[Dialogue] 1/29/09, Spong: Eternal Life: Pious Dream or Realistic Hope?

Thu Jan 29 13:00:36 EST 2009

Subject: Eternal Life: Pious Dream or Realistic Hope?

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Thursday January 29, 2009 

Eternal Life: Pious Dream or Realistic Hope?

Do modern men and women, even those who still attend church, really believe in life after death? Or do they, as I suspect, only believe in believing in life after death? Recently I attended a funeral service in an Episcopal Church where the words of the fixed liturgy proclaimed with the confidence of yesterday that God is resurrection and life and that whosoever has faith in God shall have life even though he or she dies. "If," the liturgical form continued, "we have life we are alive in God and, if we die, we die in God. So then, whether we live or die, we are God's possession." We all heard those words and found them both familiar and comfortable. When we departed from the set liturgy, however, these affirmations disappeared. Instead, we were led to say: "Those who have died live within us today….As long as we live they too will live for they are now part of us." The exhortation was to remember them for in our remembering, it was said, they continued to live. The service was designed to provide mourners with a time to remember the achievements of the deceased, not to celebrate that person's entrance into eternal life. It was hardly a ringing
 affirmation of life after death. 
In a recent New York Times book review, "The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks," by Robin Romm, the inability on the part of some modern people to believe the old affirmations was stated clearly. The reviewer opened her article with these words: "The fundamental condition of being human is that we are going to die. Almost as basic as that truth is the fact that we are incapable of believing it." In the book itself the author, describing the death of her mother, spoke of her inability to release her mother to death. While her mother assured her daughter that she would be okay without her, Ms Romm stated that she screamed in response, "I won't be okay. I can't imagine life without you" — to which her mother replied, "Sweetheart, I don't need your permission to die." The point of this dialogue was to demonstrate that our acceptance of the inevitability of death has become a modern form of solace, one quite far removed from the convictions that once comforted us in the face of death. 

In my church a century ago, a funeral service included no homily and no eulogy. It was rather a bold affirmation that "death is swallowed up in victory" and that even at the grave we shout in defiance, "Alleluia," the ancient Hebrew word that means "Praise Yahweh." Today, this affirmation has been replaced by transforming the service into a memorial, giving thanks for the life of the deceased. In our societal life, even the words heaven and hell, which once symbo
lized life after death, have been drained of their ancient meaning. "Heaven," if it is a noun, is nothing more than a synonym for the sky; as an adjective, "heavenly" is used to describe everything from a delectable dessert to a good date. "Hell" has become a mild oath that is so totally devoid of its original meaning that one can say without embarrassment: "It is cold as hell today!" 

The connection of religion to people's lives in our increasingly secular society has narrowed to what people regard as life's major transitions for which we feel a need for some ritual, namely birth, marriage and death, or "hatching, matching and dispatching," as one wag put it. Even here, however, evidence suggests that faith is fading. Baptism has devolved, first into a ritual of dedication, and now is disappearing as people celebrate the miracle of life without the need for religious institutions. Marriages have become social events in which religion plays an ever smaller role. Today's weddings are moving away from churches to civic offices, homes and natural romantic settings. Funerals have been the slowest of the major transitions to drift away from church, but, even here changes are profound. In New Zealand I have met people whose employment is to provide secular funerals for those who want no part of religion even at death, but who feel a need for some ritual of closing. For a fee, these secular liturgists help plan and preside over the transition out of life into death with a dignified service of remembering. =0
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In England this past Christmas Eve, the playwright Harold Pinter, author of such Broadway and London hits as "The Birthday Party," "The Caretaker," "The Homecoming," and "Betrayal," died leaving the following funeral and burial instructions: "No prayers are to be said at this service," he directed, "but mourners are asked to read poems and to tell stories about the sport of cricket." God had clearly faded from Pinter's consciousness. 

Even in religious circles today, there is an increasingly honest skepticism about the traditional religious claims of life everlasting. Don Cupitt, the English theologian and prolific writer, in his most recent book, Above Us Only Sky, denied outright any claim to life after death He even used the tag line, made famous by the Looney Tunes cartoons, to assert that at the end of life: "That's all that there is, folks." Bart Ehrman, a New York Times bestselling author and the popular and articulate professor in the Department of Religion of the University of North Carolina, stated in his last book, God's Problem, and in my presence in a series of lectures at Lee's Summit, Missouri, that there is no life beyond death and our goal must be to find meaning and happiness in this life. Lloyd G. Geering, perhaps New Zealand's best known citizen and former Old Testament Professor at Knox Theological Centre at the University of Otago in Dunedin and at Wellington's Victoria University, has made his views quite clear that this life is all there is and that no attempt should be made to=2
0rob this life of its meaning by postulating any theory about some life to come. Robert Funk, the late founder of the Jesus Seminar and Schubert Ogden, the great retired Methodist Theology Professor and noted author from Perkins Theological Seminary in Dallas, have held quite publicly similar, but more carefully nuanced, positions on this great question. 

I do not mean to be either critical or judgmental about these people, all of whom have been my admired teachers, close friends or colleagues. I use them only to demonstrate that the state of conviction about the reality of life after death is fading even among the most articulate Christian leaders of the Western world. This is not because these people have departed from the Christian Faith, as their traditional critics are quick to assert, but because their understanding of life after death has not been able to survive the expansion of knowledge that has occurred over the past 400 to 500 years. 

This explosion of knowledge, beginning with the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, started the process of removing God from the divine location just above the sky, thus rendering the God who stands at the heart of traditional Christianity to be homeless. That understanding of both the size and immensity of the universe has been confirmed time and again by Copernicus's successors — Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking — and its truth has been confirmed by the Hubble telescope and manned and unmanned space probes. The God who kept record bo
oks on human behavior from a dwelling place above the sky has become unbelievable. Next Sir Isaac Newton presented us with a view of the universe that operated under precise physical laws in which there was no longer room for either miracle or magic. God was left unemployed, no longer having any work to do. 

It was Charles Darwin, however, more than anyone else who gave the ultimate coup de grace to the ideas that had been associated with the traditional concepts of life after death. Darwin removed from human life its assumed biblical definition as "just a little lower than the angels" and replaced it with the new biological definition of being "just a little higher than the apes." In our previously supposed unique human creation in "the image of God" we made the essential claim that only human beings had been endowed with eternal worth and this was symbolized by the affirmation that human beings alone possessed immortal souls. It is this deep, but subliminal threatening aspect of Charles Darwin's work alone that makes sense out of the almost hysterical religious negativity to the insights of this great scientist. In response to Darwin, above anyone else, the Christian Church has split into two mutually exclusive movements. One is the fanatical resistance of fundamentalism with its irrational but powerful attempt to defend the literal inerrancy of the Bible that has given us "creation science" and "intelligent design." The other is the rapid increase of secularism in the developed world of Europe and North Am
erica that wants nothing more to do with religion in any of its traditional forms. This same secularism is now also growing in Japan, India, China and even in places like Iran, Brazil and Nigeria. The militancy of fundamentalism among the uneducated in the Muslim world or in the backwater regions of the Christian world appears to be in itself little more than a last gasp response to the tide of a rising, religionless secularity. 

So where are we really today on the subject of eternal life? The old verities are fading. Shouting our religious convictions ever more loudly will not arrest the decline. Radical new thinking on the subject, however, might offer a new perspective on eternity. I have been working on this subject for years. The result of that work is now with my publisher, HarperCollins. It will appear in bookstores late next summer under the title Eternal Life: Pious Dream or Realistic Hope? It is the subtitle, however, that outlines the book, My Personal Journey into a New Vision of Eternity. It reveals how I had to struggle to find a way beyond the current religious debate to arrive at a place where I could with theological integrity and personal honesty assert what I believe is the truth of eternal life. I hope it will force the debate on life after death into a new place, less sterile than the one at present. Suffice it now to say that I believe in life beyond death and this book will tell the world why. The New Reformation remains essential. I hope this book will be a 
part of it. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Kenneth Jacobson, from Frazee, Minnesota, writes: 
The news has been received that a California Episcopal Diocese (San Joaquin) has reached the second stage in voting to leave the national Episcopal Communion over the issue of homosexuality. The media is describing the anti-gay position as biblical, the pro-gay as being against Bible teaching. After reading Living in Sin and The Sins of Scripture, I can not believe that it is that simple. Reporters are not doing their job of careful investigation.

Have these biblical stories and texts that are quoted to support the anti-gay position ever been read, analyzed, thoroughly debated and defended in bishop's conferences? These are supposedly intelligent people who respect scholarship. How can they support exclusion on such flimsy evidence? 

Am I wrong to think this struggle among Episcopalians might be a healthy thing, which resistance from the highest levels might be a way of teaching and illuminating facts and reality, exposing the prejudice for the evil it is? 

Where is all this going? What could or should be done to bring about a rational and acceptable result?

Your thoughts, your comments, would be very much appreciated.

Dear Kenneth,

It is not fair to expect secular journalists to be biblical scholars, nor should it be anticipated that they would spend the necessary time to research the issue. It is for that reason that they 
tend to accept uncritically the oft-repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti-gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro-slavery and anti-women. 

There is also a widely accepted mentality that if the Bible is opposed, the idea must be wrong. That is little more than nonsensical fundamentalism. The rise of democracy was contrary to the "clear teaching of the Bible," as the debate over the forced signing of the Magna Carta by King John of England in 1215 revealed. The Bible was quoted to prove that Galileo was wrong; that Darwin was wrong; that Freud was wrong; that allowing women to be educated, to vote, to enter the professions and to be ordained was wrong. So the fact that the Bible is quoted to prove that homosexuality is evil and to be condemned is hardly a strong argument, given the history of how many times the Bible has been wrong. I believe that most bishops know this but the Episcopal Church has some fundamentalist bishops and a few who are "fellow travelers" with fundamentalists.

The Bible was written between the years 1000 B.C.E. and 135 C.E. Our knowledge of almost everything has increased exponentially since that time. It is the height of ignorance to continue using the Bible as an encyclopedia of knowledge to keep dying prejudices intact. The media seems to cooperate in perpetuating that long ago abandoned biblical attitude. 

That is not surprising since the religious people keep quoting 
it to justify their continued state of unenlightenment. That attitude is hardly worthy of the time it takes to engage it. I do not debate with members of the flat earth society either. Prejudices all die. The first sign that death is imminent comes when the prejudice is debated publicly. The tragedy is that church leaders back the wrong side of the conflict, which is happening today from the Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury to the current crop of Evangelical leaders. That too will pass and the debate on homosexuality will be just one more embarrassment in Christian history.

–John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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