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The honest answer, I suppose, is "Not particularly! II " But I hasten to add that this is not in the least because I do not recognize questions about the afterlife to be questions that any Christian theologian, not to say, any Christian, ought to be willing to go into, if anyone sincerely asks them. The simple fact of the matter is that talk about the afterlife, in one understanding or another, has been a part of the Christian tradition from its earliest stages, as well as of the wider Western cultural and religious tradition by which all of us in our society and culture have somehow been shaped. Moreover, Christian witness and theology both have traditionally formulated the implications of Christian faith in ways involving – again, in one understanding or another – belief in an afterlife as an essential element in Christian belief. Withal, it's clear from the historical record that the real use and meaning of talk about the afterlife has all along been more or less seriously problematic, so that questions about it can hardly fail to arise in any thoughtful mind, including, I should thin~ think, any thoughtful Christian mind. But this is all by way of saying
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that any such talk, as well as any properly theological talk about its meaning and validity, is bound to be difficult, particularly in the concluding minutes of any single, all too brief, theological conversation such as this.

Recognizing this, I shall respond to the question in two main parts. In the first, I shall simply state – all too summarily and dogmatically, I fear – the main things I try to keep in mind in thinking theologically about any talk about the afterlife, including the talk that I take to be typical of traditional Christian witness. In the second part, then, I will accept the opportunity the question as asked gives me of speaking – again, all too summarily – as I myself as a Christian am accustomed to speaking about the afterlife, in the straightforward sense of such life after death as I myself, as a Christian, hope and expect to be mine, along with any and every other creature of God, nonhuman as well as human.

The first thing I try to keep in mind is that, from at least the time of the New Testament writings on, there have been, not one way, but two ways – in fact, two very different, not to say contrary, ways – in which Christians have thought and spoken about the afterlife. The earliest such way is that of Jewish apocalypticism, with its talk about resurrection from the dead, or resurrection of the body, as well as a new heaven and a new earth when this old evil age has come to an end and the new age of God's coming reign has begun. Some such understanding as this is simply taken over, more or less uncritically, by most of the New Testament writers, following most of the still earlier writers whose work they somehow appropriate in their own. But in some of the New Testament writings – notably, the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine epistles – this apocalyptic way of envisioning life after death as resurrection of the body is displaced by another, non-Jewish, Hellenistic, specifically Gnostic understanding for which the key concept is, not resurrection of the body, but immortality of the soul. The remarkable thing, however, is that both of these very different understandings in which different early Christians thought and spoke about the afterlife were eventually worked together into what became the understanding of Christian orthodoxy. On this third, highly problematic understanding, the soul, being immortal or undying, goes immediately upon death either to heaven, where it rests in the hands of God until the final judgment, or to hell, where it already tastes the torments of God's punishment. (I should explain that I'm
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here following the Protestant version of the narrative, which intentionally rejects the third "receptacle" of purgatory so important in Roman Catholic piety and theology as well as the other two receptacles referred to as "limbo," Lei.e., the limbo of infants and the limbo of the fathers, meaning the righteous of the Old Testament, who prophesied Christ's coming, but died before its fulfillment.) But, then, with the coming of Christ and the last judgment, the bodies of all the dead, righteous and unrighteous, are to be raised and united with their souls, wherewith they will be consigned irreversibly either to everlasting blessedness or everlasting torment.

I can't go into any more detail, but I trust I've said enough to make two further things I try to keep in mind clear. First, neither of the understandings of the afterlife worked together into the eventual understanding of Christian orthodoxy is in any way original with Christian faith, but was simply taken over by Christians from the larger cultural and religious environment, Jewish or Hellenistic, in order to formulate their own understanding as Christians of the ul tim ate ultimate meaning of their lives. Then, second, there can be no doubt that, by contemporary standards of judgment, both understandings are properly classified as mythical or mythological in literary character. This in no way implies, I hasten to add, that they're simply false. It means only that, in speaking about what they're really about – the ultimate meaning of our existence as human beings – they speak in terms appropriate enough to talking about the immediate realities of our ordinary experience, but hopelessly inappropriate to talking about the ultimate reality of our existence, of ourselves, others, and the whole. They are just as misleading, indeed, as talk about God's transcendence as though it were a matter of immense spatial distance, as though God were simply another being among others, exalted only by being simply higher, or spatially "above" them. Here again, I have to be brief. My point, very simply, is that all traditional Christian talk about the afterlife, on any of the traditional understandings, is undoubtedly mythical, or mythological, and therefore has to be – in the term used by my revered teacher, Rudolf Bultmann – demythologized. That is to say, it has to be critically interpreted so as to bring out the self-understanding, or the understanding of existence, that it is really concerned to express, but that it as myth manages to express only most inappropriately.
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But, then, so far as Christian witness and theology are concerned, the criterion by which Christians must judge the self-understanding, or understanding of existence, of any myth, including any myths about the afterlife, is the self-understanding, or understanding of existence, of Christian faith itself. I ask you to recall yet again the all-important distinction I introduced early on in our conversation, between Christian faith itself, on the one hand, and its various, always only more or less adequate, forms and formulations, on the other. As bound as we are to the first, I insisted, we are just as free from the second free to make use of them or to set them aside, depending on whether, or how adequately and fittingly, they allow us to bear witness to the boundless love of God decisively represented to us through Jesus Christ. So far as Christian faith is concerned, then, it is solely this all-encompassing love that is both the beginning and the end of our lives and of everything else. And this means, I hold, that it is this love alone that is both the ground and the object not only of our trust and our loyalty, our faith and our love, but also of our hope. In other words, God's love alone is not only why we hope as Christians, but also what we hope for. But, then, all the traditional understandings, or formulations, of Christian hope have to be judged by their appropriateness for expressing what Christian hope itself actually hopes for, not only in life, but also after life – namely, the pure, unbounded love of God, by which our lives and everything else, present as well as future, actual as well as possible, are everlastingly embraced and preserved.

This brings me to the second part of my answer to the question, in which I have promised to speak about the afterlife as I, as a Christian, am accustomed to speak about it. I cannot help but recall in this connection a story my friend, the New Testament scholar, Willi Marxsen tells toward the end of his book, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It is about his own theological teacher, Heinrich Rendtorff, who, when he was dying, asked his wife to listen quietly to what he had to say and then went on: "The last nights I have been thinking over and testing everything that we can know and everything that we have been told about what will happen to us when we die. And n~wI now I am certain of one thing: I will be safe." To which Marxsen adds: "Nobody could call Heinrich Rendtorff a representative of 'modern' theology. But he was a level-headed man who always tried to confine himself to statements which he could justify. The only thing he was sure of on his deathbed was: I shall be safe" (188). 21

In somewhat the same way, the only thing I'm sure of, and therefore the only thing I speak of in speaking about the afterlife, is that I shall be safe – indeed, that all things shall be safe within the all-inclusive, never-ending love of God. This in no way implies, on my understanding, that I myself will somehow survive death as a subject and continue to enjoy for either a shorter or a longer future both myself and every other creature's being embraced by God's love. My objective immortality, or resurrection, in God's love is one thing, my own subjective immortality, or resurrection, or even my survival of death for some unspecified time, something else. But to avoid any misunderstanding, I neither deny our subjective survival of death nor have even the least interest in denying it, however problematic I continue to find all affirmations of it, especially affirmations of subjective immortality in the strict sense of the words, as distinct from merely subjective survival for some limited period after death. No, the only thing I would deny is the oft-heard claim that our subjective survival is in some way essential to the hope that is Christian hope itself, as distinct from some of the understandings of it in the Christian tradition. In my view, any such claim, fully thought out is quite simply idolatrous – setting up something besides God, instead of obediently surrendering to God alone as what we as Christians hope for. Whether or not we subjectively survive death, what we hope for, insofar as our hope is Christian hope, is not our own subjective survival or immortality, but solely God's love for us, and, because of it, our objective immortality, or resurrection – our being safe – in God's love.

There's more I could say in speaking about the afterlife as I'm used to speaking about it. But such "more" as I could say would only be by way of elaborating upon what I have already said, which is the only thing I can say and, as a Christian, would ever want to say – namely, what I take Paul to be saying to the Romans in the fourteenth chapter of his letter: "We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living" (vss. 7 ifff.).

Nederland Community Presbyterian Church 17 September 2008