This post requires some up-front disclaimers. First, although I articulate here what I believe, it’s not what I expect everyone to believe. There’s a lot of latitude in Christian tradition and inter-religious thought for our wonderments about “life after death.” But the more I think on the matter, the more I have become committed to believing what I believe in spite of substantial cultural pressure to believe otherwise.
I do not believe in a soul separable from the body.
Related, (and this will become clear as I lay down the notes of this perspective) a lot of assumptions track together around this topic, so please don’t assume, for example, that because I do not believe in a soul separable from the body this implies I don’t believe in heaven, etc. One can believe in an embodied heaven. Biblical tradition imagines not a disembodied heaven to which our souls flee, but rather an embodied “kin-dom of God” that descends to us.
It’s all more complicated (and more wondrous) than the currently popular imaginings.
In the end, what I’ll describe here, what I believe, is more “Christian” than what a lot of people assume is the “Christian” belief. This isn’t detached speculation. It’s just part of classic biblical reflection, in conversation with some philosophical and scientific work.
Ok, here goes.
Let’s start with Jesus. When Jesus dies, he’s dead. When he rises, there’s an empty tomb. So we have as a central narrative in Christianity a commitment to bodily life, bodily death, and bodily resurrection.
Notice there’s no soul that flees the body of Jesus when he dies, flitting off to occupy another body. Nor does Jesus ascend to heaven as a soul, leaving the body behind. Rather he dies, is raised as a body, and ascends as a body.
To put a fine point on it, the creed most Christians confess says, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”
The creed most Christians confess does not say, “I believe in the immortality of the soul.”
Let’s continue with our own death. Although the popular (and comforting) notion that the soul leaves the body at death and travels off to God in heaven is widespread (I actually know very few people who don’t believe in some form of it), there have been other ways of imagining the time between death and resurrection, the most common one being a kind of soul-sleep, where when we are dead we are at rest until we are raised at the resurrection.
I’m not particularly concerned about the particulars of how it all works. I don’t think we actually know (or can know). Much of this system of belief arises out of grief. When we are grieving, although we may latch onto popular notions of our loved ones golfing with their buddies in a suburban heaven… what we are actually most concerned about is that they are okay. That they will still live. That there will be some future connection with them for us. That they will continue to “be,” to “be themselves,” after death.
This can as readily be accomplished by trusting God’s embodied creative work and promise of resurrection in Christ, as it can by relying on notions of a soul’s immortality and departure from the body at death.
Although I do not believe in a soul separable from the body, this does not mean I have a simplistic or entirely materialist sense of the self or the body. I recognize, along with great poets like Walt Whitman, our profound connection to our situated materiality:
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same (Song of Myself)
So we are formed from the wider creation of which we are a part (the soil, the air, which themselves came from the founding of the universe and even ancient stars), but also biological inheritances (of parents from parents the same, and their parents the same).
Sometimes people worry how their bodies will be re-formed in the resurrection if their ashes are spread far and wide, if their body rots in the ground. What if part of me is eaten by worms which are eaten by birds which are pooped on another continent?
The glorious and wild reality is that our bodies are never our bodies for very long as it is, even while we live. Matter in your body is replaced daily. Who you are as a body is not mostly who it was ten years ago. Our bodies are so much more than our current bodies. Bodily existence is already far more extensive than the parts of us walking around today.
Another complexity in thinking about life after death and body and soul is the mind itself. At least since Kant, and really long before that, the question became whether there was anything at all outside the apperception of reality. At the very least we recognize that our perceiving selves and “the world” come together in such a way that it becomes difficult for us to establish there is a world outside our perception of it.
“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of question.” (Heisenberg)
Whether we create the world in our minds, or a world is created in our minds by others (The Matrix problem), or whether there is a world truly there outside our mind’s apperception, these are themselves open questions. Mix these philosophy of the mind problems together with material reality complexity, and one begins to sense how much more there is to maintaining that we are simply “bodies.”
But also the world is more complex. Even the reality we believe we are observing is itself wickedly complex. Matter can emerge from nothing and return to nothing, much of the matter of the universe is theorized to exist while remaining mostly undetectable by us, some matter can remain entwined with other matter, responding instantaneously to each other in “spooky action at a distance.” Which has left quantum physicists theorizing you can have time, or you can have matter, but you can’t have both…
Which then makes the whole “where are we when we are dead” topic even more complicated, because what we imagine is a long time between death and resurrection (since we’ve seen people die, get buried, stay dead) and we assume this means they have to “wait” for the resurrection, when in reality time’s relationship to matter (not to mention time’s relationship to God) is simply not as straightforward as all that.
Now for a big disclaimer: Very little of this matters for daily, bodily existence. We just don’t know very much about life after death. There’s almost nothing to go on scientifically related to souls or to bodily resurrection (although there has been some rather convincing theological work done in this area at the intersection of science and resurrection). We have eye-witness testimony to the resurrection of Jesus but not a resurrected body who has stuck around long-term. Similarly although we may have testimonies from some of “out of body” experience or “near-death” experiences, nevertheless they are non-repeatable (non-replicable), and we have no on-going open-channel communication with souls or those in a heavenly realm.
What we do have is steadfastly material. We have what we have. Which is why by and large as a Christian I’m committed to caring for this body, the one we have been given, both myself, my neighbors, and the creation. And I believe the gospel, rather than pushing me to invest lots of energy worrying over eternal life, instead invites me to not worry about it, and instead focus freely on neighbor love.
Nevertheless these topics seem to continually matter to us. Although I do not emphasize them in my preaching as a pastor, I do think on some levels our beliefs about the soul end up influencing, sometimes profoundly, our choices here and now (the opiate of the people problem). Thus this blog entry.
Many bodies fail us before we die. It’s worrisome to imagine carrying those failings into death and the resurrection: ailments and disfigurements, declines and losses. However, the promise of the resurrection is not revivification. The imagery is of “resurrected in Christ,” a seed planted that grows into a tree. Our resurrected bodies, whatever they are, are and are not our current bodies. This again returns to the topic of trust, trusting God to handle our resurrection into Christ, but also it includes imagining being formed into something more complex than our current bodies, made up of the body of God, the body of the creation, which as I’ve indicated earlier is not as difficult to imagine as we might think, given we are already made from the dust of stars and from day to day composed of different waters and elements.
Part of what you were yesterday is now in a lake. Some of what you were last week has sloughed off and is composting in the soil. Who you are in your personality was shaped long ago through your parents. Some of who you are now is impacted by your friends, or even just reading this blog.
So why does this all matter? Well, for one I’d like to invite us to wander around in the capacious doctrines of Christianity rather than wander off to other metaphysics. Since Christians confess the resurrection of the body weekly in their creeds and trust in the one resurrected from the dead, I’d like us to stick more closely to that promise and see what it does among us.
But also, I just believe a commitment to the belief in the body can have profound social justice and creation care implications. If this, this right here, this body, is what we have and will be made (and has come from) the body of God, this belief can (especially long-term) transform how we relate to our bodies, to other bodies, to bodily life.
Such belief is eminently practical. It works from what observably is the case (with the caveat about apperception). It leaves behind some of our more bizarre wish fulfillments (the worst of which is the middle class captivity of heaven), and invites us to imagine resurrection as something accomplished not through sheer force of fantasized will (“there IS going to be a heaven with souls after death, because I said so”), but rather something worked in and through what has already been given as gift (this earthly life, this cosmos).
This body.
I literally just gave 2 sermons and a Bible study using the exact same theology offered here. This post was of course, more articulate and well thought out. Great job here, a useful guide , thanks.