After We Die: Theology, Philosophy, and the Question of Life after Death

By Stephen T Davis

In After We Die, philosopher Stephen T. Davis subjects one of Christianity’s key beliefs—that Christians not only will survive death but also will enjoy bodily resurrection—to searching philosophical analysis. Facing each critique squarely, Davis contends that traditional, historic belief about the eschatological future is philosophically defensible.

Davis examines personal extinction, reincarnation, and immortality of the soul. By juxtaposing two systems of salvation—reincarnation/karma and resurrection/grace—Davis explores the Christian claim that humans will be raised from the dead, as well as the radical Christian assertions of Jesus’ resurrection, ascension, and long-anticipated return. Davis finally addresses Christian thinking about heaven, hell, and purgatory.

The philosophical defense of Christianity’s core beliefs enables Davis to render a reasonable answer to the eternal question of what happens to us after we die. After We Die is essential reading for teachers and students of philosophy, theology, and Bible, as well as anyone interested in a reasoned analysis of historic Christian faith, particularly as it pertains to the inevitable end of each and every human being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781481303446

Stephen T Davis

Stephen T. Davis (PhD, Claremont Graduate University) is the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. He specializes in the philosophy of religion and Christian thought, and he is the author or editor of over fifteen books including Encountering Evil, Christian Philosophical Theology, and Disputed Issues. He has also written more than seventy academic articles and reviews. In 2015, he was honored with the festschrift Christian Philosophy of Religion: Essays in Honor of Stephen T. Davis.

Book preview

After We Die

Theology, Philosophy, and the Question of Life after Death

Stephen T. Davis

Baylor University Press

© 2015 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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978-1-4813-0344-6 (ePub)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davis, Stephen T., 1940–

After we die : theology, philosophy, and the question of life after death / Stephen T. Davis.

175 pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4813-0342-2 (hardback : alk. paper)

1. Future life—Christianity. I. Title.

BT903.D38 2015

236’.2--dc23

2014048043

Contents

Introduction

1. Survival of Death Theories

2. Karma versus Grace

3. Resurrection

4. Ascension and Second Coming

5. Hell

6. Purgatory

7. Heaven

Conclusion

Endnotes

Footnotes

Bibliography

Scripture Index

General Index

Other Baylor University Press Titles by Stephen Davis

Introduction

I

We are all of us concerned about the future. What will it hold for me and for the people I care about? Will we thrive or will we suffer? Is there anything that I can do to achieve future prosperity and happiness for us? Is there anything that I can do to avoid future disease, accident, poverty, dishonor, or suffering for us?

Most of us are also concerned about what we might call our ultimate futures. What will happen, if anything, to me and to my loved ones after our deaths? Will I go on existing as the individual that I am? If so, what sort of existence will I have? Or will death permanently end my existence?

These are some of the most important questions that human beings ask. We most deeply want to know the answers to them. But the trouble is that they are not the sorts of questions that we can readily answer. Both the future and the ultimate future are mysterious to us. It is often said that nobody can accurately predict the future. And it seems that nobody has ever died, experienced the afterlife, and come back to give us reliable information about it.¹ These are ultimate (or philosophical) questions.

What is an ultimate question? I suggest that a question has to satisfy two criteria before it can be considered ultimate. The first is that it must be a question that human beings keep asking and deeply want to answer. Was Julius Caesar right-handed or left-handed? is a question that almost nobody cares about (a biographer of Caesar might). But ultimate questions keep appearing in various cultures, societies, and epochs of human history. Is there life on Mars? appears to satisfy this condition, at least in recent times. People are highly curious about it. Whenever NASA successfully sends a probe to Mars, at the press conference at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the scientists are always asked whether the probe has uncovered any evidence about life on Mars. Indeed, this is usually the first question that the reporters ask.

But Is there life on Mars? is not an ultimate question because it does not satisfy the second criterion. An ultimate question must also be a question that cannot be answered by the scientific method, where I mean the term scientific method in a broad sense. In other words, there is no accepted method of verifying or falsifying possible answers to ultimate questions. We cannot answer such questions by doing an experiment in a lab, by observing a phenomenon, by measuring an effect, by taking a poll, or by crunching numbers. Is there life on Mars? can be answered in principle by the scientific method and doubtless will be answered in the future. If we actually discover life on Mars, or if after years of painstaking effort we discover no evidence of life there, our question will have been answered.

What are some ultimate questions? They are, in effect, the questions that make up much of the subject matter of philosophy. Does God exist? Do human beings have immaterial minds or souls? Are all human decisions and actions causally determined, or are we sometimes free to do one thing or another given the same antecedent conditions? What is knowledge and how does it differ from other cognitive states like believing or having an opinion? How can we know what is morally right and what is morally wrong? There is no experiment that we can perform in a chemistry lab or a physics lab to answer these questions. But notice that one other sort of question definitely belongs here too: Does my death end my existence, or will there be life and experience for me after my death?

II

There is no doubt that death is extraordinarily frightening to most human beings. We are never assured of our continuing existence; we find ourselves always precariously perched between existing and not existing. Indeed, death seems to be the great scandal of human experience: we live, and then we die, and it seems that in death all our hopes, aspirations, achievements, and goals are negated. We believe in progress, in science, in human effort. We think that with the right application of human reason and technology, we can solve any problem. But not death. We can rationalize it away; we can ignore it; we can even deny it; but we cannot escape it.

Death is not amenable to scientific analysis; the nature of death is an ultimate question (unlike the nature of dying, which is amenable to medical science). Science is based upon experience, but (again unlike dying) we do not experience death. As the great twentieth-century Austrian/English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.² Accordingly, we do not know what, if anything, happens to us (as they say) on the other side. Most people fear the unknown—attending a new school, being in a roomful of strangers, starting a new job. But death is the greatest of all unknowns. It is like a black abyss of nothingness.

Moreover, death is inevitable. Unless the stories in certain religions are true, there is no escape from it. Some people live longer than others. There is even a person in the Hebrew Bible, Methuselah, who is said to have lived for nine hundred and sixty-nine years (Gen 5:27). But even he eventually died. Intellectually we all can easily admit the truth of the statement I will die. But we are the centers of our own universes; the idea of my no longer existing is terribly frightening. We have a hard time imagining the world going on without us. And for most of us, we never know when we will die. It may be many years from now (or so we like to think); it may be tomorrow. So we always live under its threat.

Thus there exists the phenomenon of denial of death. Death is not a topic of polite conversation. It is considered a taboo subject; conversation about it is considered morbid. We often tell jokes about the things that we fear. That is one way that we handle our fears. Thus the great proliferation of mother-in-law jokes. But death is so frightening that we cannot tell jokes about it. The only joke about death that I know of is the line that says, Only two things in life are certain—death and taxes. But that joke is more about taxes than about death. Notice how we try to keep the news of his imminent death from a sick friend or loved one—Don’t talk that way, we say, you’re going to be fine. When somebody does die we try to cheer up the bereaved folks, as if they are not supposed to be sad. We flood the room with bright, cheerful flowers; we make the corpse as alive looking as possible, as if the deceased person is just asleep. (In some funeral homes, the viewing room is called the slumber room.) Instead of dead or death or died, we use elaborate euphemisms like passed away, departed, was called home, went to be with the Lord, was called to her reward, passed over to the other side, was called to the great beyond, croaked, kicked the bucket, bought the farm, or bit the dust.

But precisely why do people fear death? It seems that there are several reasons to do so:

Fear of dying painfully

Fear of hell or of some kind of painful existence in the afterlife

Fear of the unknown (we have no clear idea of the afterlife)

Fear of absolute solitude, isolation from others (if we could all hold hands and leap together into the void, perhaps death would not be so frightening)

Fear of separation from my loved ones

Fear about the earthly fate of my loved ones after I die

Fear that my hopes, goals, and aspirations will be unfulfilled

Fear of being forgotten

Fear of nonbeing, of my total annihilation as a person.

Of course, different people will rank these fears differently. One famous person who clearly ranked the last one highest was Miguel de Unamuno, the great twentieth-century Spanish novelist, public intellectual, and existentialist philosopher. Thus he wrote, As a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself.³

I have been interested in the sorts of questions to be discussed in this book for almost as long as I can remember. It began, perhaps, during World War II, when I was a small child. Although I remember virtually nothing else about the war, I do recall how worried the members of my extended family were that my stepfather and two uncles—one serving in the Pacific theater, and the other two in Europe—would not return. And as an adult, throughout much of my academic career, I have occasionally taught a course called Life, Death, and Survival of Death.

III

This is a book about the ultimate future. It is a Christian book, an exercise in Christian philosophical theology, or as some have called it, Analytic Theology. My aim is to think clearly and faithfully about eschatology, which is the Christian study of what will occur at the end of the world. We will look briefly at different after-death scenarios, but will spent much of our time discussing the Christian notion of resurrection. I should note that I do not propose to consider and evaluate the different eschatological scenarios or time lines that have been suggested, that is, premillennialism, postmillennialism, amillennialism, etc. Frankly, I am not particularly interested in debates about those issues.

Christian eschatology presupposes a linear view of time. On circular views of time, as are found in some contemporary and many ancient and tribal cosmologies, history endlessly repeats itself, no one event or person has eternal significance, and history is mythology. Following its parent Judaism, Christianity holds instead that human history and the creation itself are moving in a certain direction. As St. Paul says, in a crucial but often overlooked line, salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers (Rom 13:11). We are moving toward a goal or telos in which history will come to a dramatic end, a final apocalyptic battle between good and evil will be fought, God will emerge triumphant, and a limitlessly good end state will exist. We can refer to this end state as the kingdom of God or the eschaton.

A distinction should be made between two sorts of eschatological theories. An individual eschatological theory holds that there is life after death for human beings. The theory then describes our postmortem fate. A cosmic eschatological theory holds, like Christianity, that all of creation and history are moving toward a goal. Such a theory typically describes what will occur at the end of history. It is important to note that it is possible to have one sort of eschatological theory without the other. Plato, for example, argued strongly in several of his dialogues that human souls survive death, but he offered little or nothing in the way of a cosmic eschatology. Karl Marx, on the other hand, did not believe in individual survival of death, but offered a cosmic eschatology that involved inevitable historical progress toward the overthrow of capitalism and the advent of the classless society. Christianity, like many religions, offers both an individual and a cosmic eschatology.

To return to our questions: Is there life after death? And if so, what happens to us after we die? There appear to be four main answers.

(1) Death ends all. Death is the complete and final end of our existence as human beings. The atoms of which our bodies consist may continue to exist after we die; our lives may be remembered by people of the future; our descendants may carry our genes to the future; we may even be able in our lifetimes to contribute to the overall progress of the human race. But there is no life after death in the sense of continuing, conscious existence as individuals. Death ends all theories obviously deny any individual eschatology but may (as with Marx) or may not (as with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus) offer a cosmic eschatology. Obviously, people who accept such theories spend little time talking about the next life; their efforts are normally directed toward arguing that the prospects for life after death are dim, and drawing implications from that point for how we ought to live our lives here and now.

(2) Reincarnation. At death our bodies die and permanently disintegrate, but some essential and immaterial aspect of us (a soul or mind or "jiva") continues to exist. At some point, it is reborn into and animates a new human (or, on some theories, nonhuman) body. The process continues for a very long time or even (on some theories) eternally. The status and station in life of each incarnation is a karmic function of its moral and religious behavior in previous lives. Reincarnational theories obviously offer an individual eschatology, involving continued incarnations until (at least in some religions) salvation or enlightenment is achieved. This escape from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth can be conceived in various ways; in Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, for example, the goal is oneness with Brahmin. Apart from the idea of the undifferentiated unity of all things, reincarnational theories typically offer little in the way of cosmic eschatology.

(3) Immortality. At death our bodies die and permanently disintegrate, but an immaterial aspect of us called the soul or mind lives on forever (with no further bodily incarnations in this world) in an immaterial world. The idea is that souls quite naturally survive death; no divine miracle is required. It is important to note that this theory posits not just that the soul is indestructible but also that it is the essence of the person; the real Jones is Jones’ soul, not Jones’ body. Otherwise, what survives death will be only one aspect or vestige of Jones, but not Jones. This theory, which is usually called immortality of the soul, was strongly defended by Plato and Kant, as well as by other philosophers and thinkers, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such a theory obviously offers an individual eschatology (our souls will go on living after death), but not necessarily (and not usually) a cosmic eschatology.

(4) Resurrection. The last theory, and the one with which we will be centrally concerned in this book, is bodily resurrection. On this theory, our bodies disintegrate at death, but on some future day God will miraculously raise them from the ground, constitute us again as living persons (the same individuals whom we were on earth), and bring about the eschaton. In Christian thought, the idea is not, as immortality says about souls, that human bodies naturally (so to speak) survive death. The claim is rather that bodily death would mean permanent annihilation for human beings apart from God’s miraculous intervention.⁴ But resurrection and immortality of the soul have a complex relationship in Christian thought, which we will discuss in more detail below.

IV

So the focus of the present book is resurrection. The concept is firmly embedded in Christian teaching and is crucial to the entire Christian plan of salvation, including eschatology (1 Cor 15:12-19). In chapter 1, I will discuss in a bit more detail the first three after-death theories: death ends all, reincarnation, and immortality. These are theories that, as noted, Christian theologians almost unanimously reject, although Christianity’s relationship with immortality is quite complex, as we will see later in the book. We will consider