Afterlife

One of the consequences of becoming an annihilationist, or a believer in conditional immortality, is that my sense of the certainty of eternal life has been diminished. By that I mean to say that as I gave up the idea of hell and the idea that our true selves are inherently immortal apart from our physical bodies, I eventually lost the certainty of Heaven. Heaven became replaced in my mind with a future physical resurrection of some sort, at which point I would be fully "alive" or conscious.

Now even that has faded somewhat and what I am left with is uncertainty. What does it mean for a person to die? What really happens to them?

Amidst all of the hell controversy spurred on by Rob Bell, who as a typical, high-profile, emergent refuses to be clear about where he stands, or to lay out with any certainty the path that he is on, I have revisited the idea of annihilation and universalism.

The chief flaw in universalism is the problem it has with evil within a "Christian/biblical" framework. Christian Scripture is clear that that there are people who choose evil and refuse to turn from evil to good. What happens to these people after death in universalism? Most Christian universalists consign them to a temporary hell in which they eventually see the error of their ways and repent and join the Kingdom of God.

Lately everyone is referring to C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, which portrays a hell whose gates are "locked from the inside" and populated by willing people. Evangelicals have latched onto Lewis' idea and it is frequently postulated as an alternative to the fiery versions of hell put forth by others. It's an improvement on the traditional doctrine of hell...but still not very satisfying.

In The Great Divorce those who are in hell remain mostly unconvinced by the inhabitants of Heaven despite the great lengths that the inhabitants take to persuade them. Though Lewis portrays the possibility that they can all choose Heaven, almost none of them do. This isn't very "universalist" in scope. The hell-dwellers don't seem to have any more access to the reality of God than they did in their earthly lives, which eliminates the idea that after death an encounter with the divine would be more tangible and easily understood than it is in ordinary, physical life.

Lewis writes a new story that is only slightly different than the old one....that those who are in hell want to be there and have chosen to be there on some level.

What are the options before us? Eternal torment, extinction, no extinction but the possibility of choosing to remain ignorant of God and live in hell...which is ultimately unsatisfying but also not fiery.

In my more evangelical days, I remember longing for Heaven/Resurrection as an event that would make me perfect and holy. I imagined how wonderful it would be to not be tempted to make bad choices, to always be loving and kind, to always know the truth in any given situation. It was a soothing idea.

However, even when I thought about this future me, I wondered how much of "me" would be left. In my mind, so much of what constitutes "me" and my personality are inseparable from the likes and dislikes and all-too-human tendencies, many of which would seem to melt away in this other-worldy perfection I was imagining. How "me-like" would I be?

Lewis plays with this theme a little in The Great Divorce when a painter is aghast at the idea that he won't be known by his painting, because there are many great painters in Heaven and all of them are there only to serve and not to worry about their own contributions or uniqueness. The painter doesn't like this at all and rushes back to hell.

Lewis' point is that concern for individual recognition is selfish and ungodly.

Yet...isn't that what the hope for an after-life is all about...that we will continue on in some way as individual beings recognized and reunited with those who are particular to our own lives and stories? We would be happy to see anyone in Heaven, but we most want to see our departed family members and friends. We want individual redemption and recognition, not universal, general salvation.

Lately, when I ponder what will happen to me when I die, I am left with much uncertainty. Unraveling how Scripture truly portrays the afterlife, and losing the sense of inerrancy of Scripture, has made me unsure of just about everything.

How can I know what happens when Scripture argues with itself? How can I speak of things for which I have no experience or evidence?

Honestly, I don't know anymore. All I have is a vague hope that God will remember me. That when my breath returns to God that there will be something worthy enough of me to be retained in His mind.

This is not a very "Christian" concept but one that makes sense to me.

At this point I hope that the good in me will be remembered while the evil in me is forgotten. Maybe those who cultivate evil in their hearts will be wholly forgotten. Maybe feeding our dark side ultimately erases the part of us that is worthy of remembrance.

Death, annihilation, being forgotten....isn't this what we want to have happen to evil?

Perhaps the idea of sanctification is a metaphor for making more and more of ourselves worth remembrance in God's eyes, keeping what is good in us and discarding that which isn't.

Moral Law and Being Human

Every once in while I want to knock C.S. Lewis around. He's quoted everywhere. He is the "go-to" guy in Christian apologetics. He's consistently relied on, too consistently in my opinion, by authors with an evangelical, intellectual bent. They like to pull him off the bookshelf to give themselves some intellectual street cred.

There is even a new C.S. Lewis Bible being sold. I shook my head in wonder when I learned that. Someone is finally publicly acknowledging Lewis as the fourteenth apostle.

I get tired of him after a while.

I guess I shouldn't blame them, because so far evangelicals have not managed to produce anyone like a C.S. Lewis in the last 50-60 years. He's all that they have.

Even though I get tired of hearing Lewis speak from beyond the grave through his fan base, I think I understand the fascination with his work.

Lewis was not a theologian, or a scientist, or a biblical scholar. He was first and foremost a story-teller. His life revolved around literature; teaching it and writing it.

A good story always takes place within a bigger picture. Grand epics are epic because they are about more than the individual; they involve a stream of action in which the individual is only one moving part.

Lewis, especially in his fiction, is always working within that larger view. His science fiction series begins with the idea that there is more beyond Earth and that a general system is incorporated in each planet. Earth's particular details only make sense in the grand scheme of the solar system. In order to understand what happens on Earth, Lewis tells us about what happens elsewhere.

He uses the general to tell us about the specific...and he is exceptional at it.

As with most of us, though, Lewis' strength is also his biggest weakness. Because he is not bound to the details of theology or biblical interpretation, or even evolution, though there were probably fewer details about evolution for him to address in his era, he slides past many objections and problems that might interfere with his big picture.

Perhaps, that is why he so often turns to fiction to express his theology. In fiction, he has the ability to fully convey themes in new worlds without having to account for the sludge and drek of this world, or deal with the annoying details that detract from the grand epic.

In recreating portraits of the Divine, he sidesteps the conflicting pictures we had beforehand. He boils mythological themes into an essence that can infuse his works. When Aslan is creating Narnia, or leading the children in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, we are not tangled up in trying to understand how God can be both a lion and God, or whether he is part of a trinity, or whether the earthly Christ we think of should be assumed to be like Aslan. Instead, we simply feel the force of his portrayal and don't bother ourselves with details.

It is just a story, after all. In reality, it is not Lewis' fault that he doesn't address the complications of interpreting "biblical" doctrine, because that is not his aim. He is trying to evoke a response in his reader, an emotional and psychological recognition of his themes.

Lewis' argument from Moral Law is one such successful emotional and psychological evocation. It succeeds because Lewis doesn't attempt to promote belief in God based on scientific proofs, or technically philosophical arguments. He uses a general philosophical and logical approach to communicate his ideas, but that philosophy and logic is firmly embedded in human nature, in the universal urges that humans have, and in the intellectual/emotional longings that humans express.

We should believe in God because we have an innate sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice. We should believe in God because every desire we have has something which will satiate, every nook in our being has a corresponding piece that will fit into it. We should believe in God because it gives us the best understanding of why humans are the way they are.

Those are my general impressions of Lewis.

In many ways, Lewis' approach is probably the best one that Christians have. In a world in which humans are noticeably more dominant, more intelligent, and more adaptive than most of the species on the planet, looking to ourselves for the answers to our questions is the probably the only thing we can do.

To postulate being human without morality is to postulate being inhuman.

It is one of our defining characteristics. We don't always respect the Moral Law, or always willingly acquiesce to it, but it is undeniably there.

What does it mean in the context of evolution and theology?

It means that we live within a human conceptual world, bound on all sides by our humanity. We can't escape it, or go beyond it. At every point in which we think we have, we have only expanded our own humanness in a particular direction, perhaps widening the dome we live under, but still remaining contained within that conceptual dome. Outside of the dome, things fall apart. There may be all manner of things outside the dome, but they are outside of our realm of comprehension. All that we can do is try to make our dome larger every now and then.

Moral Law, God, and religious experience live within that dome.

The Fourteenth Apostle

I have become convinced that as far as Evangelicals are concerned, C.S. Lewis is officially the Fourteenth Apostle of the Christian church, St. Paul being the thirteenth.

Countless conversations that delve deeply into theology that I have been involved in will inevitably have someone bring Lewis into the picture, with a quote from one of his essays, or more commonly a reference to one of his novels, be it the space trilogy, or the Narnia series, or The Screwtape Letters.

He has affected the way modern, Protestant, Christians think and express themselves so deeply that most don't even realize the debt that they owe him.

Most interesting to me is the way that Lewis' stories have resonated with Christians and, sometimes, seem to carry a general authority in their portrayals. Conversations about hell will have someone quoting The Last Battle or The Great Divorce. Discussions about temptation or spiritual warfare will have someone referring to Screwtape and Wormwood.

Lewis' work has become so absorbed that there is no self-consciousness in even mentioning it within the context of theology and practical church matters. No one seems concerned with the fact that these concepts come from fictitious fantasy novels.

My point is not demote the stories' importance....but to turn that observation to something else.

Lewis' work successfully captures the imagination because he has taken our sacred stories and made them bigger . He has expanded ideas about God, mankind and salvation and sewn them into other dimensions and worlds. He has left the door open for a future that might indeed be perplexing to us; worlds with sentient, alien life, worlds with talking beasts, and dimensions of a reality just outside of our senses.

Whether those worlds do, or even could, exist is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he provides a way for us to imagine how it might be, or could be...and that speaks to people in powerful ways.

Jeff Dunn, over at internetmonk.com, has a post up about his disappointment with the newly released Voyage of the Dawn Treader. His disappointment is almost completely tied into his assessment that the theology of the book was somehow lost in translation in the making of the film. In a strange way his severe reaction highlights the weight given to Lewis' work, because although most book-lovers are frequently dissatisfied with movie renderings, few are so upset at the loss of meaning that he attributes to the rendering. He even goes on to discuss how a portrayal from the book has changed his life, or given him hope.

This jogged my memory of another post at internetmonk in July in which a father recounts reading a passage of Lewis to his children, barely able to keep from breaking down at the emotional impact it had on him after he had received bad news about his daughter's health. His post so closely identifies Jesus with Aslan, that I found it startling.

Part of my former evangelical self read his post disapprovingly. The more liberal part of me recognized that what this man was doing was what all people in all times do...they use the stories that convey deep meaning to their lives...stories that may, or may not, be literally true, factual stories.

This is a strange mixture of things. In circles in which people feel the necessity to defend the literalness of the biblical stories, there are also people who are incredibly touched by a modern fictitious story which they know is not true, but which has been equated as a valid representation of the sacred story.

This is how cultures incorporate and systematize their symbols, through the broad acceptance and reliance on particular distillations that speak to a particular group.

In my fanciful moments, I wonder if 500 years from now,--after more authors have continued to study and read Lewis and write books about him, and his influence continues to grow within Christianity--Lewis' work and symbols will be so ubiquitous that Jesus will be represent as a lion with a full mane.

And...I wonder what future generations would think of such a development.