We Christians don’t believe in life after death. We have full belief in Jesus, and afterlife with him is implicit in our experience of him as alive in our here-and-now. (“I am with you always,” he says at the end of the New Testament’s first book.)
Jesus is unique in that his is the world’s only name with which the full range of possibilities exists:
1.....FULL UNBELIEF. Jesus never was born, never lived. Christianity’s foundation is nothing but fantasy. Though this position is, most historians agree, highly improbable, it reappears whenever conditions are right for it.
2.....NATURAL belief. Like everybody else, Jesus lived and died. This is the Jewish position.
3.....HALF belief. Jesus lived but didn’t die (he was taken to paradise): that was somebody else who was crucified. This is the Muslim position.
4.....FULL BELIEF. Jesus lived and died but didn’t stay dead. Three days after his execution, he appeared among his followers—and continued to re-appear many times for more than a month—often enough, and in sufficiently different circumstances, to overcome all their understandable doubts that he could be alive again. His disciples experienced him not as resuscitated (restored to the life he had lived on earth) but as resurrected (re-created in newness of life, with powers of life as we know it but also beyond). We should not be surprised if these experiences—once, to “more than five hundred” (1 Corinthians 15:6)—were variously reported, as indeed they were: we should rather be suspicious if the Bible were to have given us a neat, mythic miracle-story. The materials we have point to a singular historical event in which nature and the supernatural converged. For us Christians, Easter is more than a festival of springtime.
Jesus’ resurrection, and his disciples’ experience of it, converted a small messianic movement into Christianity, which is his believers’ life together after his death and its sequel. One of our “On Faith” panelists, Nicholas T. Wright, has written an 817-page magisterial work—THE RESURRECTION OF THE SON OF GOD—affirming our Christian faith and meticulously confronting all denials of Easter.
This week’s “On Faith” question is three questions: (1) “Do you believe in life after death?” Yes. (2) “Have you ever been visited by the spirit of a dead relative or friend?” Yes, by Jesus resurrected and present in and among his believers. (3) “Do such visions or visitations have any theological meaning?” Yes, (1) to meet our need for correction and an open gate to newness of life here and hereafter, God has come among us as a human being; (2) moral seriousness (responsibility, accountability) is increased by belief that our behavior’s consequences to us personally are not limited to life before death.
As the diameter of our knowledge of consciousness increases, so also does the circumference of its mystery. No scientific solution is possible to the question whether (as scientism says) mind emerges from matter or (as the religions and most philosophies say) matter emerges from mind.
Finally, in thinking about this week’s questions, we moderns must deal with a learned disability. Scientism’s genetic fallacy has mistaught us that we are—as are the other animals--nothing but physical bodies. I believe in evolution, and wonder how long it will take us to outgrow evolutionism.
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