Saturday, 07 November 2009

• Response to Death, Philosophy and Souls

  In reading this post this morning, it was the first time I'd ever seen someone who believes in the resurrection posit that there is no human soul. The relevant paragraphs were:

  I don't believe people have souls.  We are bundles of tissues and nerves and synapses that, when working properly, constitute a person.  When they are no longer working, they constitute a dead person.  There is an abstract and purposive part of human consciousness that could be called the soul, but I don't believe it is self-existent or capable of being abstracted from human physicality.  So when you die, you die. 
  
  Some might think (and certainly Prof. Kagan thinks) that challenging the belief in the soul would be problematic for evangelical Christians, but I don't see any real obstacles.  It is not on the basis of an immortal soul that Christians believe in life after death, but on the basis of the saving activity of God.  There's nothing special about humans that makes us innately immortal.

  Now obviously, right from the start, I disagree. Traditional Christianity, and the Catholic Church, have always maintained the existence of an immortal soul that survives the death of the body, and indeed the definition of death is the separation of soul and body. To believe otherwise puts us at odds with certain scripture passages, for instance Matt 10:28 "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell."

  Further, Saint Paul speaks of our bodies as earthly tents, which will be destroyed so that we may enter into heavenly dwellings (2 Corinthians 5:1).

  The entire tenor of the Bible is impossible to understand without the assumption that there is something in humans that is immortal, which we call a soul. Without that understanding, the arguments of Jesus with the Sadducees, or Paul's escape by pitting them against the pharisees, or the story of the witch of Endor, even the injunctions against divining and necromancy, make no sense. When reading the Old Testament, one gets the idea that communication with the dead was forbidden, not because it doesn't work, but because there was the horrible possibility that it might.

  However, the argument was not so much whether there is life after death, but rather why there is life after death. The supposition was that there is nothing innately in our nature that would keep us alive, but rather (I take it) that God keeps us alive, or brings us back to life, by a miracle.

  There is some truth to this, but it is formulated in such a way as to draw a false distinction, as if the possibility of humans being innately immortal somehow negated the constant work of God. Of course it is the constant and inescapable attention of God that keeps us alive, before and after death. We are the sort of creatures who sustain themselves in a physical environment, but that does not negate the fact that it is God who keeps us in existence. Our nature as physical beings is to live. That nature comes from God. There is no contradiction between the two. In the same way, if our nature is such that our consciousness continues after and independently of the death of the body, it was God who designed and created that nature and keeps it in existence.

  The problem, then, with saying that "It is not on the basis of an immortal soul that Christians believe in life after death, but on the basis of the saving activity of God" is that it creates the false impression that immortality was something tacked onto our nature after the fact, rather than our destiny from before the world began. It also connotes salvation with immortality, as if the mere fact of living forever was synonymous with resurrection into glory. It is also part of our faith that humans can live forever in hell, forever cutting themselves off from God's saving love.

  There is, however, another kernel of truth there, in the insistence on the bodiliness of the soul. The human person was never meant to exist without a body. In fact, the very urge to cheat death, to live forever, to survive in legend, in memory, in monuments, in descendants, all prove that we were never meant to die. We are the sort of creatures who were created to live. The fact that we get thirsty indicates that we were meant to drink water. The fact that we hunger for immortality indicates that we were meant to live forever.

  (It may be argued that animals also struggle to escape death, but I would disagree that this is the same thing. I've noticed that it isn't the fact of dying that animals mind, but the fact of being killed. To me that seems to indicate that the present violence and destruction in the animal kingdom were not part of the original order of creation, but that animals were still always meant to die.)

  The basic premise of Theology of the Body is that the human being is a creature that is meant to be body and soul, a union of two types of creature into one. Originally that union was indissoluble, just as the union of marriage was originally indissoluble. It was only with the entrance of sin that marriage and the unity of the human person became unstable. There is a profound rightness to this understanding. From the beginning God created man, body and soul, and humans, male and female. He created the different unions to be dependent on and sacramental of each other to some extent, so that it is through the fact of being bodily that a masculine soul and a feminine soul can unite, and it is through a bodily act that this is done. It is through sin that death and divorce enter the world, both being the same reality in different unions. Death is the disintegration and disunion of the union of the human person, body and soul. Divorce is disintegration and disunion between the male and female, the man and woman in the communion of persons. Body and soul, male and female, one flesh. After sin, corpse and ghost, pimps and prostitutes, disintegration and death.

  Thus the natural meaning of the human person, and the natural state of the human person, was one that tended toward eternal life by nature. We tended toward God. To say that it was by nature is not to diminish God's role, anymore than saying that I breath by nature negates God's constant saving work in keeping me breathing. After sin we tend away from God, so the curiosity is not the desire for and longing for immortality. Rather, the curiosity is the human who attempts to deny it. That is the freak, the anomaly, the stunted creature, who will not accept that he is human and therefore going to live forever. He would rather be an animal.

  The glory of Eden was something we don't understand, but probably more like immortality than anything else we can comprehend. (The tree of life seems to us like mythical language, though I see no reason why God shouldn't create a fruit tree which, when eaten of, would bestow eternal life.) The reality of fallen man is death, but the soul, being spiritual, does not die. It continues separate from the body, an abomination, a corruption. Even the souls of the just are not as they were meant to be as long as they are unbodied. But now we witness the saving might of God, who out of death can bring resurrection. Not the undoing of the evil that was done in Eden, but the redemption of it. The body and soul will be reunited. They will be intrinsically joined so that the body, while still being bodily and even more fully bodily than it is now, will nevertheless be also spiritual. We see glimpses of this in the transfiguration, and in the Risen Body of our Savior which could pass through walls and yet still enjoy some grilled fish, appear and disappear undeterred by the ordinary boundaries of space and time, and yet still be tangible to the touch of dear friends. Saint Paul tells us that "it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." 1 Corinthians 15:44.

  There is more going on than meets the eye. Our souls are immortal, because God created them to be. Immortality is not the anomaly, death is. Resurrection is the eternal plan of redemption of death, the final conquering. After that, "What we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." 1 John 3:2

  What is your reaction to this response?
  

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