Life after death?
As a teacher of Religious Studies, you often get asked by kids about heaven and hell. Some of these young people are curious; some of them are genuinely worried; and some are indifferent.
My standard answer when my students put the question to me usually goes like this: “Well, you know how there are some people who create heaven around them? They’re fun to be with, and make people feel valued and wanted. You always come away from being with them feeling so much better about yourself and about the world. And there are some people who, let’s face it, are hell to be round; they are self-absorbed and demanding, walking black holes, sucking the goodness out of life. Now, no one really knows what happens after death; but my guess is that if you are the sort of person who creates heaven around you, then, if life does go on in some shape or form after death, you will continue to do so, only more so. And that will be your heaven. If you are the the selfish type, you are likely to carry that with you into eternity too. And that will be your hell. So the important thing is not to worry too much about what happens after death, but get it right how you live here and now, because that’s the only time and place we can be sure about”.
Those who have read C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce will recognise that I have stolen his idea here. It’s probably not very good theology, but I like the way it focuses on the now rather than the hereafter.
Having said that, it’s true that when you have a terminal illness, your thoughts do tend to wander to the hereafter, and you wonder whether any form of who you are might continue on beyond the point where your heart and brain flatline. At the moment I’m in a good state of mind and very much living in the moment, but of course there is a fairly sizeable and lethal Damoclean sword poised over my head, or at least my abdomen, called a dedifferentiated retroperitineal liposarcoma. Sooner or later, its aggressive growth will bring me to the brink between life and death. So yes, I do think from time to time about what might happen beyond that point. Here are a few thoughts, starting from a number of different angles.
THEOLOGY
Most of us have grown up unwittingly imbibing what we call “Western civilisation” (which reminds me of Gandhi’s response to the question “What do you think about Western civilisation?” - he paused for a moment and then said “I think it would be a very good idea!”) We may not realise it, but the way we see the world has been powerfully influenced by Judaism and its offshoot, Christianity, and by Greek philosophy. These schools of thought shape our beliefs about the afterlife too, so as I give my own personal views, I’d also like to interact what we have inherited from our culture.
Christians turn to the Bible, and find all sorts of reasons there for hope of resurrection and afterlife. They believe that Jesus of Nazareth came back from the dead, and they hold to his own teachings and those of his followers, which state unequivocally that life goes on beyond the grave. The New Testament indicates that at the end of time, people will be resurrected, their lives will be judged according to their deeds, and they will be rewarded or punished appropriately: hence, Heaven and Hell.
The notion of an afterlife has held a powerful sway over Christian Europe for centuries, and can be seen graphically portrayed in great works of art such as Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, found in the Sistine Chapel, or in great works of literature like Dante’s Inferno. The longing for heaven, and, perhaps even more powerfully, the fear of hell, remained potent weapons in the hands of the Church as it sought to hold power within the kingdoms of Europe.
However, when we look more closely at the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, beliefs in resurrection, heaven and hell are not so easy to clarify. Early Judaism doesn’t seem to have had any strong belief in survival after death: when Abraham dies in Genesis 25, he is “gathered to his people”, but we are not told what this means. There was a belief in a shady underworld known as Sheol, and in the First Book of Samuel, King Saul consults a witch, who manages to bring the prophet Samuel “up” from wherever his spirit has lodged. There is no sense here of a joyous afterlife, just a slightly dreary place of rest for the dead, somewhat akin to the Greek Hades, a place of darkness. The Jews were much more interested in prolonging their life and preserving their heritage through their “seed” - their descendants.
In the sixth century BC, Jews were profoundly influenced by their Exile to Babylon and Persia. At the time, the Persians were followers of Zoroaster, who taught that there were equal powers of Light and Darkness in the universe. It is probable that the Judaism derived some of its beliefs about the afterlife from Zoroastrian dualism (apologies for theological and historical oversimplification here), including possibly the notions of Heaven and Hell. The word “paradise” is a Persian borrowing,
By the time we reach the New Testament, there were a number of different groups within Judaism, and their differences find an echo in the Gospels, in particular the conflict between the purist Pharisees, who believed in a resurrection from the dead, and the priestly caste of Sadducees, who did not. For the Sadducees, there was nothing after death; and although Jesus speaks harshly about the Pharisees, he was actually much closer to them than he was to the priestly caste. He certainly agreed with them that all human beings will be resurrected at the end of time, and judged according to their deeds on earth. He talked about both heaven and hell, particularly in his parables.
I am now going to get a bit controversial, so hold tight! Apart from Jesus’ own resurrection, the most well-known story of return from the dead is that of Lazarus. In this story, found in John 11, Jesus calls a dead man out of his grave four days after his death, when his body is already beginning to rot (the Authorised Version of the Bible puts it wonderfully: “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.” Gotta love the absence of PC euphemism!) It’s an amazing account, but there is a big problem: the story only makes it into one of the four gospels. What’s more, the gospel which does relate it, John’s, is believed by most scholars to have been written later than the others. One of the other gospel writers called Luke begins his book by saying that he has thoroughly researched Jesus’ life, using as many sources as he can find - and yet he knows nothing about Lazarus as a person, let alone his amazing return to life (although he does mention Mary and Martha, who were the man’s sisters).
Now if you were writing my biography, and I had called a dead man back to life after four days in his tomb, with the body already smelling bad, it seems unbelievable, ludicrous even, that you would fail to include that story. If it happened, it would certainly be a glaringly vital incident in the life of Jesus, included as the centrepiece in every account. So why do three gospels ignore it, and what do we conclude? One short answer, which I subscribe to, is that, like other stories in John’s Gospel, the recounting of Lazarus’ resurrection is carefully placed there for its theological, not its historical value. John is interested in exploring the nature of zoe, eternal life which begins here and now. Lazarus becomes a metaphor for the power of new life brought to the world by Jesus. There are other explanations, but this is the one I find most convincing.
What then of Jesus’ death? Most Christians stake everything on the belief that he returned from the grave, in a form that was both recognisable (people knew it was him) but different (he was able to materialise through walls, and there seemed to be a different quality about his existence - at one point he tells Mary Magdalene not to touch him).
However, once again, it is not as simple as it seems. Most commentators believe, for a number of very good reasons, that Mark’s Gospel was the first to be written. They also believe that it finishes at Mark 16:8 - the earliest manuscripts do not contain the rest of the chapter, which is in fact a mishmash of texts from the other Gospels. Mark 16:1-8 is thus our earliest Gospel reference to the resurrection - and it simply confronts us with an empty tomb. Jesus makes no appearance, and the story ends with the women going away in fear.
However, when we move to the other Gospels, there is a striking development of the story: different numbers of angels appear, there is an earthquake, and in John’s Gospel, Jesus himself pops up right there by the tomb. It is hard not to conclude that the story grew in the telling. What happened to kick it off, we don’t know. What is certain is that the earliest Christians were electrified and energised by their belief that Jesus was alive, and they ended up transforming the Roman Empire. But the event at the beginning is shrouded in mystery.
These were different times, and there was a willingness to create and believe stories which seem far-fetched to the modern mind. As with the story of Lazarus, I am more comfortable thinking about the theological meaning of Jesus’ resurrection rather than insisting that it literally happened. It is a story about how a person who lives a life of absolute love will triumph over death.
It may come as a surprise to some that a person such as myself, who has twice been ordained (as a Baptist and an Anglican) and who has worked for fifteen years in parishes in France, and a further fifteen years as a school chaplain, should end up expressing so little certainty about literal bodily resurrections, and a literal Heaven and Hell. It has been a long slow journey for me away from the black-and-white truths of my childhood, when I was a biblical literalist, believing it all happened exactly as it is written. I am now much more comfortable with mystery and metaphor and shades of grey. The older I get, the less I know.
For those who do choose to believe in a Christian afterlife, there is a basic error to avoid. If we ever do meet our loved ones in a different world, we can be sure they will not be simply an eternal physical copy of the temporal person we knew. Those sentimental pictures beloved of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and fundamentalists of all sorts, showing earthly people reunited with shining earthly people, are so much juvenile candy, believed by people because they want to believe something nice and comforting, not because they have thought it through. The New Testament talks about a totally new creation, and what happens in the afterlife is contrasted with life on earth as a full-grown plant is contrasted with a small seed. To hope that reunions beyond the grave will be simple continuations of this life here and now doesn’t actually tally with the sacred text, and betrays an immature understanding of what resurrection might be. If it does happen, our re-birth into the afterlife will be far beyond anything we can imagine.
PHILOSOPHY
I’m not a philosopher, although I have been teaching a bit of philosophy to high school students over the past couple of years. Plato, known as “the father of Western philosophy”, was a great believer in life both before and after death. He believed in an ideal eternal “World of the Forms” from which all things come, including ourselves. We existed before birth and we will exist after it; we spend a few years in our bodies before discarding them and returning to glory. Later, we return to another body, and then another - it’s a form of reincarnation.
Plato’s ideas have attracted many followers; John Mortimer’s famous character Rumpole was a lover of the poet Wordsworth, whose ode on Intimations of Immortality he would frequently quote:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home …
This is pure Plato: we come into this physical earth from the spiritual World of the Forms, a place of eternal ideal. But as we are born, we are already beginning to forget where we came from, and the whole of life on earth is a sort of falling asleep; the memories of Eternity slowly fade. However, at death, the soul wakes again as the body which has imprisoned it disappears, and the soul can return heavenwards.
As many critics have pointed out, this Platonic philosophy is terribly demeaning to our actual life on earth. What matters for Plato is eternity, and earthly existence is compared to a shadowy cave-like existence, to be escaped as soon as possible. Most modern philosophers would have no truck with this, and the emphasis is placed on the here-and-now: this life is the only one you get, and the best philosophy is that which tells you how to make the most of your one shot.
Christianity was influenced by Plato, particularly through Saint Augustine. Jews and Christians originally saw body and soul as one entity, and talked about death followed by a resurrection at the end of time; but modern Christians are more likely to be Platonic dualists, believing that body and soul are two separate parts of human existence. They are content with the thought that at death the mortal soul discards the body to return to eternity; they don’t realise that these ideas come more from Plato than from the Bible.
I have to say that I have never been convinced by a philosophy which accepts that something with a finite beginning could have an infinite ending. If you want to believe the soul is eternal, you should agree with Plato and accept that the “eternity” in question runs both ways - before and after your earthly existence.
MEANING
As you will be starting to realise, my own position about the afterlife is more agnostic than anything else: I am content to remain in a state of unknowing about it. But this poses problems of its own, and one of the main ones is the question of meaning. If there is nothing beyond death, then isn’t life ultimately meaningless? The famous atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell put it starkly and bleakly:
No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins.”
And if that’s not gloomy enough for you, he goes on to conclude we should construct our existence “only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair".
Cheerful chap!
Is there any way of overcoming the despair of death other than insisting that life gains its meaning by what happens beyond the grave? I think there are several. The most obvious is the one I mentioned previously in the context of the early Jews: you pass on your life to your children, and in some mysterious way, something of you lives on in them, and in their descendants. There is a fascinating story in Genesis 38 about a man called Er, who died before he could have any children. According to the custom of the time, his brother was required to impregnate his widow; the children born to her would be considered to belong to the dead Er, who could thus survive death by living on through his descendants. It was a source of great suffering to see your line come to an end, and people were willing to take very unusual steps to avoid that fate.
At the end of his wonderful autobiography Leaving Alexandria, Richard Holloway, former bishop of Edinburgh, seems to reach the same conclusion as the Israelites. He reflects on his own death, expressing the desire that his three children, Ann, Sara and Mark, will spread his ashes on the lovely Pentland hills south of Edinburgh. And in the last few words of the book he writes: “I now know that the three of them is what I was for. It has been a great purpose being one of the instruments of their becoming. I love them, and [her] who bore them.”
If you were to replace the names with “Chris, Steph and Becky”, I would gladly sign up to what Holloway says here, as long as it is understood that survival through children is not the only way of creating meaning. It has been a huge source of joy and fulfilment to help bring our three children into the world; but I am very aware of all those people who live strongly and meaningfully without passing on life to the next generation. Procreation is one meaning among many. So what are some others?
When our daughter Becky died in 2003, we included a quote from Tom Stoppard’s play Shipwreck in the order of service for her funeral. Here is an extended (and edited) version of the passage, where Stoppard’s character Herzen is reflecting on the death of his son:
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. […] The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question.
Obviously, when a child dies, there is no chance of its surviving through its own descendants; what meaning there is must be found in the way the child lived. “Life’s bounty is in its flow”; meaning is to be found in every moment, not in some future paradise or utopia. “Later is too late”; treasure the harmonies and the dances of the present moment, and avoid the temptation to “own the future, too”. We seem to feel somehow cheated of meaning if we are unable to prolong the good moment, but we need to see things differently, and cherish the day. Beauty is not necessarily enhanced by being banked for some later heavenly existence.
I’m not sure if I agree with the last couple of sentences in Herzen’s speech, when he states that the only question is to ask whether or not the child was happy. “Happy” is a shallow word, suggesting some sort of bouncy optimism. As I think about Becky and the fifteen years she spent on earth, I would wish for more than “happiness” for her; my question would be “Was she loved, and did she love?” And I think I can answer a resounding “Yes!” to both of those. The meaning of her life for me was bound up in the love we gave her and in the love she herself gave to so many, including us, her family. Do I need to imagine a future reunion with her in Paradise in order to give her life meaning? No: she has already clothed herself in love, and that is enough.
Love can be defined as the gift of oneself. When I give freely of myself to myself and to others, I demonstrate a powerful form of love. When I selfishly cling to what I have - and unfortunately this is all too often the case - I diminish my own humanity and lose something rich. So for me, meaning is closely bound up with loving and giving. The moment of giving is one of depth and significance, and I don’t need to validate it further by the thought that I am building up treasure in Heaven, or some other such notion. It’s enough to live this richness in the moment.
JUSTICE
There is a problem with what we have just been discussing: if meaning has to do with love, as I have argued, then children deprived of love are also cheated of meaning. I am haunted by the image of those trainloads of children hurtling into the hatred and the oblivion that was Auschwitz. What meaning can we offer to their lives?
The world is a terribly unfair place: it isn’t necessary to catalogue a list of catastrophes, wars and plagues to make that point. Some people have relatively easy and pleasant lives; some small children suffer pain and hunger and die before they even learn to speak. Murderous tyrants like Stalin die in their beds; people doing great good are suddenly struck down by aneurysms or leukaemia. The amount of justice on this side of the grave is minimal, which leads many people to believe there must be an afterlife so that all wrongs can be righted.
This is a powerful argument. We seem to be born with a penchant for justice, and little children are particularly fond of the expression “It’s not fair!” With this innate sense of right and wrong, we are outraged by the injustice of the world, and demand some sort of solution. It seems unthinkable that the cruel unfairness of the Universe should not ultimately be resolved somehow in the Beyond. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
However, if I turn away from belief in life after death, I have no choice but to accept that the world remains a horribly unjust place, and that there is no way to square all accounts, even after death. This seems intolerable. The only response is to say that such a belief (or lack of belief) should lead me to fight and struggle for justice as much as possible on earth, because there will be no Kingdom of Heaven. And it is true that, just as there have been Christians with an acute sense of social justice who have fought for the rights of the downtrodden, there are also many unbelievers whose lack of faith in an afterlife gives them extra motivation to make this world a better place.
At the same time there have been plenty of religious believers who have been willing to stand back, enjoy an easy life, and trust God to sort it all out. At its worst, the belief in the afterlife allows believers to remain relatively untroubled by injustice, since God will make it all OK later. Many American Christians believe, for example, that we should not bother to protect the environment, because the more it is degraded, the sooner Christ will return to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. This is a classic example of what happens when you place too much emphasis on the afterlife and so minimise the importance of the here and now. Those who discard belief in eternal rewards and punishments have no such luxury.
Having said all that, I feel something of a fraud, because to say that my life has been a “struggle for justice” would be a glaring overstatement. I have had an incredibly rich time on earth, and have often been content to bask in the satisfaction of clean modern housing, healthy abundant food, extensive travel, and all the other privileges of modern life as a white Westerner. To grow up in New Zealand in the 1950s was to win the lottery several times over. Yes, I worked in inner-city Marseilles and did my bit for the homeless, and I spent a fair bit of time as a prison chaplain in Toulouse. As a school chaplain in wealthy privileged schools I have tried to help young people make sense of life. But all that is small beer when compared to the immensity of injustice in the world. We watch our screens helplessly as people drown in their hundreds and thousands in the Mediterranean. Desperate to escape the cruel unfairness of the countries they were born in, they are victims of the gross injustice of the world. Will they find justice in another world? I’m afraid I don’t think so. The shell-shocked faces of four-year-olds staring at us from Syria remind us that we live in a world of betrayal and contradiction and cruelty. And apart from exhorting us to do what we can to fight for justice for them, I have no answers. But then, I don’t think anyone else does, either - certainly not Christians who believe the little Syrian boy is going to Hell because he doesn’t believe in Jesus. Where is the justice in that?
HOPE
The final question I want to address is that of hope; if your idea of an afterlife is vague or non-existent, what on earth can you hope for?
This too is crucial. When Becky was sick, we realised as never before how important it was to hold on to hope. We went through times of great hope and dreadful times of despair. One of the worst occurred when we were pinning our hopes on some radiotherapy, and the doctor told us she was too sick to go ahead with it. He suggested it was time to think about palliative care. At that time I wrote “Hope is a huge giver of life, even if it is only a shred. When that shred disappears, one feels flattened, run over by a ten-ton truck. At this point in the story the last shred of hope seemed to have gone, and the journey back to Starship [Children’s Hospital] was miserable.” We sat stunned and gutted by her bed in silence for an hour or two; then, out of the blue, some neuro-surgeons turned up. They had heard what had happened and were offering to drain her tumour and give her another chance. Glorious hope returned, and what a wonderfully life-giving thing it was.
What do we hope for when it comes to death? For believers, the hope is to go along that tunnel towards the light; to meet Jesus or whomever else you may have worshipped; to be welcomed, and then, joy of joys, to be reunited with family and friends. Accounts of Near-Death Experiences have taught us to expect such encounters, or at least to wonder what they might portend. Is this real, or is it just the endorphins kicking in as death approaches?
Having lost a child myself, I suspect that there is a good deal of wishful thinking in hopes of reunion, simply because it is too agonising to go through a parting so final as death, and our minds and bodies recoil against something so monstrous. I believe it is more psychologically healthy to allow the death of a loved one to do its worst to you, to accept the bleakness and horror of that person’s absence, than to attempt to soften the blow with thoughts of an eventual reunion beyond the grave. If you can allow tragedy to strike you hard and receive the full force of its blows, not cushioning them with false hopes, you are so much stronger afterwards.
I was in Becky’s bedroom as she exhaled her last breath. Perhaps I am just a dolt, but there was no spiritual experience for me, no sense that her spirit had winged away; just a mixture of utter anguish and relief that it was over. Hope had not died by then, but our hopes had shrunk: we were hoping to survive this ordeal emotionally and physically; we were hoping that our marriage would survive the death of a child when so many others don’t; we hoped that the funeral would do justice to our girl and what she meant to us; we hoped that Chris and Steph would be able to carry on; we hoped to live our grief fully and find some new depth of life through the suffering.
We did not hope for a last-minute miraculous healing, or for a resurrection. And I have to be honest again, and say that I do not hope to be reunited with Becky at my own death. I don’t reject the possibility totally, but I’m not holding my breath. After Becky died, I wrote these words, somewhat bitterly:
For us there were no near-death-experiences, no miraculous healings, and so far, no dreams or visions comforting us with the image of Becky revelling in Paradise. If anything, this parting has made me less sure, not more, of something going on after death. One of my parents’ old friends wrote that she saw the gates of heaven opening up, and Becky dancing with the angels into the presence of Jesus. Bah, humbug! Sentimental tripe, the sort of stuff you say to children to allay their fears of death. For God’s sake, let’s be adult about this. All that remains of Becky at the moment is a small box of ash and dust; if her spirit has departed somewhere else, we have no idea what that might mean.
Hope is essential, but hope also has to be rooted in reality. I am a great fan of Rabbi Harold Kushner, whose son died of a prematurely ageing disease at the age of 14. I often quote Kushner’s words, but here they are again, and I have taken the liberty of changing the word “pray” into “hope”. As you will see, it doesn’t alter the tenor of the passage:
“Somewhere in the oncology ward of a hospital, a child is dying of leukaemia. Her parents are at her side, hoping for a miracle. Friends and relatives, all the members of their church or synagogue are hoping for a miracle. But she dies, just as the doctors feared she would. Was there no miracle? Were their hopes dashed? Sometimes the miracle is not that the child survives. The miracle is that the parents' marriage survives, despite the awful strain that the death of a child places on it. The miracle is that the parents are prepared to go on affirming life and risking the vulnerability of loving each other, even after they have been so badly hurt by life. The miracle is that the faith of the community survives, that they are able to go on believing in the world and the value of hope, even when they have learned that this is a world where innocent children die. I have seen miracles like that happen. Some of them have happened to me."
So what am I hoping for now? No tunnel of light, no encounters with Jesus or with the dead. I hope that this current period before my death will continue to last for a long time; I hope that the conversations and encounters I am having will continue to be as rich and profound as they have been so far; I hope that my love for Linda and Chris and Steph will grow deeper and deeper and that we will find ever new ways of expressing and enjoying that love; I hope I will not suffer too much pain or discomfort; I hope that I will be able to keep fear at bay; I hope that a good deal of who I am will carry on through the people whose lives I have touched and whose lives have touched me; I hope that something of me will carry on through my descendants; I hope that Linda and Chris and Steph, and my wider family, will learn to cope with my absence; I hope for peace.
Let me finish by coming back to Richard Holloway. Leaving Alexandria finishes with him thinking about his children returning from the hills after sprinkling his ashes up there:
And they can make their way back down the Kirk Road to the Green Cleuch and the beech-lined road below Bavelaw and home. And that’ll be that. Well, almost certainly …
Is death the final end? Holloway’s last three words, and the three dots that follow them, leave a small doorway open into the mystery of eternity.
I’ll go with that.
