saint John wrote, “It does not yet appear what we will be” (1 John 3:2).
What we do know is that the resurrection is a sacred mystery, and the more we give ourselves to it the more it becomes that ever expanding, intricate, and luminous network of meaning and life that Barbara Brown Taylor thought of as a divine web of light. The more we give our hearts in solidarity with God’s eternal cosmic plan to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Christ through love, the brighter the woven pattern of light becomes. Creedal statements, like “I believe in the resurrection of the dead,” are then declarations of the truths and principles by which we live our lives. I grew up and was originally ordained in a denomination that claimed to be “noncreedal,” but the reality is that every church and every individual, acknowledged or unacknowledged, has a creed by which they live. Indeed, “belief,'” from “by lief,” can also be understood as that by which I live my life. Charles Tart’s “Western Creed,” which you should google if you have never read it, is an attempt to awaken North Americans, in spite of all their self-delusion and denial, to the beliefs and values by which they actually live. When Brenda and I say in our morning prayer that we believe in the resurrection we are owning Jesus’s teaching of the resurrection, with all its spiritual implications, as determinative for the way we live.
In our secular culture serious discussion of what lies beyond the threshold of death is casually dismissed as a sign one lacks the sophistication of a decent college education. “What remains,” as the liberal theologian John Cobb notes, “is a vague assurance that all will be well. Since no content is ever suggested for the imagination, the reassurance is, for many, not very reassuring.” Since I feel no need to defend my education––a Bachelors in Speech (rhetoric), with minors in Literature, History and Religion, a Masters in Counseling Psychology, a Masters in Religion, a Masters in Theology, and a Doctor of Ministry in Pastoral Care; and, having experienced a call now decades ago to participate in expanding the awareness of “the mystery of the ages which is Christ us––the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26-27), I offer, without embarrassment, the following reason for the hope that lives in me.
A Relationship Stronger Than Death
In the Old Testament scriptures there is no real or unambiguous theology of an afterlife, immortality, or eternal life as there is in the New Testament. At best there are only a mere handful of references to what may lie beyond the threshold of death, over which both scholars and ordinary people have puzzled and speculated. However, what does exist in Old Testament theology, and in the deepest thought and feeling of the ancient Hebrews, is a powerful and explicit sense of covenant. Every society has traditions, a mythos, which explains and sustains its existence. For early Israel the central reality from which her institutions and identity came was the covenant between herself and God. This was unique with Israel in that for Israel’s neighbors identity and meaning were determined by a cosmic myth in which the visible order of things was determined by what had transpired and continued to transpire in the unseen world of wars among the gods. But for Israel it was her covenant relationship with God that determined everything. Covenants are frequently thought of as contracts, agreements, treaties; or as something like the metaphorical social contract theory of government –– the idea that people live together in society in accordance with an unspoken agreement that establishes moral and political rules of behavior. In may ways Israel’s covenant with Yahweh is very much like the treaties and agreements that existed between ancient rulers and their subjects. But their covenant was different not in that it contained promises and conditions and vows, but in that it was a covenant between Israel and God. Like all covenants it established a relationship, except that it was not a relationship between monarch and subjects, or husband and wife, or conqueror and conquered, or one involving mundane affairs; but, rather an eternal and sacred relationship of committed love between a liberated people and their Creator, Sustainer, and Deliverer. Fixed deep in Israel’s spiritual consciousness was the conviction that her covenant with God was the direct result of her liberation –– the great exodus from Egypt. She had been chosen and had said yes to that choosing.
Now, what does Israel’s covenant with God have to do with the question of death and the life everlasting? Just this. The covenantal relationship between Israel and God is stronger than death. Israel has no comprehensive theology of life after death; it does have a profound conviction of a lived relationship with God that cannot be dissolved by death.
Constant Love
By ‘constant’ in this heading I mean continuing, unchanging, enduring love–– I mean hesed. Hesed is one of those biblical Hebrew words that is nearly impossible to translate. Depending on the context, it has been translated as loving kindness, mercy, compassion, love, grace and faithfulness. But none of these quite capture what is meant by hesed. It conveys feelings of kindness and love; yet, it is also far more than an emotion. It has been described as that sort of loyal or faithful love which will not let go or abandon the beloved no matter what. Found some 250 times in the Old Testament it expresses an essential part of God’s character. At the Burning Bush, God is described not only as “The One Who Is,” but also as “abounding in,” or “filled” with hesed, which is translated, depending on the particular English translation being used, as “loving faithfulness,” “unfailing love,” “faithful love,” steadfast love,” and “loyal love.” It expresses God’s loving faithfulness. The central idea of this term is that of loyalty or faithfulness within a relationship. It is, therefore, closely related to God’s covenant with His people, Israel, and expresses God’s loving faithfulness to them.
Faith in the Faithfulness
From the Christian perspective it is possible to speak not only of the Mosaic covenant of Mount Sinai and the new covenant in Christ, but of other covenants as well; there is the Garden covenant with Adam and Eve in which God promises that they will have everything they need for their physical and spiritual lives as long as they trust him. The story of the “fall” in Genesis is, then, the story of how Adam and Eve broke their covenant with God and instead of trusting in the goodness of God chose to rely on themselves. But notice this, neither the covenant nor its breaking is meant to be understood as something involving one or two individuals –– as something entirely private. The covenant with Adam and Eve is meant to be understood as extending to the whole human race, and their fall is meant to be apprehended as the fall of humanity; indeed, this blind self-will in which we choose to rely more on ourselves than to trust the grace and goodness of God is the great affliction of human kind. Every covenant between God and the human characters of the Bible is extensive rather than singular and individualistic. The eleventh chapter of Genesis begins the story of the Abrahamic covenant. God promises Abraham and Sarah that if they will trust God with their lives and journey into a strange and distant land, God will bless them –– their descendants will become a populous and strong nation, and by one of them the whole earth will one day be blessed. Whether we look at the covenant made in the Garden with Adam and Eve, the covenant made with Noah, the one with Abraham and Sarah, or, the covenant made at Mount Sinai, it is not made solely with and for the benefit of any single individual, but rather with and for a people.
Israel’s Hope
What can be said at this point, then, is that Israel did in fact hope for an idyllic future; or as John Baillie put it in his book The Life Everlasting: “We might express the facts by saying that throughout its early history Israel indeed looked forward to a blessed immortality, but that the nation and not the individual was the unit of the immortality in which it put its trust.” Baillie went on to note this perspective was natural for the ancient Hebrews given that the nation as a whole, or in some cases the tribe or family, was regarded as the unit of moral responsibility, accountability, and spiritual connection to God. This is a difficult perspective for our Western minds to grapple with; however, Saint Paul’s word in Philippians 1:6 might frame it in a way that is more easily understood. Paul the Christian Apostle, but also a Hebrew of the Hebrews, wrote to the Philippian church saying: “For I am confident of this very thing, that the One who began a good work in you and among you will bring it to completion by the day of Christ Jesus.” Or, we might think of Paul’s words to the Christian community in Rome, “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The Hebrews of the Old Testament, with whom Paul was in continuity, could have said the same thing; except, they would have thought in more collective than individual terms. Everything good, true, and beautiful is eternal. The hesed of God is everlasting.
People Like Trees Walking
In Mark 8:22-26 there is an intriguing story of the restoration of a blind man’s sight that can furnish something of a parable of how the revelation of God in history is incremental, step by step, a progression in understanding. Jesus and his disciples arrive in the village of Bethsaida, and a sightless man is brought to Jesus. Jesus put a little of his spit in the man’s eyes and then asked him: “Do you see anything?” The man answered, “I see people walking around. They look like walking trees?” Jesus placed his hands on the man’s eyes again and asked: “How about now? Do you see anything?” The man takes a good look and realizes he has recovered his sight perfectly. I have always found this an interesting story, a paradigm of how God works incrementally.
R. H. Charles in his classic book on this subject, Eschatology: Hebrew, Jewish and Christian: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life published in 1899, argued that biblical revelation is progressive. “As in nature, so in religion,” he said, “God is revealed in the course of slow evolution.” Charles was clear that this did not mean this “slow evolution” or “progressive revelation” was a merely natural development. It was a process, but it was a process in which God was truly involved. “All true growth in religion, whether in the past or in the present,” he said, “springs from the communion of man with the immediate living God. . .”
By the time of the apocalyptic movement (roughly from the time of the writing of the Book of Daniel, a significant step had been taken in understanding the afterlife. Guided by the teaching and work of the prophets, Israel came to a new evaluation of the significance of the individual. If we were to cast the change in eschatological thinking (the doctrine of last things such as death and the afterlife) that took place among the Jewish sages and people in more contemporary terms, we might cast it like this: They experienced a deeper realization of both the worth and the moral responsibility of the individual person. They saw, not that God was more loving or powerful than previously thought, but that in a living personality there is a value which is greater than all other values; and, that if what they had thought to be of the highest value, what they considered most precious, truth, justice, compassion, love of God and neighbor (Deuteronomy 6:4-10), was to survive as something more than abstract philosophical concepts, then the individual persons who are the carriers of that spiritual tradition must have everlasting life.
There was also during this period a second realization that fueled belief not only in life after death, but in resurrection. The prophets taught the people to interpret the promises of God’s bliss as applying to a future time of national blessedness that would be inaugurated with the coming of the “Day of the Lord.” This became known as the Messianic Age or the Kingdom of God. Among the important texts are Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2-3.
Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise.
You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a dew of light,
and the earth will give birth to the dead.
(Isaiah 26:19)And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.
(Daniel 12:2-3
What is anticipated in these verses is not some sort of vague shadowy existence in the underworld, or even a happier state for the dead than that of a grey, ghostly, immortality in Sheol. What is looked for here is a return of the whole person –– body, mind, heart, and soul to a world of joy and vitality. Envisioning this as simply an epoch of world history, regardless of how peaceful or prosperous, was found inadequate. The resurrected life, the Kingdom life, filled with the presence of God had to be conceived of as heavenly or spiritual. We also now see an indivisible linkage between the community and its individual members. What is experienced is, first of all, hope for a future time in which a new way of life would permeate society –– a new order in which God’s will of peace and justice and grace would be a lived reality. And, second, there is the hope that those individual men and women who have immersed themselves in this new depth of life will, in the end, be raised from the dead to share in the eternal community of light, love, and bliss.
Before going further it is important to note that the basis for this hope of resurrection and eternal life, this longing for the kingdom of God, remains constant and can be summed up in the following premises:
• The core insight of spiritual religion is that the heart of ultimate reality is One who is supremely good and trustworthy.
• What is highest in spirit is also the source of the deepest values of our human nature –– our most cherished ideals and most sublime and noblest thoughts and practices to which we aspire.
• The ideal and the real are therefore inextricably and enduringly identified with one another, and the God of Hebrew and Christian Scripture cannot deny Himself––can do nothing incongruent with his own nature or character.
What the Hebrew prophets, poets, and sages believed, and what became ever clearer to them as they journeyed, was that all that is most precious and noblest about us as human beings, our spiritual consciousness, our sense and practice of justice, love, truth, goodness, and beauty is eternal, not as in an abstract philosophical idea or concept, but as something warm and living. God cannot scrap what is most precious to Himself. We are safe in the hands of God; in fact, it is only in God’s hands that we are completely safe.
Central to the whole of Jesus’s teaching, including his teaching on life after death, is the kingdom of God. It is a kingdom both present and future. The fullness of the genuinely religious life, of the spiritually transformed life, is known in the fellowship of the transformed community. Jesus held out to his people hope for the community, but he also believed and taught hope for the individual––hope that the faithful dead will rise from the grave to the joy of the eternal kingdom. Our present life is a preparation for the resurrection and entering the kingdom of heaven, but it is also possible to taste something of its fruit now. Eternal life is, therefore, both a present and future reality. Consequently, the Apostle Peter says to the Christian exiles: “You have tasted the goodness of the Lord” (1 Peter 2:3). And the unknown writer of the Book of Hebrews wrote: “Once people have seen the light, gotten a taste of heaven and been part of the work of the Holy Spirit, once they’ve personally experienced the sheer goodness of God’s Word and the power breaking in on us—if then they turn their backs on it, washing their hands of the whole thing, well, they can’t start over as if nothing happened. That’s impossible” (Hebrews 6:4).
The Trick Question
Some Sadducees, a religious group that denied any possibility of resurrection, approached Jesus one day intent on proving that he and the Pharisees, with whom Jesus agreed about the afterlife, were wrong. They had a good rabbinical argument in the form of a question no one had ever been able to answer. It was meant to reduce all argument for the resurrection to an absurdity––a technique still used by philosophers and debaters. The case presented by the Sadducees with its question is this:
In giving the law, the Torah, Moses said: “If a man dies childless, his brother is obligated to marry his widow and have a child with her who will then receive the deceased brother’s part of the family inheritance.” Now, here’s a case where there were seven brothers. The first brother married and died, leaving no child, and his wife passed to his brother. The second brother also left her childless, then the third—and on and on, all seven. Eventually the wife died. “So here is our question,” said the Sadducees, “Since this woman was married to each of the seven brothers without ever having a child, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?”
Jesus’s response is devastating. Instead of either throwing up his hands and walking away in confusion because he cannot logically solve the problem, or admitting that their case does indeed show how ridiculous any idea of resurrection really is, he says with perfect poise and confidence:
“You are mistaken. You understand neither what the Scriptures say, nor the power of God. What makes you think the heavenly life will be just like this life only better? In the resurrection people will not marry, but are like the angels. Furthermore, it would appear that you have either not read or paid attention to what has been spoken by God through Scripture––certainly you have not understood it. So consider this, the Lord God says: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ God is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Matthew 28: 20-33).
There are several things important to notice in Jesus’s response. First of all, notice one reason the Sadducees are mistaken in their interpretation of Scripture is that they see, or imagine, the resurrection and the Kingdom of Heaven as following the same physical, material and social processes as this world. In doing so they have actually limited God and the deeper reality of the after life by their own limited literal imaginations and thinking. Both very conservative and very liberal Bible interpreters frequently exegete Scripture with a literalness and an all or none orientation that leads them to believe they know far more than they know or can know.
Second, notice that in saying we will be like the angels Jesus is indicating we will have “bodies” but they will be “transfigured” so that we will be like the angels. His basic thought seems to be that we will not be like the grey ghosts of the Greeks in the nether world. In Homer’s great tale, The Odyssey, he has Odysseus visit Achilles in the realm of the dead. Achilles, you will remember, was the great and fierce Greek warrior who had chosen to die a hero in the battle for Troy rather than live a long, peaceful, and prosperous, but unremembered, life at home in Greece. But in this meeting in the underworld, Achilles tells Odysseus that he would “rather slave on earth for another man–/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down there over all the breathless dead.” His lament is that he is not truly and fully human and alive––not in the greater sense of those words. Saint Paul makes the same point Jesus does here in 1 Corinthians 15. To not understand this is, like the Sadducees, to not understand the power of God. To doubt the resurrection is to doubt the power of God.
Third, they and those who do not see the doctrine of eternal life in the ancient Hebrew Scripture, do not understand Scripture itself, because the essential presuppositions for the resurrection of individual men and women are present in Moses and the prophets.
Fourth, notice that Jesus’s belief in the resurrection is based on what he knows of the nature, of God––the God of Israel has always been, now is, and will ever be God of life. The poets had said it again and again in the Psalms:
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
Whom should I fear?
The Lord is the defense of my life;
Whom shall I dread?
(Psalm 27:1)
The Lord does not just do something to save me, but is mysteriously actually my salvation, does not merely defend me but is the defense of my life, and not only gives me light but is my light. In the same vein Jesus says that experiential knowledge of God not only informs me about life, but is life (John 17:3). If God is, as Jesus taught, the loving Abba Father, and the Creator in whom we “live move and have our being,” then as the Apostle also said, “Whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8). To once more quote John Baillie:
If the individual can commune with God, then he or she must matter to God; and if the individual matters to God, then he or she must share God’s eternity. For if God really rules, then God cannot be conceived as scrapping what is precious in His sight. It is in the conjunction with God that the promise of life resides. This in Dante’s phrase is come l’ uom s‘ eterna.
Christ the Life Everlasting
Jesus taught his disciples that he himself would suffer, be killed, and rise again in three days; their experience of Jesus as alive and present with them after his crucifixion became for them the ground of their hope and of everything that makes life worthwhile. It is, of course, not possible to know two thousand years later the precise nature of their encounters with Christ after that first Easter Sunday morning. Nor, does it greatly matter whether the resurrected body of Jesus they saw was a physical flesh and bone body, or a transfigured body, or whether they had visionary experiences, which the popular Religion professor Marcus Borg claimed could include sense experiences like taste, touch, smell, and sight. Certainly, the biblical account itself leaves us wondering about such question.
According to the biblical text, Jesus tells Mary Magdalena in the Garden not to cling to him, invites Thomas to touch his wounds, and eats a breakfast of broiled fish and honeycomb when he first appears in the upper room. All of this seems aimed at demonstrating Jesus is no mere apparition, chimera, or glamour. But Jesus also appears suddenly in the upper room when the doors are locked and secured against surprise intrusions. What sort of corporal body can do that? And the appearance of Jesus to Paul on the road to Damascus, which is counted as equal to those to the twelve, and which has the power and reality to change the whole course of Paul’s life, is undoubtedly entirely visionary. The question that presents itself, then, is whether a visionary experience is about anything real or is entirely subjective, symbolical, or a purely cerebral process. In short, was the resurrection of Jesus really real? I don’t want to allow myself to be drawn into a long discussion of that question here. So for now, I will only attempt to provide as simple and as much of a common sense response as I can. For most of us to say that something is real is to say that it actually exists or happened as opposed to being imaginary, illusory, or delusional. It is what is extant rather than an interpretation or reaction. We may not be able to give a definition of reality that would satisfy a professional philosopher or physicist, but most of us are perfectly capable of discriminating between the real and unreal.
In 1587, a group of about 115 English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island just off the coast of what is now North Carolina to establish what would have been the first English colony in the Americas. A little later that year the governor, John White, sailed back to England in order to gather fresh supplies. White was delayed by the naval war that broke out between Spain and England. It was nearly three years before he returned. When White and his party finally arrived back at Roanoke they found no trace of the little colony––including White’s wife and infant daughter. The only clue to what had happened, if it was a clue, was the word “Croatoan,” carved into a wooden post. “Croatoan” was the name of a Native American tribe on an island south of Roanoke. They had vanished without a trace––a complete mystery that has never been solved to this very day. Now, while what happened to that little band of colonists, or how it happened, is entirely unknown, it was a real event. Something actually happened. In a similar way we can say that while no Christian can legitimately claim to know exactly what processes occurred (what happened) at the resurrection, as if the whole thing had been recorded in high definition video, he or she can reasonably claim that something powerful actually happened in the warp and woof of time and space.
In regard to the specific post crucifixion appearances of Jesus to his friends and followers, look at Paul’s experience on the Damascus Road. Paul, or Saul of Tarsus as he was known at the time, sets off for Damascus where he intends to arrest anyone who “follows the Way”––lives the teachings of Christ. As he nears the city there is a brilliant flash of light, and as Paul falls helpless to the ground he hears a voice. The voice, equating the persecution of members of the Christian community with harming Christ, asks: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Now blinded, shocked, and helpless Paul asks, “Who are you, Master?” The voice answers: “I am Jesus, the one you are hunting down.” The men with Paul could see the light but couldn’t understand the voice. “What do I need to do?” asks Paul, and is told to go into the city where he will be told everything. His companions take him by the hand and lead him into Damascus. Here we have an appearance quite unlike that in the Garden of Gethsemane, the upper room, on the road to Emmaus; perhaps that is part of the problem, they are just dissimilar enough that it is impossible to get a grip on a single understanding of what it really means when we read: “He appeared to them.” On the Damascus Road the only physicality seems to be the flash of light and the sound understood only by Paul as a distinct and articulate voice. But it seems to me that what makes it real is not the light or sound, but that it is a genuine encounter, what at the very least is an interpersonal encounter but one far beyond what the great Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber called an “I –– Thou” encounter, a meeting of persons involving true presence to one another and mutuality.
What I propose is that if Jesus was truly alive and present in an appearance to his followers, if he communicated with them after his death as one person to another, if they knew him as one they had loved, then, regardless of any physicality or lack of it Jesus is truly risen. Nothing is more certain than that the disciples and the closest friends of Jesus believed that after his death on the cross and burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea he had appeared to them, not as a figment of their imagination or a symbol of hope like the mythical Sphinx, but as real and alive.
Summary
Because of the growing constraints of space I will state as briefly as possible here why I think any reasonable person may place their trust in Christ and the hope of the resurrection; and, do so without any intellectual embarrassment whatsoever. First, the awareness of the extraordinary beauty and character of Jesus of Nazareth –– a sense of beauty and knowledge that emerges out of the perfectly plausible Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life and teaching and by “living into” his life and teaching. Second, a belief in God adequately grounded in thoughtfulness and reason. Contrary to what you may have heard, some of the world’s most notable intellectuals, scientists and thinkers are Christian believers. Third, the conviction that God has conveyed a message through the prophets that finds its completion in Christ. And fourth, a careful rereading of the gospel stories in light of these first steps. This does not mean that no ambiguities, questions or puzzles will continue to exist for the believer in the Biblical text, but it does mean that he or she can hope in Christ with intellectual integrity.
Apart from faith in the reality of God –– faith in God as supremely good, loving, and trustworthy, Christianity offers no basis for belief in an afterlife. The New Testament does not make unassailable empirical evidence available so as to demolish every argument of unbelief. The resurrection of Jesus on the third day is not the basis but rather the content of the Christin faith. Spiritual truth is spiritually discerned by a trusting heart, not the stunning blows of logic or by God overwhelming the human ability to think. Those who live that ever deepening faith as profound trust and relinquishment know life as they live into the One who is life, those who don’t know don’t. “Those who have no Amen have no hold” (Isaiah 7:9).
Questions
Q. What do you make of near-death experiences? Do you think they provide evidence for life after death?
A. The question is well put because even if they are taken as evidence for life after death near death experiences still would indicate nothing about Christian eschatology––nothing about the doctrine of resurrection itself or any sort of assessment or accountability for how we have lived. Near death experiences may indicate nothing more than a physiological (neurological) process that occurs at the time of death. Marcus Borg, who was so skeptical about Scripture, thought that near death experiences did indicate something about an afterlife. He argued that people reporting “out of body experiences” during a near death incident have accurately described seeing things they could not have seen from where they were lying. My understanding is that there are experiments being conducted on this very question. But no, I am too much of a skeptic and there are too many other reasonable explanations available for me to think near death experiences say anything substantial about an afterlife.
Q. I have friends who tell me that they don’t believe in the Christian idea of resurrection, but they do believe in the doctrine of reincarnation. Do you think reincarnation gives us reason to hope for immortality?
A. The ever-returning wheel of existence, the concept of an endless round of birth, life, death and rebirth, has been embraced as a positive doctrine by some, particularly in America. I am not sure why that is, other than that for many in this country, life has been pleasant enough that they would not at all mind repeating it endlessly. But if you are among the poorest of the poor in this world, if your life is full of suffering, and you contemplate innumerable rebirths, the joy or pain of which each depends on how well you have lived this life (karma), and that many of your lives will be subhuman –– a mosquito in a fetid marsh, the bat that eats the mosquito, the crocodile whose reptilian brain is without thought other than an instinct for survival, or the abused dog you see on television–– then the doctrine of reincarnation may be more the basis for feelings of depression and futility than hope. Actually, this is the problem the Buddha sought to solve with his teaching on Nirvana–– how to escape the endless cycle of suffering occasioned by reincarnation. However, as I understand it when asked whether Nirvana was complete extinction, total oblivion, or a state of existence Gautama, the Buddha, did not answer.
Q. Well, billions of people believe that ultimately, when we have achieved enlightenment and die, we are absorbed into a cosmic consciousness like a drop of water absorbed into a vast ocean. Isn’t that immortality?
A. There are a number of religious systems which teach what is sometimes called reabsorption. The largest and best known is, of course, Hinduism. So I will respond only in very general terms here. As I understand it, what is suggested with some variations is that all human minds, along with those of all other sentient beings, are part of a single universal impersonal mind, and when enlightenment or full consciousness is attained, then at death that person merges, or is completely reabsorbed, into this cosmic consciousness like a drop of water absorbed into the ocean. For the Christian who believes that ultimate reality, that God, is essentially relational and personal, that everything true, good, or beautiful is a part of and comes from the Living God; and, that the personality of the individual person created in the image of God is of incalculable value, this simply does not count as eternal life in any meaningful sense. For Christians the value of the individual is inseparably bound up with personality. So the first thing I would say is that it is hard for a Christian to see reabsorption as anything but the end of the individual and all his or her loves, joys, compassion, honesty and virtue.
It also seems to me that if the individual disappears, ceases by all practical and common sense definitions to exist, then what we come to is that individual human personalities ultimately come to nothing––have no significant intrinsic worth. If that is true, then how I treat individual men and women either separately or in mass, or for that matter my relation with the whole of creation, is of no great consequence, and discussions of moral philosophy and theology, of justice and ethics, may sound sophisticated, but are quite empty.
Q. Doesn’t modern humanistic philosophy honor the worth of the individual and the higher values like justice, nonviolence, love, and compassion without the need for belief in an afterlife? And, isn’t the really important thing that we pass along these higher values? Isn’t this a kind of immortality?
A. I assume the question has secular rather than Christian humanism in mind. Secular humanism is a philosophy that rejects religious doctrines and beliefs in the supernatural and emphasizes reason as the basis for all ethics and morality. The value of the individual is, at least in part, in embracing and spreading the higher moral values like justice, nonviolence, and compassion for the poor and vulnerable. It is these values rather than individuals that are immortal. Individuals are immortal only in the sense that they teach these values and furnish a conduit through which these values pass to future generations. The Tom Hanks character in Forest Gump probably gave about as good a response as any to this perspective. Hanks, as Forest Gump, repeats several times: “Smart is as smart does.” The same can be said of any moral or ethical quality––justice is as justice does, nonviolence is as nonviolence does, compassion is as compassion does. William Ritchie Sorley, in the prestigious Gifford Lectures 0f 1918 put it like this:
When I say “love is good,” I mean that love as realized in the personal life is good, that justice as manifested in a person’s character or in a social order is good, I do not mean that the mere abstract quality, love or justice, is also good. The mere quality love, conceived abstractly and without any reference to its realization in personal life, is not good. . . . Good belongs only to the concrete. . .––to persons.
Q. Is there anything scientific that furnishes evidence for the Christian resurrection and an afterlife?
A. There is no empirical or scientific proof of the afterlife. Quantum physics, I think, suggests the resurrection is scientifically possible, but it certainly proves neither the certainty of Christian resurrection nor immorality in general. When I was a young boy I sometimes wondered how people who had been blown to bits, buried at sea, or perished in flames could be reassembled. I was, of course, not considering what Paul said about how our resurrected body would be a spiritual body. But I also obviously had no way of knowing how Quantum physics would change our understanding of what is really real. So, notice that the real me cannot be my material body, because my material body is actually changing all the time. Your body has very few atoms that composed it a few years go. The real you, in Quantum physics, is the immensely complicated ‘pattern’ in which the ever-changing atoms of the human body are organized. John Polkinghorne, the British mathematical physicist who helped pioneer the discovery of quarks, served as the President of Saint Mary’s College, University of Cambridge, was ordained as an Anglican Priest, and is a founding member of the prestigious Society for Ordained Scientists, wrote this in his book Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity:
The pattern that is me forms and grows as my experience accumulates and my character forms. It is not limited within the confines of my skin, but in some way, it must include also those significant relationships that do so much to constitute me as a person. . . . It seems an intelligent and coherent hope that God will remember the pattern that is me and re-create it in a new environment of God’s choosing, by a great act of final resurrection.
Now, there are some other ideas from the strange world of Quantum mechanics pointing in the same direction, but I am not a scientist and in attempting to explain them I am talking well above my head. But this is hopefully sufficient to honestly answer the question.
Q. When I was in college I took a religion class in which the professor, one of my favorites, said that Christianity is really about spiritual transformation here and now and not an afterlife––going to heaven someday for being “good” in this life. That made sense to me. What do you think?
A. That is a perspective that has asserted itself more and more in the last forty years. And I am familiar with it. There is a good deal of what your professor said that corresponds with Christian teaching, but it does so only partially––somewhat like a puzzle piece that looks like just the one you need to fill; a space, but does not quite fit. It is true that Christianity is far more about spiritual transformation than about a future reward for being good now. But it is pretty much impossible to read the New Testament without seeing and grasping, or perhaps I should say without being grasped by, its promise of eternal life. Perhaps, a little more difficult to apprehend is the intrinsic connection between its promise of eternal life and spiritual transformation. As a Christian you should be able to think of several such connections without even pausing here in your reading: (1) “Eternal life” refers not only to life without end, but also to a quality of life that begins now––rather like tasting a delicious piece of fruit before you have consumed it. (2) The Bible constantly connects entrusting our future into God’s hands with our ongoing transformation––both our present and future. (3) Relying on Christ to save us from death itself is an act of radical spiritual surrender and faith without which no real transformation is possible. The most sublime experience possible, is that which is known by a man or woman who at the moment of death is able to say in complete surrender: “Lord Christ, into your hands I commend my spirit.” (4) Eternal bliss in the presence of God is, in fact, that transformation which is beyond all the power of the human mind to conceive or imagine. (5) If you are suffering from a catastrophic injury or illness, and your thoughts are simple thoughts of comfort, and longing, and hope as you contemplate being completely and fully with the Lord in that place-less place we call heaven, where there is no suffering, or pain, or sorrow, or death, then you have been and are being transformed. I would far rather be where you are in my thoughts than with the “superior” intellectual whose transformation will end in a handful of dirt or ash.
Q. Doesn’t belief in the resurrection depend on faith?
A. Yes, I would say that the hope of the resurrection begins, and ends in faith. It begins with faith as mental assent or belief in the reality of God who is good, just, trustworthy, and loving; and, for want of a better term, personal. And it ends with faith as unfathomable trust. Without faith in this first sense, faith as belief in the God of the Bible, the logic which has been traced from Scripture and employed here falls apart. That is, it all begins with a certain assumption about the reality and nature of the Holy Trinity. Take that away and I have no idea why anyone would believe in the resurrection or afterlife. I think it important to also note that faith is, if properly understood, a kind of “energy” or “power”––the power of the Spirit of God (Mark 11:22-23). Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century said “faith is our passion for God.” Certainly, the more we open ourselves, the more we trust, the more spiritually receptive we become. And through the practice of the spiritual disciplines the more our ability to confront the forces of confusion and anti-life is enhanced. (Matthew 17:21). Trust (faith) and loving intimacy, are so closely linked that they are virtually synonymous. The more we rely on the love of Christ than on ourselves and empty ourselves in order that the Spirit may fill our hearts and minds, the more effectual our faith.
Q. I am wondering if the resurrection is somehow intimately connected to both Holy Communion (the Eucharist), and also to baptism?
A. You are absolutely correct in thinking so. The bread we eat is the body of Christ who died for us on the cross (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24). The cup we drink is the blood of the New Covenant (Matthew 26:28); and, because we, though many, eat this one bread and drink this one cup, are one body––the one body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16-17). And in baptism, we die and are buried with Christ, and resurrected to new life, to eternal life, in him (Romans 6: 3-4; 1 Corinthians 10:1-4). From earliest Christianity the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper and baptism have been known as “the mysteries.” Keep up this meditation on the mysteries of the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, contemplate them constantly and in the years yet to come you will see things more wonderful than you ever thought possible.