First Things readers may remember the late Richard John Neuhaus’s critique of N.T. Wright, entitled The Possibilities and Perils in Being a Really Smart Bishop:
Most of [Wright's Surprised by Hope] is devoted to making the case for a greater accent in Christian piety and liturgy on the final resurrection of the dead and the coming of the Kingdom of God. Or, as Wright likes to put it, we need to recover the biblical focus on “life after life after death.” I believe Wright is right about that. As he is also on target when he insists that the resurrection “is not the story of a happy ending but of a new beginning.” But his argument is grievously marred by his heaping of scorn on centuries of Christian piety revolving around the hope of “going to heaven,” and his repeated and unseemly suggestion that he is the first to have understood the New Testament correctly, or at least the first since a few thinkers in the patristic era got part of the gospel right… Wright debunks traditional ideas of heaven by noting that Jesus could not have been referring to heaven when he said that the good thief would be with him today in paradise because Jesus still had to descend to hell and be resurrected and therefore was not himself in heaven on that day. Gotcha. Now why didn’t Thomas Aquinas and all those other smart theologians think of that? Here and elsewhere, N.T. Wright is as literalistic as the staunchest of fundamentalists.
It was all a bit over the top, as was Wright’s response. But now that the dust from this clashing of theological egos has settled, it’s worth noting that a criticism similar to Neuhaus’s emerged from Christianity Today editor Mark Galli last month in his excellent assessment of Near Death Experiences:
As N. T. Wright has said, he’s not so much interested in the afterlife, but in the life after the afterlife—meaning bodily life in the new earth (Rev. 21). Those enthusiastic about these theological themes have little patience with spiritual and soul talk. They wax eloquent about what might be called a kind of Christian materialism, about the new heaven on earth, when justice will reign globally and we’ll enjoy bodily life in a redeemed state. All this is true as true can be. The resurrection of the body is indeed the best and final way to talk about our ultimate state in the eschaton. And we can be grateful that a generation of evangelical scholars has made this clearer than ever.
But here’s the pastoral rub. In general, when life-after-the-afterlife folks talk about this future state, the language gets global and the vision abstract… There are sweeping statements about “the culmination of history” and “the coming reign of God” and “the renewal of the whole earth.” This is heady stuff, and, as stated above, true as true can be. But it doesn’t always connect with the widow whose husband was struck by a fatal heart attack. …Some of us (usually the highly educated among us) may be most interested in life after the afterlife, but most people in the pews are deeply concerned simply with the afterlife—the one that comes right after this one… The kingdom of God will be a just world order that will bring history to a glorious conclusion. But day to day, that hope is too distant and vague for many Christians to grasp emotionally as good news. For many, it’s just interesting news. What they want to hear more than anything, especially when they or a loved one is on the threshold of death, is this: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Galli’s gentle course correction to an important movement in American evangelicalism causes me to think that maybe Neuhaus had a point.
January 19th, 2013 | 2:06 pm
I have never heard or read anything that adequately explains how humans can be truly physical beings and yet can “have” souls that allegedly separate from the body and continue to perceive, think, remember, and so on. In the Christian vision (or at least, the Catholic one, which I am most familiar with), “In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body.” Immediately after death, the soul goes to heaven, purgatory, or hell. Save for Jesus and Mary, any human being that has ever lived and died currently exists as a disembodied soul. What is the point of bodies in this view? What is the point of the resurrection of the body? One might also ask in what sense “glorified bodies” are actually physical.
January 19th, 2013 | 6:27 pm
I think that for Christianity to reject the massive statements, works, and judgments of the great Christian thinkers of the last two thousand years, that humans continue existing after death as a soul would be a big mistake. Granted, we don’t understand what the essence of the soul is, or how/why it’s “connected” to a brain, but we also have no clue how God could reassemble the molecules that constitutes one’s dead body, into a living one either,so should we chuck the belief in a resurrection too? If the fact that there’s no scientific evidence (currently) to indicate that a soul exists, and if the lack of scientific evidence is the criterion for determining whether a religion notion should be accepted, we better not accept the resurrection either.
Perhaps the “Christian Materialists” believe that the notion of a soul is not biblically based, and is derived from Platonic philosophy. Well, that’s debatable, as one could cite many passages that refer to an afterlife, but why would the fact that something is derived from Platonic philosophy make it less believable? It seems as if there’s this little notion of a Trinity, that most Christians accept, that owes more than a small debt to the broad shouldered Athenian.
January 19th, 2013 | 8:25 pm
It seems pretty clear on an Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics.
Men, as distinct from angels, are not by nature immaterial, and are thus not pure forms by nature. While our rationality, our capacity to abstract forms from matter, is immaterial (abstraction, after all, is only possible insofar as the universal is separated from the particular, and matter is fundamentally the particularizing principle) that’s only a part of our human nature, which is partly animal.
Our intellects are not self-sufficient, as that of angels, but work in conjunction with our sensible faculties and our appetites, which are necessarily material, as sense and appetite deal with particulars and not universals. The intellect, together with our senses, thus forms with our other bodily elements a functional unity, the nature of which is our human nature, and which determines the conditions of our perfection.
As human nature is the nature of an embodied thing, it is then truly proper to human nature to be a material thing. Of course, a given instance of human nature may come to lack a body at all, and continue to persist in virtue of the immateriality of its intellect, which is immaterial even when embodied. The immaterial aspect of the human Form continues to ground human existence after death, though such is a necessarily incomplete existence. The presence of such a component as a partially self-subsistent Form doesn’t make humans less truly physical, since all material things are made of matter and form anyway.
While our immaterial capacities properly considered entail some manner of immaterial existence after death is possible, necessarily this state is an imperfect one in which to exist for the kinds of things we are. As rational *animals,* human nature is only perfected in embodiment. Thus it is fitting that a God who loves us, or wills our objective good, should desire to…
January 20th, 2013 | 9:22 pm
Not long ago I read an interesting take on Jesus’ 3 days when he descended ‘to the dead.’ Seems that Jesus was working even then going around spreading the word to those millions who were ‘dead’ in the nether world. He told them he had died and opened Paradise to them (those who were worthy) and that soon their souls would be with God and Him.
So, when Jesus told the Good Thief, Dismus, that he would be with Him in Paradise that very day it was true as Jesus was only waylayed in the ‘dead world’ for those 3 days but was actually spiritually ‘risen’ to await the 3rd Day.
January 21st, 2013 | 5:29 am
Consider the troparion of the Pascal Hours:
“You were In the tomb with the body, and in Hades with the soul, in Paradise with the thief and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, O boundless Christ, filling all things.”
January 21st, 2013 | 7:42 am
Maybe Neuhaus had a point???
Yes, he certainly did, and many others as well. One of his points, as a Catholic priest, was that he said hundreds, probably thousands, of masses which had been requested for the sake of people who had died. A theologically and pastorally sound practice, which gets to the real point. In the Communion of Saints, the dead are still our living brothers and sisters in Christ, who benefit from our prayers for them. While we, of course, benefit from praying for them.
Fr Neuhaus knew all this. He certainly did have a point or two.
January 21st, 2013 | 2:38 pm
Joe DeVet,
Nothing you have said bears on the question of what it can possibly mean for a soul to exist separately from a body. I have come across this interesting piece of information in Josef Pieper’s Death and Immortality, p. 36:
What exactly does it mean, then, to say that St. Peter is in heaven? Was not St. Peter a person? If the soul of St. Peter is in heaven, but a soul is not a person, in what sense does the person who was known as St. Peter exist?
Consider the following:
One might ask if disembodied souls—which obviously do not have functioning brains—are in the same situation as living persons with brain injuries. If human beings have emotions because we are physical, and souls have intellect and will, can the soul’s capacity for “willing” function adequately without the body’s emotions?
January 22nd, 2013 | 11:00 am
David Nickol raises some good points. When one examines Near Death Experiences, one sees that those who have them not only are able to hear, see, ect., but they also experience emotions (such as fear or happiness).
And, although I’m not Catholic, and therefore feel somewhat uneasy answering this, (perhaps those who are Catholic can address this more proficiently) I don’t think that the Catholic Church has officially endorsed the Angelic Doctor’s theory of mind. That is, although Aquinas is considered a brilliant contributor to the Catholic faith, the Church has not endorsed his views on everything (e.g., when the soul enters the body of a fetus). Therefore, although Aquinas has provided much insight into the human mind, he may not be correct in his assessment.
January 24th, 2013 | 2:26 pm
[...] we’re making parallels between evangelicals and Catholics, why not do the same for evangelical and Orthodox thought (as represented in First Things)? Here [...]
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