I know that my redeemer lives
And at the last day he shall stand upon the earth.
And though this body be destroyed I shall see God
I myself will see him, my own eyes,
I, and not another.
Job 19
Recently in a St.
Louis airport café a widow asked me to explain my beliefs about the afterlife.
Since her husband’s death a bit over a year ago, she has felt cut off from her
Church. The shadow of death falls between her and the community of faith. Now
“it’s coming on Christmas” and she does not want to face another Feast of the
Nativity so alone. She wanted some way to reconcile faith with the hard fact of
death. I had 5 minutes to set out a theology on the nature and destiny of
humankind. It seemed to help. I hope so. But it left so much unsaid! This blog
post too will leave much unsaid, but I hope it will be a little more thoughtful.
A disclaimer: I can’t
prove what I say. If I could prove it, it wouldn’t be faith. None of us has a
photograph or a soil sample of “that undiscovered country from whose bourne no travelers return.” Death is a
mystery. What I hope to present is my faith, grounded in the Church’s
teachings, a “reasonable faith,” meaning a faith for which I can state a
reason. It isn’t a proven fact but it isn’t just wishful thinking either.
The question matters.
It matters for how we live now. As the years pass, I am not too concerned yet
about my own mortality, but more and more of the people I love have died and I
do miss them. I want to know what I can
dare to believe about their present and their future. Their passing teaches me the
mortality of those I love who are still here. At a service following the recent
mass shooting in Las Vegas, a Jewish cantor sang these words to a distressing
modernist setting:
It is a fearful thing to love
that which death can touch.
What is it that death
cannot touch? Who is it safe to love? A life in which love is not possible, now
that scares me far more than my own death. But what faith, what hope makes love
possible in the face of death? Those are the questions that demand answers to
the mystery of “that undiscovered country.”
God. Our faith begins and ends in God.
We used to speak of logical “proofs of God” – ontological proofs, cosmological
proofs, moral proofs, etc. Now we speak more humbly of “warrants for belief in
God” – meaning reasons that support our belief. For now, let’s just say it is reasonable to
believe in God. The God in whom it is reasonable to believe is not a superbeing
on a distant star. The God in whom it is reasonable to believe is not a being
at all. Our God is the source of Being itself. Our God is the ultimate origin
and ultimate destiny of everything, us included. What’s more our God is infinitely
good, worthy of worship and devotion. So, we start with this Lord of Sea and
Sky, the Be-All and End-All of everything, us included. What then, if anything
does God have to do with us?
Self. Though
this body be destroyed I . . . .
Job’s words open a
huge question. Who is this I who
shall do these things though this body be
destroyed? It is not a small slip of the tongue. It is his point. Job says,
And
though this body be destroyed I shall see God
I myself will see him, my own eyes,
I, and
not another.
I and not another. Job believes his
identity is not limited to his protoplasm. That is a good thing. Cells are
constantly dying and being replaced. It has been said that we roughly speaking
swap out our bodies once every 7 years. I would now be on my ninth body,
working on 10. Yet, I still feel myself to be the same person. I do not have
the same skin. Nor do I hold the same opinions. I do not look the same. And yet
I am somehow myself. There is a core to our being. We have all sorts of
subpersonalities with their quirks and idiosyncrasies. But at the center, I am
still me. What is that me, that core self, and where did it come from and where
is it going?
We come from God. It
is that simple. We come from the heart and mind of God. We say that without
hesitation because God is by definition the Source and Destiny of everything.
So, then, if we come from God, does God forget us? Does God cease to care for
his children.
Can
a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no
compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she
may forget, I will not forget you.
See, I have
engraved you on the palms of my hands.
Isaiah 49: 15-16
If we, in our mortal
frailty are capable of abiding love, how much more so is God who is infinite
and eternal, and whose very nature is Love! As long as God remembers us and
cares for us, we cannot fall out of existence.
Lady Julian of
Norwich, in the 14th Century, fell victim to the Plague. She was so
clearly dying that she received last rites. As the priest held the crucifix
before her dying eyes, she had 16 Visions of Divine Love, then recovered and
lived to describe those visions in the first book ever written in English by a
woman. One vision was of a hazelnut that seemed so small, so frail, so flimsy,
she wondered what keeps it from falling into nothingness. She asked what it
was, and God told her it was the entire universe. How can it exist, it is so small? she asked.
It exists, God answered, because I love it.
In another vision,
Julian described the soul. Even in the spiritual Middle Ages, Julian did not describe
the soul as a ghostly wisp of spirit. Rather she saw it as our core self, our
true self, the thing we mean when we say I.
And she said, that
our daily lives, our thoughts, feelings, and actions might well be severed from
Christ. But our soul, our core self, is never separate from Christ who is the
core self of the cosmos. The division is not between God and us. It is within
us.
Our true life is
already in God. It has always been in God. It will always be in God. Each day
there is a dying, a dying of the body and of the personality we were yesterday.
But our self, our core being, our life is in God.
You have died. Now your life is hid with Christ in God.
Colossians
3: 3
If God is eternal – by
definition, God is eternal – and God is love as our faith holds, then our lives
are held eternally in God’s love.
But shall we remain ourselves?
The view of some Eastern religions is that our individual identity is a problem
to be overcome and eventually it is overcome as we fall like drops and dissolve
into the ocean of eternity. That is plausible. But we Christians have another
view arising from two paradoxical truths we hold in in tension:
First, there is a
unity to all things, a Being underlying and uniting all beings. That is what we
mean when we say: God is one.
Second, this one God
is constantly proliferating diversity. The one God who is the essence of
Reality itself spins out the universe in all its multifarious complexity.
And God said, “Let the waters teem with living creatures
and let birds fly above the earth and
across the vault of
the heavens.
So God created the great creatures of the sea
and every
living thing . . .. And God saw that it was good.
And God
blessed them and said be fruitful and increase
in number. . ..
Genesis
1: 20-22
God is procreative.
God’s nature is not to suck all things into Godself but to scatter Being out
into the Void making this wild menagerie of creation. God is procreative and
God is relational. God delights in relating with us as the unique individuals
that we are, that God created us to be. Theologian Karl Rahner said, Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable word
of God. Can a word of God be lost? Can a word of God be silenced? God does
not love humanity as an abstraction. God loves each of us in our individuality
and for our individuality.
That means our image
of eternal life is not a drop dissolving into the ocean, but a dance or a
banquet, an occasion of mutual delight. We are lost in wonder, love, and praise but we are still ourselves wondering,
loving, praising, while God laughs in cosmic joy at our homecoming.
I myself will see him, my own eyes,
I, and not another.
Reward and Punishment? What to
believe about reward and punishment in the afterlife is quite a quandary. On
the one hand, carrot and stick religion has been used to browbeat and
intimidate people for too long to endure. Such a religion is not the child of
mystic insight but rather is the tool of a domination system to keep people
compliant. See for example, On The
Necessitie of a Publik Religion by Benjamin Franklin. It portrays God not
as Love but as a vindictive Judge demanding our fear but unworthy of our love. It ratchets up spiritual ambition and dread to
make a selfish religion. I practice my religion to advance my own interests and
save my own hide.
The alternative,
universalism, gives us a considerably more appealing God. The doctrine that all
the cosmos will be redeemed has roots in Paul, was expressly taught by that
giant of Early Church theology, Origen, and has been proclaimed by greats in
the Anglican tradition like F. D. Maurice and Charles Gore. But this too has a
problem. Universalism denies or at least diminishes the significance of our
earthly lives. If we all end up the same, what difference does it make what we
do, think, or feel?
C. S. Lewis offers an
Anglican middle way. It is not about what God does to us. It’s about who we
become. Lewis observes our tendency over the years to become more and more the
way we are. We become more extreme versions of ourselves. A little virtue over
the course of a lifetime may grow but life is not long enough for it to become
too big. If the trend continues into eternity, however, one could become
beautifully holy. Conversely, a little vice will grow worse though the years.
But life is short so the worst it is apt to do is make us a disagreeable old
person. If that vice grows on through eternity, however, it could produce a
monster.
Our happiness is
found in relationship with God. That relationship will be considerably more
harmonious for the holy than for the monstrous character. Indeed, Lewis
suggests elsewhere that heaven and hell may be the same reality experienced
very differently by people depending on the state of their souls. Do we want to
be nearer my God to thee?
But is the vice-ridden
person then lost forever? Not so. Only God and that which is of God are
eternal. Those things that are not of God are mortal. Over the course of
eternity, the vices lose their energy so that all will be redeemed.
In one book from the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan sends the
children on a mission sternly ordering them to stay on the path. Do not wander.
But, of course, they do wander and become lost in the forest. There they
encounter Aslan. Remorseful, they confess their disobedience and ask Aslan if
all is lost now that they cannot get to their destination. Aslan assures them
they will still make it to the destination, and they can achieve their mission,
but the road will now be much longer and much harder.
There are
consequences to our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, our practices, and our
habits. They can make our path shorter or longer, easier or harder. But we cannot
defeat the love of God which was and is and ever shall be. The love of God is
our destiny. In our freedom, we can resist it, but we cannot resist it forever.
Conclusion. Many have speculated
about that undiscovered country. I hope
I have added nothing new. I am just recounting teachings from the Church – not
universally agreed upon but teachings, nonetheless -- the wisdom of the ages as
I have received it. If God is God as we believe God to be – the Source and
Destiny of All, the Being and the Void, the Meaning of the cosmic story – and
if God is as we believe God to be – Infinite Love, procreative and relational,
holding the cosmos in being by loving it – then I trust this ancient teaching
is a reasonable belief. I will stake my life on it, and dare to love that which
death can touch because death touches us all but holds none of us forever.
