RETURN

Paul Tillich, Death and Eternal Life
Thomas Hooker

            In this paper I will be discussing Heaven and Hell, particularly the nature of such existence.  The paper will also debate whether unconditional immortality, conditional immortality, or no immortality of the soul is more likely to be the case.  Finally, it shall determine the general nature of resurrection. 

            When average people are asked about the afterlife, what is it they normally say?  If they are fairly average, notions of Heaven and Hell “slip out” during a funeral or other tragic occasion.  Further questioning among the average Christian layperson, and even some priests, reveals a rather crude drawing of the afterlife.  Heaven is stereotypically viewed as a realm in the sky with harps and angels, with joyful singing.  Hell is supposedly a place of torture, burning, and demons with pitchforks.  Put in this way, both of these sound rather far-fetched, which is good, as both are largely mythological ways of portraying the afterlife.  Therefore, it is necessary to receive the advice of a Christian theologian like Paul Tillich in order to make sense of what would otherwise be incomprehensible, although this paper will not be entirely from his point of view.

            Immortality of the soul is different from the teachings of Christianity, so it would be good to dispel this notion. The concept is Greek rather than Judeo-Christian in origin, but despite the best efforts of the Church, it crept in through Paul’s dealings with the Greeks.  The idea is that the soul is immortal from birth, and that death is not a factor as the soul is unconditionally reborn to eternal life. That is, if one believes in an immortal soul, it does not follow the resurrection also exists, for this would mean the spirit or soul goes back into an physical body even though it has already been cleansed.[1]  Tillich said that the soul’s immortality is “a weak substitute for courage” that allows people to avoid dealing with the fact that death eventually comes to all people.[2]  However, the idea that resurrection exists without immortality would create a situation where the person’s soul for all intents and purposes is destroyed, and yet the soul comes back to life.  This is effectively a zombie, so this idea is to be discarded.  There is a solution to this but it relies on knowledge of what it means to be immortal. Immortality in the subjective sense would be to die and go to afterlife in the general sense, as in simply no longer existing on Earth.  This would be simply like having one’s body and/or soul intact, and awakening in Heaven or Hell.  Objective immortality, on the other hand, would be for the person to be remembered by God, whether simply their actions, or what they stood for.[3]  This would be in line with Tillich to say that God would retain the memory of our ultimate concern after death.  Therefore, the idea of conditional immortality is to be desired, as without it, the soul is immortal regardless of our actions.  This cannot be true, as there are some which not only have gone wrong in terms of their ultimate concern, but they seem to lack one aside from the fulfillment of selfish needs.  In the notion of conditional immortality, the memory or ultimate concern may either be snuffed out or it may become treasured eternally after death depending on circumstance.               

            First, it is necessary to discuss Tillich’s theories to demonstrate how they fit with a theory of the afterlife. Tillich said that faith might be defined as a person’s ultimate concern; that is, that which a person holds as the single most important idea or object to their existence.[4]  This is quite different from the typical notion of faith as simply a creed, for a creed might be that someone believes in demons, but mainly a few obscure Southeast Asian rulers have actually made it their faith to train for demon-hunting. Faith is the pursuit of that which is spent during every waking hour; it is not Sunday morning worship, but rather one’s set of rules for daily life.  Concerning faith, Tillich noticed some faith tended to be more material while other faith was more spiritual. He found that the more physical the object was, the more idolatrous faith was, and the further from an acceptable ultimate concern it was.  Thus, money can only offer the purpose of collecting more money, while raising a family is self-sustaining in its concern.[5]  This also helps to explain how the afterlife is not visibly seen, it would make a poor concern if it were the materialistic representation that Heaven which has a physical address.  Thus the afterlife is reflection of the ultimate concern.

            Tillich also said that symbolic language might be used in order to represent ideas in religion, though the symbols themselves are not the object itself.  For instance, the image of God as an aging bearded man on a throne is a symbol, for Tillich would instead claim that “God is the ground of being” and nothing else.[6]  Thus, the afterlife likewise is symbolized in any case that it might be represented, as even a definition as a shapeless void leaves and impression as a symbol. This is not to say that Heaven and Hell are whatever one wants of them, as this would also be misrepresenting God.  Instead, Hell is known as the eternal separation from God’s presence, while Heaven is eternal unity with God. More or less, Heaven and Hell are the existence as one is remembered, and have more to do with whether one was loved by others and put such people over self than whether one keeps the Sabbath or bathes the appointed number of times.  Heaven is the fulfillment of the ultimate concern, while Hell is the failure of such; therefore, the success or failure of one’s ultimate concern is synonymous with the unity or separation with God, as is being loving or not loved synonymous with such.  There is not one all-significant concern, although dedication to being or love is more important than perhaps pleasure; rather, it is that the concern itself is not only fulfilled, but it also has effect outside self-centered existence.  As Jesus said, “you are neither hot nor cold; how I wish you were one or the other, but you are lukewarm, therefore I will spit you out of my mouth.”[7]  That is, one may have courage [hot] or have faith [cold], but when one is neither, this person is likely in a state of sin.  Other than this, there is some flexibility of the appearance of Heaven and Hell, as even among faithful of the same creed, the individuals involved have different order of priorities.  Likewise, Hell would be a person’s ultimate concern gone wrong, that is whatever good acts one reached for in life would be tainted by the selfish desires and dark emotions of the person within.  The conditional immortality aspect comes in when a person has totally selfish faith, and whose courage is swallowed up by earthly concerns; for such a person, the afterlife has no validity, and such person simply has no way to make the soul or memory maintain, and ceases to exist after death.  In this case, the conditions have not been met, and barring God’s forgiveness, which is granted rather than earned, the immortality is void.  For purposes of the simplicity though, the fate of humanity may be divided in to those whose ultimate concern exists on things outside themselves and thus God remembers the soul, and between those who have no ultimate concern outside themselves and thus God would forget.  However, Hell will continue to be discussed as the distorted ultimate concern, as such a vision of afterlife would be difficult to envision without it.     

            Tillich’s view of courage was not bravery as is customarily the meaning.  Instead, it is defined as “the strength of spirit needed to perform the greatest good for others.”  In addition, courage as related to the self has been attributed with the mood of that person.[8] What does this mean? If the mood is responsible for courage, it might also follow that such has some bearing on the nature of sin and death, particularly since Tillich mentions that the lack of such courage to be may even lead down a path to self-destruction.  Tillich says that anxiety of the pathological sort involves conflicts between the desire to be accepted and rejection phobias.[9] Guilt on the other hand, is defined as a call to change in some way, and if the two relate, this implies a general dissatisfaction with self and a lack of acceptance.[10]  However, it is not guilt that is the cause of sin as the guilt is the result, nor is it the deed itself which is before being done simply a neutral act.  However, even though guilt does not lead to sin in any way, it is wrong in two ways.  First, the guilt is a sign to God that one has committed something that is the cause of separation, and thus God may either choose to punish, or more likely, ignore the person thereafter.  Second, dwelling upon guilt attracts other negative emotions which if left unchecked, will poison the being with such that it will eventually exist in a state of self-torture.  In fact, Tillich claims that many so-called righteous people are doing exactly the wrong thing by accepting guilt as a result of sins, as God’s forgiveness is independent of human actions so no amount of guilt will ever erase an evil act.[11]  Thus, the best one can hope to do is to learn from our sins, and not do them again.  This is the meaning of repentance, and it makes confession all but irrelevant.  The main reason one must still confess sins is because it is needed to remind oneself in order not to repeat them, never to collect guilt for previous deeds.  However, this lack of guilt should not be converted into the notion that one’s sins may be forgiven by oneself, that is, just because one does not take that which is said or done against another seriously does not mean it did not have some repercussions.  A sin always affects a second person or God, and anything that does not hurt a second person or God at least indirectly is really not a sin.  So if we ourselves do not have the power to remove sins from ourselves, how are any sins forgiven?  Tillich says that it is of greater importance to be forgiven or accepted by another, and to follow this with acceptance of forgiveness or acceptance.[12] This is probably what Jesus meant in his numerous statements that “your faith has made you well” as the people had received forgiveness from him and had accepted it.  This does not imply that others may just keep sinning and be forgiven every time, as because the conditions for forgiveness are not actually something that may be done, it is entirely up to God whether to forgive you right away, next year, or a decade later; instead, the forgiveness may only be asked for in confession, the confession never grants absolution.  Even if forgiven, one must be aware of the forgiveness and be grateful for it, as this is the way to be accept forgiveness.  Failure to accept such forgiveness or even to realize that it has been given would result in such an act becoming void.

The problem of guilt may need further explanation under existential theory.  The guilt which is discussed is described as being susceptible to punishment.  The target of such punishment lives in fear through guilt of an expected consequence of a former action. Fear in this way deals in future events, creating a dread of coming punishment; however, guilt deals in past events, and even if the consequence or punishment never arrives, the stress does not become less because the guilty party is trapped in past events through memory.  Guilt is also the awareness of being less worthy of happiness.  The punishment is considered to be the unhappiness that one supposedly deserves, and this is presented in such a way as to perpetuate that belief.  But does guilt cause repentance? Not at all; in fact, both criminal behavior and war crimes have found a common element of guilt avoidance stemming from this original fear of guilt.  In the case of the criminal, five specific means of guilt avoidance are used called “denial of responsibility”, “denial of injury”, “denial of victim”, “appeal to higher authority”, and “condemnation of condemners”. Denial of responsibility is to take the popular stance that the criminal is not responsible because of genetics or background, denial of injury states that the crime did not hurt anyone who wasn’t insured, and denial of victim is that the so-called victims of the crime were also committing evil acts.  The appeal to higher authority, as it is called, was particularly common in army crimes, as it claims that either the peers or the leader of the group told them to do the act.  Finally, the condemnation of condemners states that the people sentencing the criminal have guilt too by sentencing someone else to torture or death, which is true although it is moot; incidentally, this was Saddam Hussein’s tactic of choice for displacing blame, since he had no higher authority, and none of the denials were likely to work.[13]  Neither guilt nor guilt avoidance are truly the answer to avoiding sin or evil, but it is forgiveness and acceptance.  Only by this may the being learn to put guilt in proper perspective rather than by extremes.

            How does this relate to death then?  Tillich says that “courage is the self affirmation of being in spite of nonbeing, thus it always involves the risk of nonbeing”; therefore, it would be meaningless to seek immortality as such, for the very act being self-centered rather than other-centered would ensure that the conditions would fail, following the line of reasoning for conditional immortality.[14] Tillich also said that when despair turns to suicide, the person in despair seeks to end their existential anxiety; however, as he said this course of action does not actually provide relief.[15]  Although it would work under the conception of God as just simply to portray such a situation punishment for taking the easy way out, this neither seems to fit with any concept of a loving or merciful God, nor does it seem to be what Tillich is trying to say.  Some suicide is brought in by grief of lost family and friends, and in this case the suicide aligns itself with the self-torture similar to that which occurs during guilt.  On the other hand there are some people who fail to cope with their own condition in life, and in this case, the life ends not with self-torture, but with the snuffing out.  However, in the former case there is hope, as even though they spend eternity in a dystopic version of their ultimate concern which is actually being fueled by their own grief, it is eternal existence rather than everlasting existence. The word eternal means “outside time” while everlasting means “continuing indefinitely”, and even though one spend eternity in separation from God, the fact that one is eternal means that one is still existent.[16]  So how does this help?  Everlasting life in Hell would mean that even God’s hands are tied, as the being has been sentenced to the same punishment despite becoming unified somehow with God.  Eternal on the other hand, means that there is someone that can be done.  Under the assumption that God is indeed loving and merciful, Hell cannot be final; nevertheless, even this mercy doesn’t prevent the sinful from eternal punishment as explained. Even if God were just, no justice system on Earth operates where the guilty are punished forever for their crimes. However, the situation still stands that neither God will offer any actions as conditions for redemption, nor may the person forgive themselves; thus, as before, another must act on the behalf of this sufferer. So what happens if this ultimate concern is reached? The being exists as a memory in a state of unity with God, true, but there lie a problem.  The ultimate concern is representative of the set of priorities considered by the original being, but if it is left as a memory, it serves no purpose to those who live.  Thus, there are some grounds for the idea that one is reborn, and also this serves to de-emphasize the concept of immortality by putting stress instead on being a good disciple of Jesus’s teachings.  This is backed up by Paul’s Letter to the Romans 1:17, which depending upon the translation either says “He who through faith is righteous shall live” or “He who through faith is righteous shall not be regenerated unto death.”[17]  Of the two translations, the first is more true, but not because rebirth does not exist; it is because the conditions for rebirth are backwards.

            Although there may conceivably be rebirth on Earth, without a clear vision of Heaven, this is back to the existence described by the Greeks where all being is attached to forms, and only by assuming a new body is there immortality.  First, what is Heaven or Hell?  Heaven is seen as among other things as having great light and heat.  This heat is a symbol of love, both in Heaven and Hell.  The heat of Heaven is love given toward the neighbor and to God the Trinity; on the other hand, the heat of Hell is love only of self.  This is one way of depicting the fate of the self-centered, though it seems more likely that they simply are snuffed out through their faithlessness.  Also, this light adjusts itself to its occupants, and thus the natives (angels) being spiritual beings see the idea of light unattached; humans on the other hand are creatures of nature and thus see what more appears as the sun. [18] Although many of these are symbols of the ineffable nature of Heaven, this is only because there is such a common notion, the Heaven being an ideological plane rather than a material one is somewhat subject to the beliefs about it coming from Earth.  Likewise, many of the things appearing on Earth such as trees and shrubs may appear in Heaven, as it needn’t be entirely be conceived as clouds and such, even with that being the common version.  It is said that all such things may happen rather than that such will happen, because this would be taking away one myth and replacing it without another.[19] Also, the Heaven is described as having separate “societies”, each of which is a pocket version of Heaven.  This is consistent with the idea of the ultimate concern defining the nature of existence in the afterlife. [20] Consistent to what has been said before, the author believes that people are not sentenced to Hell, but rather they sentence themselves.  And how is it they do this?  Is it through drinking, smoking, or gambling?  Not at all, though such things in excess depict a self-centered lifestyle, particularly if they are done to the exclusion of other people, this is not in itself the road to Hell.  What instead happens in this case is that the person’s desires and thus ultimate concern have been so distorted that they seek out company which has like emotions and desires.  They seek people who have been consumed by anger, greed, sadness, or worse, they seek out nobody at all, in this case winding up in the nonbeing.[21] But there is hope even in the Hell which we have made for ourselves.  All people have good and evil within them, and the freedom to choose between the two, this is the true of power of the Tree of Knowledge. Nor may this power be taken away, for this choice to enter Hell may be reversed provided one truly repents and is forgiven of Hell.[22]

Also, are these places coexistent, coterminous, or separate in relation to Earth?  Coexistent would mean that they are completely merged with each other by existing together, while coterminous refers to the fact that the boundaries meet together (terminus- “boundary” co- “together”) or overlap, though it isn’t officially in the dictionary as a word. [23]  From what was said before concerning Heaven, they appear to either be coexistent or coterminous rather than completely separate.  As Heaven and Hell are ideological realms, perhaps that best place to start with is whether such realities are palpable in this existence.  It is however said that one is in Heaven during times of great happiness, most particularly when in love with another being.  Furthermore, it is said that during times of great stress, it feels as though one is Hell, particularly after a bout of either loneliness or romantic heartbreak.  This implies that such do exist in the world, but as such emotions quickly pass, and since Heaven or Hell never fully manifest themselves into this world, as people do not get swarmed by angels nor are they surrounded by pits of flame, not that such things are accurate representations of such.  As Tillich says, behind death is

another picture above and beyond it- the picture of Love.  Every death means parting, separation, isolation, opposition, and not participation […] Love overcomes separation and creates participation in which there is more than that which the individuals involved can bring to it. Love is the infinite which is given to the finite […] It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death; it bears everything and overcomes everything.[24]

Thankfully, there are two sources we can rely on in nature to verify this reality.  The first is Jesus, a man who lived and died for love.  The second can be found in one’s own backyard; when a plant dies, the compost actually nurtures a new plant to being.  It is these small miracles which give us strength in belief that something does await us.                 

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Bibliography

Graham, Marilyn Grace. On Reincarnation: The Gospel According to Paul, an Interpretive Matrix Explaining Romans. Quest Publishing: Miami, 1998. BS2665.2.G73

Swedenborg, Emanuel. Heaven and its Wonders and Hell. Swedenborg Foundation: New York, 1988. BX8712.H5

Tillich, Paul. Courage to Be.  Yale University Press: New Haven, 1952. BJ132.C8T5

Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. Harper Torchbooks: New York, 1957. BT771.T54

Tillich, Paul. The New Being. Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1955.

Westphal, Merold.  God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion.  Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1984. BL51.W44

Morris, William. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin: New York, 1969.

Angel, Gary. Religion 331 Notes.