Identity in Death & Resurrection
I had surgery today to repair a hernia. This surgery was my first ever. I gotta tell you, it was a walk in the park. The anesthesiologist said, "I'm going to put such and such drug in your I.V., and you'll fall a . . ." Then immediately the nurse gently called my name, "Kevan." That's when I woke up and she told me it was over.
I don't know this for sure, but I think that's what death will be like. As the only Lutheran in my eschatology course (doctrine of the coming of God's Kingdom), I argued almost alone (with the help sometimes of a Presbyterian/Episcopal classmate) that if there is an intermediate state that is niether this life nor the next (as Roman Catholics would describe purgatory), then we don't experience it.
How could we? If we accept the classic anthropology that humans are an embodied rational soul, then without the body, the soul could not perform its rational function to experience personally such a state of being. And if we reject the classic anthropology in favor of a more scientific or relational one, then the question is mute. Luther speaks of the "soul's sleep", that death is like falling into a deep sleep and the next thing we experience is Jesus lovingly calling us by name. I may not use Luther's language, but I think he's on to something here.
When I die, I can't be in the fullness of God's Kingdom unless or until everyone else God wants to live in the Kingdom is also there. Otherwise, if there are still people yet to come into the kingdom, then it can't be the fullness of the kingdom. So I think we can speak of some kind of intermediate state in which we exist but which we do not experience.
How can this be? The answer, I think, lies not in any anthropology, that is not in anything naturally constitutive of what it means to be human. Rather, I think the answer is Holy Spirit. God gives us life by breathing into us the Spirit. And for Christians who follow Jesus the messiah, the indwelling of Holy Spirit is the power of the fullfilled covenant to live in the kingdom of God and to participate in the triune divine life. God's Spirit in us experiences in God everything we experience personally. When we die, Holy Spirit "returns" to God thus keeping present to God everything we ever experienced.
And so the continuity of our human identity from this life into the resurrection does not rely on anything we do, or on anything we are. For example, some would say that when our bodies die our souls survive and are purified while they await the fulness of God's kingdom. Rather, I'd say, God's covenantal faithfulness in the gift of the Spirit maintains our identity as an act of divine grace. If we allow death to be death -- and not merely some different mode of life -- then we don't have to fuss with theological patchwork like the doctrine of a purifying purgatory to defend our anthropological presuppositions. More importantly, if we allow death to be death, then we can appreciate more fully the power of resurrection that is Holy Spirit.
Well that's what I think, at least. I haven't yet received back my paper from my professor, so I can not tell you at this time whether my ideas are heretical. But if they are, would that surprise you?
3 comments:
Kevan,
It is a very good theological and philosophical writing you have here, but i am wondering what biblical texts you would use to support your points...
I really resonate with what you wrote here Kevan. My only surgical experience was the extraction of my wisdom teeth, and as I'm talking to my methodist oral surgeon about theology, I remember right after the needle going into my arm him saying, "This is going to sting a bit and then you're going to feel really good..." The next thing I remember him saying was, "You're all done Nathan. It's time to wake up!" I've used this story to illustrate what I believe happens in our death. When I start exegeting the Apostles' Creed to my people and answer questions about what it means to believe in the resurrection of the dead, this story serves to comfort and communicate. The extraction of those teeth only took 20 mins. But for me, no time passed at all. It was for all intensive purposes instantaneous. To answer Brock's question about biblical support...he needs to read and exegete Romans 8:29-30 and Revelations 1:5...Jesus the firstborn (e.g. the first to be Resurrected from the dead into God's future).
The resurrection is a radical deconstruction of the Zoroastrianism and Greek/Roman philosophical dualism that has infected the church's sense of the eternal. And you don't have to dig for it. It's as simple and apparent as the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus; right there in front of our noses; in the belief structures (fulfilled) of Jesus the Pharisee...the one who preached and taught the resurrection of the dead.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, and for stirring up some conversation.
Nathan
Hey Kevan,
I think that here, you don't have to contend so much with finding Biblical texts to support your point, but more pointing out the absence of it. Of course, there's the idea of "falling asleep" in Paul's writings and "sleeping with the ancestors" as a formula in the OT books of history. But the fact that nobody had any particular preoccupation with what that intermediate stage "felt" like seems like pretty powerful proof that if it is "experience-able," it certainly wasn't worth writing about. But you always get into problems in arguing from absence. As George W.'s pundits loved to say about WMD's, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
But I still think that, frankly, if there is an intermediate stage, few if any of the Biblical writers cared abbout what it was like. An interesting vision is the movie, "Waking Life," which envisions the afterlife as a (semi?) permanent dream state. It's always interesting to conjecture one way or the other, but if we want to care about what the Biblical writers seemed to care about based on what God revealed to them, I think on this issue we have to kind of shrug our shoulders.
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