My Eschatology

The earliest Christians did not have a concept of the immortal soul. Originally there was no "Christian" concept of an afterlife in some other reality beyond our own. Instead, there was the expectation of the resurrection. If one follows the history of Judaism, it is quite possible to trace an evolution of their ideas for what followed death. The advent of the Law in Hebrew culture brought with it the idea that God should, or must, reward the righteous and punish the evil. God became a Just God, and justice for his people was expected. Then over the course of time, his people came to the realization that things rarely followed this scheme.

Resurrection seems to have arisen as an answer to the question, 'If the righteous die, and the evil receive the worldly rewards, then why be just?' Especially in the shadow of Babylonian captivity, and Graeco-Roman rule this question burned all the more. Over the course of hundreds of years, there was a growing preference for the idea that the righteous dead would be raised up by God. As the world would be given to them then, this eschatological world would be a just (and therefore perfect) world. By Jesus' time, the idea seems to have caught on with the 'lower' strata of society. But, then we hear that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection. Jesus argues that this is because they don't understand the Scriptures, and since we all follow Jesus this must be true . . . but it's not. The Sadducees who had all the comforts of Graeco-Roman culture, had no need for a future day of justice. They were getting by perfectly fine as it was. They were actually staying truer to traditional Jewish thought than the Pharisees or Essenes. Obviously on both sides, pro- or anti-resurrection, there were ulterior motives for believing as such.

A vastly important point is that there is practically no evidence that Semitic cultures had any room for an eternal soul. All ideas of heaven and hell are imposed on Judeo-Christian thought from Greek thought. Even in John, which is vastly influenced by Greek culture, Jesus does not go to Heaven in his ascension, but only "to be with the father". According to Paul it is not his soul that was raised, but his glorified body, which was accordingly designed for this world, not heaven. In other words, Jesus has gone to be with God for this interim period of history while we expect him, body and all, to come back with God for the coming eschatological age.

There is a lot more that could be said about this, but let's fast-forward to today. In the age of impending nuclear war, the idea that God is patiently waiting to come back and restore the world to the righteous seems in many ways to have lost its appeal, and for many including myself, any prospect of validity. There are narrow parameters in which I believe we can still speak of a resurrection (meaning I don't deny that Jesus was "raised"), but to do so requires semantic/conceptual contortions that I don't plan to go into in this post.

But what of the 'soul'? My basic position is that there is nothing eternal about us. I am currently taking two neuroscience classes, which have both pointed out that all the things that make us "human" are products of neurological structure. I don't deny that there is a gestalt quality to people which marks a unity we can call a soul. I just don't believe that this is eternal. In adapting itself to Greek concepts and Greek cosmology, Christianity has subsumed this idea into its faith. But, it seems that it is neither original to Christianity, nor necessary.

I find this to be an important point since Christianity has long obsessed over its mission to "save souls". In this regard it seems that the majority of modern Christians are consumed with proselytizing people to an overtly Greek manner of thinking, which essentially has nothing (!) to do with Christian faith.

We have become so consumed by this syncretized form of Christian religion that we have ceased to remember that it is a religion that is whole-heartedly concerned with justice - not soul-saving.













I'll close by saying what I have personally come to believe. I have grown up as a Christian, and we are all sympathetic to the culture we grow up in. Yet, my worldview is far more scientific: I order my reality by science. Thus, my faith is shaped creatively by this tension between the way I perceive reality (science), and the ideals I hope for (God as I experience through Christian faith). I have found that Christianity does not validate the soul, and science flatly denies it. Christianity does concern itself with an eternal God, and that God's implications for justice and human dignity. Science frequently denies this God, but does not do so unilaterally, and is incapable of disproof. Science has forced us to alter the language we use to speak of God, as well as God's role in the causality of our universe.

I believe that humans have no hope for eternity outside of God. But, this theocentric hope is actually original to Judeo-Christian faith. Before Greek thought made a mess of it, Christianity agreed that God alone was eternal, and that our hope was in him as evidenced by the "resurrection" of Jesus. Jesus, the prototype of righteousness, was not lost to death. His life did not end in meaninglessness, but was validated as God raised him, which is a poor way of saying that he joined into God's eternity. However different my worldview is from Jesus' first followers, my hope is the same: that in/by the mysterious Eternal, I am remembered.