Resurrection: Myth or Reality? by John Shelby Spong - Chapter 21 (emphasis mine GCS)

Life After Death—This I Do Believe

      All of my adult life I have wanted to write a major book on life after death. I wanted to make the case for its reality to modern folk like myself. I have thrown myself into this task with great energy. There was a time when I thought that this was the Rubicon line, and unless I crossed it all else would crumble. I have done massive research on the subject. For an entire year I studied the concept of life after death in the Hebrew Scriptures. I learned some fascinating things in that study—for example, that life after death did not appear as a major category in Hebrew thought until a concept of individualism was formed around the sixth century B.C.E. It did not gain much shape or power until about two centuries before Jesus’ birth, and then it grew out of the pain of oppression and the heroic, sacrificial deaths of Jewish folk who put devotion to their understanding of God’s truth ahead of their personal safety. These were interesting insights, but they led to no conclusions.

I spent another whole year looking at the understanding of life after death in the Christian Scriptures. I again learned some fascinating things. Every writer in the New Testament seems to have believed something different about the afterlife. There is no hell, for example, in Paul’s writings. Paul mentions only the hope Of life in Christ or the absolute annihilation of life in a timeless death. Most of the hellfire references in the New Testament are Matthew’s gifts to Christianity. He was particularly obsessed with that idea. If Matthew had never written his Gospel, the revivalist preachers on the sawdust trail who trafficked in guilt and fear, and whose oratory has regularly stoked the fires of hell, would have had almost no biblical basis for their fulminations.

I spent another significant period looking at the various shapes the idea of life after death took in Western history, and the way that idea affected human beings, particularly in times of total belief. Peter the Great of Russia, for example, would visit the site of the execution of one whom he had condemned to death, to console his victim with vivid heavenly assurances. I began to understand how the concept of life after death had acted as a deterrent to any passion for building a just society. Life after death made the unfair world appear to be fair, for it represented justice delayed, not entirely denied. Karl Marx, who rejected the realm of heaven altogether, suggested that such a religion, built on such an idea, was properly recognized as nothing but an opiate of the people.

I also began to document the historical and political reality that when belief in life after death began to fade in Western civilization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was replaced by liberal politics. Indeed liberal politics were born, I would argue, to fill the vacuum created by the denial of a belief in life after death. Everything—from Marx to the varieties of European socialism including something called “Christian” socialism, to the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the war on poverty, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, and the role of organized religion in the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement, and the gay movement—was an unconscious response to the loss of a sure conviction in regard to life after death. The hope for life after death in a believing age took care of the human need to be assured that God and life were fair. When the hope that fairness awaited us in the afterlife waned in our unbelieving age, the need to make fair the unfair world was keenly felt and found expression in the political arena. Liberal politics came into being with that as its single basic agenda. If fairness was not destined to be achieved in an afterlife, a passion to achieve it in this life must be served. That was the first political response, I believe, to the loss of faith in God and the loss of a hope for heaven.

The second political response to this loss was not near so noble. When the secular spirit won the day, the drive to serve God by creating fairness on this earth lost momentum. When it did, liberalism became a bad word. Then the obsession to create earthly fairness was replaced by a spirit of greed and amorality in the political arena. In the United States this amoral greed was born, in my opinion, when President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963. He was, for many, one who articulated the final glimmering ideal of hope for a better and fairer life in our world. This is not to say that President Kennedy necessarily embodied those ideals in his personal life, but it is to say that these were the symbols and legends that gathered around his person, and upon his death these values, which form his legacy, entered the realm of mythology.

Following that death, however, American political life was marked by one final attempt to build a fair world called “the great society.” But that effort was marred by self-serving greed that stretched from the way Lyndon Johnson’s personal wealth was created to the way various people made fortunes. The desire to assist the unfortunate was derailed by misuses of appropriated monies. In the Johnson years, however, people still had a sense that they were doing something wrong, no matter how well their behavior served them. But Johnson was followed in office by Richard Nixon, whose years were marked by a shift in attitude from immorality to amorality. The Nixon administration seemed incapable of seeing or knowing the difference between right and wrong. This movement culminated in the Reagan years, when the tax code was adjusted to allow capital to flow away from the poor and the middle class to this nation’s wealthiest people. The twin realities of extreme wealth and rising homelessness became two sides of the same coin in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States.

In the United Kingdom similar phenomena of greed and legal class warfare marked the long reign of England’s Iron Lady of politics, Margaret Thatcher. In that administration also the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

If heaven did not make fair our unfair world, and if that was also not able to be achieved politically, then fairness as an ideal began to fade. People in what were once the leading Christian nations of the West started to act as if they could do whatever they wanted to do in order to get their share in the jungle called life. No one else really mattered. It was an ominous turn in values. Tracing this trend made me aware of how important the idea of fairness associated with life after death had been in the history of our civilization.

So it is that in much of the West in the last decade of the twentieth century, a time that has also witnessed the death of communism, a political system based on fairness is no longer considered a realistic possibility. A dawning sense exists that a new basis and a new value system for human life must be found.

Next I sought to understand life after death in the other religious traditions of the world. Nirvana, reincarnation, the transmigration of souls—all engaged my attention, titillated my interest for a moment, but then finally lost their appeal. I read widely in parapsychology. There is an amazing amount of material in this area of human speculation. There are also striking claims and fascinating “coincidences” that cry out to be explored. There are provocative hints about levels of communication that, by our standards today, are nonphysical. But no emerging or real consensus exists. Perhaps there are telepathic messages that human beings can pass one to another, but the data is so chaotic, so lacking in verification, as to be untrustworthy. I keep an open mind, but I remain an agnostic on this approach.

Finally I sought to analyze the images of both heaven and hell that have been dominant in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Hell has been a place of separation, a place of punishment, and a place of nothingness. Each of these concepts plays on something deep in the human psyche—our need for intimacy, our sense of guilt, and our quest for meaning. Hell in its various forms speaks to each of our distorting fears.

The concept of Heaven also grew out of something deep within the human being. To wilderness wanderers heaven was “a land flowing with milk and honey.” To a church living in persecution, heaven was a place where there was no sorrow or sadness and no separation. To medieval peasants, who worked at physical labor from sunup to sundown six days a week, with only Sunday to recuperate and restore their energy, heaven became the eternal Sabbath, the heavenly rest. Basically, beneath the images, people were saying that hell was the ultimate symbol of that which threatened their humanity, and heaven was the ultimate symbol of their dreams and their vision of human fulfillment.

But above all it was clear that heaven and hell have been used by both church and society as a method of behavior control. A member of the British Parliament actually suggested, as late as the early 1990s, that we should revive the idea of hell to be a weapon in our fight against crime and drugs. This M.P. naively observed that in those eras when hell was taken seriously, we had less crime and less drug abuse. His conclusion could hardly be faulted, but the way he got to his conclusion was marvelously self-serving and ignorantly bizarre.

Nonetheless, heaven became the ultimate reward for good behavior, with God being cast as the rewarding parent, and hell became the ultimate parental punishment for evil behavior, with God being cast as the punishing judge. Heaven and hell, ultimate reward and ultimate punishment, were just another step increase from that era in which peerages were handed out to extraordinary citizens for exemplary contributions and where the whipping post was the threatened destiny for social derelicts, drunks, petty thieves, and debtors.

THE MERGING OF TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE

This study of life after death consumed as much as five years of my life. It fed many other things that I was doing, but the study itself seemed to lead me to no final conclusions. I do not today regret the years I spent on this subject. I treasure the insights I gained. But I will never write the book I set out to write, for I still do not know what to say or how to express my convictions on this subject except with a consuming vagueness.

   I do believe that death is not the end of our lives. But I do not know how to talk about that. I have no words, I possess no concepts. I am reduced to silence before this ultimate mystery. But if someone were to ask me Job’s ancient and searching question, “If a man (or woman) dies, will he (she) live again?” my answer would be “Yes.” That is my conviction. That is what I believe. Yet there is so much about the traditional content of heaven and hell that I do not believe, that I can speak negatively far more easily than I can speak positively.

   I do not believe in life after death as a method of behavior control. I have no interest in the reward/punishment aspect of the afterlife. In the honesty of one’s heart of hearts, the person whose life is noble only for the sake of gaining the ultimate reward of heaven is immediately guilty of being self-serving. If one acts one way and not another only to get a reward, one’s life becomes insufferably shallow and petty. I would not be drawn to anyone or to any religious system that approached life in such a way. I recall the hymn that says: “I love thee Lord, but not because I hope for heaven thereby, Nor yet for fear that loving not, I might forever die.”¹ This hymn speaks to a higher good than that of the selfish person seeking a reward. It is my hope that Christianity will shed its reward and punishment motifs as a clear aberration in our understanding of the Gospels and as simply unworthy of the Lord we claim to serve.

   I hope, too, that the church will someday reject the behavior control business as a blind and alien path that we have traveled in ignorance. The business of the church is to love people into life. When we confuse that and begin to think that our job is to judge one another, out of some self-imposed standard of righteousness, we have then, in my opinion, misread the whole message of the Gospel. To make moral pronouncements and to judge human life has become the favorite indoor sport of institutional Christianity, but it has never been of the essence of the Gospel. So I dismiss heaven as a place of reward, and I dismiss hell as a place of punishment. I find neither definition either believable or appealing.

   Life after death must mean more than that. Talking about heaven is, for me, like talking about the resurrection. I no longer need to describe it. In this volume I have written about the resurrection of Jesus. I have dismissed many of the later-written details of Easter as legends, but I continue to cling to the core experience that inspired that legend. When I come to describe what actually happened on the first Easter, I find that I can talk about the effects that Easter had, the power it produced, the changes it wrought, the context in which it was experienced, and the results it created. But the moment itself? About that I discover that I am reduced to a profound, reverential silence. That moment was beyond time and space and, therefore, beyond the capacity of our language to capture or of our minds to understand. One has only to stand before that transcendent moment, containing that which the church has called the resurrection of Jesus, and there utter only a simple yes or no. In that silence I speak my yes, and then I seek to live into the power of that resurrection in my life.

In a similar fashion my years of study on the issues of life after death have given me no words with which to discuss the idea. For Jesus it seemed to mean something like communion with God. It meant being in touch with something that transcended all of one’s human categories, including a transcendence of the self that one is. It meant having one’s eyes opened to see dimensions of life not normally seen and to have one’s ears open to hear melodies and harmonies not normally heard.

This means that now I no longer look for God or for ultimate meaning in some distant place beyond this world. I rather seek these realities in every moment and in every relationship. For me the transcendence of God is no longer something different from the immanence of God. Transcendence is always a dimension of the immanent. The immanent is the point of entry; the transcendent is the infinite depth capable of being discerned behind any moment, beyond any point of entry.

For me heaven is an invitation into life, which, when explored deeply enough, when lived fully enough, when engaged significantly enough, is a way of passing into transcendence. In this way finite moments slip into being infinite, timeless moments. I also believe that human life can be lived so deeply, that love can be experienced so powerfully, that incarnation in fact occurs again and again. God is not a heavenly man, an external force, or a judging parent. God is the creating spirit that calls order out of chaos. God is the life force that emerges first into consciousness, then into self-consciousness, and now into self-transcendence, and ultimately into we know not what. God is the love that creates wholeness, the Being at the depths of our being, the Source from which all life comes.

This is the God that I see in Jesus of Nazareth, and so I affirm that this life is the life of God being lived among us. His was a life not finally bound by human limits. When those whose fear of God’s presence was so total that they struck back to kill him, they finally were forced to discover that all they actually did was to free the meaning of his life from the boundaries of finitude and to make him timeless, eternal, and ever-present. When the eyes of Simon finally saw the meaning of Jesus’ life, when the ears of Simon finally heard the music of Jesus’ life, then he stared across that invisible but ever-so-real barrier that separated time from timelessness, finitude from infinity, human spirit from Holy Spirit, and he saw Jesus inside the meaning of God.

How does one talk about that? Only symbolically, I assure you. First there was the ecstatic negative proclamation, “Death cannot contain him!” In time the ecstasy of that claim was turned into human stories about tombs being empty, stones being rolled away to allow the divine exit, grave clothes being placed so as to suggest that he rose out of them, and startled women conversing with him in the garden. Next there was the ecstatic positive proclamation, “We have seen the Lord!” In time the ecstasy of that claim was also turned into human stories about heavenly apparitions that appeared inside sealed space, during a meal in Emmaus, by the Sea of Galilee, or in the upper room. To quell the doubts and to answer the questions, details were added. So we are told that Jesus ate a piece of broiled fish, that he spoke to them to interpret the Scriptures, that he invited the physical inspection of his wounds, and that he commissioned them to be his agents in all the world. It was not long before that transcendent moment in which meaning broke into the consciousness of those still living inside this world, meaning that was beyond this world, had been turned by human beings into a concrete fact of history, complete with magical details.

Such a transformation might be sustained in a premodern age of faith, but that kind of magic and sleight of hand will never survive in our contemporary world, where miracle and the supernatural are both suspect. If we insist that Easter’s truth must be carried inside such a literal framework, we doom Easter’s truth to the death of irrelevance. Yet to talk about ultimate moments is something that human beings must do, and to explain human experiences is a compelling human need. We need not apologize for that. We do need to apologize for the arrogance of those human beings who insist that we reduce all transcendent reality to an explanation, using literalized human words, and then claim ultimacy not for the experience but for the explanation. We do need to apologize for the human assumption that when we have explained something in understandable human language, we have established the objectivity of our explanation as the bearer of ultimate truth.

Because Jesus was the name given to a life of ultimate, transcendent meaning that emerged in a Jewish context, Jewish concepts were inevitably the first line of human explanation. We see the influences of the feast of Tabernacles and the feast of Passover. We see the interpretative power of such Jewish concepts as prophet/martyr, atoning sacrifice, suffering servant, and son of man. There was nothing any more literal about these explanations than there was about the narratives of empty tombs or apparitions. The former was an intellectual attempt to explain. The latter was a legendary attempt to understand. The truth of Easter lies beyond both of these interpretive efforts.

So also does life after death get twisted and tangled in the words used to convey it, and in the power that is thought to derive from it. I want to move beyond the pious sentimentality used in times of crises even by those who do not believe in God. I want to move beyond the immature assurances with which an adult consoles a child who has lost either a pet or a parent to death. I want to move beyond the institutional tactics of behavior control, of reward and punishment, that finally issued in the practice of the sale of indulgences, primarily on the Catholic side of Christianity, and the manipulation of human fear by extolling the punishing power of divine wrath, primarily on the Protestant side of Christianity. I do not want either the promise of heaven or the fear of hell to manipulate any person into doing anything. That may well be a proper function of society, of the laws that govern the social order, of civic awards and public praise on one side and civil fines and even penal incarceration on the other. But that is not the role of God, the vocation of the Christian church, or the function of heaven.

Life is finite. At least in every individual expression of that life, it is finite. It comes into existence at a particular moment. It lives out, more or less, its appointed span of days. It passes out of existence, and the elements that once coalesced to form that life return to the primal soup to be reformed as part of another entity. My affirmation is that only those creatures who have developed self-consciousness can, within their span of days, commune with that which is beyond our limits. When we commune with the limitless, the eternal, the ultimately real one, we share in those aspects of that reality with which our hearts and minds are bound. If one does that completely enough it could well be said of that one that his life had been incorporated into God at the moment of his death. If Jesus of Nazareth provided us with the means by which we can walk on his path into the same destiny, then it is easy to understand why some would claim that they heard him say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me”; or “I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me, though he die yet shall he live.”

So I stand before this portrait of God painted by Jesus of Nazareth and interpreted by the church. I recognize the legends, the accretions, the context of that ancient world which had the task of transforming the inbreaking reality into human words. I probe all of those elements until I get beyond them to the experience that produced them. Here words fail me. Silence engulfs me. I peer beyond the limits in which my life is lived, and I say my prayerful yes...

Yes to Jesus—my primary window into God;

Yes to resurrection—which asserts that the essence of Jesus is the essence of a living God;

Yes to life after death—because one who has entered a relationship with God has entered the timelessness of God.

These three yeses coalesce into being the defining experience of my life. Out of these affirmations I will live, I will love, and I will enter life deeply. I will scale life’s heights and explore its depths. I will seek truth without fear, and when I find it, I will act on it regardless of the cost. I will never rank peace above justice or the unity of an institution ahead of the integrity of that institution. Those are just other ways of being faithless to the primary defining “yes” that lies at the center of who I am.

I will never again seek to speculate on the nature of life after death, the definition of heaven, or the arguments for or against its reality. Those books on life after death that I read in my earlier life will remain in a row on a shelf in my library. I will not open them again. I will treasure those persons with whom my life is emotionally bound today, and I will enjoy the expanding privileges of their friendship. When they die, I will grieve at the loss that my life will experience. I will not speculate on how, if, or in what form I might see them again. That is not my business. My business is to live now, to love now, and to be now. As I give my life, my love, and myself away now, I hope that others can be called into deeper life, greater love, fuller being, and that by expanding each other, we enter the infinity of what Paul Tillich called “the eternal now.”² To live it, not to explain it, is my task and, I believe, the task of the Christ in this world and therefore the task of that group of people who dare to call themselves the body of Christ.

So let us live, my brothers and sisters. Let us even eat, drink, and be merry, not because tomorrow we shall die but because today we are alive and it is our vocation to be alive—to be alive to God, alive to each other, alive to ourselves.

“Choose ye this day whom you will serve!” As for me and my house we will serve the crucified/risen one, who said, “I have come that you might have life and that you might have it ABUNDANTLY,” and I will live in expectant hope that where he is there will I someday be. That is quite enough for me.

Shalom.