For humanity as a whole, the concept of a soul that never ceases to exist is very common.  It’s so common, in fact, that many would even say it’s universal.  As we look at cultures throughout history and all over the world, the idea of life after death shows up so much that we are no longer surprised by it and modern science would have us assume this is a belief that just naturally came to primitive people.  Even though these people lived in close quarters with physical death- both of animals and humans; though they could literally see how the death of a person and a chicken appear identical for all practical purposes; we are directed to take for granted that they would naturally leap to this belief in the existence of life after death.  Of course they would, we are taught, primitive cultures were stupid and superstitious! They had to answer with imagination and fiction what we can now answer with science and truth.  Their philosophy “embraced a belief in the immortality of the soul… which was the genesis of all superstition.”[1]  So logically, with the more reasonable lenses to view the universe from, the belief in life after death should have disappeared from the human psyche right?  When we look at our situation on this side of the grave, it’s not even close to what we would expect if we only listened to philosophers and scientists with prejudices against any higher realm of existence that would be in authority over their own bitter and hopeless rule.  Studies have even shown that we are born assuming we have an eternal existence.  The concept of death is shocking to us and even after we understand it and we continue to live as if it is not real.  We treat others as if they will live forever, assuming we always have time to tell them what we want them to know, and when they die we regret (in a horrified and surprised manner) that we no longer have any time with them.  We also live as if we will never die.  Business owners will commonly resist preparations that would ease the transition from their leadership to another’s because, deep down, they really don’t feel like it’s necessary.  We are prone to hoard possessions and procrastinate preparations to the point of psychosis!  In truth, we all have a sense of eternity and an assumption of immortality that is not entirely learned but built into our DNA.  In explaining Christianity in particular, C.S. Lewis noted the ubiquitous nature of this belief “against the modern Western European materialist.”[2]  Christianity’s approach to our place in existence and our relationship with eternal life is both natural and rational with an open ceiling that is, at the same time, supernatural and timeless.  Though the concept of immortality is instinctively present in all humans, for the Christian, through Jesus, eternal life is a gift that colors present and transfigures the future.

Researchers have been surprised at how deeply our assumption of immortality is rooted.  Many humanists, like Rushton Dorman who believed life ends at death, ascribe it to a kind of survival instinct that requires a chaotic environment to make some kind of sense.  Dorman admits this is a universal human phenomenon and notes that “a striking illustration of this fact occurs to the writer, who, while among the negroes of the South, found among that uncultured people the same superstitions that prevailed in Africa, which were also the same as those found among equally uncultured peoples everywhere.” [3]  More recently, studies have shown that children appear to be born believing in their own immortality and a spirit world beyond our material existence.  One in particular, a study by Natalie A. Emmons and Deborah Kelemen from Boston University, illustrates the fact that children from different cultures believe the same thing about their soul’s eternal nature.  Their studies also show that “beliefs about the enduring quality of mental states [cognitive life after the death of the body] were untutored rather than learned responses.”[4]  The belief that our existence disappears with the death of our body has to be taught to children by materialistic tutors and the innate acceptance in an immortal existence has to be unlearned!  These findings fly in the face of earlier humanists who claimed that structured, superstitious explanations of spiritual realms were forced, unnaturally, on children by a repressive religious culture.  These findings are consistent with the agnostic researcher, Pascal Boyer, and his study of instinctive belief patterns.  Boyer came to the conclusion that “disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions.”[5]  Emmons and Kelemen go on to note that “afterlife studies have found that children not only endorse the enduring functionality of emotions and desires after biological death but also all other mental capacities including epistemic states such as thinking.”  Add to this the shock that we feel when death occurs- exactly the reaction we would have to something pointedly unnatural– and our disposition toward a life that continues on indefinitely emerges even more clearly.  “We don’t expect death. We act as though it never happens… we pretend death never happens.”[6]  In fact, C.S. Lewis notes that time is just another word for death and we are surprised by it continually!  “You say the Materialist universe is ‘ugly’.  I wonder how you discovered that?  If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there?  Do fish complain of the sea for being wet?  Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?  Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time.  (‘How time flies!  Fancy John being grown-up & married?  I can hardly believe it!’)  In heaven’s name, why?  Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.”[7]  And, in a way, humanity as a whole is right.  Our souls are immortal.  However, according to Christianity’s answer for existence, that doesn’t necessarily mean our souls will enjoy eternal life.

Christians in particular received the promise of eternal life as a clear answer to their vague and muddled Jewish ideas about life after death.  Simcha Raphael, a Jewish scholar studying his heritage of belief concerning the afterlife, notes that early on “To die… is to return to the company of one’s ancestral family.”[8]  The Jewish identity was tied more closely with the tribe or family than with the individual and this was represented in their understanding of the afterlife.  “Just as the living tribes unified, so the realms of the ancestral dead merged; this unified collectivity of the dead became known as Sheol, a conception that became increasingly important in the Israelite worldview.”[9]  People who went to Sheol were called “rephaim- ghosts, shades, or literally, weak ones, powerless ones.”[10]  Raphael notes that God’s power over Sheol was also understood as seen in the Psalms: “But God will redeem my life from the grave [Sheol]; he will surely take me to himself.” (Psalm 49:15, NIV) and “The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave [Sheol] came upon me… Then I called on the name of the Lord: ‘O Lord, save me!’… he saved me.” (Psalm 116:3-4, NIV).  Raphael also attributes the personal view of moral and ethical responsibilities with consequences stretching past death to the Babylonian exile when Jews were forced to approach God as individuals instead of communally.  This opens the idea of punishment and reward for people who must take responsibility for their own actions and their own relationship with God.  “The soul who sins is the one who will die.” (Ezekial 18:4)  “Everyone will die for his own sin…  I will make a new covenant… I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.  I will be their God, and they will be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:30-33, NIV)  “The doctrine of resurrection… which in rabbinic terms is called tehiyyat ha-metim– originated in in the late Biblical period and to this day remains central to traditional Jewish teachings on the afterlife.”[11]  When we see Jesus entering the landscape of Jewish culture, he brought a clear message to people confused about just what life after death would be like or if it even existed at all.  The great debate at that time was between the Pharisees, who believed in a resurrection that would accomplish ultimate justice, and the Sadducees, who believed that death was final and consequences for right or wrong behavior ended at the grave.  Raphael notes, from a decidedly Jewish point of view, “Even in the Gospels we see how Jesus, obviously a product of early-first-century Judaism, tacitly accepted the Pharisaic belief in a resurrection of the dead for all humanity.”[12]  Jesus not only confirmed the human soul’s immortality, but he qualified that immortality in terms of death and life.  More to the point, eternal death (or dying) versus eternal life (or God).

The message that Jesus brings is about a kind of life that isn’t just endless, but also beginning-less.  It is truly timeless.  This means that the life Christ offers isn’t limited to a specific starting point (like the death of the believer) but can be experienced and enjoyed at any time. It is contrasted with the mortal life we now enjoy as a form of life that is perpetually satisfying and refreshing.  The word immortal gives us the idea of someone or something that began to exist at some point and will continue to exist forever.  Christianity uses another phrase to describe what God offers through Jesus: eternal life.  This is life that is timeless, without beginning or end, and thriving.  In the words of Christ, “but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14, NIV).  This eternal life is present in believers according to their faith (belief in Jesus) and knowledge of God in this world.  “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3, NIV).  “The Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.  For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  (John 3:14-16, NIV).  That this is a present possession is especially highlighted in passages that refer to it in the past tense: “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.”  (John 5:24, NIV emphasis mine).  Also, this eternal life is both a gift for now, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23, NIV) and a hope for later, “Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of God’s elect and the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness- a faith and knowledge resting in the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time” (Titus 1:1-2, NIV).  This life is characterized as a hidden possession of Christians during this mortal portion of life, only showing itself in actions and words of holiness and love from the faithful.  Later, at some point after death or after a rapture of some kind, eternal life will instead possess the believers perfectly.  It is as if believers are given a small deposit representing the vast inheritance they will later receive.  Early in church history, martyrs were dying testimonies of the faith in a life beyond the grave that was more real than their sufferings.  One striking testimony of the presence and power of eternal life possessed by a twelve year old girl named Agnes in the face of Roman tyranny is remembered to this day as a visible witness of the reality God offers us through Jesus.  Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, wrote of her: “The cruelty which did not spare even so young a child serves only to demonstrate more clearly the power of faith which found witness in one so young… It was her final achievement that people believed that she must have received the inner resource for such testimony from God, for humanly speaking it was impossible.”[13]  The very word “martyr” which is now identified almost entirely with death for faith, simply meant “witness” in the original Greek.  And what greater witness of the glorious reality of a better life after this one could there be than that squeezed, drowned, dragged, stoned, hung, boiled and burned from the lips of the faithful?  The first recorded martyr, Stephen, testified about the reality of this next plane of existence to his murders just before death: “Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’” (Acts 7:55-56, NIV).  To further testify of the insignificance of this life and, ultimately the evil actions of his murderers, Stephen added a request that they be granted forgiveness for this particular sin because no retribution was necessary- they were actually sending him to a far superior place.  The power of his testimony no doubt shook Saul, a persecutor of Christians who was present for the stoning, and worked toward his conversion to the believing Paul, instrumental in writing most of the New Testament.  It really is difficult to say too much about the power of a believer’s death as testimony to this eternal life, both present and promised.

Another important distinction about the eternal life that Christians speak of verses many other ideas of immortality is the fact that this life isn’t something that exists independently.  It is actually tied so closely to divinity that it could actually be said to be God.  In fact, before bringing Lazarus back to mortal life, Jesus is recorded as saying “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” (John 11:25, NIV emphasis mine).  And attempting to explain salvation through Christ, John writes: “We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ.  He is the true God and eternal life.” (1 John 5:20, NIV emphasis mine).  This concept seems awkward at first- that God would actually be eternal life- until we recognize that all life is a gift.  Even our mortal life comes directly from God.  Our very existence is a loan from the Creator of everything.  And as God breathes life into humanity while upholding all things created, it necessarily follows that any future life we may have relies directly on our relationship with God.  Kathryn Tanner summarizes the situation nicely:

This understanding of eternal life follows the Old Testament suggestion, then, that all the goods of life (‘life’ in its extended senses) flow from relationship with God (the second biblical sense of life in relationship): ‘ye that did cleave unto the Lord are alive… this day’ (Deut. 4:4, KJV).  The effort to turn away or separate oneself from God has, in the understanding of things, the force of death, broadly construed.  (It is literally the effort to unmake onself.)  Eternal life as life in God is a way of indicating this priority of the second biblical sense of life as relationship with God.  It is also a way of specifying a character of relationship with God that might survive death.  If the world, human society, and individual persons live in virtue of a relationship with God beyond the fact of their deaths, they must live in God and not simply in relationship with God.  After death, the only powers of life our bodies have are God’s own powers of life via the life-giving humanity of Christ in the power of the Spirit. [14]

Our  possession of this life directly parallels our relationship with Jesus and God’s possession of us.  The same people who want the world to be God-less also desire a heaven without God and neither is possible in reality.  But God does allow those who would spend eternity outside of his presence the room to push away from the Heaven of his company.

Because true life comes from and is maintained by God, any eternal existence outside or away from God’s presence cannot accurately be called “life” at all.  It would be more appropriately referred to as eternal death.  This is the eternal situation spoken of in Matthew where Jesus tells of those who “will go away to eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46, NIV).  The place they are sent is described as “eternal fire” (Matthew 18:8, NIV) and the lack of a real relationship with Jesus prior to death is highlighted in his response to those trying to enter the kingdom of heaven- Jesus says plainly “I never knew you; depart from me…” (Matthew 7:23, ESV emphasis mine).  This eternal death is an absence from the presence of God in a life-giving way.  In that outer place there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Luke 13:28, ESV).   This place of punishment is the opposite of heaven and it is often referred to as hell.  “If there is one basic characteristic of hell, it is, in contrast to heaven, the absence of God or banishment from his presence.  It is an experience of intense anguish, whether it involve physical suffering or mental distress or both… the separation is permanent.”[15]  Though it is difficult to imagine a death that is both final and eternal in duration, this is the best description we have of those who die outside of a saving relationship with God through Jesus.  “Scripture speaks not merely of eternal death (which one might interpret as meaning that the wicked will not be resurrected), but of eternal fire, eternal punishment, and eternal torment as well.”[16]  This is not the will of God though it may be a necessary risk for the existence of a true, free relationship of love that is also eternal.  “We should also observe that God does not send anyone to hell.  He desires that none should perish (2 Peter 3:9).  God created humans to have fellowship with him and provided the means by which they can have that fellowship.”[17]

Because Christians have an unending future that is secured by the God of all existence, and because this relationship with the eternal creator is enjoyed even in this temporal mode, believers should behave markedly different when compared to those with no hope.

 

 

[1] Rushton M. Dorman, The Origin of Primitive Superstitions and Their Development Into the Worship of Spirits and the Doctrine of Spiritual, Agency Among the Aborigines of America (Classic Reprint) (Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2012), 386.

[2] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: a Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction, of the Three Books, Broadcast Talks, Christian Behaviour, and Beyond Personality (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2015), 35.

[3] Rushton M. Dorman, The Origin of Primitive Superstitions and Their Development Into the Worship of Spirits and the Doctrine of Spiritual, Agency Among the Aborigines of America (Classic Reprint) (Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2012), 386.

[4] Natalie A. Emmons and Deborah Kelemen, “The Development of Children’s Prelife Reasoning: Evidence From Two Cultures,” Child Development 85, no. 4 (July 2014): 1617-33, doi:10.1111/cdev.2014.85.issue-4 (accessed May 2, 2015).

[5] Pascal Boyer, “Religion: Bound to Believe?” NATURE 455 (23 October 2008): 1038-39.

[6] Sheila Kitzinger and Ceclia Kitzinger, Tough Questions: Talking Straight with Your Kids About the Real World (Boston, MA: Harvard Common Press, 1991), 179,180.

[7] C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.s. Lewis, Volume 3 (Danvers, MA: HarperCollins e-books, 2009), 76.

[8] Simcha Paull Raphael, Jewish Views of the Afterlife, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, ©2009), 44.

[9] Ibid., 52.

[10] Ibid., 55.

[11] Ibid., 68,69.

[12] Ibid., 156.

[13] Robert Atwell, Celebrating the Saints: Daily Spiritual Readings to Accompany the Calendars of the Church of England, the Church of Ireland, the Scottish Episcoplal Church and the Church in Wales, enl. ed. (Place of publication not identified: SCM, 2004), 54-55.

[14] Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: a Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 108-109.

[15] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1998), 1242-1243.

[16] Ibid., 1246.

[17] Ibid., 1247.