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Introduction

Do you ever think about life after death? You must do. We all do, do we not? What do Jesus' words on resurrection mean to you? Just to remind you, Jesus said to Martha as he was comforting her on the loss of her brother Lazarus: "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me will live, even though they die." (John 11:25)

I write this as I am travelling through Idaho, and its collection of Bible Belt chapels churches and chastisements, especially from roadside hoardings and church notice boards. "Are you going to Heaven or Hell" asked the last one. "Neither", I said, "I am going to Spokane"

I discovered that Spokane is pronounced "Spoken" (with a short 'o'), and it made me think of the contrast of the spoken word versus the written word. Sure, we read our bibles, but do we talk our bibles? The Faith Development Group is keen to raise the level of faith discussion in our church. We enjoy our fellowship with our parishioners, but do we hear and feel the human hurts and hopes behind them? Do we know what others think about the Resurrection? What is their view of life after death? What makes ourselves and others tick when it comes to deep and meaningful insights on Life, The Universe and Everything?

I shall not give you answers in this series of reflections, but I shall give you some thoughts upon which you might reflect. I guarantee that when you come up with your own interpretation to them, you will find a greater confidence in your own faith!

There are 6 chapters in this series of reflections:

  1. Consciousness
  2. Soul
  3. Spirit
  4. Death
  5. Resurrection
  6. Life Everlasting

Consciousness

What do we mean by the word "consciousness"? My dictionary says it is "the state of being aware and perceptive of one's surroundings". We know that animals have consciousness, but that rocks do not. What about living things such as plants? There are trees that respond to touch (mimosa), and there are plants that close traps upon unsuspecting insects (sundews). Are they not "perceptive to their surroundings"?

My guess is that you would say not. After all, they cannot choose to do otherwise, their responsiveness is mechanical, and demonstrates no thinking process. But a cat, on seeing a mouse, can choose to chase the mouse, or not. Why would it not? It might perceive the presence of a large dog near the mouse, and decide that its hunger is not sufficient to force it into danger. Clearly some form of consciousness is at work here.

So should we add some form of choice into our definition of consciousness? This touches upon the philosophical notion of free will, and I have just come from a bible study on Jonah. Now I had always dismissed Jonah as an interesting story about failing to follow God's commands, but it is indeed much more than that. Perhaps the Faith Group might sponsor a bible study on Jonah some day? But I digress. Jonah's story is much more about man's choice between acting on God's word, and the consequences of running from it. Indeed, you could say that that is the whole message of all the Old Testament prophets. "Repent, for the Wrath of God is at Hand" is a fair paraphrase of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Hosea, Habakuk and all the other prophets starting with 'H'. And that is certainly the message pushed by many of our more evangelical brethren. If only you repent and declare the Lord as your Saviour, then you shall find eternal life.

And that is a very comforting message if we wish to think no further. But it pushes a lot of responsibility away from ourselves. It gives us little choice in how we are to behave, in fact it gives no guidance at all. When faced with ethical dilemmas, how does the Lord as our Saviour help us to respond?

I would argue that the idea of the Lord (as) our Saviour is of little use. But Jesus of Nazareth is. Jesus faced many ethical dilemmas in his time, and he made it clear that it is an issue of choice. The two ethical dilemmas that he faced that stand out in my mind both involve women: the womand taken in adultery, and the woman at the well. In both cases there was a clear case of sin, and the possibility of judgement. But in both cases, Jesus responds not with judgement, but with compassion. He makes it clear that the women have choices: "Go, and sin no more".

Incidentally, I heard a funny story from one of the preachers on one of the cruises that I took. The Rev. Barrie was in good form, and told a good joke about Douglas McGregor, a scottish house painter, who always cheated on his customers by thinning down his paint, and not putting enough coats of paint on. One day he was commissioned to paint the local church, which he did with his usual dishonesty. As he finished, there were several bolts of lightning, and a big clap of thunder, down came all the rain, and washed off his newly applied thin paint. He fell to his knees, and cried out to God, "What must I do?" in much anguish. Back came a voice from the heavens: "Repaint! Repaint, and thin no more!"

Our consciousness allows us to make choices, and it is in the choices that we make that God develops a relationship with us. Without consciousness, we cannot make those choices. Without the right choice, we cannot have a right relationship with God. That is true of life before death, and it is what defines our relationship with God after death.

Soul

I have asked several people about the difference between the soul and the spirit, and I have never been entirely comfortable with the answers. To many people, the two terms are synonymous, and it is easy to see why, when we often use them interchangeably. If we are to talk of death and resurrection, then I think we need to be more careful in our use of the two words. We talk of our "immortal souls", and "his spirit lives on", but do they carry the same meaning? I think there is a subtle distinction.

My on-line dictionary defines "soul" as "the spiritual or non-material part of a human being ... regarded as immortal", and "spirit" as "the non-physical part of a person that is regarded as the seat of emotions and character; the soul", so they do not make a distinction, and are not much help.

So how would I distinguish them? Before I answer that, think about what you think the difference (if any) might be. Ready? The distinction is in fact partly evident in those two definitions above, but we must tease them apart. The soul is that part of our make-up that is irrevocably linked to who we are. It is that word "irrevocably" that lies behind the notion of "immortality" in the definition above. When we talk of "immortal souls" we mean that that person, that entity, that living being (even if "living" applies only a short time frame) can be thought of, can be referenced at any time in the continuum of infinity. Yes, we can talk of "souls departed", and have distinct memories of the fleshly form of that soul. But we can also talk of "future souls", whose fleshly form is yet to appear. We do not know how they might think or act, but we can certainly posit their existence. It is what the Bible means when it talks of "Abraham and his seed forever", or what people in the modern day mean when they talk of climate change and its effect upon "future generations". We do not know who or what they are, but they are a powerful force in our thinking.

But what of the spirit? Here is where our notion of consciousness and choice comes into play. Souls do not necessarily have consciouness, but spirits do - or at least, the choice part of consciousness. For what makes the spirit of a person is how they behave in the light of the choices they are faced with - their "emotions and character" in the definition above. More of this in the next chapter.

Let us return to the soul. I have said that it is that part of us irrevocably linked to who we are. Moses asked God who He was, when He appeared to Moses in the burning bush. God's answer? "I AM what I AM". The great existential statement of all time. God is Being. There is really no other way of saying it. When we talk of other people, we must use grammatical artefacts just like "I AM" to refer to them. We use names, labels, pronouns, epithets, anything but the soul, because we have no "label" for the soul.

At the risk of becoming too technical, allow me a slight computing digression. Computing has this same problem of referring to objects, and how we manipulate them, without have to have "them", the objects themselves, immediately to hand. We make explicit distinctions between the labels and the objects. It is easy to understand that "6" is a label for the number 6, but far more subtle to know that when the label "6" is used in different programs, even though the labels appear in different places they still refer to the same object - an abstract object, in particular, an integer number. A student of mine once wrestled with this idea in an exam, when asked to explain the binary number system (as opposed to our decimal numbers, based upon 10). "2", he said, "is the number of legs on a normal man". He had grasped the fact that the idea of 2 and the label 2 are different, but the idea could be referred to in a number of different ways.

We call such labels (like '2') "persistent identifiers", because they always reference the same object. It gets more complicated when we use persistent identifiers like "John" in different places, because what happens when John changes his name and decides that he wants to be called "Angas"? '2' is always the number 2 (or we would be in a great deal of semantic trouble otherwise!), but everywhere that "John" is used as a name for the person, the name becomes "Angas", but the person does not change. The label is alterable, but the thing being referenced is not.

Things become even more complicated when we overload labels with multiple referents. I went on a tour last year with 10 couples, and 4 of the blokes involved were called "John". We solved the problem by changing the names to keep them unique, attaching the wife's name as a suffix - so I became "JohnBarb" to distinguish me from "JohnMarg", "JohnJenny" and "JohnSandra". (Most normal people use surnames to distinguish between Johns.)

You will see how difficult this becomes. "John", "Angas" and the person John are three different things, and we have to keep the distinctions clear. I might change my name, but people who know me still know the same person, even when my label changes. "John" is a convenient way your brain recognizes what to call me, and many readers will have experienced the embarrassment of knowing the person, but losing the label for the person. This holds for many of our attributes. Even if we don't change names, think phone numbers or email addresses as another example of labels that change.

But the soul is an "irrevocable" or "unchangeable" part of us. It cannot be changed, whether we want it to be or not. Even when we die, it remains that irrevocable part of us. That is what makes the soul immortal. Or, as Tom Rose put it recently in one of his services, "The table of eternity whispers your name". It does not matter what that name is, but eternity forever identifies your soul.

That is the key to understanding how we might think of life after death, and resurrection.

Spirit

So what of the spirit? Back to that definition, and the connection with 'emotions' and 'character'. I came across this phrase in a recent "Faith" article in The Sunday Age, talking about a 13-year old girl diagnosed with leukaemia: "although her movements became limited, her spirit did not diminish". Clearly the physical persona and the emotional persona diverged as the disease took hold. We talk of people whose spirit rises above their physical disability as having an "indomitable spirit", a spirit that "cannot be tamed".

The spirit is how we like to think of a person. It is our "everyday" definition of the soul, and that explains why the two terms are often conflated. We say "her spirit lives on", in an attempt to capture how the personality, rather than the person, still survives in our collective memories. But we understand from our collective faith that it is the soul that is immortal, and that is why we feel the need to express the notion that the "spirit lives on". For if the spirit sometimes does not "live on", what happens to the soul in this case?

The spirit is the embodiment of the choices that we see in a conscious person. We do not see the spirit in a non-conscious person (whether they be simply asleep, or more profoundly, dead) except in our own memories - there is no consciousness exhibiting that array of choice-making decisions that we associate with personality and the spirit. So "spirit" and "consciousness" are inextricably linked.

And here that semantic distinction between the object and its identifiers becomes relevant again. How can you relate the spirit of some person, the collection of choices that a person makes, their ethos, their morality, their behaviour, indeed their personality, without using some collection of words, some identifying symbols, some images such as photos or movies - all of which are not the person themselves? Those words or images are not the spirit. Those words or images are not the person.

I had a revelation when I recently visited the Kimberley. You must have noticed that television broadcasters will often comment before showing images of native peoples that "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are advised that this programme may contain images and sounds of deceased persons"? I discovered why on my trip, when being guided down the Geike River by a Bunuba elder whose soul I shall refer to as Bill (clearly not his "real" name). It is because when aboriginal people die, everything associated with that person is destroyed. Even their names cannot be used, and others in the tribe with the same name will change their name out of respect for the deceased person. While this may sound very odd to Western ears, I find that I have a certain spiritual sympathy with this custom. Indeed, I wrote in my diary at the time:

The message in all this is that our spirits are changeable, whereas our souls are not. We can make conscious choices as to how our spirits may appear to others - whether we are generous or mean, whether we are peaceful, or aggressive, whether we are introverted, or extroverted, and so on. I deliberately used that last example because I know there will be those that say "ah, but introverted or extroverted is part of our nature, like the colour of our eyes, and cannot be changed. A good point, but I think the real touchstone is that when it comes to relationships with others, we always have a choice. The colour of our eyes, or indeed of our skin, should {\bf not} affect our relationships with others (and vice versa!), since we have no choice about them. But whether we engage or retreat from relationships is certainly part of the range of choices facing us, and we can work at changing them if we try.

Death

So what happens when we die? Do we see those transitional bright lights that people with a near-death experience report? Is there a "light at the end of the tunnel"? I don't know. My scientific mind would like to believe that such experiences relate to some form of the brain shutting down, as it suffers from lack of oxygen, and this would give a convenient explanation for those near-death experiences. Not all of us may experience that of course. Our consciousness may well have slipped away long before the brain suffers from lack of oxygen, and those effects can be imprinted on our brain cells.

I prefer to think that death is just the permanent loss of consciousness. I remember reading that someone once said that death was just like not being born. Before we are born (perhaps it might be better to go back slightly from there, and say before we are conceived, but the point is the same), we have no consciousness. Same after death. When people ask me if I believe in life after death (however you might care to define "life"!), I reply that I did not believe in life after birth before I was born!

But birth and death are different, clearly. The big difference is that before we are born, other people clearly cannot relate to our spirits, but after we die, our spirits "live on" (in some form) through the interactions we have with others, and the memories in others that we generate while we are alive. And as discussed above, our souls now have labels, names, symbols that allow others to reference that immortal soul that we suggest is there even before we are born. Nothing can change the fact of our existence on earth (even if totally erased from living memories); we have been here, our immortal souls have interacted with people and things on earth, and none of the circumstances of our birth, life or death can ever change that.

Neither the tragedies of a short life, nor the accomplishments of a long one, alter our essential being or our unique relationship with the Divine Presence. That is the WE ARE, just as God is the I AM.

Resurrection

So John, you are a Christian, and you recite the Nicene Creed, including the phrase I believe in ... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Are you saying that that is all baloney?

I have to admit that "the resurrection of the body" is not that straightforward. Scientific evidence shows that our bodies do decompose, and Christianity freely admits that cremation does not flout this aspect of the Nicene Creed (save for a few unusual sects). So how can we have resurrection of the body?

The short answer is, I don't think we can. If your belief system admits of a mechanism whereby a cremated body can somehow be reconstituted by God's almighty power, then fair enough, hold to that belief. But I don't think that earthly understandings can begin to encompass what Christ meant when he said "destroy this temple, and in three days I shall raise it up" (John 2:19). The conventional wisdom is that Christ was referring to the temple of (his) body, and that he was predicting his resurrection on the third day. The literal text of the gospels is very clear - Jesus reappeared to his disciples, and they took his appearance to be in the flesh. Thomas exemplifies this astonishing thing. He would not believe "unless I put my hand in his side". Jesus invites him to do just that, and there is no suggestion in John's gospel (the only gospel to record this event) that Thomas and the others with him saw any reason to comment that Jesus was not in the flesh at that point.

Nevertheless, there are two key points that must be made: a) the disciples in Jesus time were creatures of their own time and culture, and relayed things as they appeared to them; and b) something happened after the crucifixion that totally changed the lives and behaviours of all the disciples.

Many authors have commented on this latter point and it remains for me the most profound aspect of the gospels. How could such a bunch of poorly organized, under-resourced, and totally demoralized people bounce back in such a world-changing way? Either they were the most comprehensive con-artists the world has ever seen, or they saw and experienced something that took them well outside their earthly experience. If they were con-artists, why would they argue for such a selfless view of the world? No, they did have a completely new spirit-life, and the choices they made after the resurrection appearances were totally new choices, indicative of a new spirit (in the sense as defined above) within them.

Those choices were so profound, and so different that the words subsequently used to describe their experiences must be different from the words that we use to describe our everyday experiences. So I don't think it matters much exactly what they saw with the appearances of the post-crucifixion Jesus. Yes, they described those appearances as best they could; no, we do not need to take them literally. What we must do is to be aware of the profoundly life-changing forces at work in those early Christians, and see that as a resurrection of the Jesus life-force.

Our souls live on after death anyway - but our spirits can be resurrected to give new life to the choices we would make, had we the consciousness to act upon them. That is resurrection of the spirit, if not the body.

Life Everlasting

I made the comment above that when we die, our spirit is absorbed back into the Divine Presence. Clearly our souls, our unique identity as human beings, are part of this Divine Presence (as they always have been, forever and ever, amen). But what do we mean by saying our spirit is also part of the Divine Presence? Here I must turn to Michael Morwood, whose book It's Time: Challenges to the Doctrine of Faith contains some of the answers to this question. He has a list of some 13 articles of faith, which I will not list here, but appeal to three key statements in that list:

  1. The Divine Presence is always present and active.
  2. The Divine Presence was/is/will be present in all that exists, including humans
  3. Jesus died into the Divine Presence as we all do

We are surrounded by the Divine Presence (call it "God" if you will) (point 1). We cannot escape it, even in death. It is the ultimate consummation of spirit (point 2). Indeed, our "spirit" is in a real sense "borrowed" from the Divine Presence during our earthly existence, and returns unto the Divine Presence when we die (point 3).

I do not know whether we might be conscious of that state of returning to the Divine Presence. But I do believe that the Divine Presence will be that much more enriched when we do return. The choices we make in this conscious life will determine the extent of that enrichment. As the words of George Handel's wonderful anthem "Lord, I trust Thee" puts it:

John Hurst April 2018

FaithDiscussionResurrection (last edited 2024-07-06 06:30:29 by DavidMorgan)