Is Eternal Life Real?

"If a person dies, shall he/she live again?" For a significant number of people this question, framed by Job, is the most important question that is addressed by their religious convictions. The ability to determine a person's ultimate destiny has been the source of the greatest power that religious bodies have amassed. Wherever that institutional power has been exercised in the social order, the primary result has been to enforce human conformity to cultural standards and to control behavior. The enforcing lever has been the claim that the religious institution spoke for God who had the divine ability to reward or to punish. So effectively has this power been exercised by the Christian Church throughout its history, that guilt came to be associated with the Church as the emotion most often elicited. It was not enough for the Church to promise earthly blessing for a life well lived, for evil too often seemed to be rewarded and goodness punished. Given the presuppositions out of which our ancestors operated, it became a theological necessity to provide both a heavenly realm where the good people who had nonethess suffered in this world could receive justification and a hell where eternal flames would engulf those whose actions were contrary to the Church's stated values, but yet had been rewarded with earthly success. However, in our day, this reservoir of enormous ecclesiastical power has dissipated and little conviction exists today about life after death.

There are, I believe, at least four serious problems that have coalesced to destroy the believability of most of the Church's understanding of life after death. They need to be lifted into our consciousness and examined if we are to be believers once again.

First, the traditional view of life after death was predicated on a theistic understanding of God. The God who dispensed heaven and hell was an external, supernatural parent figure who, to listen to the preachers from this era, spent all of the divine time keeping record books on everything anyone did that would form the basis of final judgment. So pervasive was this concept that jokes about particular confrontations with St. Peter at the "pearly gates" became a recognizable part of our western humor. But as our view of the universe expanded from Copernicus and Galileo to space travel the idea of a record keeping theistic deity somewhere just above the sky became less and less believable. As God understood in these theistic categories faded, so also did those parts of our theological system directly dependent on that God definition. Conviction about life after death was a major casualty.

The second problem developed with the rise of a sociological consciousness in the 19th century, when the medieval patterns built on class distinctions and racial differences in the human family were seriously challenged by a rising sense of democracy that took centuries to develop fully. First, the divine right of kings, the lynchpin of this social stability, was compromised by the adoption of the Magna Carta. Next, innate ability rather than God-given status began to be valued. Finally, we began to look at the radical inequality found in the variety of starting places in life and to see how unfair the sense of judgment we had once attributed to God really was. Novelists like Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo posed these issues for us in dramatic ways. Is the poor child, abused by society because of his poverty, to be judged by God on the same basis as one born to privilege? Is stealing a loaf of bread, when that is the only way one's family might escape starvation, to be judged on the same basis as one who stole as a way of life? Shortly after the theistic deity who kept record books on individual deeds began to fade, the basis upon which that theistic deity made divine judgments and dispensed reward or punishment began to be questioned and destabilized.

The third problem gnawing at this once powerful religious conviction came in the psychological revolution that arrived in the first half of the 20th century, bringing the collapse of that naive individualism upon which the judgment of this theistic deity was presumably based. If a psychologically abused child grows up to be a murdering adult, where does blame lie? Can an individual deed be judged on its own merits or must we be aware of the extenuating circumstances shaping that person's life? If we do that, how do we assess blame sufficiently to enable divine reward or punishment to be dispensed appropriately? Suddenly heaven began to seem unfair and hell unjust, no matter what we believed about the record-keeping theistic deity.

The fourth reason brings, in my opinion, the profoundest challenge of all. That objection comes when we recognize the radical self-centeredness of the motivation that such a belief creates. The reason for goodness is not that goodness is itself a virtue, but rather to enable one to achieve rewards or avoid punishments. This viewpoint assumes that goodness cannot be motivated on its own merits, but must be encouraged by the selfish desires of reward or the fear of being punished. Heaven and hell therefore are vestiges of this radical self-centeredness.

So under pressure from each of these four serious compromising objections, the concept of life after death has entered a theological limbo. The Church will not abandon it officially; but few theologians seek to engage this profound issue, because it makes little sense inside the box of traditional theistic thinking and no one has proposed a new context in which it can be examined. So in both conservative and liberal Christian circles, a conspiracy of silence has fallen on the subject. In a 1997 Time cover story the issue life after death was said to be ignored across the Christian spectrum. It has become nothing more than pious rhetoric employed frequently in the homes of the deceased. The word "heaven" has been transformed into an adjective and applied to an ice cream flavor known as "heavenly hash," or it is used in romantic language to describe what it is like to be with one's beloved. The word "hell" has become a mild oath, which has clearly lost most of its traditional content when one can say "It's cold as hell today."

Historians suggest that this loss of confidence in an afterlife created the passion that gave birth to liberal politics. Both communism and socialism in Europe, as well as the emergence of those programs called the New Deal, the Great Society and the War on Poverty in the United States have been expressions of this phenomenon. A passion to address the injustices of human life lay dormant in western civilization as long as the conviction held that these injustices would be addressed in an afterlife. When the power of that conviction began to fade, human beings, seeing this world as their only time to live, were no longer willing to be passive. So the driving passion for racial and ethnic equality, gender fairness and the end of homophobic prejudices became major 20th century issues. The poor no longer viewed their status as the will of God, and so agitation to improve their status emerged with vigorous force. None of this occurred until the anticipation of life after death retreated from the consciousness of our modern world.

Right wing conservative voices will immediately deny these insights. They do not want to face the fact that the traditional concept of life after death has died and a vacuum exists in the very place where their religions power once resided. That is why Thesis #11 raises such anger among them and why no significant conservative voice is wrestling publically with this issue.

Life after death, understood as a place of reward and punishment, must, I now believe, be jettisoned from the Christianity that hopes to live into the next millennium. It has died already. A slight breeze blowing in its direction will topple it publicly. The days when guilt can be used by the Church as a weapon of behavior control are over.

But having said that let me now state my deep conviction that our conscious life is not ended with our biological death. For me this is a certainty that arises out of the heart of the Gospel, but I could not see it until I escaped the boundaries of theism which has captured that Gospel for most of its two thousand years. For me, God is no longer a supernatural being external to life. God is rather the very ground and source of Being itself. This means that the more deeply I live and love and have the courage to be the self I am, the more fully God can be seen and revealed in my being.

Jesus is not for me the incarnation of a distant theistic deity, but he remains the ultimate revelation of God for me because his humanity was so complete he became the perfect conduit through which the reality of God as Being itself could be seen, met, engaged and experienced. When I "live and move and have my being in God," as Paul suggested, I enter that presence which transcends my every limit including my mortality. When I am able to be an agent of life to another, I discover as a grace-filled serendipity that the words of Francis of Assisi are correct, that it is in giving that I receive, in loving that I am loved and in dying that I am raised to new life. So heaven for me is not a place of reward. It is the experience of the fullness of Being. Hell is not a place of punishment. It is the experience of non-Being. I can taste both of these realities now in those relationships that call me beyond my fears and prejudices and in those relationships which shred my personhood. I grow not by seeking to be good, but by experiencing that love that sets me free to be, and acting on that love, as a giver of what I have received, and as an agent of another's freedom to be.

It is in those moments that I touch eternity, know transcendence, and meet God. That is the place where I believe I enter a reality that is not bound by finitude. Eternity lives in me just as God lives in me. I am a part of who God is, or as Meister Eckhart observed in the 14th century, "my me is God." No, that is not a statement of arrogant, modern megalomania. It is rather the discovery of the doorway into a Christianity that will emerge in the coming reformation in which a new God-consciousness, beyond the theistic limits of yesterday, will be born. I await the Reformation! I hope I have contributed to its arrival.

-- John McDowell (jmcdowell43@hotmail.com), March 21, 2002

Answers

John McDowell,

I understand that you believe in the papers that you post, but I think it was unethical of you to post a long letter, implicitly taking credit for the writing.

This is just a copy of a letter written by an Episcopal Bishop's (Right Reverend John S. Spong's) from November 1999. His website is:

http://www.dioceseofnewark.org/vox31199.html

As the name suggests, this is the Episcopal Church, not a bastion of orthodox or consistent teachings.

You have plagiarised Rev. Spong's work by not giving him credit. Please give your quotes' authors the recognition that they deserve.

Thanks,

Mateo el Feo.

-- (MattElFeo@netscape.net), March 23, 2002.

Bishop Spong is also a gay-rights activist, and is considered to be far left-wing, even by Episcopalian standards!

-- Marcella (marcellack@yahoo.com), March 23, 2002.

Dear Moderator,
Mr. McDowell has had a chance to read Mateo's and Marcella's responses, either via robot-generated e-mail or here, under his message.
I recommend that this thread now be deleted as inappropriate (not related to Catholicism) and possibly illegal (plagiarism) -- thus against your rules.
Mr. McDowell has proved himself, via multiple threads, not to have any interest in our faith or in conversing about it. His rubbish (and that of the very warped Mr. Spong) should not see the light of day here.
Thanks. JFG

-- (jfgecik@hotmail.com), March 25, 2002.