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Chapter 3: The Scientific Enterprise

I begin this chapter, a discussion of process thought’s relevance for the scientific enterprise, with some hesitation. I am not a professional scientist, although for a brief time I studied chemistry as a major interest. But I am encouraged by many conversations with friends who are professional scientists, some of them distinguished men and women in their particular fields, who not only have provided me with considerable information but have confirmed my opinion that process thought offers a useful context for scientific observation and experiment by providing a perspective for the framing of hypotheses.

There was a time, especially in the middle of the nineteenth century, when those engaged in scientific work were inclined to look at the cosmos as a great machine, relentlessly and meaninglessly grinding along. Some historians of science have said that this attitude was the result of the primacy given to Newtonian physics, a primacy which continued for some two hundred years. With the evolutionary interpretation of the appearance of human beings, developed by Darwin and others, the position changed. There was a tendency to see the changes in the natural order, and everywhere else too, as similar to the reshuffling of a pack of cards or the redistribution of particles of matter. Hence we had the construction of philosophies of materialistic naturalism. Mind, spirit, human evaluation, and appreciation, the sense of freedom of choice, and the like were supposed to be merely epiphenomenal, like the steam of a locomotive, which does not make any real difference to the running of the engine. Everything was rigidly determined; little or no room was left for chance, for freedom, for purpose, or indeed for life.

Naturally, that outlook brought about a reaction. In its place some biologists, for example, suggested that each instance of living nature, more especially at the higher levels, was controlled by an entelechy, an invisible spiritual or mental agent. This was the vitalistic hypothesis associated especially with the German Hans Driesch but accepted by a number of other workers in the biological field. For various reasons, however, and chiefly because methodologically it was unnecessary, this view did not commend itself to most of those actually engaged in experimental work. They were convinced that one could get further and discover more by employing a mechanistic model for what even they felt obliged to call "living" phenomena.

Still another possible approach did not suggest the abandonment of mechanistic method but severely restricted its application. The mechanical aspect was there, to be sure, but it was relatively unimportant in the total picture. Thus there appeared the philosophy of creative evolution, whose leading protagonist was Henri Bergson, a French biologist who had turned to philosophical writing. Bergson said that the mechanical models resemble a "still" seen when a movie film has been stopped at a given point. But the reality is the flow of the film, while the "still" is only an abstraction that is misleading as to what the film is about. There is an invisible but ever present life-force, which he called the élan vital, running through everything; this is the reality. The mechanistic models are convenient and useful for special experimental purposes but not finally significant.

There were also scientists who succeeded in compartmentalizing their lives. When they were in the laboratory they were prepared to follow mechanistic methods to the very limit, but outside the laboratory and in other contexts they were eager to speak of mind, spirit, freedom, and God -- yet without relating the two areas of concern. Such a compartmentalization was especially popular with strictly "biblicist Christians," since it enabled them to accept in one area what they rejected in another. For example, miracles are related in the Bible and are to be believed because they are recorded there, but they do not happen in any realm with which modern science is concerned. Such dichotomizing of thought and experience is logically impossible for anyone who grasps the unitary character of things, and above all if one accepts the evolutionary interpretation of the world. Nonetheless, it was -- and occasionally still is -- adopted.

The important event of the past century has been the complete collapse, save within a very limited field, of the older mechanistic scheme. Whitehead once pointed out that as a total picture of how the world goes classical Newtonian physics itself collapsed. Albert Einstein is often named as the person who brought about this collapse, but there were others before him and beside him. While still a fellow and a lecturer in mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge, Whitehead told how he witnessed the breaking down of the Newtonian scheme in the nineties of the last century. Quantum physics, the principle of indeterminacy, relativity theory, and the like, were all instrumental in bringing about this change.

At the same time, a new approach was coming to the fore in the sciences that deal with living phenomena. Vitalism was not a possible view, but neither was the presumably omnicompetent mechanical scheme. In their place an organic (in Whitehead’s word, "organismic") picture was found necessary to the newer understanding of evolution itself. Novelties did occur, but they occurred within the wider continuities of nature. Thus evolution was interpreted as epigenetic, as technical jargon put it; it was not merely or only the mechanical rearrangement of bits of matter.

The thinkers who adopted this view believed that because novelty is real and inescapable the natural order should be characterized as basically a continuity in which, as we have just seen, genuinely new things emerge. The operational word here is emerge. Without any absolute break and without any intrusive introduction of external factors, nature can produce what hitherto has not been present. But how? The answer proposed was that the novelty is in ordering or patterning or arranging previous materials in such a way that a difference appears. The organic, interrelational, interdependent nature of things brings about the emergence of the new. Of course, in one sense potentiality for such novelty is present in the previous "stuff," but it cannot be made actual until the right new relationships are established among the various ingredients of the "stuff."

Nowhere is this seen so clearly as in the appearance of the human species. Below I shall quote at length from a distinguished scientist who has admirably summed up the qualities that differentiate human beings from the animals to which biologically they are related. At the moment, however, I wish to indicate -- relying on the conversation of my scientific friends -- the way in which elsewhere in the understanding of the cosmos a change has taken place. This is found in the study of quanta of energy. The truth is that physics seems more and more to be a study of what Whitehead once called "low-grade organisms." This does not mean that it is identical with the study of living things. The way in which the word organism may be applied at lower physical levels is quite different from that appropriate to living or human experience. Yet it has its analogues.

Two points may be made. First, there is an element of chance or unpredictability running through the physical realm. There is no complete and total determinism, certainly not at the microscopic level. The cosmos might therefore be described as open-ended. At the macroscopic level -- big-scale instances -- determinism may indeed seem to be there, but the activity of the smaller units making up the macrocosm is not absolutely predictable. Second, there is no doubt these days that the ingredients or constituents of the physical order are events or focuses of energy (we may call these "energy events," as I have done earlier). They are not little bits of matter, hard and enduring, bumping against one another. Furthermore, each focus is a concentration of the total cosmic process as it has impinged upon and been used by that particular instance. Thus the interpenetration within the energy event is paralleled by interpenetration of that particular energy event with other such events. Force, a term much used in physics, is not sheer coercion but the mysterious attraction exercised by one entity, understood as an energy event, upon another. This whole picture is very different from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mechanistic scheme.

No responsible scientist today denies that the human species is continuous with the natural order from which it has appeared. It is the cousin of the other primates, yet it is different from the "naked apes," however much it resembles them in certain respects. Sir Julian Huxley has said for many years that there is a distinctive quality about the human species, and contemporary scientific writers are prepared to agree with him. This speciality of the human species has been stated succinctly in Professor Harold K. Schilling’s recent book The New Consciousness in Science and Religion (Pilgrim Press, 1973, pp. 148-49):

When he [man] arrived, evolutionary activity took on a new character. His extraordinary powers enabled him quickly to bring forth a great variety of utterly new realities: tools and processes, abstractions and symbols, languages and logics, rational analyses and syntheses, measurement and experimentation, and many others equally unprecedented. In this way social rather than biological evolution came to dominate change. The arts and literatures emerged, and the religions, and philosophies, laws, the sciences and technologies -- and thus man’s cultures and civilizations, with new orders of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and deception. Moreover, there came to this new being the capacity for self-analysis, which was quite unprecedented. He learned to investigate himself, as well as his world, with both critical objectivity and discriminating introspection, and in depth. He discovered that his "self," his so-called "nature," and his tremendously varied potentialities are not "possessions" or innate attributes of his own but in large part the gift-consequences of his relationships with other entities and processes and with nature as a whole. Through his knowledge and understanding he has achieved a remarkable degree of self-determination. To a large extent he is now in a position to be both the architect and builder of his own future, which could certainly not be said about any of his evolutionary forebears.

This "whole" view of human existence -- I use the adjective whole to indicate an inclusive understanding of human nature -- has become increasingly attractive to those working in the many different branches of science that have a bearing on human existence. Process thinking has made its own contribution to this cooperative attempt on the part of physiologists and psychologists, biologists, chemists, anthropologists, and sociologists to see more completely what is distinctively human. By its stress on event and on patterning and integration, by its insistence that relationships constitute an entity, by its concern for an awareness of the depths of human experience (motivations, desires, drives, and "emotional intensity," for example), as well as by its recognition that we are part of the world and continuous with what has gone before us and even now surrounds and affects us, process thought not only has been in agreement with the newer scientific emphasis on "wholeness," but has also contributed a perspective which can give that emphasis a meaningful setting and a context in the structure of things in a dynamic universe.

So it is not surprising that a considerable number of biochemists and zoologists, biophysicists and biologists, psychologists and sociologists, have been attracted to it. One of the world’s greatest experts on evolutionary development, the late Dr. Theodosius Dubzshansky (formerly of the famous Rockefeller Institute in New York), has written of its value for his own work. Dr. Joseph Needham and Dr. W.H. Thorpe, Cambridge authorities on biochemistry and zoology; Dr. A.R. Peacocke, biologist in Cambridge; Professor L.C. Birch, Australian expert on evolutionary changes in the realm of living matter; and Ian Barbour, American physicist, whose special interest has lately been turned toward the ecological problem -- these are but a few of the many who have publicly avowed their acceptance of a process way of looking at humankind and the world.

I am not claiming that every worker in every field of science takes such a positive attitude toward process thought. I wish only to indicate that in highly responsible scientific circles this kind of thinking has been valued precisely because of the possibility it offers for a unitary vision of human life, with a serious recognition of what makes our existence distinctive and different from anything else in the natural world but at the same time genuinely part of that natural world.

Whitehead himself was a mathematician, and he was also much interested in and wrote about physics. But he became more and more conscious of the importance of what in North America are called the life sciences, particularly biology and its relationship with physical phenomena. His own major concern in science was to work toward a theory that would relate the sciences having to do with life with those that study nature in its inanimate aspects. Whitehead had concluded that reductionism was impossible because it was absurd to interpret living things through nonliving things. He reversed the procedure and sought to apply the operative principles of life to the realm of energy. He found that this was more rewarding and more illuminating, and capable of greatly enlarging our understanding. Hence his remark, quoted earlier in this chapter, about physics as the investigation of lower-grade organisms and biology as the investigation of higher-grade organisms. But for him this did not entail vitalism. His point was pattern, ordering, arrangement, and increasing harmonization of contrasts, and he believed that there was a remarkable analogy, derived from generalization, running through the whole order of nature.

It is precisely here that the scientists I have mentioned have been most impressed by process thinking, for they also see such an analogy running through the order of nature and they find that the use of that analogy is valuable to them in their work. In his fascinating book Nature and God (SCM Press, 1964), Professor Birch has described the ways in which the analogy may be applied in biology. Professor Barbour has done the same for the physical sciences in Issues in Science and Religion (SCM Press, 1966). An American medical man, scientist, and philosopher, Prof. Richard H. Overman, has lately written a careful study of the scientific field from this perspective, applying it to the Christian concept of creation. His Evolution and the Christian Doctrine of Creation (Westminster Press, 1967) demonstrates the remarkable change that the use of the process conceptuality can make in talk about creation and its mode, and in the scientific corollaries of this world view. These are but three of the recent relatively popular books which in differing ways make some of the points noted above. In the field of psychology, too, it is interesting to note that Professor D.S. Browning of Chicago (especially in his "Psychological and Ontological Perspectives," which appeared in the Chicago Journal of Religion in October 1965) surveyed the dynamic and gestalt psychologies, along with the so-called depth psychology of the psychoanalytic school, to show a convergence upon a view of human behavior and human self-awareness that is similar to the organic pattern stressed in process thought. Much the same may be said of work in sociology and anthropology, where today great emphasis is being laid on the structural quality of social life, on the patterns seen in tribal custom, and on the holistic behavior patterns of primitive peoples.

The scientist as scientist is not expected to be a philosopher. The scientist has his or her own subject, methodology, and area of competence. That is as it should be. Yet at the same time, the scientist is a person who spends much time with colleagues and is increasingly conscious of the responsibility for use of experimental findings. This consciousness has been especially apparent in the postwar ethical concern shown by experts working in atomic science. The scientist as a person cannot fail to be vitally interested in how scientific work fits into the more general pattern of knowledge and how it is to be employed for good and constructive uses. This is why the scientist needs and desires a vision of things as a whole, in which the scientific speciality has its own place.

My own conversations over many years with my Cambridge colleagues who are dedicated scientists have convinced me that they are seeking almost desperately for a conceptuality that will on the one hand guarantee the validity and autonomy of their own inquiries and on the other hand provide a genuinely humane context for knowledge along with the recognition of responsibility for the results of those inquiries -- a responsibility that such a context can provide. When the process conceptuality is expounded to them they are often greatly impressed and in many instances are delighted to embrace it.

This attitude was demonstrated recently after a lecture I was invited to give to the faculty of a large English technological school. My audience was composed of men and women engaged in research or in the application of research to concrete contemporary problems. It was obvious that they could not accept a supernaturalistic view of things, and it was equally obvious that they were dissatisfied with a conception of scientific work which was unrelated to wider issues and insensitive to moral responsibility. My own inadequate summary of the process conceptuality intrigued them, and it was fortunate that there were present some who were well-known as experts in their own fields of study and who therefore could be given as suitable references for further information about the specifically scientific application of the principles I had discussed from the philosophical side. A fascinating evening followed. I believe that this experience is typical of much that is going on today, and this is one of the reasons that in this first part of the present book I seek to give a bird’s-eye view of process thought with continual reference to the many different areas of human interest.

In the preceding chapter I tried to say something about another of those areas, the humanities and the arts. It is worth noting that it is often scientists themselves who welcome a discussion of that other area. Lord Snow’s portrayal of the "two cultures" is no longer quite accurate. More and more men and women of science are giving marked attention to the humanities and the arts, not only as a relief from concentration on their own disciplines but also as a way of locating those disciplines in a more inclusive setting. As one who is principally concerned with a humanistic discipline, I am also delighted to find that many of my colleagues in that discipline today see clearly the necessity of acquainting themselves with what is going on in the world of science. Process thought has its significance here, too, since one of its main contentions is that a unitary interpretation of existence, human and natural, can make sense of and give sense to all the fields of human inquiry and human enjoyment.

Chapter 2: The Humanities and the Arts

The founder of process thought in its generally accepted version was, as we have noted, Alfred North Whitehead. He was an English mathematician and theoretical physicist, who ended his academic career lecturing in philosophy in the United States. The son of a parson-schoolmaster in the Isle of Thanet in Kent, in the southeastern part of England, Whitehead attended Sherborne School in Dorset, one of England’s oldest schools for boys; he then went to Cambridge University as an undergraduate at Trinity College, which had been founded by King Henry VIII. There he remained for more than a quarter of a century after graduating and being elected a fellow of his college. He became lecturer in mathematics in the university and a distinguished member of the academic community. Bertrand Russell was among his pupils, and he had many other close friends in all the faculties. Yet Whitehead left Cambridge and joined the faculty of the University of London. He lectured at the Imperial Institute of Science and Technology, and while there he served as head of the senate of that university and had much to do with the revision of the curriculum and with teaching methods, as well as with extramural education, taking a special interest in workers’ education. Finally, just as he was planning retirement, Whitehead was invited to Harvard University in the United States. There he lectured in philosophy for more than a decade. After retiring from his professorship he produced some of his major works, and he and his wife continued to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until his death in 1947 at the age of eighty-seven.

Whitehead’s major interest during much of his life and certainly until he went to the United States, had been in the sciences, particularly in mathematics and the mathematical side of physics. But from his earliest days, as he recalled toward the end of his life, he had been a great reader, especially of poetry and fiction. As a boy, he had been taught both Latin and Greek, as was common for young people of his background and class. He was familiar with religion and had respected and admired his father’s devout and genuine faith. When he married, his wife brought into his life an even deeper interest in the humanities and in art, not least in music. She was a woman of aesthetic sensitivity, and she made him understand (as he himself said), that an awareness of beauty of form, sound, and color is very much in the center of a truly human experience. Finally, Whitehead had always been conscious of, and had given time and attention to, ethical issues, not only pondering questions of personal human responsibility but also being active in the realm of political and economic affairs; indeed, he took part time and again in English political campaigns, on the liberal and labor side because of his deep concern for social justice.

I have outlined Whitehead’s varied interests to enable us to see that the man who developed the basic categories of process thinking was not a narrow specialist but a man of deep culture and wide sympathies -- truly a humanist. It has been said that Whitehead was one of the really "universal" people of recent years, with much more than a superficial acquaintance with the best that has been thought and said in human history and at the same time with a sympathetic concern for many areas and aspects of contemporary life. Indeed, he has been more than just the founder of process thought. For those who have adopted that conceptuality, his breadth of interest and his openness to all sorts of human experience have also been a model to follow.

But it is not only Whitehead’s own example that has brought adherents of process thought to their concern for the humanities and the arts as much as for science and formal philosophy. The process perspective is itself an invitation to take these with enjoyment and to recognize their importance. This is because process thought is concerned with analyzing human experience at its deepest and widest, never being content with regarding that experience abstractly but always intent on its concrete disclosure to us of what it means and what it feels like to be human -- to be human in a world that is both the origin of and the setting for human existence with its distinctive qualities and capacities.

A book that seeks to present the process conceptuality should devote a chapter to considering some ways in which process thinking illuminates the humanistic disciplines, especially the way these disciplines invite men and women to participate, to find enjoyment in that participation, and in the end to experience an enrichment of their own lives -- to know what Whitehead called a heightening of the "emotional intensity" which, as we have noted, was for him Important for its own sake but which has the added value of suggesting to us a more profound understanding of the "energetic activity" found in the wider cosmos itself.

In a conversation some friends had with Whitehead’s American interpreter Charles Hartshorne not long ago, that process thinker, who was approaching his eighties at the time, made this comment: "If I were bringing up a child, I should not start by burdening him with a lot of moral rules. I should begin by trying to help the child see that life can be beautiful and can be lived beautifully. Then I should not need to bother so much about how moral ideas would develop." This remark sums up very precisely and movingly the point I shall be making in this chapter.

Life can be beautiful, and life can be lived beautifully. What does this mean? A great many people will say that it is only a bit of sentimental talk which need not be taken seriously. Their saying this is an indication of the superficiality of much modern thinking and, consequently, much modern living.

The frequent reduction of beauty to the merely pretty, the notion that it is sentimental to delight in the aesthetic side of experience, the easy dismissal of that aesthetic component of human existence as either irrelevant or unimportant, and the resulting willingness to acquiesce in ugliness -- all these are proof of the cheapness and triviality so prevalent among us. It is tragic that people who should know better, men and women of excellent education and background, are so often prepared to accept this attitude. Even in academic circles one frequently finds a contempt for art, a dismissal of the aesthetic as interesting only to those who happen to "like that sort of thing," and a refusal to consider the aesthetic experience in all its aspects as a clue to something very deep and real in human life and in the world in which we live.

On the other hand, I know a considerable number of distinguished scientists who are keenly sensitive to the aesthetic, not only because they take "elegance" to be one of the criteria for a sound scientific theory but also because they have come to feel that without opening themselves to and developing within their lives some profound aesthetic awareness they would be greatly impoverished. Some of the "greatest" people I have known, whether distinguished scholars or quite ordinary people who yet have lived deeply and well, have shown just this sensitivity. I saw and met Whitehead only three times, but I had the privilege of a long friendship with Paul Tillich. Tillich was a man who delighted in art, especially in painting and music; who read widely, either in the original or in translation, in all the literature of the world; and whose sensitivity to the aesthetic was equaled only by a remarkable gift for logical thought. Furthermore, it is unquestionably a fact of our time that many younger people are returning to just such a concern, which explains the growing popularity among them of music, painting, sculpture, and the other arts. These young people, some of them spending most of their working hours in dull jobs, know very well that the aesthetic is for them a great release. But they know also that it makes life richer and finer. In a word, they see that life can be beautiful and can be lived beautifully, as Charles Hartshorne put it.

If process thinkers are to be loyal to the conceptuality they accept, they must take this attitude. The perspective that process thought provides includes the aesthetic as one of its data. We might phrase it even more strongly and say that in a sense it is the basic datum.

What then is the aesthetic? I have urged that it does not mean prettiness or a merely superficial emotional response. Neither is it only a matter of human subjectivity, although some unthinking people have argued that this is the case. If it were merely that, we should have to attribute to our own feelings the loveliness we see, or think we see, outside us. But, no. Most of us are certain that there is something objective about the truly beautiful. And this certainty, so deep in human sensibility, cannot be dismissed as irrelevant.

In process thinking, with its stress upon the profound relationship between human existence and the world which is that existence’s origin and context, no dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity is possible. All human knowledge is a matter of relationship between objective data of some sort -- even if so badly ordered that the result is the concept of a nonexistent entity like a unicorn! -- and a perceiving subject. This rules out the sort of philosophical idealism (better called "idea-ism" or "mentalism") that finds genuine knowledge and experience a purely subjective affair. It also rules out the phenomenalism that confines data to the external world and is unable to explain how we come to assume we know these data.

Now, if ordinary knowledge is a subjective-objective complex, then aesthetic awareness is equally, indeed supremely, subjective-objective. On the subjective side, the aesthetic -- as the very word indicates, if we take account of its Greek derivation -- is primarily the business of feeling, an imaginative grasp that is more penetrating than intellectual knowledge alone. Awareness of the aesthetic is a kind of sympathetic identification with the presented material. That material, which constitutes the objective side of the aesthetic situation, is essentially a patterning or ordering which harmonizes contrasts. It is in fact a formal arrangement that satisfies the observer or listener or participant. Thomas Aquinas said that beauty is "clarity of form" -- a shining forth of pattern that evokes a positive response of appreciation. Whitehead’s view was very similar.

When we contemplate or read or hear something that we describe as beautiful, we find ourselves both stimulated and given a sense of harmony. There is excitement and fulfillment or satisfaction. In Whitehead’s own words, there is zest and peace. The zest is not disturbing, as if it entirely disrupted the sensibility of the participant in the experience, but the peace is not mere passivity. On the contrary, the two belong together and modify each other. The zest gives deep contentment, and the peace is a felt union of the experience with the experient, who feels genuine fulfillment and great enrichment through the intensifying of the emotions.

This is not irrational. When imaginative awareness -- what in some discussions is called empathy, or a sensitive subjective entrance into the presented objective reality -- is entirely contradictory to all reason and becomes nothing more than emotionalism, we have only fantasy. That is how Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it. Coleridge was quite clear about the distinction between imagination as the reason of the total personality, which includes but surpasses ratiocination, and fantasy or mere imagining, which belongs to the realm of the unreal and fanciful. A total concentration upon rationality alone, in its narrower sense of syllogistic reasoning or the simple reporting of experiment and observation, can produce the type of person who has lost awareness of the "more" in human experience, of the unexplained and unexplored, of the mysterious depths and heights that give human life its vivacity and its color. Dean Inge of St. Paul’s in London spoke once of imagination as "reason with wings." Perhaps that was too high-flown a definition, but it makes the point.

No human life can be complete if the aesthetic side is neglected or denied. Hence, for example, during their education young people ought to be exposed to the beautiful in all its aspects, and it is tragic that this is not sufficiently recognized. The houses in which people live, the furnishings they contain, the towns where those houses are located, the surrounding countryside with its natural beauty -- all these can express dignity and serve as patterned structures that are not only functional but also lovely to contemplate. The spoliation of the countryside, the ugliness of our cities, and the senseless ornamentation of public and private places are all examples of serious failure in aesthetic sensitivity. So also is the vulgarity of much writing, drama, cinema production, and music. To say this is not to deny the need for relevance, nor is it a call for censorship or suppression by official agencies. Neither is it to ask for a "prettying up," since that would be to fall once again into cheap vulgarity, like the overdecoration and sentimentalizing so often found when people make an effort without any education in art to escape from the drabness and dullness of their daily work. We need training in genuine aesthetic appreciation, and I agree with Sir Herbert Read that such training in art should be a part of genuine education.

All this is a natural consequence of the process way of looking at ourselves and our world. It is the result of grasping the wholeness of things, the many-sidedness of human existence, and the need for complementing functional efficiency by joy in doing and speaking and living. Above all, it seeks for the satisfaction that comes from the fulfilling of humankind’s yearning for harmony or peace. Peace, yes, but as I urged above, peace of the sort that allows zest, adventure, and intensity of experience full play.

Another point should be made here. One of the richest sources for our grasp of what it means to be human is found in the literature, music, and art we have inherited from the past. Without some acquaintance with this inheritance we are likely to be victims of the merely contemporary. Process thought teaches that the past is important because it provides us with the materials upon which present decisions may rightly be made, materials which are in vital continuity with the age-long movement in the world from the past into the future. We are not asked to confine ourselves to the past; in that case, the aesthetic would be nothing more than repetition. But we should not confine ourselves to the present either, for if we do that we are denying ourselves the heritage our ancestors have given us and their insight into human motivation, desire, sensibility, appreciation, and understanding. In a truly whole world past and present go together. The continuities are to be such that opportunity for new experiments, new modes of writing and painting and composing, will not be without foundation in the persistent aesthetic experience of the human race. The truly aesthetic, then, is not mere archaeology, nor does it reek of easy-going contemporaneity. Instead, it is a fusion of the past with present, and it opens up possibilities for the enrichment of life in the future.

This is not the place to explore the several media through which aesthetic sensitivity is manifested. They are indeed varied, and one or another will have its particular attraction to each of us. But I will single out one medium that has special appeal to me and can serve as a paradigm for the other equally important and valuable media. Music is the medium I find moving and enriching in my own experience.

Music has a quality that is not generally found: its incommunicability in any idiom other than itself. There is a familiar story about a celebrated pianist who, after he had completed his rendition of a piece of music, was asked, "What does that mean?" His answer was simple: "I will show you what it means." Then he played the piece again and said, "That is what it means."

The pianist gave the right answer to the question. Music is music. It means what it conveys through its combination of sounds. There is no way of stating that meaning by verbal chatter, and it cannot be defined, as some technicians have thought, by an analysis of the physics of music, the measurement of tones and the mathematical arrangement of notes. Music is sui generis. If you want to put it so, it is the supreme instance of art for art’s sake. Presumably this is why many musicians are suspicious of "program music" which purports to paint some scene in tone or to articulate some idea through sound. Yet in another sense we might say that all music does paint scenes and convey ideas. The point is that the scenes painted in music are musical scenes and the ideas conveyed by it are musical ideas. With the inner ear the musician hears and feels and maybe even "sees"; then the musician composes the piece. The performing artist is grasped by what the composer has heard or felt or seen, and excellence as a performer is to be judged not only by how well the piece is executed but also by how well the performer communicates both the interpretation of the composer’s intention and the personal experience deep inside. And the audience is caught up into this complex situation and becomes a participant in it.

Those who love music know that it conveys "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," thoughts that lie so deep that they are beyond articulation. Here is sheer beauty. Here is the union of activity and response. Here the listener’s "emotional intensity" is heightened by an ordering of sounds that bring musical contrasts together in harmonious accord. Songs that have words can do this, of course, when the words and the music seem to be marvelously wedded, but so also can songs without words, music that is simply music, like a Mozart symphony or a Beethoven concerto or a work by Mahler or Bartok, Sibelius or Messiaen. In all these, music is an instance of what Clive Bell styled "significant form." But the form must not be intruded into the material, and the significance must not be spelled out in terms of some other medium.

Music speaks to the human heart and mind, the human emotions and understanding. Other media -- the novel, the poem, the dance, the play, painting, sculpture, design -- do much the same thing, each in its own distinctive manner. The end product is an enriching of human life as well as a deepening of our sense of what it is to be human at all. A process conceptuality finds place for all this and welcomes it; it also tells us that any genuine interpretation of the world and its way of going on must remember and give adequate expression to the enormous importance of the aesthetic as one of our clues, maybe the chiefest, to what is going on.

Chapter 1: A New Perspective

A

"Process thought is a way of looking on the world that provides promise for development. . . . It stresses reality as an organism, concepts as developing, and persons as becoming and perishing. Nothing is nailed down and yet there is continuity in the midst of flux. Even though one has not heard of Whitehead or Teilhard de Chardin, one finds that this kind of thinking makes sense of the world."

So writes American educator Randolph Crump Miller of Yale University in introducing a symposium (Religious Education, May-June 1973, p. 307). Perhaps his words are as good as any for summarizing the position taken by process thinkers in many parts of the world. Here, he says, is (a) a way of looking at the world, concerned (b) with development and (c) an organic or a societal view of things, which also recognizes (d) that concepts or ideas are not unchangeable and finds (e) that human personality is a "becoming" rather than some static essence. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, he notes (f) that while such a conceptuality sees the world in movement, there is still genuine "continuity in the midst of flux."

Those six points indicate in a very general way what process thinking is all about. They need to be spelled out, however, if the ordinary educated person is to grasp what they are trying to tell us. This I shall attempt to do in later sections of this introductory chapter. But some preliminary comments may be useful.

The process conceptuality has drawn much interest in our own day for many reasons, but perhaps its major attraction has been that it makes sense of the kind of world that modern scientific inquiry has disclosed, while at the same time taking seriously the depths of human experience with which the humanities, the religious outlook, and the aesthetic enterprise in its various expressions are conceived.

The insights of process thought have been found valuable in many different areas. For example, we shall see that this way of looking at the world has provided a helpful perspective in the theory and practice of education. So also in scientific inquiry, where process thought offers a position that accepts a mechanistic methodology but recognizes life and spirit. Recent thinking about aesthetics has benefited by the emphasis of process thought on feeling-tones, with their uniting of objectivity and subjectivity in a pattern of contrasts. Writers on ethical theory and problems of morality have been helped by the process insistence on human "becoming." Finally, an increasing number of Christian and Jewish theologians have used the insights of process thinkers to develop a way of reconceiving basic religious faith and its affirmations.

In my opinion the most important contributions that the process school has made to contemporary thought are (1) its deepening of our understanding of what it means to be human, including in that understanding the central place of sexuality in human existence, and (2) the remarkable assistance this conceptuality can give in our effort to rethink the basic religious issues of God, nature, and how God works in the world. It is here that the process stress upon becoming and upon persuasion or love as our chief clue both to God’s nature and to human life is so instructive.

But process thinking is not concerned only with religion. It has a much wider spread, as we shall see. It is also closely related to other contemporary movements of thought, such as existentialism, the newer view of history, and psychological study, although it is not identical with any of them. Surely a comprehensive way of looking at the world, with an emphasis on dynamic development, interrelationship, and persuasion or love, can have considerable influence in many areas of experience. Above all, it can be illuminating in its contribution to the sense of human significance, and thus it can give some grounding for our feeling that life is worth living. Let us turn first to this human sense of life’s value.

Most men and women assume that life is worth living, that it does have meaning, and that somehow the cosmos plays a part in providing this meaning. Is this claim absurd? I do not think so, and for the following reason.

When a writer like Jean-Paul Sartre declares that the only value of existence is in what we ourselves read into it, he fails to take account of a crucial point to which Gabriel Marcel, another French dramatist and philosopher, insistently called attention -- the fact that the cosmos, the environment in which we have our existence, permits us to read meaning into life. Marcel puts this quite simply, recalling, for instance, that we make promises and intend to keep them and that thus the world is a place where making promises and intending to keep them is a genuine possibility. It is even more significant, he says, that promise-making is not only a possibility but also continually taking place. Moreover, ours is a world in which relationships are a given reality which nobody, not even a Sartre, can avoid. This world is very different from one in which such relationships would be impossible and in which the promising that accompanies them would seem absurd and unprofitable. For Marcel, to speak in this way about human existence and the world is not to indulge in airy and fruitless speculation but to affirm what we all know and experience. To deny it is to fall victim to the strange tendency of very learned people to talk nonsense about what everybody understands, even if not everybody can state it in convincing concepts or ideas.

This persistent sense of life’s significance can be illustrated in yet another way. Let us suppose that a woman decides to commit suicide because at the moment she thinks that her existence is pointless. What then does she assume that her suicide will accomplish? Presuming that she is not mentally disturbed, she is convinced that somehow it is worthwhile to end her miserable and pointless life. In the very rejecting of significance on one level, she is asserting it on another -- and on a deeper one too.

Many years ago a friend from my school days came to see me after a long period when we had not even been corresponding. He told me that he had decided to end his life and asked me if I could see any reason why he should not do this. I remembered that a psychiatrist had once told me that the best way to dissuade someone from suicide often is to appear to agree with the plan, so I replied that probably he would be right enough to do what he intended. This was a risky response, I know, but my friend, thus challenged as to the value of his own life, spent several hours listing for me all the reasons against his committing suicide. It was clear that underneath his sense of futility there was a deeper feeling of meaning which had been hidden or suppressed or pushed out of sight by his present worries. My friend went away, not to jump into the river as he had proposed but to return to his wife from whom he had been estranged, to take up his work once again, and eventually to become a well-known writer on scientific matters for a weekly journal.

However one might interpret such extreme cases, it is surely true that most people do find life worth living. In spite of boredom, drabness, loneliness, and futility, they wish to continue living. Modern existentialists speak of this enduring sense of meaning even when, like Sartre, they think it is a delusion. All high religion has the same insistence. The humanism that wishes to deny cosmic importance to human existence must still look at it in a cosmic setting, which in some strange way either itself gives meaning or is believed to be able to bear having meaning found in it.

Process thinking asks us to take this existentialist feeling of significance seriously and analyze its various aspects, see how they fit into the world situation, generalize from them, and discover how they are related to what observation of the world discloses. In this fashion it complements the introspective look of the existentialist by speaking of a wider context. It asks what it really means to feel human and to act in a human manner, and to feel and act like this in a world like ours.

B

We must now say something about the development of the process conceptuality.

Process thought had its origin during the latter part of the nineteenth century in the increasing awareness that we live in an evolutionary world. Thinkers in many countries had become discontented both with a fixed and static picture of things, on the one hand, and with a purely mechanical interpretation of the evident fact of change, on the other. They believed that there was more to the creation than matter in motion. The very fact of motion, coupled with the deliverances of observation and experiment, revealed a dynamic kind of change. Hence in Great Britain men like Samuel Alexander (Space, Time, and Deity), Conway Lloyd-Morgan (in Emergent Evolution and Life, Mind, and Spirit), and Jan Smuts (in Holism and Evolution) began in the first decades of the twentieth century to work out a general philosophy which would take with great seriousness the total dynamic and evolutionary perspective. With this perspective they coupled an insistence on the interpenetrative or relational way in which the world goes on. But it was Alfred North Whitehead who developed most fully and carefully the principles of a genuinely processive view of things.

A mathematician at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, Whitehead had cooperated with his former student Bertrand Russell in the famous Principia Mathematica, but he had come to believe that the science with which he was familiar required a philosophical setting and interpretation. During his last years in Cambridge, he began work in this direction and continued it when he went to London to lecture at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. It was not until the mid-twenties of this century, however, that he set himself the task of thinking through, and then writing down, his conclusions. What finally emerged was a full-length sketch -- not a system, he said, but a "vision of reality" -- in which due account was taken of the newer way of looking at and understanding the world.

During Whitehead’s last years, the American literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote an essay in which he spoke of White-head’s incisive mind, constructive ability, keen insight, and openness to aesthetic values, combined with his awareness of scientific knowledge. To Wilson, Whitehead was the most important figure in contemporary thought. Unfortunately, Whitehead’s style of writing did not make for easy reading, and even with such commendation as Wilson’s his books were known during his lifetime only to professional philosophers, scientists, and a few persons of letters. Yet such works as Science and the Modern World (1925), the Edinburgh Gifford Lectures entitled Process and Reality (1929), and Adventures of Ideas (1933) were original and penetrating works, opening up new possibilities for thought in setting out an organic, or holistic, view of the world. Other works included The Function of Reason (1929), Religion in the Making (1926), Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), and The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929). Along with these, a collection of Whitehead’s essays, Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947) dealt with the philosophical issues that science raises for the inquiring mind. Lectures given at Wellesley College and the University of Chicago, brought together and published under the title Modes of Thought (1938), are simpler in style and probably provide the best introduction to what Whitehead was trying to say as the result of his deep reflection and his extraordinary range of knowledge in the sciences, art, literature, and ethical and religious matters.

In Modes of Thought there is a sentence that gives the key to Whitehead’s thinking and helps us grasp why the process conceptuality, which owes so much to him, has its relevance for us today. Here is the sentence: "The key notion from which such construction [of a world view that takes into account the full richness of human experience] should start is that the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life" (pp. 231-32).

What did Whitehead intend by these cryptic words? Essentially, that in a world such as ours, with creatures such as we feel ourselves to be in our moments of sensitive awareness, there is an intimate linkage between the thrust of human existence toward the achievement of goals and the creative movement of the cosmic order in its evolutionary drive. In other words, life -- and above all humanly experienced life -- belongs to and is part of the natural world. Life -- and above all human life -- cannot be rightly understood apart from that natural world. Neither can the natural world be rightly understood apart from life and above all human life. That life of ours is part of the cosmic process, and the ground of the cosmic process is thereby disclosed in some fashion in what human experience tells us. Conversely, at the same time, the cosmic process from which we have emerged and in which we exist cannot be properly grasped and described unless that experience is taken as a significant clue to what is really going on.

This is to say that the emotional intensity which gives human existence its peculiar quality is a manifestation of the energetic activity with which the natural sciences concern themselves. There can be no "false disjunction," in Whitehead’s phrase, between the two. We belong in and to the world; and from the other side, what that world is like, what is happening in it, and whatever it may be said to mean are given concrete and particular expression in our own vivid and vital existence. A unified world view should make possible a coherent and consistent grasp of life and of nature, of human life and of the world.

We have only to read Lucien Price’s fascinating reporting of conversations with Whitehead during the latter’s last years in the American Cambridge to see that Whitehead was a remarkable example of a universal man who could propose and defend such a united world view. He lived deeply, vividly, and with zest. He was open to influence from every quarter -- scientific, literary, artistic, musical, religious, and personal. He was not content with superficial appearances but sought the "depths of things." Indeed, Price tells us that a few days before his death in 1947 Whitehead spoke of human beings as "partakers of the creative process" who can find their "true destiny" only in seeing themselves as "co-creators in the universe" (Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, Mentor ed., 1956, p. 297). In several essays that he contributed in his later years to The Atlantic Monthly, Whitehead again illustrated the point, showing how the place where one lives, one’s environment and one’s friends, one’s challenges and risks, one’s problems and difficulties, as well as the moments of one’s joy and exaltation, are instrumental in making one what one is. He also showed how all this may be seen as the manifestation of the basic cosmic structure and dynamic.

Whitehead’s insight, grounded as it was in deep experience and reflection and confirmed by experiment and observation, grasped human existence as organic to the universe. Much early religion had made that existence the great exception to everything else; much modern science had talked in the same way. But Whitehead was convinced that the only way to make intelligible the meaning or significance which we naturally take for granted in our ordinary moments is to relate our concrete experience as a human being to the mystery of the dynamic evolutionary process that is going on around us and in us. Human existence is indeed distinctive, yet it is not separated from everything else. It has its own qualities and capabilities, but these are not without analogues elsewhere. We belong to the world that has produced us. Hence, anything that deepens self-awareness contributes to our knowledge of that world, and anything that increases our knowledge of the world contributes to our self-understanding.

In this comprehensive view of things, static concepts are inevitably ruled out as mistaken abstractions. Historically, we humans have frequently hankered after absolutely fixed truths, utterly final positions, unchanging and unchangeable notions -- everything that Paul Elmer More summed up when he spoke of the pursuit of "the demon of the absolute." But we cannot have these things, for the world is not like that, nor are we ourselves finished articles who can be described or defined in terms that admit of no alteration. As a matter of fact, nobody has ever really been able to rest in such a view. Whether we like it or not, we do not remain in one stay; neither does our world. As Whitehead put it, "the reality is the process. Once we have arrived, we find ourselves off on a new journey, for despite the famous words of Shakespeare, time does not "have a stop," and neither do we.

C

Once we have accepted the world and ourselves in this new way, there are two important practical consequences. One is the possibility of a vision of things that preserves their richness, variety, and freshness, while at the same time recognizing the continuities that persist through all these. The other is the importance of decision in determining how things will go in the future. Each of these consequences must now receive our attention.

Two familiar poems by the American poet Robert Frost help us here. In his poem "Mending Wall," Frost spoke of "something . . . that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down." Dividing up the world may be useful and important for this or that academic discipline or for convenience in handling a particular problem, but when we try to make sense of existence it simply will not do. Then we see that walls, however carefully built and however necessary to preserve concrete integrity, are bound to collapse. Specialization or compartmentalizing will not serve us in the long run, no matter how helpful they may be in the short run.

In the other poem, "The Road Not Taken," Frost tells how one evening at a crossroads he was faced with having to choose the road to follow. The road he chose, he says, "has made all the difference." Here we have the inescapable requirement for decision, and with it the point that decisions do make a difference. "They have consequences," as Whitehead once remarked to a student. Things can never be the same once a choice has been made.

Process thinking assumes that everything contributes to make a unity of some sort, that we have to do with cosmos not chaos, with order not anarchy. It is clear to most of us that the day is long past when anyone could hope to have the total knowledge that may have been possible in an earlier age. The vast accumulation of information and the need for developing special skills make it impossible to possess more than a very partial and limited grasp of "things entire." Yet when this patent fact is pushed to extreme limits, it can and has produced a fragmentation of human existence and an incapacity to entertain a synoptic view of things. We have heard that physicians nowadays tend to treat a kidney or a liver, not a patient. The sense of wholeness has diminished, and as a result we feel we are less than full persons and we see our world as an assemblage of disparate and unrelated entities.

The process perspective changes this. Not only does it assume that there is cosmos and not chaos, but it is also concerned to show that this is the case. It does this by investigating human experience and the natural order in which that experience is had. The result is the vision of a unity between human existence and the world order, even if there is a real distinction between the two. Of course, none of us can know everything and fit everything together. Yet we can have the vision of such a patterning, and it is this vision that process thought provides for us.

This is true also with respect to the importance of decision. Very often it does not seem that the choices we make can really change things. Sometimes it seems that we cannot make significant decisions of any sort, for we seem to be very much creatures of circumstance, determined by heredity or environment or both. This can lead to a pessimism that denies any significant sense of responsibility. After all, we may ask, are we not helpless in the face of relentless forces that take no account of us and that we can do nothing to alter? People who are led to adopt this position feel they have lost their dignity; they are adrift on a sea of futility. Process thought, however, insists that we can decide and that our decisions do make a difference. Moreover, that insistence does not require us to believe that supernatural interventions break into the world from outside, nor does it require us to deny the genuine continuities we know so well. On the contrary, from its study of human experience, and from its observation of the order of nature, process thought is able to discern a pattern of decision that reaches down to the lowest level of the creation and up to fully conscious human choice -- even up to deity itself, for that matter.

How is this? We might start by looking at the word itself. "Decision" is derived from the Latin decidere, "to cut off." A quantum of energy decides in this sense, for it moves here, not there, thus "cutting off" one of its possible moves. In this instance of energy events of an apparently simple sort (yet really not so simple, as modern physics tell us), there is something analogous to decision as we ourselves experience it. Of course, quanta do not make conscious choices among or between alternatives, but we assume that we do. But if there is a degree of decision-making, however primitive, at that lowest level there is a probability that at other more complex and developed levels decision of a higher type will be found. As an alternative, when we look into ourselves and recognize our awareness of choices made, we may claim that we are given a clue to a pattern running through the world as a whole, precisely because people are part of that world, emerge from it, and are not complete exceptions to it. This is a world, we recall, where "energetic activity" and "emotional intensity" are not discontinuous but are mutually related and mutually involved.

So much for the vision of wholeness and the reality of decision and its consequences. Process thought has other contributions of a very practical sort. Let us look at two of them: the question of the "two cultures" and the question of "the religious and the secular."

Lord Snow once gave a famous lecture on the two cultures, one scientific and the other humanistic. In that lecture he expressed grave concern about the way in which the two seemed increasingly alien one to the other, so that the scientist cannot comprehend the humanities, and the classical scholar or literary critic cannot understand the scientific way of thinking. Yet both, he said, are genuine elements in human life. The person who is nothing but a scientist is missing much that is valuable, and the humanist who lives only in terms of aesthetic sensibility is also missing a vastly important area of human study and experience.

Process thought’s emphasis on wholeness -- its recognition of the aesthetic and the scientific, of feeling-tones as well as precise observation and experiment -- helps to hold together these two different but not ultimately contradictory ways of thinking, living, and acting. The detailed exactness of scientific reporting and technological competence, on the one hand, and the deeply felt sense of value, with its appreciative and emotional stress, on the other hand, can be grasped together even if we cannot work out completely and fully their proper relationship.

There is much talk about "the religious" as contrasted with "the secular." How is each to be understood, and how are they related? We seem to demand, and wish to express, a yearning for a reference beyond self and nature that will make sense of our immediate experience. We are aware of what Tillich called "the sacred," possessed by what he styled an "ultimate concern" that gives meaning and significance to all we say and do. We may not think in traditionally religious terms; we may reject conventional religious ideas. But a sense of the transcendent, unexhausted in our immediacies and mysteriously beckoning us toward ultimacies, seems to be part of the human makeup.

At the same time, we know that we have "come of age," to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s oft-quoted phrase. We are convinced that we live in a world where we can do much to provide what is needed and to know what is to be known. We do not believe any longer in divine intrusions or miraculous deliverances from the situations into which we have gotten ourselves. We cannot revert to the time when people thought that some power or person will come in from outside to take care of us when we are in difficulty or extricate us from having to choose this or that way forward. So it has seemed to many that there is an irremediable conflict between the religious and the secular. There is a giving up of one for the sake of the other, or there is a compartmentalizing of existence in which one side leaves the other entirely alone.

But if the "energetic activity" in the cosmos is indeed disclosed to us in the "emotional intensity" of lived experience, if the way things go is determined by some agency that does not occasionally interfere but rather "makes things make themselves" -- as the French philosopher Lequier put it long ago -- if this is the case, then the reality and value of the secular can be preserved while at the same time the deepest religious insight with respect to the "more," the "transcendent," "ultimate concern," and a "reference beyond oneself" can also be given due recognition. Above all, we may come to understand cosmic "refreshment and companionship," which Whitehead once said religion in its practical aspect is all about. The deepest yearning and satisfaction in us expressed "religiously" is not then contradicted by our awareness that we have responsibility in a "secular" way for what we make of ourselves and our society, not to mention the more recently recognized need for responsibility for the way in which, for good or for ill, we use natural resources and contribute to the future of the world in its ecological structure.

D

What is the procedure followed by process thinkers in establishing their broad interpretation of things? How does this differ from the older type of metaphysical inquiry that for a great many people, perhaps especially in English-speaking lands, seems to be nothing more than speculation with little basis in fact?

In that older mode of metaphysics, the purpose was to arrive at conclusions that were taken as omni-competent and all-inclusive in the sense that some universal scheme could provide the answer to all the questions people might ask. By a process of reasoning which was usually deductive rather than inductive -- that is, starting from general principles assumed to be true rather than from a study of concrete phenomena -- it was believed that we could demonstrate a first cause or self-existent reality or self-contained being or unmoved mover. Or if a start was made from the world we know, the procedure was to argue from the supposedly clear evidence of design or the fact of creaturely contingency toward a conclusion that indicated a designer or purposer who explained anything and everything "without remainder," or toward a necessary being that was in no way dependent upon anything else.

Whatever the type of logic and argument, one assumption was simply taken for granted by almost every metaphysical thinker in the old style: the Greek conception of perfection as total immutability or changelessness. Movement, alteration, development, and the like were thought to be somehow less perfect, less good, and less real than a being or a principle that was self-contained, self-existent, without essential relations to and without dependence upon the created world. We might sum it up by saying that the intention was to arrive at an "Absolute," however portrayed, which would explain everything. And for most thinkers this Absolute was thought to be mental or spiritual, although one school of thought was prepared to endorse a basic reality of materialistic type.

During the last half-century this kind of philosophical procedure has been attacked by the increasingly influential school of linguistic and analytic philosophers. In one way or another, followers of that school tell us that we have neither the data nor the methods to engage meaningfully in such extrapolations, whether from speculation, human experience, or observation of the world. They are sure that no verification of these conclusions is possible. Their truth or falsehood cannot be decided.

Process thought does not concede the linguistic or analytical claim that no verification of a world vision is possible from experience or observation. Members of the process school have attacked the positivistic restriction of meaningful statements to tautological propositions (which simply repeat in the conclusion what is already found in the premises) or to experimentally demonstrable ones (such as are possible in scientific work). They are convinced that such narrowing of meaningful discourse is arbitrary and selective and that it rests upon implicit metaphysical presuppositions which themselves are never subjected to critical examination. Furthermore, this narrowing is a denial of what we all take for granted.

But the process thinker does not work in the way that earlier metaphysical construction did. Whitehead himself said the process method was like an aviator who takes off from a well-known place, makes the flight, and then returns to earth where once again he is with things that he knows from his own experience. During the flight the aviator looks to see if what he observes from above either confirms or denies the notions with which he began. On returning, the aviator checks again to see if those notions are still as near as can be to the observed facts.

In other words, process thinkers start from experience, more particularly the deeply intuited awareness of what happens in human existence. They make generalizations that may be more widely applicable. These are referred to the various areas of experience and observation open to inspection to see if they will fit, if they will help make sense of those areas and provide useful interpretative principles. If they do not fit, process thinkers know that the generalizations are in error. If they do fit, even though there may be loose ends and ambiguities, it will be an assurance that so far they are indicative of how things go in the world. Process thinkers do not engage in flights into the sheerly unknown or indulge in abstract speculation that has no grounding in experience or experiment or observed data. They generalize from what is known, and they always return to a consideration of evidence that will confirm or contradict the generalized principles.

Moreover, process thinkers do not assume that their conclusions, whatever they may be, can ever be entirely conclusive. On the contrary, they stress that all human approach to truth is tentative, since it is bound to lack the complete clarity we would like to have. It is subject to correction, modification, and change, but since thought must proceed on some principles, process thinkers are prepared to trust those they have reached and to test them in as many fields as possible. This whole procedure has been well styled "metaphysics in a new mode."

In this approach, full recognition is given to the dynamic quality of experience, the interrelated or societal quality of life, the significance of decisive action, and the appreciative or valuational side of things, quite as much as to the regularities observed in the creation and the elements of order and patterning seen there. But the start is from our own human awareness of how things go with us. We have no other place to start, since this is the one area with which we are acquainted firsthand. With everything else we have but second-hand acquaintance, however trustworthy that may seem to us.

Let us now consider what human experience tells us. We know that we are living, dynamic creatures who are "becoming," in that to a greater or lesser degree we are fulfilling potentialities. We know that we are intimately related with others of the human race and that in some mysterious fashion we fit into and are part of the natural order. We know that we are yearning, desiring, striving creatures, seeking goals which constitute what may properly be called our "subjective aim" but which we also know have been given to us in the very fact of our coming into existence. We know the experience of love, with its joy and its anguish, its ecstasy and its agony. We know that we are capable of some degree of rational inquiry and thought, but even more significantly of appreciation and aesthetic delight. We know that we are affected and influenced by what goes on around us and makes its impact on us. More particularly we know the persuasive power of loving concern, which is so much stronger than the coercive force that can indeed make us go through the motions of acceptance and conformity but can never bring us to a freely given assent that involves all our personality. Finally, we know ourselves to be creatures who make decisions, who can and do make choices, however limited the areas in which this is possible may be. And we know that these choices have their consequences, for which we are prepared to assume a measure of responsibility.

Suppose we begin with what we deeply feel ourselves to be. If human experience is indeed organic with the natural order in its ongoing movement, should we not be prepared to use this experience to illuminate for us what that order is like and how it goes? And if we do this, may we not rightly use the generalizations drawn from that experience, taking them to be indicative of the fundamental dynamic and structure of the totality of things? Everything we know can make its contribution: our scientific knowledge as well as our aesthetic valuing, our sense of moral responsibility as well as our technical competence, our yearning for transcendence as well as our occasional awareness of a "dearest freshness deep down things" (in G.M. Hopkins’ lovely phrase) and of some companionship greater than, but mediated through, our human friendship and love.

To those who accept the general process conceptuality, this full and rich human experience is the starting place, the only one we know intimately and personally. Yet it is a way into other areas of the world’s ongoing. It seems to be in accordance with them, despite the terrifying presence of evil and the obvious contradictions seen in so many places. It makes possible a synoptic vision that redeems life from triviality and absurdity. Of course, the confidence that results is not demonstrable in strict logic or by exact scientific tests. But to think that living truth could be demonstrated in that way would itself be absurd and trivializing.

Where do we come out? We come out at a vision of reality in which there is dynamic movement, with a societal or interrelational quality that pervades the whole, and with a genuine place for decisions that count. We come out with a recognition that the basic constituents seen in that vision are not things, fixed entities shuffled about in this way or that, but rather "energy events," instances of "energetic activity" and "emotional intensity." This is the kind of world which surrounds us and of which we are a part.

The stress upon persuasion or love tells us something else too. While coercion or force is indeed plainly present in the world, it is ultimately neither so effective nor so persistent as the persuasive element, the love that is at work in men and women and, they dare to add, in the world. The vision finds its center here, and we shall return again and again to it.

This stress does not overlook or deny the appalling fact of evil in the world. But evil is not a radical distortion of the whole structure of things; rather, it is refusal to move forward, a continuing existence in backwaters or in narrowly selfish sidelines, a rejection of better possibilities and the choice of nonshareable possibilities. It is to some extent the inevitable result of conflicts that come from the varied decisions the constituent energy events are enabled to make. At the human level, moral evil is essentially a disregard of others and a falsely self-centered preference for immediate gains or pleasures without respect for the common good. And sin -- to use the religious word for the most serious defect in human experience -- is not a breaking of regulations or laws imposed from outside but a violation of the solicitation and lure of love, a willingness to rest content with what seems to satisfy human striving but what in plain fact damages relationships at every level: with the deepest self, with others of our kind, with the world of nature, and with the cosmic thrust of love, or God.

I close this chapter with a renewed invitation to consider the emphasis on love or persuasion that is so central to process thinking. When Thornton Wilder ended his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey with the words "Love is the only survival, the only meaning," he was speaking like a process thinker. But process thinkers are not the only ones who have spoken like this. For example, my fellow Kingsman of an earlier generation, G. Lowes Dickinson, whose general philosophical position was quite different, could write thus in his book After Two Thousand Years:

The whole universe groans and travails together to accomplish a purpose more august than you can divine; and of that your guesses at good and evil are but wavering symbols. Yet dark though night may be and stumbling your step, your hand is upon the clue. Nourish then your imagination, strengthen your will, and purify your love. For what your imagination anticipates shall be achieved, what will pursues will be done, and what love seeks shall be revealed.

E.M. Forster, quoting these words in his biography Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, p. 204), spoke of them as "splendid in diction, warm in emotion, and filled with wisdom," which they are indeed.

For Dickinson their origin was in Plato who in the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Timaeus spoke in precisely this vein. But as Whitehead remarked, "what Plato discerned in theory," with his insistence on "the victory of persuasion over force," was confirmed "in act" by what Whitehead called the "Galilean vision." In a genuinely human life, that of Jesus of Nazareth, love was disclosed both as sharing suffering and achieving "supreme victory." And the disclosure in Jesus does not stand alone. In one way or another, the persisting religious vision of humankind in all places has moved in this direction, toward an interpretation of "reality" as a dynamic process in which persuasion overcomes sheer force. Professor Trevor Ling has recently demonstrated that Gautama, the writer of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Islamic Sufis, Lao-Tze, Confucius, and others have arrived at this vision too. In his carefully documented work Religion of East and West he remarks that at this point, if not at others, there is an extraordinary religious consensus. Process thinkers are prepared to accept that consensus as indicative of something very deep in the structure of the world, not as mere human wish fulfillment but as the way in which (despite so much that appears contradictory and negative) things really do go.

Preface

The material in this book had its origin in lectures delivered in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Part One, here called "Human Experience and Process Thought," was given on the Alexander Brown Foundation as a series of lectures at Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia, U.S.A. in 1976; the material in Part Two, here called "God in Process: Christian Faith and Process Thought," was a series of lectures given at St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury, England in 1966.

Part One appears in print for the first time. Some of it I used in lectures at places other than Randolph-Macon, and I used it in its entirety at a clergy conference in Utah in the States and before students at the College of Emmanuel and St. Chad in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Part Two was published in 1967 under the title God in Process by the Student Christian Movement Press, London, as one of their SCM Paperbacks. Within about three years, the entire stock was sold and the book went out of print. Since then I have received hundreds of requests that it once again be made available; but a new edition did not seem feasible.

Last year, I was approached by T. and T. Clark of Edinburgh with the suggestion that SCM Press might return to me the rights on that book and a new, and updated, edition might be published. I agreed to this and SCM Press consented. But in my discussions with Dr. Geoffrey Green of Clark’s, I told him that The Pilgrim Press in New York was to publish the Alexander Brown lectures and I asked about the possibility of combining the two in a single volume. To my delight, Clark’s accepted this idea, and Pilgrim Press gave their hearty approval. Thus the book now in the reader’s hands is a revised version of the two originals. They are arranged so that they complement each other in their discussion of what is now called The Lure of Divine Love: Human Experience and Christian Faith in a Process Perspective.

Were I to dedicate this book to anyone, it would be to the students and faculty of Randolph-Macon College and the College of Emmanuel and St. Chad. In particular, I should wish it to be "for" several students at the latter institution, who during my three months as a visiting professor there showed me such loving friendship: David Asher, Susan Bansgrove, Rick Morden, and Deborah van der Goes. It is young men and women such as these that encourage me in my conviction that the world is much safer in the hands of the newer generation than it ever was with those of my own older generation or of the generation between me and those former students.

Norman Pittenger

King’s College, University of Cambridge, England

Appendix: When the Becoming Ceases

The approach used in this book is grounded in the more explicit philosophical and theological principles of process thought, primarily as articulated by Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead’s schema, which he preferred to call a philosophy of organism, tries to see each event in its relationship to everything else. This relationship is always dynamic and interdependent. God is no exception. In fact, God is the chief exemplification of what reality is.

A relational theology of death seeks to understand the human experience of death consistently according to the general principles of this metaphysical view. The first part of this Appendix will summarize the interpretations already set forth in the preceding chapters, but will do so in a more systematic and technical way than the individual chapters allowed. Following this presentation, the relational theology of death will be compared with the typical theology of death in order to assess the strengths and limitations of each.

A Relational Theology of Death

The fundamental meaning or value of death is its contribution to God’s experience. This is a real contribution to God’s experience, an addition or modification of who God actually is. Only a world-view that understands God to be interdependent can make such a claim. If God is understood as independent, as the dominant Western worldview asserts, then death remains ultimately outside God’s experience and God’s relationship to death is an external one.

In a relational view, the situation is seen differently. Relational thinking does not posit an ontological difference between God and the world. Rather, it assumes an ontological sameness insofar as the primary ontological principle of becoming is verified in all that actually is. Within this metaphysical sameness there is, however, an almost infinite degree of variation, with God being the most complete exemplification of being. In a relational view, God and the world are always necessarily interdependent. They become together. The obvious differences we observe are matters of degree.

Death is the eventual aim of every process of becoming, in the sense that to become some definite configuration of the world is the crowning achievement of every process. In this view, death is interpreted positively as the completion of a process or occasion that began for the sake of coming to completion. And because of the dynamic urge toward creativity, every actualized occasion spurs new possibilities that initiate new occasions, sometimes in the same series of development, sometimes in another series.

Death as the completion of discrete occasions of becoming is occurring constantly, a phenomenon Whitehead referred to as "perpetual perishing." Only when death occurs is an event valuable because only then is it fully actual. While in process, occasions are exciting, adventurous, self-creating, but they are also self-contained. No other entity or process of becoming can experience them until they have become what they will be. The final outcome is the fullest satisfaction of every experience of becoming.

The final outcome or satisfaction can then be a real contribution to the whole, to the all-inclusive experience of God’s becoming. The discrete events arise out of and contribute back to the whole. For the term of their own becoming, they are radically atomistic, but precisely in this phase of their becoming their experience is isolated. Through perishing, an entity satisfies its urge toward definiteness and becomes valuable for the whole.

Sin affects this sequence as a conditioning factor but not as an originating cause. Because God and the world are necessarily related, sin cannot break that relationship. It can, of course, affect the quality of the relationship. The quality of the becoming can be weakened, lessened, fragmented by sin, and this of course is a significant factor. Because everything is a matter of degrees in a relational view, to lessen the degree of satisfaction and the eventual value of contribution because of sin is most serious. Thus, sin is not negligible in a relational theology of death, but its effect is defined more in terms of the quality of becoming than in the origin of death.

Undoubtedly, the chief motive for our interest in a theology of death is the question of afterlife. The desire to continue our personal, conscious experience beyond death is deep and gripping for most of us. The influence of Greek thinking about the inherent immortality of the soul and the acceptance of Jesus’ resurrection as a pledge of personal immortality have combined to make a convincing argument for Christian believers.

Relational thinking is not so decisive about personal immortality. The prospect of continued, subjective experience after perishing requires a special intervention and action by God. This seems to be not inconsistent with relational principles but is not clearly required by them either. Thus, a relational theology does not offer the same assurance as typical theology about personal immortality.

On the other hand, precisely because of its hesitance on this point, relational theology keeps the primacy of God intact. Whether there is personal immortality or not, God receives the life experience of each person as a real contribution to God’s becoming. At the same time, if there is personal immortality, God is the indispensable agent of it. Thus, immortality would be viewed not as the inevitable nature of the soul but as a free gift from the gratuity of God.

Drawing upon the resurrection of Jesus and the God whom Jesus revealed, relational theology can advocate a spirit of hope for personal immortality with the accompanying disposition of openness to God who is always primary.

Obviously, if there is no personal immortality, there is no great interest in the resurrection of the dead or the end of the world. These two dominant aspects of early Christian expectation have tended to diminish somewhat in modern times, but they remain important features of Christian belief. Resurrection as a postponed event would appear to be incongruous with an organic philosophy in which processes come into being and perish continuously, but do not begin again once they have perished, Similarly, the end of the world as a ceasing of all becoming and the transition to a permanent, eternal state directly contradicts the ontological principle of relational thinking. If eternity (heaven) is actual, it must become. A nonbecoming state of perfection is impossible in a relational view.

We could, however, speculate about what a relational explanation of these two points might be. Regarding the resurrection, a relational view could see the intimate connection between the body and soul so that what the body becomes for and with the soul, how it enters the soul’s experience, is its resurrection. In this view, the resurrection of the body is a continuous process of being prehended by the soul. This process comes to its completion when the soul’s becoming ceases -- at death. This would mean a continuous and immediate resurrection. If the soul continues in some personal, immortal state after death, the body would share that condition precisely in the manner that it had entered the soul’s experiential constitution.

Moreover, if the personal immortality of the soul is effected by God and God alone, then the resurrection of the body in its immortal dimension would also be God’s act. In its immediate dimension, the resurrection of the body is the soul’s act. In either case, there would be no end-time resurrection in relational thinking similar to the apocalyptic descriptions in Scripture.

This prospect raises at least two important theological questions in addition to the interpretation of biblical passages referring to the end of the world. The first question concerns the final judgment; the other concerns the ultimate correcting of injustices. The two are intimately related. If there is no single, concluding end to the world, there would seem to be no final judgment. And if there is no final judgment, then the hoped-for redress of injustices and vindication of the oppressed also seems to vanish.

Although an absolute end to the world is not really envisioned in relational thought, divine judgment is included as a continuous phase of the becoming process. It consists of God’s experience of each completed occasion or entity. How God experiences each occasion is the evaluation of that occasion. The evaluation is framed by two poles: the intrinsic satisfaction relative to the initial possibilities that an entity contributes to God’s experience and the relative value of that contribution within the totality of experiences that constitute God’s total experience.

The first aspect of judgment is permanent and once-for-all. An entity is what it has become, no more and no less. God cannot change that. The second aspect of judgment is changing and continuous. An entity’s value in relation to the whole of becoming creation is ever present (in God) and active, What God can do with one’s becoming in relation to the possibilities for future becoming is continuously determined by the ongoing creative advance of the world.

This raises two implications for a relational eschatology and the question of ultimate redress of injustice. The first implication is that any injustice must be redressed within the world process. There is no alternative state of being or becoming where the shortcomings of this world will be remedied. Thus, a strong existential-historical thrust results for a relational eschatology. With this comes a heightened sense of social responsibility and action for justice in the present. The key motive here is the intrinsic correctness of being just. Out of this motive and the experiences that it fosters comes a dominant attitude of hope.

Hope aims at that which cannot be instrumentally produced. It yearns for what goes beyond the achievement of plans and skills. Hope includes these efforts, thus reinforcing the stress on present social commitment, but the ultimate goal of hope lies outside one’s own control and power. Thus, a relational understanding of the redress of injustice is not an eventual possession of what one is now denied but a continuous contribution to what others may yet experience.

This position is not likely to have great appeal for those who measure value in terms of their own achievement. Here as elsewhere, relational thinking is holistic, oriented to the total process and its possibilities for new becoming.

All this is borne out in a reflection on Jesus’ death. When the faith-claims for Jesus’ life and death are interpreted in a relational framework, they express the dipolarity that permeates the whole creative process. In Jesus’ life, and preeminently in his death, the contrast between human and divine poles is intensified to the maximum. By becoming this contrast actually, Jesus exemplifies the dipolarity of the world to the fullest degree.

From such an experience, God derives ever new, real possibilities for human becoming and especially for human dying. At the same time, Jesus experiences divine freedom and creative transformation to a unique degree. This dual experience, which constitutes one actual occasion, is everlastingly part of the creative process so that all entities may share its effect by reenacting it in their own experience. The ways this may be done are numerous and so are the corresponding degrees of value to be derived from them.

But the originating event is of cosmic proportions in itself. All occasions within the cosmos participate in it to varying degrees of fullness. In these terms, Jesus’ death experience remains unique, universal, and salvific, while his own relationship to God may be understood as such an exemplification of conformal union with God that he is the incarnate Logos of God, the Christ.

Critical Comparison

What real contribution does a relational theology of death make? It can appear to be little more than an apologia for process-relational thinking, especially if all the traditional positions find a place in a relational schema. Then the result is more of a relational translation of typical theology than a relational theology itself.

On the other hand, it can appear that typical theology is being exonerated by showing how historical positions can be made compatible with a contemporary metaphysics that is itself critical of the past.

Neither conclusion would be very satisfying. The former would compromise tradition by making it fit a Procrustean bed of modern making. The latter would compromise relational theology by enervating it of its potential contributions to the tradition. The results of the foregoing exploration instead suggest something more like a dipolar interaction that stimulates both members by intensifying their contrasts.

In this schema, the impact of a typical theology of death on relational thinking appears in at least four areas. First, typical theology pushes the relational understanding of immortality, specifically on the question of personal, subjective experience. For a precisely Christian theology of death, subjective immortality is central. The Easter proclamation about Jesus’ resurrection has been taken as a revelation of the destiny intended for each person. Belief in the risen Jesus rather than philosophical arguments about the nature of the soul has nurtured Christian hope and expectation of personal immortality.

It is probably true that this faith assurance has tended to redirect attention away from God’s primacy and toward our own felt need or desire to survive after death. The proper priority cannot be restored in an integral Christian theology by eliminating concern for or belief in personal immortality. More is at stake than self-centeredness. The revelation of God in Jesus has uttered a word about immortality that cannot go unheard.

The struggle of relational theology to arrive at a coherent affirmation of this point discloses one of its weaknesses as an appropriate theology for Christian belief. The suggestion put forth in chapter three is a tentative probe into the possibilities of relational thought. The question needs further exploration because it is of decisive importance. The strength of this weakness is, of course, that relational theology forcefully reminds us of the primacy of God and the creatureliness of the rest of us. But if it can go no further, it will be an unsatisfying stance and perhaps an unacceptable one. The main question remains: Can relational theology contribute to traditional belief in subjective immortality or only critique misplaced emphases within that belief? It is an urgent test question that the tradition puts to relational thinking if it is to be an appropriate theology of death.

A second area where the traditional theology stimulates relational thought concerns sin and its connection with death. it is a frequent criticism of process-relational metaphysics (as of other evolutionary-developmental worldviews) that it undervalues the role of evil and suffering. This has a special resonance in Christian theology that has given primary attention to the impact of sin in human history. Of course, the precise connection between sin and death is a matter of ongoing discussion within typical Christian theology. Even so, in a relational view of death, sin would not play the same role as in typical theology. As a result, relational theology can appear to neglect a basic and influential element.

Still, a relational worldview includes the prerequisite notions for a theology of sin. Among these are the divinely offered initial aims; the free, self-creative act of becoming; and the universal interconnectedness of actual entities. From this nucleus a relational theology of sin can be constructed. The concrete and personal effect of sin on individual lives tends, however, to be obscured in a view that is intentionally holistic and organic. The experience of sin can be artificially thinned out when put on the scale of the whole creative process. To the degree that this happens, relational thinking can drift away from the radically personalized encounters of Jesus with sin and evil, and thus lessen its appropriateness as a Christian theology.

Of course, the greatest existential concern about sin and death for most people remains judgment and their ultimate destiny. This bears directly on the question of subjective immortality and the prospect of eternal reward or punishment. Here again, relational theology’s initial position can seem to mitigate all this, not only because of its ambivalence regarding subjective immortality but also because of its view of inclusive divine judgment. A fuller explanation of the degrees of satisfaction and evaluation that relational thought envisions would, however, convey the same message about the ultimate importance of personal decisions and their impact on the future. How effectively this is done as an appeal to do good and avoid evil is a major communications task that faces not just relational theology but all Christian theology.

A third area where typical theology challenges a relational theology of death is the interpretation of Jesus’ death. This event coupled, of course, with the resurrection is at the center of Christian belief about death and immortality. Any theology that attempts to give appropriate expression to this belief must convey what Jesus’ death has meant. If Jesus’ death is the decisive occurrence that spells the difference between fulfillment and frustration, between love and loss, between union and isolation, then a relational theology of death should be able to explain how this is so.

Relational Christology up to now has not looked closely at this issue. Attention has been directed more toward the identity of Jesus as God’s revelation and transforming agent. The precise significance of his death and its effect on the history of humankind has not been addressed extensively.

As suggested in chapter seven, the groundwork for an appropriate presentation of Jesus’ death is already laid in the relational principles of universal interconnectedness, prehension and reenactment, and the overriding goal of creative advance through intensive experiences. How all this may be assembled and related to the traditional claims for Jesus is a task yet to be done thoroughly.

There is an inherent tension in relational thinking with any claim that would go beyond the fundamental principles governing its worldview. This is seen most clearly in the understanding of God and God’s relation to the world, but the same problematic arises regarding Jesus. Of course, there is an intrinsic tension in Christology to begin with, stemming from the claim that in Jesus full humanity and full divinity are united. Relational theology offers a way of interpreting the experience and union of these two poles that is consistent with its own fundamental dipolar view of reality. Whether it is equally consistent with Christian belief remains to be seen conclusively.

Nonetheless, the death of Jesus holds the same preeminent place in a relational Christology as in typical Christology. The ultimate importance of finalizing any process of becoming is directly applicable to Jesus’ death. Only when finalized can his process of becoming have real value for others, including God. Thus, relational theology would clearly affirm that Jesus "had to die" to be the Christ. Beyond this, the fuller grasp of what his death entails and how it is to be interpreted and reenacted is as elusive to relational theology as it is to typical theology.

There is one other aspect of typical theologies of death that merits a brief mention as a fourth area of examination for relational theology. This is the interaction between the living and the dead. In Christian history this has been generally referred to as the communion of saints, and a far-reaching piety has been cultivated on the basis of a real linkage between those on earth (the church militant), those in the interim state (the church suffering), and those in heaven (the church triumphant).

Relational theology addresses this with its organic emphasis and general principle of the interrelatedness of all things. Relational thinking describes in a general way how this interaction occurs, but by and large it has not developed this insight concretely enough. Here the symbols, rites, devotions of people can prod relational thinkers to explore their own views in a more usable way. In general, the Christian feeling for the solidarity of believers and the expressions of this in prayer and devotion can stimulate relational theology to maximize the social-organic character of its reflection, and thus present death as less of an atomistic event and more as an occasion in a society of events that share a real union through internal relations.

Relational theology has its own contributions to make to the tradition. Perhaps the most important of these is not strictly theological. Relational theology is developed from an explicit metaphysical, philosophical system. It offers a programmatic alternative to typical theology because the particular philosophical system underlying relational theology is quite distinct from the philosophical systems previously employed by Christian theology. The general benefit from this is that typical theology can be examined in a thoroughgoing, tough-minded way that can open up new directions, new insights, and new challenges.

The major question, however, is the acceptability of the relational metaphysic. Clearly, its validity is not self-evident and has in fact generated widespread and increasing debate. Nonetheless, its respectability as an important contemporary philosophical system seems established even as weaknesses and ambiguities continue to be explored. A relational theologian needs to keep one eye on the continuing philosophical discussion even while working out the implications for theological issues. This leads to the prospect of a genuinely constructive and speculative theology.

Such a theology can dialogue creatively with typical theology in order to formulate a more coherent, adequate articulation of Christian belief. For example, the uneven joining of Jewish apocalyptic and Greek philosophical elements in a typical theology of death can perhaps be seen more clearly when typical theology is rethought in terms that are neither apocalyptic nor simply Greek-philosophical. More than that, relational thought can provide an alternative framework for interpreting and expressing more coherently the originating beliefs, especially regarding the interim state, the resurrection of the dead, and particular/general judgment.

A second major contribution of relational theology to typical theology is the unequivocal primacy given to God. There is no dichotomy in relational theology; God and world are always interdependent. The task is to respect the limits on our desires and self-importance so that God remains primary.

At the same time, God’s primacy is described in terms of be-coming. This is translated in terms of feeling, taking in, making one’s own. The God of relational theology is very active, very intimate, and very feeling. Whereas the human, personal focus appears to be sacrificed in a relational emphasis, especially regarding subjective immortality, it is really located more appropriately in a relational view. The locus of the fullest feeling and life experience is not in what one can hold on to forever for oneself but in what one can give away to God everlastingly.

To arrive genuinely at such a position requires profound awareness of oneself as a creature, as less than God but valuable to God. Relational theology challenges typical theology to face this issue directly, to reexamine its motives and arguments for subjective immortality, and to insure that God is primary.

Relational thought counterbalances its caution and even resistance to overstressing subjective immortality with a strong emphasis on the present as having preeminent value. The present is when becoming occurs; it is the creative moment and in a strict sense the only actual moment. What becomes now has everything to do with what the future will become. It conditions the very possibilities for becoming that God can offer.

At the same time, the present is not seen in isolation from the past and the future. There is a continuous flow from the past into the present toward the future. But the possibilities and therefore the real potential for the future are determined in the present. This view has direct bearing on the typical notion of God foreseeing from all eternity everything that will occur and having a plan for the course of human history.

Relational theology forces a revision of the typical idea of providence and its shadow side, theodicy. The question for relational theology is not so much why does God allow evil and suffering to occur but where is God luring us in response to evil experiences once they occur. Such a view in turn can impel believers to a more intense and open encounter with the living God who shares intimately every present moment and seeks to share with us the next best possibility. God is no less providential in relational theology, but divine providence is exercised in a radically different way.

Finally, and extending this emphasis to the present, relational thought encourages a working through of the typical view of eschatology. The exact sense in which the end of the world is to be understood is not perfectly clear in the tradition. Indeed, belief in subjective immortality carries along with it some sense of continued being and living, and to that degree becoming. Relational theology underscores this line of thought and carries it further, suggesting a different image of the end of the world, or perhaps even the image of no end at all. In the latter case, any number of implications appear, not least of which is the problem of injustice and the suffering of the innocent. Whether removing the prospect of an end time and final judgment will increase existential commitment to justice or further weaken the energy of that commitment is hard to say. At least, relational theology forces a reexamination of the nature of the end and from that perspective our responsibility for the present.

This work was conceived as both a pastoral and theological reflection. There is a great gap between the immediate, concrete experiences in which questions about death arise and the abstract, philosophical reflection in which relational theology is couched. How much that gap has been narrowed in this book is for each reader to decide. For myself, the project continues until the becoming ceases.

Chapter 7: The Death of Jesus: Theological Test Case

Experience

The situations described in the previous six chapters represent typical experiences of death. They provoke a variety of questions that we want to respond to from the experience of our Christian faith as mediated by theology. In the first scenario, the grandmother’s death, the dominant question is one of meaning. This question is asked at three levels: the meaning of death for God, for those who survive, and for the person who dies.

The second example shifts from a relatively controlled, reflective experience of death to a traumatic, shocking experience -- the accidental death of a small child. Experiences of this type raise a different sort of question: Why? Behind that question is a feeling that some injustice is being worked or that God, who should prevent such things, no longer cares or is punishing the victims. At best, such experiences remind us graphically and painfully that we don’t understand God well enough yet.

Even in such circumstances, Christians have usually taken consolation in the expectation of immortality. This appears in the third case of the husband who feels his wife’s presence to be real in a new way. This raises the question of personal immortality: Is it real? What is it like for the person who dies? What connection, if any, is there between the immortal life of the dead and the mortal life of the living?

These questions are extended with consideration of our bodiliness and its ultimate value in God’s view. This concern figures prominently in the case of cremation, which is disturbing to the sister who interprets that act as a violation of her sister and a threat to her resurrection.

Closely aligned with our interpretation of death, immortality, and resurrection is judgment. This is especially acute when a person appears to have lived a morally evil life or to have committed suicide, as in the instance of the minister’s brother. Our anxious concern about how God judges our life is heightened in such circumstances because our responsibility for one another is more evident. Hence, judgment contains some additional questions: How will God judge us? When does judgment occur, immediately after death or at the end of the world or both? What are the ultimate, possible outcomes?

This level of questioning often remains centered on individuals and can overlook our social responsibility, indeed the interdependence of our individual lives with others. The social dimension is especially evident when we are reminded of how and why most people in the world die, a point made by the refugee in chapter six. This fact raises the question of the future as a time for final retribution, requiting of evil, and dispensing of rewards and punishments.

A general theology of death can be framed to respond to these questions, and that has been done here by combining a typical theology with a more relational one. The result is a theology that tries to be an appropriate expression of our belief and an adequate explanation of our actual experience of death. For any theology of death, the crucial test case is the death of Jesus. This is the central event around which the origins of Christianity pivot. By interpreting his death as both the revelation and empowerment of new life in God’s Spirit, Christians claim that God’s promises are fulfilled and our destiny made possible. Seen in this way, Jesus’ death is not taken in isolation from his earthly life or his resurrection. It is rather a focal point for viewing his life as a whole and for interpreting its meaning fully.

That meaning is typically supported by interconnected claims. One is that Jesus’ death is a unique event in human history. It is in a class by itself, a once-for-all event. Nothing like it had ever happened before and nothing like it can ever happen again. It should be remembered that Jesus’ death has this character because the same is true for his whole life. The uniqueness of his life culminates in his death, while his death is the culmination of his life. In other words, Jesus is unique, and his death is a special instance of this claim.

A second claim is that Jesus’ death has universal effect. This is part of its uniqueness. Although the actual event occurred in one place, at one time, and was limited by all the conditions of a historical setting, Jesus’ death is understood to be beneficial for all people, in all places, at all times. Jesus’ death focuses in a special way the paradoxical tension between the local and the universal, the individual and the many, the past and the present, which characterizes the Jewish and Christian experience of God in our lives.

The effect that Jesus’ death has is salvific. Salvation is usually understood as the fulfillment of persons, the realizing of all we can be, although sometimes salvation is presented in minimal terms. This occurs when we think of heaven as the place of salvation and when we ask what must we do to "get in," or when we think of heaven or salvation as requiring a way of life on earth that really limits our happiness or natural desires or human goals. So in an attempt to have the best of both, we can fall into the mindset of "how much can I get away with and still be saved?"

Clearly, this is not the outcome that our theological explanation of salvation desires. In its best expression, salvation has been understood as the fulfillment of our humanness, of our best selves, and not as inhibiting our human potential. This is made clear with regard to our capacity for freedom. Salvation, which is what we were made for, is freely offered and elicits a free response. No one is forced to be saved (by God anyway, even if some church persons exert pressure), and no one is saved automatically. Through Jesus, a real, attainable possibility has been inserted into the horizon of human becoming, but it must be appropriated by us.

God certainly wants all people to be saved, and in Jesus God has done everything divinely possible to see to it that all people are saved. But one thing God won’t do is take away our freedom. This leads to two specific questions: How is God’s desire that all people be saved actually worked out, and what role does Jesus’ death play in that working out? The second question is also sometimes asked in terms of how explicitly or consciously one must identify with Jesus in order to be saved. These further questions result from the prior claim that Jesus’ death has a universal effect.

The third claim undergirds the previous two. Jesus’ death is understood to be a unique event and have universal effect because of Jesus’ divinity. Who Jesus ultimately is clarifies what Jesus actually did and what value that action has. To understand Jesus’ divinity is a constant challenge for Christian theology. In one sense, the persuasiveness of the claims made for Jesus’ death stands or falls with the adequacy of theology’s explanation of Jesus’ divinity. At the same time, these claims and the original experiences that generated them are a source of insight into who Jesus is. So the theological task must be met holistically, by relating experience and interpretation continually and reciprocally.

A relational approach should be in a good position to do this. The rest of this chapter will present the potential of a relational view for explaining Jesus’ death -- the crucial test case. This explanation clusters around the three claims just discussed: uniqueness, universality, and divinity. The implications of a relational interpretation for the dominant questions raised in the cases will be discussed briefly at the conclusion.

A Relational Christology

On the surface it appears that a relational view is unable to affirm the three theological claims made for Jesus’ death. Regarding uniqueness, a relational approach affirms different degrees rather than different kinds of experience or event. This is evident in the basic view of God’s relationship to us. God is the perfection or fullness of what actually is, but God is not understood as an exception or radically other kind of being. God’s uniqueness is explained in terms of God’s fullness, the most complete degree of actuality that is possible. If this is true for God, it is no less true for an event like Jesus’ death.

The emphasis on degree of difference is also seen in a relational understanding of immortality, resurrection, judgment, heaven and hell. Everything that is actual participates in the same kind of existence, what might be called the essence or nature of actuality. There is a great range of degrees within the nature of actual existence; a relational approach affirms this range of degrees as adequate to explain reality as we experience it. That is consistent with its own principles, but is questionable as an adequate explanation of the uniqueness of Jesus’ death as we have typically understood it.

In a similar way, the universal effect of Jesus’ death seems to be undercut by the relational view that God includes all experiences and all events and all people in God’s relation to the world. This means that nothing actual is ever really lost as far as God is concerned. If this is so, what does it mean to say that Jesus’ death is the unique event that has universal effect? From another point of view, our customary approach assumes that there are mutually exclusive options. Our freedom is exercised in regard to these options. We choose either for God, salvation, Jesus or for ourselves, our existence, this world. Such absolute exclusiveness is not really conceivable in a relational view. Rather, there are degrees of choice. If we can’t really choose not to relate to God, what universal effect does Jesus’ death have? By our relational nature, we are already and always included in the realm of freedom where we can truly choose, but among options that are ultimately compatible, not exclusive.

Finally, both of the previous claims are grounded in Jesus’ divine relation with God. As developed typically, this claim embraces equally the humanity and divinity of Jesus. What this means is often seen more sharply in the interpretations that have been rejected than in the positive formulations of orthodox dogma. Nonetheless, a thoroughly relational view poses two problems. It tends to be rigorously monotheistic. As presented in this book, relational theology deals with God and the world. Reflection on the nature of God apart from this relationship falls outside the scope that relational theology can address.

In addition to its monotheistic stress, this approach affirms God’s relationship to everything and everyone that is actual. This would seem to suggest a degree of divinity in everything, or that everything has a divine character in God. Once again, it is a matter of degrees. But is that sufficient to explain the divinity of Jesus as it has been believed by Christians? Is such a superior-degree-of-divinity Christology not one of the false interpretations previously considered in Christian history and rejected?

These initial reservations are not, of course, the final word. But they must be addressed before turning to a more direct presentation of a relational view of Jesus’ death. What makes anything unique? Is it in being an exception, strictly speaking, to everything else, or is it in being like everything else but more fully, more completely? In the latter case, uniqueness is also a model, an ideal, a possibility to aim at. We can see ourselves approximating what is like us. In the former case, uniqueness is eccentric, curious, distracting. We can’t see ourselves wanting or needing to be like it.

Uniqueness as fulfillment and model is how Christians have viewed Jesus’ life and death. He is the supreme model that is attainable because he lived our kind of life and died our kind of death. In him we can see ourselves. To the extent that he appears as a totally other kind of person, we lose connection with him. This has sometimes happened in the past when Jesus’ divinity was stressed in a one-sided manner, making him seem like someone so unique, so unlike us that he ceased being a realistic model. In that respect, others took his place: Mary his mother, saints, church practices, etc.

Another way of expressing the uniqueness of Jesus’ death is by analogy. Analogy is a comparison or relationship in which differences are viewed within a more fundamental sameness. The relational view put forth here is akin to analogy. Within the fundamental sameness of death, Jesus’ death is unique because it expresses everything that a human death can really be. We may not be able to grasp all at once or simply what that is, but if we proclaim Jesus’ death to be unique in this way, that is one of the implications.

Another implication brought out clearly in a relational view is that a uniquely complete event like Jesus’ death is not static. It is not an isolated moment to be viewed and imitated. In a relational view, everything is related to everything else in an actual way, as mutually influencing and being influenced. The degree of active relating depends on the completeness of the events, experiences, persons experiencing. From our side, this means that Jesus’ death enhances our own death when we are united to him. From Jesus’ side, this means our death reenacts his to some degree and gives it a new, though never more complete, expression. Thus, the uniqueness of Jesus’ death does not separate that event from us but brings it closer, drawing together still more intimately the union between Jesus and us. How this is explained in a relational way leads to the second claim for Jesus’ death -- its universality.

In a relational view, the key to universality is in the activity of God. It is God who draws from every occasion all the possibilities for continued experience, and it is God who offers us those possibilities in the order of what is best from God’s point of view. In this way, any previous event can exert some influence on any subsequent event. Now, in a relational approach, activity acquires value insofar as it becomes something definite. While an event is happening, it is not yet clear what its value will be because it is not yet finalized. In this sense, it is only as things come to an end that they have a value that extends beyond their own experience of becoming.

To speak of Jesus’ universality is to speak of a value that extends beyond Jesus himself. It is a value that God mediates to all, once Jesus has completed the event in his own experience. Regarding death, at least human death, Jesus’ experience is the most complete experience that is possible. From this definite occasion, God can now derive new possibilities for everyone else who dies. The fact that Jesus’ death is the fullest expression of what it is to die does not mean that people after Jesus die a lesser death than he did (experientially), but that they can die a fuller death than they would have otherwise. Other events in Jesus’ life would have the same effect for the equivalent events in our life, like love, freedom, self-giving, etc. But all such events are part of the whole person’s entire life. It is death that uniquely (in the sense of fullest) concretizes, makes final, and unifies our whole lifetime of such experiences.

Thus, the universality of Jesus’ death is mediated by God to all people, but Jesus’ death has the effect it does because it is a unique experience of what death for a human person can be. What that is will be spelled out shortly, but first a word about Jesus’ divinity is in order. The basis, once again, is God and God’s activity. In ordering or ranking the best possibilities for every new occasion, God’s overriding value is creativity. Creativity implies a degree of newness, but it also implies a change or transformation in order to achieve newness. The divine principle that constantly seeks creative transformation in everything may be described as God’s Logos -- the divine, creative Word that expresses the very life of God.

The Logos is operative in everything God does, luring, drawing, beckoning the most creative (and therefore the most divine) experience possible out of the actual accumulation of experience up to this point. This framework suggests that the Logos of God has always existed with God and always seeks concrete expression in relation to the created world. As Christians, we believe that in Jesus the fullest possible expression of the Logos in human experience is manifested. From a consistently relational point of view, this is explained as the relationship between God’s Logos and Jesus as the twin poles of one, actual existence. The same two poles or dynamic factors are operative in all of our lives, but not to the same complete degree as in the life of Jesus. Whether this difference of degree is because the Logos is uniquely related to Jesus from the beginning or because Jesus uniquely responds to the Logos throughout his lifetime is part of the mystery of the incarnation.

A typical theology would opt for the former position. Because the Logos is uniquely with Jesus at his very conception, Jesus is the divine one. A relational view could also assert this, but it would not consider the relationship at the beginning to be the exclusive emphasis. Rather, the relationship of the Logos to Jesus from the beginning was and continued to be the fullest unity possible throughout Jesus’ lifetime. At any given moment (when he was twelve, when he was baptized, when he first began preaching, when he chose his disciples, etc.) the actual potential for the relation between the Logos and Jesus was different from any other given moment. This is simply what a relational view means. At every moment, however, the relationship of the Logos and Jesus was all that it could be. There was a perfect, full, complete congruence between the Logos of God and Jesus.

This complete congruence was as much Jesus’ doing as it was the doing of the Logos. That is, Jesus had to respond to, had to actualize the best possibility that the Logos offered him. Jesus’ unique response in every situation made possible new, creative opportunities that the Logos received from Jesus’ actual actiondecisions and fed back into Jesus’ life-possibilities. In this way, the real, dynamic relationship between the Logos and Jesus sustained a unique harmony or congruence that is called Jesus’ divinity. Viewed from the side of the Logos, Jesus is the incarnation of the divine principle of creative transformation. Viewed from the side of Jesus, he became the Christ, one with the Logos of God, through a lifetime of congruent actiondecisions culminating in his death. Both views must be affirmed simultaneously to have an adequate understanding of Jesus’ divinity.

A relational approach affirms the uniqueness, universality, and divinity of Jesus and of Jesus’ death. It understands these claims consistently with its own principles and view of reality. This view is unmistakably different from that of typical theology. At one level, the difference may be seen as only one more indication of the pluralism that abounds in today’s world. But at another level, the importance of that difference must be tested. For a different explanation that expresses the truth of Christian belief is one thing; a different explanation that distorts or misrepresents or falsifies the truth of Christian belief is another.

Ultimately, the criterion for deciding such an essential point is not logic and intellectual argument. It is whether a given explanation enables us to live the meaning of our belief. For Christianity is above all a way of life before it is a formulation of belief or a set of doctrines. What sort of meaning does a relational view of Jesus’ death enable us to live? How is the meaning of Jesus’ death to be understood? To answer these questions, it may be helpful to go back to the first chapter in which the general question of death’s meaning was raised and to ask the same question of Jesus’ death. What does Jesus’ death mean for God, for Jesus himself, and for us?

A Relational Theology of Jesus’ Death

The primary meaning of anyone’s death in a relational view is the meaning for God. In general, everyone’s death is a contribution to God in the sense that death finalizes each person’s novel experience of life. As an actual, unrepeatable experience, this is something God desires and uses to foster continued advancement in the lives of others. Even though everyone’s life and death is a contribution to God, the contributions are not equal. In fact, each person’s contribution is relative to that person’s possibilities in life (personal judgment) and relative to the actual accomplishment of others (general judgment).

What contribution does Jesus’ death make to God? Typical theology asserts that this is the unique, decisive event that has effected salvation for all people. One of the familiar ways of saying this is that Jesus has reconciled us, as sinners, with God, who is holy. Various explanations of redemption or satisfaction have been developed to clarify what this reconciliation is and how it was accomplished. All such theories grapple with the fact of human sinfulness as the primary, disruptive element in the relationship between us and God.

A relational approach also asserts that Jesus’ death is the unique, decisive event that effects salvation for all people. This is explained, however, not so much as restoring a relationship once established and subsequently broken, but as contributing a uniquely complete experience of the ideal relationship with God. From this experience, God is able to derive and offer to us uniquely complete opportunities for actualizing our own relationship with God. Thus, in a relational view, the ongoing, ever-new, interdependent quality of our relationship with God is given strong emphasis.

At the same time, Jesus’ death has a once-for-all character and is understood as overcoming sin. The once-for-all aspect, the ultimate decisiveness of Jesus’ death, means that this experience remains unsurpassable and always present as an operative part of God’s relationship with us. it is from this unique event that God chooses new possibilities for our future. No other event gives God the same full range of experience to draw upon. That is part of its contribution to God. In addition, this view explains how Jesus’ death overcomes sin and redeems us. The new possibilities that God derives for us from Jesus’ death are offered to us in the midst of our real circumstances. These include sin. But sin is never able to obliterate the possibility of good, which God constantly offers us through Jesus. Without Jesus’ death, God could draw upon only our own previous good acts to offer us new opportunities. Because our goodness is mingled with sin, the ultimate, decisive power of the possibilities we could generate for God would always be dubious. But Jesus’ death, lived out in the midst of a sinful world, also settles the doubt once and for all.

In this way too, the universal effect of Jesus’ death is seen through God’s mediation. A person need not be consciously adhering to the memory of Jesus to benefit from Jesus’ death. God derives possibilities for all people from the experience of Jesus. How effectively they may be communicated or how fully they may be enacted will depend on particular circumstances. At this point, being in conscious, explicit affiliation with Jesus may enhance the likelihood of a person’s perceiving and following the best course of action, but it would not simply determine whether that person benefited from Jesus’ death,

Thus, the contribution of Jesus’ death to God is that it gives God an actual, complete experience from which God can always draw new possibilities that, if we enact them, will enable us to overcome sin, fulfill our own destiny, and intensify the relationship between us and God. If this is the contribution of Jesus’ death to God, what was there about his death that made this possible? What was his experience that gives God this unsurpassable source of opportunities?

To answer this question we need to take a closer look at any experience in a relational view. It was mentioned earlier that God’s overriding aim in everything is creativity. This may also be expressed as the newest possible experience, given the reality out of which it emerges. A new experience, a creative experience, changes or transforms what is already there. In doing so, new feelings are generated. The newer, more creative the experience, the more intense the feelings. Such intensity is not a pressure or burden or neurotic emotion.

The most helpful analogy is aesthetics. Intensity of aesthetic experience is satisfying, uplifting, energizing. It excites and freshens and carries us beyond ourselves. We feel everything else a little differently after a good symphony or an engaging novel or a challenging play or a striking sculpture or a colorful painting. Our feeling for everything is intensified, enriched, deepened, made more sensitive and perhaps more sensory.

This intensity occurs when different elements are brought together in a new way. The bringing together requires some basis of compatibility. Within that compatible range, the goal is to find the most different elements. The history of art is, in one sense, the story of the effort to keep searching for new ways to bring together the most different elements imaginable. The same process underlies life itself. The fact is, however, that the immediate past has an extremely powerful influence on the immediate future. Most of us tend to repeat what we have once done. If it is familiar and if it seems effective, we stay with it (whatever "it" may be: where we sit at meetings, what kind of car we drive, where we go to eat, what we do to celebrate, etc.).

Now there are obvious advantages to routines or habit, especially for the more insignificant things we do (like shopping, hygiene, getting to work, etc.). In fact, habits can free our creative energy and imagination for more important things (like sustaining friendships, expanding personal interests, cultivating family, etc.). Here is the challenge: not to let our whole lives be channeled into routines, into expectations others have set up, into habits that limit our creativity. If God’s overriding aim is creative transformation, that should be ours too. When we do act creatively, we give God more of what God wants, and that enables God to give back more to the world.

What has all this to do with Jesus’ death? Jesus’ death is an event that, like any other event, seeks the most creative experience possible. This is achieved when the greatest differences are brought together on a compatible basis. What differences does Jesus’ death bring together? A relational view might describe these as the human capacity to receive and the divine capacity to give. The contrast lies in the fact that this exchange is carried to its fullest without the human capacity being absorbed into the divine or the divine capacity being wasted on the human.

The risk is higher on the human side. The sense that we might be engulfed by the divine, swallowed up in the transcendent, thereby losing our identity and very being, is an abiding feeling that remains part of our human experience and grounds our religious expression. At no point in our human experience is that possibility more acute than at death. In this event preeminently, we face the possibility of our extinction. To face that possibility in its fullness with the most complete openness and receptivity to God is to push the contrast to its limit. This is what happened in Jesus’ death. Through it, Jesus gave God the experience of how far the human capacity can reach and still be human. By holding nothing back, Jesus allows God to feel what the human-divine relationship, contrasted in this way, stretched to its maximum, can be.

At the same time, God takes a risk. Offering the fullness of divine life is no guarantee it will be accepted. The gift could be refused. In a typical theology, this would not ultimately affect God because God is understood as perfect apart from any relationship to creation. But in a relational view, this is not so. God is interdependent with us and needs our experience to know actually what an ideal, complete relationship with us would be. So the death of Jesus has a definite contribution to make to God in terms of God’s experience of the human capacity to receive as well as the divine capacity to be received, i.e., to have the gift that is offered actually received.

Such an experience is not simply the result of sin. Even if human beings had never sinned, there would still be the desire to extend the mutual capacities of us and God, to see how far they could go. In terms of God’s relationship to us, this could even be understood as the ultimate aim in God’s creative purpose. Once fulfilled, this experience becomes the norm according to which all human-divine relationships are evaluated and the ultimate source from which the new possibilities for the human-divine relationship are drawn.

This explanation does not radically alter the biblical affirmation that Jesus died for us, that he gave himself up on our behalf, that he carried out his Father’s will. A relational view seeks only to express in relational terms how that proclamation may be understood. The interdependent, cocreative relationship between us and God reaches a unique, complete, full actualization in the death of Jesus. Because of this event, God now knows experientially how far the human capacity can reach, And God knows experientially how full the divine capacity is to give when the human capacity is at its maximum. This divine, experiential knowledge is manifested best in what Jesus’ death means for Jesus.

Jesus’ Death for Himself

If Jesus’ death contributes to God a unique experience of the human capacity to receive God, then Jesus’ death also allows God a unique opportunity to give. What does God give? The divine experience. There are two points to make here. One concerns how the experience is given; the other concerns what the experience is.

God gives to us by relating to us, and to relate is to enter in, to become part of, to feel together. These very human words are applicable to God in a relational view. God relates to us by feeling or experiencing what we feel, sharing new possibilities with us communicated as new feelings, impulses, attractions for our own enactment. Throughout, God is with us, indeed within, in the midst of our total life experience. God’s presence is woven all through our experience. Our relationship with God is fashioned out of real, mutual, internal relations.

God’s presence is not all we sense, and for some, God’s presence may be one of the last things they sense. But for Jesus, God’s presence was always primary. God’s feelings became Jesus’ feelings; God’s vision became Jesus’ vision; God’s aim in all things became Jesus’ aim. This perfect congruence is how a relational view understands Jesus’ divinity, although saying it this way may suggest that Jesus only gradually became divine, whereas he was always human. A relational view would say that Jesus was always as fully divine as his humanness allowed. If humanity and divinity are really distinct (as typical theology expresses with two natures, human and divine), then these two distinct elements are related to each other. In a relational view, this means they are mutually related; they are interdependent; each conditions what the other is or can be at any given moment.

As Jesus developed humanly, his capacity for divinity developed as well. Whereas a gap opens up between these two poles for the rest of us, a perfect congruence or harmony characterized Jesus. His was always a perfectly actualized capacity for divine experience. And what was the divine experience? As noted before, the experience of creativity, or more pointedly in a human context, the experience of freedom. As Jesus experienced and acted on the divine freedom that coconstituted his own identity, he revealed certain characteristics that give us, who are at more of a distance from God than Jesus was, a glimpse into divine freedom.

God’s freedom is paradoxical in the sense that it calls into question every previous expression of divine freedom that becomes settled, habitual, routinized. God’s freedom remains free only by transcending itself, by going beyond its own actualization. A more relational way of saying this is that God’s freedom must be reenacted to be free -- not repeated slavishly, with full attention given to the particular details and circumstances, but reenacted, taken up anew in fresh acts of free, creative activity. This paradoxical thrust is evident in Jesus’ intention to fulfill the Law by, at times, violating the specific precepts of the Law. It is not unfree repetition but free enactment that fulfills, and Jesus experienced this from God.

Divine freedom is threatening because nothing is immune from it. If God relates to everyone and everything and if God’s way of relating is through free, creative transformation, then God’s future remains essentially open. And so should ours. But we find it hard to live that way. We want to have assurance, foreknowledge, guarantees, and we don’t want to feel that our previous efforts have all been for nought. So we tend to preserve and defend rather than push our capacity to receive God’s next creative lead. In this respect, Jesus was clearly perceived as a threat by others. But he also must have felt himself and his ministry threatened by God’s freedom. And yet, he responded with an ultimate openness and trust, even when he faced the seemingly contradictory outcome that God’s freedom required Jesus’ death. In fulfilling that last step, Jesus became forever the final threat to everything we claim in order to protect ourselves from God’s freedom.

Jesus’ experience of divine freedom is self-validating because there is nothing more from God to experience. If God’s overriding aim in every occasion is creative transformation, freedom, then no relationship to God can experience anything more than that, although it is possible to experience less. Those who experience less often put the burden of proof on those who experience more. They want to be convinced on some other grounds that divine freedom is what it appears to be in the life of one who experiences it fully. Because they take their own partial experience as the norm, anything more seems to be blasphemy or a reckless disregard of tradition. But divine freedom has no other argument than itself when it is experienced, and if it is not experienced, no argument is adequate. Thus, God’s freedom remains always an invitation to be accepted freely, not by the compulsion of argument or proof.

Finally, the experience of divine freedom is hopeful because it constantly pushes beyond the immediate, the given, the known to what else is possible. Divine freedom is never merely settled or permanent. It moves; it is active. To experience that and to make it the center of life, as Jesus did, is to be driven with urgency and filled with hope. It is to be discontent with the present as the sum total of all that can be. The experience of divine freedom means that we are constantly freed to stretch our dreams and hopes and efforts so they may be matched by God’s creative response.

Jesus’ death meant for Jesus that he experienced God’s creative freedom not as something external to him, like an ideal or goal, but as the very innermost drive of his own life. There were many counterforces to that freedom, but he never replaced God’s primacy with anything else. His lifetime of experiencing God’s freedom culminated in own final act of openness to what God could do with his death. And the story of that creative transformation has been told ever since.

Jesus’ Death for Others

In the telling and retelling of Jesus’ resurrection, the focus tends to shift toward its implications for us. This is certainly understandable and acceptable as long as the primary focus (God’s creative transformation of Jesus’ complete openness) is not obscured or subordinated. Jesus’ death does have meaning "for us." A relational approach explains that meaning in terms of the field of influence that Jesus’ death generates.

Jesus’ death culminates a process of mutual, internal relatedness between Jesus and God that stretches the human capacity to receive and the divine capacity to give as fully as possible. This relationship actually occurred. It becomes part of the total accumulation of what actually is, not just what could be. As an actual occurrence, it is always available as a source from which God can derive new possibilities for others to experience and make actual in their own lives.

The relative effect of any new possibility depends on several factors. It depends first of all on the quality of the experience from which the possibility is derived. In the case of Jesus’ death, that quality is the highest (most intense). The effect also depends on the nature of the experience. If it is a rare experience, which few people are likely to reenact, its effectiveness is lessened. We all die; Jesus’ death has maximum relevance to human experience. The effect is also dependent on the compatibility of one experience with another. What Jesus and God experienced to the fullest is the basic structure of the relationship between God and all of us.

This basic, similar structure is the human capacity to receive divine experience and the divine capacity to give it, culminating in the final act of human openness to God -- death. It would not be too far-fetched to imagine the actual fulfillment of this relationship between Jesus and God as a kind of magnetic field attracting our own still possible relationships with God. Such an attraction is not a controlling or usurping of our own free determination of how that relationship will actually turn out. It is, rather, a support, a contribution, a reinforcement of our own best possibilities and impulses in relation to God. Moreover, we can choose to enter more or less fully into the influence of this field. Specific action-decisions like prayer, intercession, memory of Jesus, funerals, preaching, Scripture accounts, devotions, etc., all have relative value in orienting us toward a fuller reenactment of Jesus’ death in our own lives.

The underlying conviction in a relational view is that everything is related to everything else. An event as central and complete as the death of Jesus is not only related to everything else, but it has the power to attract other events like it (human death) and contribute them to its own perfected experience. In this way, Jesus death can coconstitute our death. Or to put it another way, we can die with Jesus. To the degree we enter into Jesus’ death experience or let his experience enter into ours, we die a fuller death, i.e., we open wider our capacity to receive all that God has to give us.

In this sense, the extent of our salvation can be increased by the death of Jesus if we understand salvation as our final relationship with God. The degree of intensity that we could experience in that relationship is always greater when Jesus’ experience of that same divine relationship is included in our own. Whether we want to do this or not is our own choice. Whether we recognize the offer, the potential that Jesus’ death represents for us depends on our sensitivity to being open to God and God’s free activity in our lives. However we perceive it, Jesus’ death is always for us. Whether our death is also for Jesus and through him for God is the ultimate question each of us must answer for himself or herself.

Practical Implication

With this understanding of Jesus’ death, how would a relational approach respond to the questions raised by the cases seen earlier? The meaning of Jesus’ death has been spelled out already. From his death we can strengthen our own desire to contribute further to God’s experience of us and our capacity to receive from God. This in turn enables God to continue interacting with those still alive by drawing from our experience new possibilities for others.

Regarding the question why, Jesus’ death illustrates how God is able to bring new possibilities for life out of tragedies when they are experienced in relationship with God. No one was more unjustly killed than Jesus. God’s response to this event was not to explain why or to punish the wrongdoers. God’s response was to transform that event, give it a creative, new meaning by the possibilities God drew from it. But the new possibilities were (and are) available to those open to feeling them, willing to trust God and experience what God would do with their human capacities stretched to the extreme point. Jesus’ death shows us that the greater our capacity to entrust ourselves to God, the more creatively God can transform us toward our fulfillment.

The creative transformation God worked in Jesus is a further indication of what we may expect for ourselves if, like Jesus, we remain open to what God can and will do rather than predetermining what God should do or what we want God to do for us. When we take the latter direction, we limit God. We narrow our capacity to receive and therefore God’s capacity to give. Often this means that both we and God are disappointed. But if our primary focus is on God, not ourselves, and if we trust that God will do all that God can do, then immortality and resurrection are gifts we hope for and enable God to give to us in the fullest possible degree.

In the same way, the field of influence generated by Jesus’ death allows us to enter into a deep, internal relationship with God wherein our relative contribution to others, through our contribution to God, is already occurring. The value of this contribution is God’s judgment of us, or evaluation of how our actual experience furthers God’s creative advance. When our contribution is united with and influenced by Jesus’ contribution, that judgment is already positive and remains only a question of degree.

The same may be said for our social responsibility. By intensifying every present occasion as fully as possible and staying open to what God can and will do freely with it for the future, we contribute to a hopeful future, one that God can effect to the degree our present actions allow. The ultimate shape of the future is not ours to give. Ours is to do what is right in the present, to respond to God’s best aim for us here and now. Out of that will come the best possible future.

The present chapter has aimed at explaining Jesus’ death in terms of the general relational view put forward in this book. A relational explanation is quite different from a typical theological explanation. Whether the differences are acceptable variations on our common belief or mutually exclusive alternatives is an important question, although it may still be too early to decide. In any event, it will be helpful to summarize the contrasts noted in this book and draw together some final conclusions about when the becoming ceases.

Chapter 6: A Nation’s Oppressive Death: The Question of the End of the World

Experience

The speaker had just finished a lecture on the Christian meaning of death. She was a theology student in a nearby seminary and worked in this parish for her field placement. She had agreed to give a series of talks during Lent on the theology of suffering and death. In this particular presentation she described the stages a person typically goes through when anticipating death. She related these to a growing, honest affirmation of belief in Jesus and acceptance of the power of his resurrection. She had prepared well and prayed over her material so that it would be sincere and personal. She felt good about her presentation as she ended. A question period followed.

At first, no one asked any questions. It seemed like everyone was caught up in the faith-witness and openness of this obviously Christian woman. Then someone raised his hand. He was a refugee who had recently come to the U.S. and who had been attending the parish church for about a month. Although he was unfamiliar with many American customs, he handled English quite will. He began to speak carefully and calmly.

He thanked the speaker for her beautiful and encouraging talk. It was clear to him that she believed what she had spoken, but he wanted to make one observation. In his experience, most of the people in the world do not die as she had described, thinking through the meaning of their death in relation to a reasonably good life they had enjoyed and don’t want to let go of. Most people die because they starve or have no medical help or are killed in war or simply cannot escape persecution, oppression, neglect, or abuse. He just wanted everyone to remember how these people die and how many of them there are.

The man knew what he was talking about. He had been raised in extreme poverty. He was one of six children, only three of whom survived infancy. His father died at the age of forty; his mother had been living with his sister for the last ten years. She had worked in the fields all her life to provide what she could for her children. Now she too was in poor health, although she had not reached fifty. She had done everything possible to give her children a good education because she believed that might help them escape the life they had been born into.

The man who had spoken at the parish meeting was the most successful in taking advantage of his mother’s efforts. He had done well enough in school to qualify for a scholarship to college, where he excelled. From there, he won another scholarship to study in Europe and earned a doctorate in economics. His goal throughout was to return to his native land, try to give his mother and family a better life, and educate his own people in economics and how they might improve their own security. He held a teaching position at a state university and had begun to realize his goals. He also married and started his own family. Then a new government came into power.

The new regime was much more restrictive and extremely suspicious. One of its targets was the university system. Anyone teaching in a way considered dangerous or subversive to the government was removed and either imprisoned or exiled. This economics professor got word that he was being investigated. His encouragement of economic reform and suggestions for reorganizing labor and the use of profits was considered very dangerous. He had never thought of himself as undermining his government or being anything but a patriot, but it was obvious that someone else was defining the terms. The risk was increasing daily.

Anticipating his fate, he had arranged for his wife and their infant son to leave the country, ostensibly to visit relatives on a holiday. His plan was more secretive. He was going to escape with several others who were hoping to get to the United States and be admitted as refugees. He felt he might be able to locate there for a time, maybe even permanently, and be reunited with his family.

After a perilous escape and difficult crossing, he and his friends managed to get to the U.S. His case was taken over by a church social-welfare agency, and one of the local congregations began sponsoring him. He was living temporarily with one of the families in the congregation. They had helped him obtain a job as a waiter in a restaurant that served his native food. Working nights, he was able to use mornings and his day off in the library, reading journals and trying to keep abreast of his field. The agency was trying to arrange for his family to enter the U.S.

All the help he had received was not able to offset his deep feeling of loneliness and alienation. He also had to cope (again) with the sharp contrast between the poverty and repression in his own country and the affluence and freedom in the U.S. It made him realize the disparities that fill the world. He was not exactly bitter or angry. He just felt victimized and wondered whether there was a justice he could rely on, whether the abuses he and his family and country had suffered would ever be righted.

Generally, he had kept these feelings to himself. Until tonight. As he heard the speaker describe the anxiety and resistance of basically affluent people facing death after a comfortable life, he could think only of the many people he knew, like his parents and relatives, who suffer so much so unjustly. In their name, if nothing else, he had to speak, not to refute what was being said but to put it in a larger context. His brief comment elicited some striking reactions.

A few people responded rather defensively, saying that they knew others are oppressed, but that they didn’t feel responsible for that. They didn’t think of themselves as oppressing the rest of the world. They worked hard and did the best they could, right at home. Some of them let it be known they had never been to Europe. They barely even got a two-week vacation each year.

Others said they didn’t feel guilty either, but they did admit there is some responsibility to do what they could to help those who are oppressed. The problem often is knowing what to do. On a global scale, the issues were so many and so complex. That’s why many of the parishioners liked the idea of sponsoring one person whom they could get to know and help. That may not be much but it is something. Many people agreed with this.

But one person stated honestly that when the idea of sponsorship was first proposed, it wasn’t too appealing. It felt like one more request on an overcrowded agenda. The parish was already active in several social projects, not to mention the involvement of individuals on their own. There was only so much one person or one parish could take on.

Time for discussion was drawing to a close. The speaker politely thanked everyone and acknowledged that there had certainly been a lively discussion. Privately, she realized she had been thinking of death too narrowly and had not even considered the questions implied in the refugee’s comment. Why do so many people live and die in oppressed conditions? What can we do about it? Does our theology have anything to say about this?

Theological Question

Lying behind the discussion after the speaker’s lecture on death is the question of social responsibility. This question is posed by the fact of social injustice, oppression, and violence. What can we do? What does our Christian faith expect us to do?

The three basic reactions in the discussion typify the feelings of Christians toward these questions. There are some who feel no responsibility. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are indifferent or callused toward those who suffer. But mere awareness of social injustice does not bring with it any felt urgency to act to change the conditions that produce injustice. Unless we are directly responsible, many of us don’t feel responsible at all. The question is: Are we responsible for the suffering of others in the world?

Even those who do feel some responsibility and want to do something about injustice don’t always know what to do or how to do it. This is especially true if the problem is focused in another part of the world, but it can be in this country, or city, or community and the same question arises. Sometimes the question is just a way of avoiding responsibility, but most of the time it is a genuine concern. It is especially pressing if established channels for effecting change, like the legislative and judicial process, have been used and yielded meager or no results. Compared to the scope of the problem, small victories sometimes intensify the frustration and almost taunt continuing efforts. So the question is: What to do?

When something is done, it leads to other related problems and demands. Very quickly, those who accept and act on a social responsibility feel responsible for other problems and want to address them. As a result, they can be overwhelmed in no time with the relentless demands of social justice on their resources. In any event, to respond adequately to any social issue requires a person to be informed, to consider alternatives, to work with others, and to refrain from imposing judgments/stereotypes on those presumed to be the oppressors. In short, to respond to social injustice is a demanding and tiring and often futile task. And so the question arises: Why bother?

These three questions are tied together and related theologically to the question about God’s response to social injustice and oppression and violence. God’s response is God’s judgment, and that has to do with the future. The future as the realm of God’s judgment may be understood in two senses. One is a historical sense; the other is a final sense. In the historical sense, the future is the time still to come and what may happen in it. God’s judgment is indeed an evaluation of the past, but it is also a projection of the future, a vision of what could be and from God’s point of view what should be (if the future is to be all God sees it can be and wants it to be). In the final sense, the future is the end of time. It is the decisive event in which God’s judgment on the whole of history is rendered with the corresponding outcome, customarily described as reward and punishment.

The hope that theology articulates is that the historical future really will contain a change from our present and past experience of injustice. It is an energizing impulse to work for that future and not to grow weary or abandon it altogether. The hope that theology articulates is also that the final future will at last redress the injustices that have been perpetrated throughout history. Even if the wrongdoers are not punished, the innocent sufferers will at least be rewarded. But prior to that, hope in the historical future is stressed because that is the realm where we can still do what God expects.

The task then for theology is to respond to the questions: Are we responsible? What do we do? Why bother? Theology’s response comes from dwelling on God’s response to social injustice. This means exploring the meaning of the twofold future and the hope it generates. Is hope in the historical future sufficient to preclude a final future of punishment for social injustice?

Theological Reflection

A typical theology of the future embraces two broad approaches. Each one relates differently to our social responsibility and identifies the object or goal of hope differently. One theological understanding of the future is "the last things." These are not really things, of course, but events. They are the final, definitive events in the life of an individual or of the whole world. Up to now our attention has been focused on the last things in the lives of individuals: personal death, particular judgment, immortality, an interim state, heaven/hell, and bodily resurrection.

When the last things refer to the life of the world or history as a whole, they customarily include the second coming of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, general judgment (eliminating an interim state and resulting in heaven or hell), and the consummation of the world. The same parallel observed in previous chapters between philosophical and biblical sources appears here also. It is the parallel between individual and social, private and public, specific and general concerns. In terms of this chapter, the interest is in the end of the world. On this point a typical theology of the last things is extremely speculative. Speculation is inevitable, as has been pointed out above, for any reflection on death. But at least in the case of personal death, we have observed people dying and we can anticipate our own death by certain vicarious experiences (like sleep, trance, ecstasy, etc.). This isn’t true for the end of the world. Individual existences end; the world does not, at least not in our experience of it.

At the same time, the biblical imagery associated with the end of the world is not very helpful. It strikes many people as fanciful and not very likely to be the way things will end (as was already noted in chapter five regarding the general resurrection). Even if this imagery is explained as a description suited to its own times, there isn’t anything comparable to put in its place. And to the degree people do accept it as a revealed account of how the world will end, it tends to draw attention to the details of these events (feeding curiosity and missing the deeper meaning).

The result of an emphasis on the last things is that social responsibility is easily avoided or put off to the absolute end. This corresponds to the attitude of those who responded to the refugee by saying they felt no responsibility for social injustice because they were not directly oppressing others. We have a tendency to leap over everything between us and the last things. The time question that arises is, when will it occur, instead of, what can we do until then to improve the world and prepare for the last things? And when preparation for the last things is addressed, it is usually in terms of personal preparation for individual salvation. The last things provide the public context in which hope for personal salvation is located.

Even the biblical account of the last judgment can be used to feed into this preoccupation with personal salvation. The decisive issue appears to be how each individual deals with other individuals who are in need, not why there are still individuals in need at the end time. The hope associated with the last things is not primarily a social hope but a private hope that is guaranteed by personal action in a setting that is somewhat social. The deeper, original social dimensions of the biblical view are eclipsed when the last things are interpreted in such a highly individualistic way.

A second theological understanding of the future tries to be more integrally social. In this approach, the future is used to interpret the present. The future is not concentrated at the end, as with the last things, waiting to happen. Rather, the future is active; it exerts a genuine influence on the present. The future that does this is the future God has allowed us to glimpse in the divine activity in our previous history. Those events in which God gives us this glimpse form the core of salvation history from its origins down to the present day.

Thus, the future as interpretation is a collective vision, drawn from certain privileged experiences in the past. This vision is not just a memory of what has been. It is a view of what can be. This view is realistic (rather than utopian or illusory) because it is based on what actually has happened, but the future viewed in this way is not intended to be a repetition of what has happened. It is that privileged past projected beyond the particular factors and limitations of the past. Because the future does not have such limitations, it frees the experience of the past to become a new vision for the present. In this sense, the future interprets the present; it sketches the favored possibilities that the present can enact.

There are important implications in this view for social responsibility. The past events that are favored or privileged glimpses into God’s vision of the future are usually events of liberation from various forms of oppression, injustice, violence. These events give rise to a future permeated by God’s social concern and social commitment. That awareness alone underscores the value and necessity of social engagement, thereby reinforcing those who feel some social responsibility.

In addition, the vision of God projected into the future may also shed light on what can or should be done to alleviate current social problems. Both of these aspects were expressed by the second group of parishioners who responded to the refugee; they felt their social responsibility (and maybe needed that feeling reinforced) but didn’t know what to do. The future as interpretation of the present aims at addressing both concerns.

But there are difficulties with this approach. The concrete meaning of "future" in this case is hard to specify, at least in a way that can be translated into social programs and action. It all remains fairly nebulous and perhaps not very useable practically. Partly for this reason a second difficulty arises. The specific content of the future that interprets the present is drawn from events of the past (whether the recent or the remote past). But these events must be interpreted too; indeed, a decision must be made about which are the privileged events. The glimpse of God’s activity in these past events is just that, a glimpse. It needs elaboration, and the elaboration is prey to some infiltration of our own biases and preferences. This often means that our contentment with the status quo (especially if we benefit from it) takes over and interprets the future in such a way that it will confirm the present. Sometimes, too, it happens that people try to do all at once everything that the future holds out. This can give rise to the attitude described by some as being saturated, overworked, burned out. So even if the general account of this understanding of the future is accurate, it is very difficult to make that account more specific and to keep our own prejudices out when doing so.

How would a relational approach view our social responsibility and what sort of theological understanding of the future does it provide? In a thoroughly relational view, everything is related to everything else, and these relations are established through actual experiences or events. These two aspects contain important implications for social responsibility that may be stated as: There are no purely private acts, and nothing is determined until it is determined. The first point underlines our inescapable social responsibility; the second point emphasizes our power of freedom.

To say there are no purely private acts may seem to contradict our own experience. There are many things we do or think or feel that no one else knows about. And to some degree we can keep such things secret or withhold any public expression of them. Everything we do, however, is actual and has some effect outside of ourselves. In chapters one and two this was explained In terms of God’s fully experiencing our experience and drawing from it all the possibilities for continued experience that each event generates. These possibilities are then offered to us by God as the continuum from which we create our next experience. This is already a public carry-over of our every private act. God’s involvement guarantees that nothing remains entirely enclosed within our own world of experience.

The way this activity of God is communicated and experienced in the public realm will vary quite a bit. In general, what happens is that everything that actually constitutes a person’s experience generates an influence that may be compared to a field or environment. We can often feel or sense this about another person without knowing very much specifically. We speak of "picking up the vibes," or gauging "the climate" of a meeting or encounter, or sensing "the mood" of a group, etc. All these expressions reflect the fact that something is being generated by and among people.

That something is not necessarily an intentional sharing of a person’s ideas or feelings or experiences. For example, after the speaker finished her lecture, there was a certain mood in the group. That mood was the result of all the feelings and reactions and thoughts that the lecture had generated in the people present. Their reactions may have been private, but they were not purely private.

Likewise, when the refugee spoke, there were responses, even though at first they were not verbalized or clearly expressed in any other way. The spoken reactions sharpened and perhaps intensified the mood of the group, but the mood was already there before the words were spoken. And that is the point. Whatever we feel, it inevitably extends beyond our innermost selves no matter how hard we try to keep it suppressed. This does not mean that our private acts are always clearly and fully perceived by others. In fact, quite the opposite is the case.

It requires a good bit of attention usually to pick up, to sense, to enter into the environment generated by others. This is due to many factors. Sometimes we’re more attentive to our own feelings and just aren’t open to what others are generating. Sometimes we expect one kind of feeling (because of previous experience or biases or preconditioning) and don’t sense what is really there. Sometimes the others are repressing or faking or distorting their private experiences. They may do this for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of ways, and with all degrees of success. So we may not perceive accurately the environment that others’ private experiences generate, but those experiences do generate an environment and it does influence us in one way or another. This is because everything is related to everything else in a relational view.

From this point of view, our social responsibility is inescapable. Everything we experience inevitably contributes to a social environment, i.e., to our feeling about the larger world we inhabit. And this feeling-for the larger world is the indispensable foundation for any eventual social action. This point overlaps with the explanation of original and social sin in chapter two. Negative, defensive, resistant feelings, like those expressed by some of the parishioners, contribute in that way to the environment that we inhabit and live in together. Even if those feelings are not expressed in some obvious, overt way, they are there and their influence is felt, and that is what social responsibility is about at its most primal level.

The other side of this, of course, is the environment generated by feelings of concern, compassion, justice, involvement, change, etc., like those expressed by some of the other parishioners. These feelings have their influence too, whether expressed explicitly or not. In fact, these feelings have an intrinsically greater influence because they are more like the feelings of God disclosed in the privileged events that give us a glimpse into God’s future. Thus, they have a higher valuation in God’s scheme of things and allow God to draw out more of the best possibilities for future enactment.

But because all of this is at a rather nebulous level of experience, it seems to many people to be either wishful, romantic thinking or weak by comparison with the tough, pragmatic, hard-nosed realism of action. There is a point here. To concentrate exclusively on being in touch with the mood or climate or feeling-for the world in any given situation is not yet relating to that world in a full, actual sense. This is where the power of freedom enters in.

The most free acts and the most powerful are those that actualize the aim which God offers as the best in any situation. How do we know what the best aim is? Ordinarily, it requires some real attending to the mood or climate of the situation. The feelings generated by the immediate, just-now-completed events are the best indicator of what God sees as the next best possibility. This may seem to undercut the value of objective norms and principles for right conduct. It is not intended to do that.

Stated principles and norms, what we call objective truth or morality, are an expression of the very feelings described above. These are privileged articulations, on a general level, of what we may expect to be in touch with concretely when we are in an actual, "live" situation. Put the other way around, our discernment of God’s view in the concrete is experienced as feeling-for God’s aim in the midst of all the variable factors and messages and possibilities in the same concrete situation. It is not a question of clear, objective norms versus ambiguous, experiential feeling, but rather a question of the interplay between the two. Both are allies working for the sake of the best, as God sees it, in every case. Together they can shape actiondecisions that more closely approximate God’s vision.

This is power -- the power to enter a situation openly, assuming as little as possible in this actual circumstance but grasping, sensing, feeling-for what God offers as the best possibility. This is free be-cause it is not predetermined; it is powerful because it leads to actiondecisions that define this experience and thereby generate new possibilities for the future. These possibilities are more or less what they could be in God’s view, depending on our actual decisions. Thus, we have power regarding the future; we decide what kind of environment we shall fashion and move into.

The ultimate failure of social responsibility is not to believe in our power and not to act on our freedom. That disbelief is made easier when we don’t attend very carefully or regularly to the environment being generated all around us. Admittedly, this presentation gives us no concrete suggestions for how to discern more accurately God’s vision, or how to spell out more strategically the steps to be taken to enact that vision. These are indispensable follow-on moments. The point of the discussion here is that a relational view affirms and explains both our social responsibility and the power we have to choose freely how we shall shape the social environment that we inhabit. There are no purely private acts, and nothing is determined until it is determined. How we determine/actualize the possibilities that our social responsibility generates depends in part on how we view the future.

In a relational approach, our understanding of the future as "the last things" is virtually impossible. This is because of the essential conviction that whatever is actual is in relationship, and relationship is understood as event, occurrence, making definite what is possible. So it is a contradiction in terms for a relational world to cease being in relation, i.e., to cease becoming altogether. This does not rule out the possibility, however, that the type of relationships we now experience could reach the level of a new type of relationship. What that may be we cannot say. What we can say is that any such development would have to be a true development, an outgrowth that is in real continuity with the nature of relating as we now experience it. Otherwise, we would be talking about a new kind of reality that relational categories would be inappropriate or inadequate to explain.

From a consistently relational point of view, even if there are radical developments and variations, there is no absolute end, no last things in the sense of a complete halt to relational experience. There is rather an indefinite continuing of the relational world that has been described up to this point. This leads to a very open-ended notion of the future. In fact, the only end point would seem to be our concept of the future itself. That is, we are bounded by or are heading toward that future which our experience of the past enables us to foresee. This is very compatible with the second theological understanding of the future described above.

One of the things a relational view would stress about the future seen in this way is that it is determined by the interaction of many forces. The future of just a single event is all the possibilities that event generates. These are perceived differently by all those in touch with that event and therefore enacted differently. The variety of perceptions and enactments means that the future of this one event is never a single, controlling, exclusive possibility. When this fact is extended to all the events that comprise our actual existence until now, the complexity of the future is staggering. To be sure, most of us tend to identify one or two strands of experience that we use to envision our future and enact our present. But if we take into account the total picture, it leads to a proliferation of possible futures, all of which coexist both in vision and in action.

This reinforces the importance of our freedom and the decisiveness of our choices. We are free to see what the future can be and therefore what the present can contribute to it. Our vision is not entirely left up to our own imagination. It is conditioned by the actual past, and that includes God’s part in the past. All the possible futures are included in God’s perfect knowledge of the past, but not all possible futures are equally desirable or valuable. God will not, however, force the divine vision on us or force us to enact it. Our freedom is real and God’s commitment to relationship consistent.

What this all means is that relational theology orients us to review again and again God’s vision of the future, to become so familiar with is that it hones our instincts and sensitivities and feelings for what God sees as our best future. That future is not our only option, but it is our best option. It opens our eyes to what can be done in the present and where those decisions will lead. It puts into our hands once more the power to determine how extensive or how narrow, how inclusive or how exclusive, how free or how limited the future is.

In order to stay in touch with the privileged expressions of God’s view of the future, Christians return to the life of Jesus. Given the particular focus of this book, that means looking in a relational way at the death of Jesus and trying to see in that event the future that God prizes most of all. This will be done in the next chapter. If that vision can be made clear, then the possibility for enacting that future may be more attractive and the ultimate meaning of death may be seen.

Practical Implication

The observations of the refugee after the speaker’s talk brought home the reality of our social responsibility. The reactions of the parishioners highlighted three further questions: Are we responsible? What can we do? Why bother? The relational view presented here responds to those questions by showing the inherent social responsibility all our experiences carry with them and by urging that careful attention be given to cultivating our feeling-for the future that God envisions, given the actual events of the past. In such a view, the typical theology of the last things virtually disappears, and the future appears as an ongoing, open-ended perception of what can actually be.

There are two practical implications of this view that need to be addressed. If there are no last things, no definitive conclusion to the world-history process, what happens to the conviction that justice will finally be done at the end and that all wrongs will be righted? Doesn’t an open-ended view also increase the sense of futility in trying to change things for the better? Our efforts seem so ineffective, so incapable of reversing the magnitude of social suffering in the world. Both questions are serious challenges to the relational view described here.

There is no doubt that the prospect of a final day of reckoning has sustained many persons in the midst of unjust suffering and persecution. The sustenance has come from the belief that ultimately there is a God in control who will vindicate the innocent and requite the guilty, who will redress the wrongs and punish wrongdoers, who will restore justice and wipe away every tear. Is all of this discarded? Not really.

The significant difference in a relational view is that God alone is not ultimately in control. God-with-us, God-in-relation to us is ultimately in control. God can do only what can be done with us. God will not do what we will not do with God. God simply doesn’t act unilaterally in a relational world. At the same time, God cannot be overcome by any contrary force because God draws whatever good there is from every situation. This is the relational understanding of what it means that God is "in control." God’s control is not to impose or dictate or usurp or destroy. God’s control is to keep relationships happening and to keep offering the best possibility for every relationship. The control is persuasive, luring, suggestive, visionary, creative.

Where does that leave the innocent victims of injustice? It leaves them, by virtue of their innocent suffering, closer to the heart of God’s deepest relationship to the world. This will be explained in the next chapter in connection with Jesus’ death. The same point is affirmed in Scripture regarding the privileged position of the poor, and it has been reaffirmed forcefully in recent liberation theology. This claim for the privileged status of the poor is sometimes connected with the vindication at the end of the world as customarily understood.

The same privileged status of the oppressed can be explained relationally apart from the end of the world, in terms of the congruence of their experience and God’s. The degree of congruence between their experience and God’s means, in a relational view, that God draws the best possibilities for the future from their experience more than from the experience of others. And in light of the previous discussions of immortality, resurrection, and judgment, their sense of being for the world with God may be greater than that of most of us. In a way, this could be interpreted as a kind of vindication or reward at the end of their lives, even if it is not the end of the world as such, If taken this way, their reward does not mean a separation from the world but a more God-like relation to the world. And that is the ultimate reward that God can and wants to give in a relational perspective.

This brief discussion touches on the relational response to the other question about the success or futility of efforts to change the world. It is understandable that we measure our efforts in terms of discernible success. But in a relational view, this is a secondary criterion. The primary criterion is the intrinsic quality of one’s experience in trying to improve the world. This means the degree of unity with God’s priorities in every situation, whether or not the outcome is "successful" in terms of limited, specific results. Being-with God and freely feeling the future as God does is never futile or unsuccessful.

This is another instance of trying to maintain the correct priority. God is primary. Our identification with God’s relationship to the world is primary. All else is secondary -- not insignificant nor worthless nor negligible. As secondary, all else flows from and is enacted in order to make complete God’s vision of the future. No enactment is futile if it flows in this way from an actual union with God. And that is why we should bother.

Chapter 5: A Brother’s Suicide: The Question of Judgment

 

Experience

It had been a hard day for the minister, this third day of a week-long retreat. He had looked forward to this week as a break away from his hectic parish schedule. He had felt the need to stop for a while and reflect on what he had been doing in his ministry, what it meant to him, and where it seemed to be leading him. But instead of a relaxing and peaceful review of his life, he found himself facing questions he could more easily avoid in the active ministry: Was this really a valuable service to others? Was he just giving people what they wanted, or was he challenging them, helping them to grow and mature in their faith? Was he growing? Did he feel really close to anyone, or was his work consuming him?

He was mulling over these things after dinner when word came that the parish deacon was there to see him. He could think only that something had happened in the parish because the deacon was covering for him while he was away. Typical, he thought, even when you try to take some time off, something always comes up that only you can handle. He felt the parish and his ministry tightening in on him as he went to the front of the retreat house. What the deacon had come to tell him was that the minister’s younger brother had committed suicide.

The brothers came from a family of four boys. Their father worked two jobs and their mother was often ill. She had to be taken care of by the children more often than she could take care of them. As a result, the boys grew up to be very self-reliant and independent. They didn’t experience a great deal of personal attention or favor from either parent. The boys’ determination paid off. The oldest son excelled in school and won a full college scholarship. His success put pressure on the rest of the boys to do likewise.

After high school and a couple of years working, the next son decided he would enter the ministry. In his family such a choice was highly valued because they were very devout Christians and tried to live faithful, hard-working, humble lives. Everyone was very proud of him and reinforced his decision all through the seminary years. Everyone except his younger brother, but then he seemed to react against all his brothers. He did not do well in school; he couldn’t keep a job; and he didn’t seem to want to. He had some friends but none of the relationships lasted. Now in his mid-twenties, he had been drinking more and more and was suspected of getting into drugs as well.

The minister-brother felt a special responsibility toward him. After all, he had dedicated his life to helping people in crisis, and he had acquired both skill and experience in doing so. And yet, it was more difficult to approach his own brother. He didn’t want to invade his privacy, and he didn’t want to come on as a moralizing clergyman. If the truth be told, he really didn’t know what to say anyhow. Most of the things he heard himself saying when he imagined talking to his brother felt like artificial piety or religious jargon. You ought to have a purpose in your life; God has a destiny or plan for each of us; you don’t do yourself or anyone else a favor by taking drugs; you’re a good person with many gifts.

Imagining himself saying those things made the minister-brother realize how much he had been resisting, sometimes even rejecting, the typical style of ministry he had been trained in. He wondered if he was also rejecting the Christian way or style of life. The two were so closely connected for him, and he was not sure where he stood with either one right now. So he hesitated to speak to his brother because he wasn’t sure he could be helpful, and he might have to face some things in his own life that he would rather avoid.

Recognizing all this, he decided to make this retreat. He felt it would give him the chance to sort out his feelings, to claim what he saw as valid and meaningful and leave the rest aside. That might even mean leaving the ministry altogether and he was prepared for that. He was prepared for just about anything except the news of his brother’s suicide.

The deacon sat with him while the minister tried to sort through his reactions. He couldn’t believe that his brother felt so badly about himself. He asked the deacon if he was sure it was suicide; maybe he had accidentally overdosed if he were using drugs. There was no accident. The brother had left a clear suicide note explaining that he could not find any purpose in his life to keep going. He knew he was troublesome to others; so why make or keep everybody unhappy? The shock of the news alternated with strong feelings of guilt. The minister kept asking himself why he didn’t recognize that his brother was so bad off. Did his preoccupation with his own ministerial crisis blind him to the signals his brother was sending? He knew from his training and from some occasional experience that people inclining to suicide usually give indications before they act. Why didn’t someone pick them up in this case? Why didn’t he?

His feelings of guilt made him aware again of how responsible we are for one another and how much we depend on one another for support, guidance, truth, purpose. He knew he was in need of some reinforcement in his ministry, and he looked to others to provide it; but he seemed to miss his brother’s need, or if he sensed it, he didn’t respond adequately. It made him feel very fragile and helpless.

His thoughts also turned to God and especially to how God would judge his brother. He never did believe that God was a stern, demanding judge who would punish people if their wrongs deserved it. (One of the views discussed in chapter two.) On the other hand, to take his own life, the brother had to feel pretty worthless. Had he rejected God? Did he turn his back on the opportunities God may have offered him to find meaning? His suicide was deliberate, a choice he had made. How responsible was he for that choice? How accountable before God? Just then the minister realized that he’d better head for home.

Theological Question

As the minister reflected on his feelings about his brothers suicide, two thoughts kept recurring: our responsibility for one another and God’s judgment of how well we fulfill that responsibility. People who believe in immortality may think about God’s judgment when any death occurs, it’s part of the unknown dimension of death that makes us suspenseful, nervous, anxious, fearful. But a suicide makes us aware, in a way that other death experiences don’t, how interdependent we are. Like it or not, we are tied in with each other and we affect the way another person lives -- and dies.

This responsibility moves between two extremes. At one extreme each person is considered solely responsible for every choice, action, decision, etc., that is made. This attitude presupposes a very self-contained, isolated, almost stoic understanding of the human person and works against any involvement or influence from outside the person as through family, church, society. On this end of the spectrum, there is not much chance for community or sharing or relationship.

At the other extreme no one has much personal responsibility for what happens. Indeed, individuals aren’t allowed to make personal choices or decisions. The community or church or society predetermines everything. Individuals are one with the larger group; their identity coincides with the identity of the whole. Everyone is responsible and no one is responsible.

Most people find themselves between these two extremes. There are shaping influences from outside of us that minimize our responsibility, either for ourselves or for others. We cannot usurp another person’s responsibility for self-direction. While no one of us is completely autonomous, neither are we completely determined. In the realm of interaction, interrelation, interdependence, we face the difficult question: How responsible are we for one another, not in the abstract, but in the concrete, with this person, for this action or decision?

Our ambiguity oftentimes about our responsibility gives greater weight to God’s judgment. Presumably, God is not ambiguous. God knows exactly what our responsibility is in every situation. Maybe we should have known more clearly too. Or maybe we were very clear but wrong. How understanding is God? And how merciful? If we have shirked our responsibility, if we have simply not developed our sense of responsibility, if we have failed to carry it out fully, what will happen? What will God do about it?

So the question of God’s judgment ultimately is, for us, a question of reward and punishment. If there were no personal outcome, we wouldn’t care that much what God’s judgment is. Or if we felt that everything would be worked out in this life, we could expect to "get what we deserve," and we would have a pretty good idea what that would be in terms of human experience in this life. But things don’t seem to work out completely in this life. Too many good and innocent people suffer while too many dishonest and selfish people get what they want. These observations, coupled with a belief in immortality, give rise to the expectation that right and wrong, responsibility and irresponsibility will finally be taken care of in the next life. And that means that God’s judgment has everlasting effects.

For some, this prospect is a major stimulus for the way they live. For others, it has no bearing at all. Underlying either view is a particular understanding of God and how God operates. It is preeminently the task of theology to express our best understanding of God and how God operates in order to clarify what our responsibilities are and what we may expect to happen when we fulfill them and when we don’t.

Theological Reflection

A typical theology of judgment presupposes that we are responsible for our actiondecisions. (This strange word is used here to convey the idea that our decisions must be enacted to become actual, and also to avoid looking at actions as isolated acts, apart from the whole context of deciding which produces them.) This in turn presupposes that we are free to act even though our freedom is conditioned by the influence of both limitation and sin (as discussed in chapter two). When we fail to exercise our freedom responsibly, we sin. When this actually is the case and when it is not must be decided through moral discernment. The intent of this reflection is not on deciding when freedom is used responsibly in given instances and when it isn’t. The interest is rather in clarifying how God judges our actiondecisions and what results from that judgment.

A typical theology of judgment affirms that the ultimate judgment of a person’s life, like the brother who committed suicide, is made by God, but that God exercises this judgment through Jesus. This is part of what is implied in the title, Jesus as Lord. To be Lord means that Jesus is the embodiment, the fulfillment, the perfection of God’s relationship in human life. Because of this, Jesus as Lord is the norm by which everyone else is judged, for we are all meant to be as fully the embodiment, the fulfillment, the perfection of God’s relationship in our human life as Jesus was in his. None of us can be more perfect than Jesus; therefore, Jesus is the standard by which our perfection is measured.

Typically, theology tries to express this by drawing upon both philosophical and biblical sources, just as it does when explaining immortality and resurrection. Corresponding to the immortality of the soul, as depicted by the Greek philosophers, there is a particular judgment immediately after death. Because of the image of the soul leaving the body, this judgment seems to be a judgment of the soul only. And yet, it is the final, unchanging, everlasting judgment rendered by God through Jesus as Lord. Presumably, the soul enters the state it is judged worthy of, even though the body is yet to be resurrected and reunited with it.

Corresponding to the resurrection of the dead, as depicted graphically by the Jewish Scriptures, there is a general judgment at the end of the world. Because of the imagery of resurrection, this judgment clearly appears as a judgment of the whole person and of all persons together. It, too, is final, unchanging, and everlasting, rendered by God through Jesus as Lord, as narrated in Matthew 25:31-46.

Borrowing in this way from these two sources obviously creates some problems. There appear to be two judgments: the particular judgment at the end of each person’s life, involving the soul only, and the general judgment at the end of the world, involving the whole person and all people. The latter appears to be a duplication of the former with nothing essentially added to the judgment, although there is the addition of the resurrected body to the soul and the public character to the previous, private judgment. These are not insignificant additions to the event, but they do not add to the judgment unless the immediate, particular judgment is incomplete without the general, public judgment. But in that case, what state is the soul in, separated from the body between the particular and general judgment? It would seem more consistent to say with the biblical Jews that the whole person dies and awaits resurrection and judgment.

The heart of the problem is trying to make compatible two different views that really are not compatible. If theology follows the Greek notion consistently, then the body is not included in the afterlife, and trying to find a way to keep the soul in readiness for this reunion just won’t work. On the other hand, if theology follows the Jewish notion, the bodysoul is kept in readiness for the final resurrection, but that doesn’t seem compatible with our understanding of Jesus’ resurrection as an immediate event and its implied promise that we too are united with him when we die. It is clear that theology wants to affirm that each person and all people are judged by God through Jesus as Lord. When and how this takes place is not as clearly worked out when both the philosophical and biblical traditions are put side by side,

In one sense this is not the primary concern with judgment. It is the outcome that counts. Here, typical theology affirms two ultimate possibilities: heaven or hell, with some prospect of an interim state (purgatory) between the time of our death and our full entrance into heaven. For many people today neither the interim state nor hell are taken seriously as possibilities.

The notion of an interim state never did achieve complete acceptance in the church’s history and is not widely affirmed at the present time. Partly this is due to the way it has been depicted and partly due to its rationale. The depiction of the interim state as hell-with-an-end strikes most modern people as fanciful. The standard graphic images are not very fearsome and do not constitute the essence of this view in any event. For that reason, some contemporary theologians have tried to recast this notion in terms more compatible with our outlook on life today.

We all experience change through maturation, crisis, choice, accident, etc. Changing from one condition to another is often painful, as when a child goes through adolescence, or when a spouse adjusts to the death or divorce of another, or when adults enter the aging process. Extrapolating from these experiences, some theologians envision our transition from this life to the next as another painful movement. The experience may not be radically unlike those just mentioned. The degree of pain involved depends on our whole past life. We move more or less easily into the afterlife depending on how we moved through our present life: generously or selfishly, inclusive of others or exclusive, open or closed to newness, freely or predetermined. In experiencing this interim movement, we are experiencing the outcome of our lives, and the passage is a kind of purgation or cleansing of the aspects of our lives that in fact keep us from entering fully into God’s relationship with us.

In this way, theologians try to preserve the meaning of the interim state without being bound to some of the imagery associated with it in the past. At the same time, they are trying to recover the rationale for the interim state in the first place. That is, we are responsible for what we do in this life. If we don’t fulfill our responsibilities now, we will have to later. This was originally proposed in terms of temporal punishment due to sin. Some abusive practices grew up around this notion, and the impression was given that people could buy their own or another’s way out of the interim state. Moreover, the whole idea seemed to undercut the universal salvific effect of Jesus (which shall be discussed in chapter seven).

Theologians who are rethinking the interim state are trying to integrate this part of the tradition with insights from modern psychology and human-development studies. If we are responsible for what we do in life, how do we compensate for irresponsible actiondecisions? What do we do about those acts of irresponsibility that we can’t really reverse or can’t adequately make up for once they’re done? Does God merely overlook them? Are we cut off from heaven forever because of them? Some kind of interim solution would seem called for if these acts are neither to be simply dismissed (which would call into question how responsible/accountable we really are) nor to deny us our destiny forever.

Whether an interim state described in terms of a personal passage, which is more or less easy depending on how responsibly we have lived our lives, is convincing or not is an open question. Certainly the imagery and rationale for such a transitional state is more coherent than the typical understanding of purgatory. In any event, this is an interim state. It is the final state that people are really concerned about, and many find it hard to take hell seriously. The primary reason for this is trying to understand how an all-good, loving, merciful God could condemn a person to hell forever. A secondary reason is, once again, the imagery often used to depict hell.

A typical theology affirms the possibility of hell because it takes with utmost seriousness our freedom to act responsibly or not. This freedom seems to imply that we are free to say yes or no to God. If we say no, that is our choice. And God respects our freedom. Consequently, hell is a logical and necessary implication of freedom. While affirming this point in this way, theology typically hastens to add that there is no certainty that any human being actually is in hell. However it is depicted and however necessary it seems to be as a corollary to our freedom, hell is only a possibility for typical theology -- a real possibility, but not necessarily an actualized one. That knowledge is finally God’s. But if there is anyone in hell, it is not because God put the person there. God’s judgment is only a ratification of the person’s actual life. We are not consigned to hell; we choose our way into hell . . . and into heaven.

A typical theology is more assertive about people being in heaven, Some persons are designated as saints by name, and there is a long-standing reference to the communion of saints. That affirmation is very appealing. The description of heaven, however, often is not. Like the general description of immortality in chapter three, heaven as it is usually imaged seems uneventful, abstract, unappealing, boring. The most concrete references are those that are least likely to be real: pearly gates, St. Peter’s list, trumpet blasts, angel wings, etc. Even the beatific vision seems rather static, like looking at something bright for all eternity.

To be sure, there are other attempts to describe the experience of heaven that are more exciting and draw upon our best human experiences in this life. But so much of our thinking is influenced by the Greek ideals of contemplation, changelessness, spirit, transcendence that we find it hard to imagine heaven in other ways. A relational view can help us do that, and maybe see judgment, responsibility, the interim state, and hell a little differently too.

In a completely relational approach, such as the one being developed in this book, God is involved in everything that happens. As described in chapter one, this means that God knows completely everything and everyone that is actual, e.g., the brother who committed suicide. God’s complete knowledge is operative at two levels. God knows everything there is to know about the brother, and God relates that knowledge to everything else that is actual. This twofold knowledge frames the understanding of immortality and resurrection, as presented in chapters three and four. It also grounds the explanation of judgment.

God’s judgment is God’s perfect knowledge of the brother and of the brother’s relationship to everything else God knows. God’s knowledge or judgment of the brother is a particular, immediate, personal judgment. It is God’s experience of this man both at every moment of his life and as a completed, finalized, definite person at his death. This judgment of God is couched in the context of all the possibilities that the brother had for becoming who he finally turned out to be. As explained earlier, God experiences every event fully and sees in that event all the possibilities that could flow from it for subsequent, continuous experience. When God sees these possibilities, they are ranked from the best to the worst.

God’s ranking may be called a valuation. God offers it in various forms of communication and awaits the actual response, in this case of the brother. Whatever the response is, God experiences it completely, draws all the next possibilities from it, ranks them, and offers them for future enactment. The actual response of the brother is more or less compatible or congruent with the ranking God envisioned. God’s determination of whether a given response is more or less harmonious with God’s valuation may be called an evaluation or judgment.

God’s particular judgment is comprised of both the valuation and evaluation. The valuation of possibilities is what God sees and desires for the brother; the evaluation is what the brother actually chooses, including all the particular factors involved in how he chooses and enacts this possibility rather than that one. Two points are worth noting in this explanation. One is that what God wills for each person is ongoing and constantly developing. It is shaped in and by the relationship God has with the brother. What God wills is partly determined by what the brother does. That is, God always wills what is best for the brother given the brother’s actual development up to that point. Only God always sees what is best, but God sees only what Is best relative to actual conditions. The second point in this view is that God’s judgment is inclusive. God relates to everything that is actual. Whatever the brother does, God experiences it as it is. Nothing is rejected or discarded or pushed outside of God’s experience. God evaluates it for what it is and for what it can lead to (valuation). One of the attributes of God is that God can draw out of every experience and every event some new possibility for life. Obviously, some events yield very little (as we saw in chapter two). God can see, do, feel only what is actually present in any given relationship, but God does see, do, feel all that is present. The relative degree of what is present varies, but God’s evaluation of it is always inclusive. In this sense, it may also be said to be positive, as long as "positive" covers a range of degrees.

The evaluation of the brother’s actiondecisions relative to God’s prior valuation of the brother’s possibilities expands when it is put In relation to everything else God knows and evaluates. This may be considered as the general judgment. It is general in the sense that God sees the value of this event, the brother’s actiondecision, in relation to everything else which is actual, i.e., everything else that has ever happened. It is also general in the sense that this event affects to some degree the general accumulation; it affects it quantitatively by adding one more experience to the whole, and It affects it qualitatively by being the actual experience it is.

Clearly, only God can form this type of general judgment. If we were to speculate, we might say that the brother’s actiondecision to commit suicide was not the best possibility God envisioned for him. Nonetheless, it was one possibility that God also envisioned and presumably ranked as the least desirable. The brother is free, however, and once he has actualized his choice, God experiences everything that makes it what it is. From our perspective, it has minimal value and yields minimal possibilities for new experiences. It has a minimum evaluation.

Relative to everything else that has happened, this minimal event may have slightly more value. That is, it is conceivable that some action decisions have been worse and contributed less to God’s experience and the world’s. In that case, the general judgment might yield a different result, and an event with minimal value in itself (i.e., in relation to its own possibilities) might have greater value in relation to the whole. The complete judgment includes both levels.

It should be noted, however, that the general judgment as described here is never absolutely final. As new events occur, their actual experience is added to the whole. The general evaluation or ordering of actual events to one another is constantly changing, both quantitatively and qualitatively. So the general judgment is always all-inclusive and ongoing. This is simply the equivalent notion regarding judgment that we saw in the last chapter regarding general resurrection.

The evaluation, although changing, is always positive. This means that its value (such as it is) can never be decreased or diminished. It can only be Increased. If a less valuable experience is added, relative to that, the previous experience is evaluated more highly. If a comparable experience is added, It reinforces what value Is already there. And if a more valuable experience is added, it accentuates the value that is there in the previous experience; it affirms all that is in that experience even though there is more of value in the new experience. The more pertains only to the new experience; it does not give a corresponding "less" to the previous experience.

One further point to note here. God’s general judgment includes everything that has already occurred, but this is not confined to those who have died. Every experience in a person’s life once the experience occurs is included, even though the person is still living. This has an important implication for the notion of intercession and leads to a discussion of the interim state.

The brother’s evaluation relative to his own possibilities is set, but his evaluation relative to everything else is always open to change as long as there are new events occurring that are added to the whole. One source of new events in this case is the minister’s feelings and response (actiondecisions) to his brother. If he has negative responses, anger, exclusiveness, etc. (as the woman in the previous chapter), he will not contribute much to the general evaluation of his brother. However, if he is accepting, understanding, caring, then he will contribute more to the general evaluation of his brother.

In the first instance, the brother’s own minimal contribution would be reinforced. In the second instance, the brother’s minimal contribution would be put in a different relation; whatever its positive value, it would be enhanced, strengthened, affirmed. In terms of the explanation of immortality in chapter three, the minister would be giving the brother back to himself in a way and to a degree that the brother had not himself chosen to do. In this light, the value of praying for the dead, of remembering others positively, of uniting ourselves with one another in the best sense we are aware of, all have real, contributing value. In this same light, we can begin to see how a relational view might interpret the intercessory role of Jesus’ earthly life, a topic that will be discussed in chapter seven.

Does the same type of influence work the other way? Do those who have died intercede for the living, as the grandmother in chapter one expected to do? This is more difficult to affirm in a relational view because those who have died do not generate new events. And yet, in terms of the explanation of immortality in chapter three, after death a person exists for the world. What does this mean? God derives new possibilities from the actual world that has already occurred. Included in that actual world are those who died, with their personal evaluation and (changing) general evaluation. Each new event is a response to possibilities that God offers from the actual world. Usually this means from the actual world most relevant to the new event.

In the case of human persons, those who were directly in relationship with one another while alive would be some of the most relevant sources of new possibilities. Their actual relevance would depend, of course, upon their value in God’s total experience. But it is conceivable that the grandmother’s life, which had already been a source of possibilities for the couple during their lifetime together, would continue to be so, and perhaps even more so if the grandmother’s evaluation in God’s general judgment were greater now than when she was alive. In this case, it is God who is actively involved mediating the intercession of the grandmother.

This same pattern of influence could be drawn out for other types of relationships: heroes, well-known persons, namesakes, those whose influence is mediated indirectly, patrons, etc. In a relational world, everything is connected, with varying degrees of influence. The actual degree of influence in a given instance depends on God’s particular and general evaluation. God’s particular evaluation is God’s experience of who the person has actually become, relative to the person’s possibilities in life; God’s general evaluation is God’s experience of who the person continues to be, relative to everything else that happens. One of the things that happens is that the living can enhance God’s general evaluation of the dead, while the dead can intercede for the living by providing God with their actual experience from which God can offer new possibilities to the living.

In this approach, is there anything like an interim state? It does not seem so. As explained here, the transition through death from this life to the afterlife is immediate. When a person’s becoming ceases, God at once experiences that person fully. This is the basis for understanding immortality, resurrection, and judgment. There is a sense in which the afterlife as conceived here, continues to be related to the still-developing world of the living. Within that dynamic relationship, the dead are given back to themselves in a continual way by the experience of the living, and the relative contribution of the dead to the living does shift from one occasion to another. But this is not really an interim state. It is rather the permanent state of reality as interpreted relationally. There is not some other kind of state of existence still to come that makes this situation an interim one. This aspect of the total view will be discussed in the next chapter on eschatology.

Likewise, this view does not envision a condition like hell as it is typically understood. A thoroughly relational view is all-inclusive, at least in reference to God. We may and do exclude from our experience certain things or people. In fact, we probably exclude most of what is realistically available to us. This act of exclusion Is another way of saying we are limited; we simply cannot experience everything, nor do we experience what we do in a complete way.

This leads to a relational view of freedom. As was stated above, the possibility of hell seems to be required by our understanding of freedom. The understanding assumes that freedom is a choice between mutually exclusive alternatives. A relational view does not see freedom this way because it does not see things as mutually exclusive but mutually connected. Our freedom means we choose what we experience and to the degree we decide. But every choice is a renewal of relationship with the whole, with God. We don’t have the freedom to eliminate all relationship because freedom is for relationship.

So God’s judgment is not inclusive of some and exclusive of others. God’s judgment is a graded or ranked evaluation of everything and everyone. The ranking means that there is a spectrum of most to least valuable. The least valuable experiences or events or persons are those from which God can derive virtually nothing that will contribute to the future development of his relation to the world. What would such a minimal experience be? In the case of the brother who committed suicide, it might mean that his experience of life and of himself turned out to be so empty, so undesirable, so negative that very little can be gleaned from it to offer as a stimulus or as new possibilities for others.

On the other hand, his struggle to find meaning, the liberation he may have felt in finally choosing to end his life, the benefit he may have felt by removing himself as "troublesome" to others could actually be valuable experiences that God can use positively to stimulate more meaningful actiondecisions in the minister-brother, for example. In general, a person’s life is valuable, a contribution to God to the degree the person’s experiences include freedom, novelty, choice, decision, feeling. A person who tends to conform, be repetitious, obey, go along, repress has less value to contribute.

Obviously, these general characterizations must be nuanced with particular circumstances and qualifications, but the general orientation of value is between creativity, novelty, decision and repetition, sameness, conformity. The former way of life is more valuable because it generates more possibilities, a wider range of experience, greater versatility. The latter perpetuates what already is and weakens the thrust toward newness. Nonetheless, whatever one’s life experience, It is a contribution to God and through God to the world. Nothing is excluded.

On the other side of this consideration, to anticipate being with God, while God goes about the divine activity of drawing new possibilities, is to anticipate a constantly changing, new, dynamic process to which we continually contribute ourselves. This is a far cry from a rather static contemplation of a perfect and changeless God. Further, if we live by such a vision in this life, it means we are seeking the most creative, novel, stimulating, intense experience in virtually everything we do. No situation is trivial or useless in this perspective because every situation is a contribution to God, more or less valuable depending on how we live it, what experience we actually make of it. Obviously, some situations have more potential than others. Every case we’ve looked at in this book has far more inherent value than going grocery shopping, taking a shower, reading the newspaper, or going to sleep. But even these ordinary events can be invested with as much feeling, meaning, self as they are capable of.

This approach clearly stresses the value of the present. In every moment the relational question is: What is the potential of this situation and how can that be experienced most fully? This question is not originally ours. It is our way of trying to get in touch with what God is offering us. God’s offer is always complete, i.e., it includes all the possible answers and communicates them in the priority God sees. Thus, every situation is charged with the dynamism of God’s relationship to us, which lays before us the challenge of our freedom and the possibility of making our contribution to God.

Heaven is not a completely new state of existence; it is a constantly new realization of the contribution our lifetime makes to God and through God to the world. For a truly theocentric faith, there can be no delight, no satisfaction, no awareness more desirable, more appealing, more exciting. And at that point we may ask: Why would we want it to end? Why would God want it to end? Does it end? These are questions for chapter six.

Practical Implication

The minister was disturbed by the sense of responsibility his brother’s suicide aroused in him, and he was concerned about God’s judgment. The relational view presented here would certainly affirm our responsibility for one another, but that responsibility is not limited to our activity with others while both we and they are alive. In a relational approach, there is a continuing influence, mediated through God, between the living and the dead. Put another way, the minister’s responsibility for his brother doesn’t end at the brother’s death. By his continuing relationship (through prayer, memory, example, story, etc.), he goes on contributing to God’s evaluation of his brother by adding new, actual experiences that affirm the brother’s value. These contributions are, of course, put in relation to everything else, so it is not a question of our trying to tell God something God does not already know, or persuading God to change the evaluation of someone, like the brother who commits suicide. God’s evaluation is God’s experience of what actually is, but what actually is keeps happening and we contribute to it. In this way, our continual, new contributions are an extension of our responsibility to others.

This view should not undercut our responsibility to others while they are alive. The minister’s contribution to his brother after the suicide is severely reduced in comparison to the contribution he could have made before the suicide. The reason for this is that be-fore the suicide the brother was still an active, relating, becoming person. He had a range of choices before him and his action-decisions were still to be determined. None of this is true after death. The brother has become who he is; the possibilities for his further actual development are ended. The value of his actual life might increase as other events occur and are added to the accumulation of the whole. But that is a slight advance when compared to the possibilities during life. So, the extension of responsibility beyond death and the contribution we can make in this way is not equivalent to what we can and should do before death; there is no safety valve here to catch up or make up for our irresponsibility during a person’s lifetime. Opportunities missed are missed; new opportunities are relative to actual conditions. After death, there are still opportunities to contribute to another person, but those opportunities are severely limited to the actual condition of the one who has died. In a relational view, the present is always of paramount importance.

A second practical implication of this view is that it can relax anxiety about God’s judgment of us. If everything and everyone is included in God, then there is no reason to fear condemnation in the classic sense of exclusion from God. Even if we think we are capable of choosing against God, God accepts that very choice and draws from it something new. We cannot annihilate our relationality; we simply do not have that power. Despite our most deliberate acts of opposition, we cannot move outside of God’s relationship to us. Our freedom is not a power to choose between absolutely exclusive alternatives; it is a power to choose among related options. We can choose more or less freely, more or less valuably, but we cannot opt out absolutely. God won’t let us do that because God sees in every experience some possibility for contribution to the future. And God’s vision/experience of itself draws us back into relationship with God.

Thus, in a relational view, freedom is more limited than in another view, i.e., our freedom does not extend to the possibility of acting in a way that absolutely contradicts the nature and purpose of freedom. As pointed out above, this does not mean that all free choices are equally valued. Just the opposite is the case. No two choices are ever exactly equal. Each one is new and generates new possibilities. It is true, however, that every free actiondecision is more or less valuable relative to God’s prior valuation of possibilities and God’s subsequent evaluation of actuality. A continuum of degrees is thus produced that is the actual world and that is God’s judgment. Everything is included in its proper place, i.e., where it actually belongs relative to everything else. Only God can see what that order is, which is why all judgment is ultimately God’s.

Chapter 4: A Sister’s Cremation: The Question of Resurrection

Experience

It is a weekday morning. A woman in her late fifties is knocking hard and loud on her neighbor’s door. The neighbor is only a few years older than her friend, but she recently had a foot operation and still moves around rather slowly. Besides, her hearing is a little impaired and her doorbell never works. Her friend knows all this, so she makes a lot of noise when she comes by and waits for the door to open.

Usually she and her neighbor do things together: go to church, shop, play cards, watch TV. They are both widows and have been close friends most of their adult lives. They find mutual support in their friendship and they look out for each other. In fact, this recent foot operation was a joint decision. It was corrective surgery that didn’t have to be done but was supposed to help relieve some discomfort. They talked about it, considered the implications, inquired about medical coverage and costs, and finally decided to go ahead with it.

Their shared feeling was that even though they were aging and past their prime," there was no reason why they shouldn’t take good care of themselves. If minor foot surgery would make it easier and more comfortable for one of them to get around and there were no real obstacles, why not do it? Part of their agreement was that while the one was recuperating, the other would do the shopping for her, pay her bills at the bank (to save on postage), cash her pension check, etc. They had it all worked out and things had been going well the first week after the operation.

When the door finally opened, it was obvious something was wrong. As the one woman inched back on her cane into the house, she kept grumbling and complaining. She was very disturbed about something. It took a few minutes to calm her down and get the story. Late last night she had received a phone call from her brother-in-law telling her that her sister had died. That was shocking enough, but when she asked about the funeral arrangements, she was told that her sister had already been cremated. That disturbed her most of all.

The news of her sister’s death was quite surprising. She had been in reasonably good health for someone nearing sixty-five. On the other hand, she didn’t write or phone very often, and she had been living in a city 300 miles away, so visits were infrequent. Anything could have been happening to her health and the family wouldn’t have known about it unless she took the trouble to tell them. Her husband surely wouldn’t.

He had never been on good terms with the rest of the family. They all felt he had seduced their sister and caused her to divorce her first husband whom they all loved. Sometimes they felt angry toward the sister; sometimes they felt sorry for her. She didn’t seem to be all that happy in her second marriage, almost as if she were being controlled by her husband. There was never much variation in the family’s feelings toward him; they were always angry with him,

Another reason why they couldn’t stand him was that he was an avowed agnostic. He made no secret of his disregard for religion and seemed (to the family) to delight in criticizing church-going people as hypocrites or duty-bound slaves to habit. He could be very cynical about religious beliefs and practices, all of which the family valued very highly. They were staunch, traditional Christians who were very involved in the church and very dependable volunteers.

Over the years a lot of hostility built up and was never dealt with directly or honestly. Everyone seemed content to tolerate the husband on the occasional visits home (no one ever visited them) and to communicate only with their sister. So it was quite strange to hear his voice on the phone last night. The conversation was not lengthy. He simply wanted to inform the family that their sister (he did not say his wife) had died and in accordance with her wishes had been cremated. Her ashes were in a mausoleum. Settlement of the estate would be handled soon, but almost everything had been willed to the husband.

The call had come too late for the sister to let her neighbor know, but she launched right in as soon as she came to the door. She had a mixture of feelings: sadness that her sister had died, frustration that she couldn’t have seen her and didn’t even know that she had been ill, anger at the husband for not telling anyone, and outrage at the fact that her sister had been cremated. She kept lamenting that "she had to have something like that done to her." It seemed just like her husband to pull such a thing, knowing how it would disturb everyone in the family. And cremation! Here she was, going through this operation at her age to try to feel her best and take care of herself, because she was always taught that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit and we should take care of them. Her sister knew that too, and now she was cremated.

It didn’t help when her friend tried to point out that she was just as dead whether cremated or embalmed. To her sister, she had been violated. Maybe pagans who don’t worship the true God and don’t know any better can cremate people. But in this case, someone had intruded into the way God intends things to be done. And she knew just who that someone was and why he had done it.

Theological Question

The sister in this instance doesn’t seem to have any questions. She is full of judgments and feelings built up over years of pent-up animosity. Very little that anyone can say or do now will change that. But underneath her anger, there are two issues that may be troublesome to her and that are real questions for other people. One concerns our bodily existence and its value in our ultimate destiny. The other is the actual condition of our bodily selves in the afterlife, what has customarily been referred to as the resurrection of the body.

This woman places real value on her own bodily existence. She is willing to go through an unpleasant operation to improve her physical condition, and she seemed to feel some theological responsibility for taking care of herself, symbolized in the notion that she is a temple of the Holy Spirit. The value of the body is largely shared by people, whether from religious motives or not. The only self we know is a bodily self, and so we are prone to affirm our bodiliness as good because it is who we are. The question is whether this value, which seems so clear in this life, carries over to the next life. Is our bodiliness valuable enough to be included in our immortal existence?

Opinions divide on this question. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Greek philosophical tradition, which has influenced our Christian theology so much, did not see the body as valuable enough to carry over to the immortality of the soul. In fact, the body was seen as a liability to the soul, no matter how useful or necessary it might be for existence in this life. The body simply belongs to a lower level of existence, and the sooner it can be discarded, the better. This leads to a dualistic view that many still espouse, according to which the material and spiritual, body and soul, are seen as separate and unequal elements, temporarily joined together (during our lifetime) but separated in death so that the soul can assume its rightful, higher place. The body has some pragmatic value for life in this world, but no value whatsoever for the afterlife.

The Jewish tradition, which has also influenced Christian theology, although not always so much as the Greek philosophical tradition, did see the body as valuable and integral to the life of the person. This was felt so strongly that for a long time Jewish people envisioned no immortality or resurrection for the dead because it seemed to them that when death occurred, the whole person died. Death meant a kind of hazy, indefinite drowziness, not exactly unconsiousness but certainly not fully alert, active existence. This conclusion followed from their very holistic view, which many people today espouse on different grounds, according to which the material and the spiritual, the body and soul, are inseparably united. Whatever the fate of one, that is the fate of the other. Bodysoul existence is always a united, integral existence.

The Jewish expectation of a general resurrection, which had been developing shortly before the time of Jesus, was consistent with this holistic view. At the end time, the dead would be raised up by God. The whole, bodysoul person would be resurrected. This expectation, and the language/imagery used to convey it, was used by the early Jewish Christians to express their experience that Jesus had been raised from death by God. One of the startling features of their proclamation was that one person had been resurrected before the rest. But another feature was not so startling to Jewish hearers: Jesus had been raised as a bodysoul person.

Many persons today accept a holistic view of the human person not on biblical grounds but on modern scientific, biological, psychological grounds. On this basis alone, many persons conclude, like the ancient Jews, that the whole person dies. Without any religious belief in immortality or resurrection to supplement this conviction, they see nothing beyond this life. There are no compelling reasons to think that one part of a person lives on if the whole person does not live on, and it is hard to imagine how a whole bodysoul person can live on.

Perhaps the cremated sister’s husband felt this way. He just didn’t have any persuasive reason to think that the whole person who is his wife doesn’t die completely. The traditional religious beliefs of his in-law family may have struck him as a hodgepodge of philosophy and religion with no real consistency. His wife dies; her body decays but the soul lives on; eventually the body will be resurrected and reunited with the soul. His wife will be complete again. But what about in the meantime? Was she whole or not? Either the body is integral to a person’s existence or it isn’t. If it isn’t, why reunite it? If it is, how can it be suspended and the person still be in existence? The attempt to have it both ways strikes many people today as inconsistent and possibly unnecessary. The real task is to explain the immortality of the whole person without minimizing the value of the body dimension by postponing its inclusion or presenting it as an eventual addition to the real person, the soul.

This touches on the second theological issue lying behind the irate sister’s feelings -- the resurrection of the body. The resurrection of the body certainly points to the ultimate value of the body, the material dimension of afterlife, and sees the whole person as the ultimate goal. But the resurrection, as pointed out in the last chapter, is a special act of God. It is not an automatic, natural event. This fact alone may make some people wonder how intrinsically related the body is to the soul if it takes a special act of God to resurrect it. However, if we do not assume the Greek idea of a temporary separation of body and soul, then we can think of the resurrection as affecting the whole person, all at once -- as the ancient Jews thought of it. When this holistic resurrection takes place is another matter, one we shall discuss shortly.

Apart from these considerations, there is the further question of what the resurrected bodysoul person is like. Usually this question is asked in terms of the body only, because it is assumed (from the Greeks again) that the soul is what it is and cannot be different, whereas the body, or our bodiliness, can take different forms. This is part of the sister’s anxiety about cremation. What if something essential to the bodily composition is destroyed in that act? What if our resurrected body depends in some way on the condition of our body when we die?

Speculation about what the resurrected body is like has virtually nothing to go on. The accounts of Jesus’ resurrected appearances are highly stylized proclamations that do not seem to have been written to give us information for our questions. Probably the response of St. Paul to the Christians in Corinth is the most perceptive (1 Cor.15:35-36). When asked what sort of body the dead will have when they are raised, he replied that that was a foolish question.

Well, foolish or not, theology tries to answer it, speculatively but consistently with what is known from tradition as well as what is seen, maybe for the first time, in contemporary experience. The challenge to theology is to affirm the whole person while explaining the resurrection. How does theology do this?

Theological Reflection

A typical theology keeps the discussion of the resurrection of the body in its proper biblical context -- the resurrection of the dead. To isolate discussion and focus it on the body is a misleading theological direction. The resurrection of the dead conveys two important points. One is the whole person; the other is the communal or social aspect of resurrection.

Death affects the whole person, not just the body. It is incorrect, from a theological point of view, to say that only our body dies. The thorough, permeating dimension of death is better conveyed by the expression resurrection of the dead, which is also the biblical and early creedal expression. This is hard for many people to grasp today because we have become so accustomed to thinking of death as a separation of body and soul, implying that the soul is unaffected by death. But if the soul is embodied, indeed if the purpose of the human soul is to enliven bodily matter, then even a separation is a death for the soul in the sense that its purpose is over, its capacity to enliven this body is completed, its existence as an integral part of this bodysoul person is terminated.

In addition, the phrase "the dead" is a collective. It includes all those who have died. Whether we assume that each of us is essentially an individual who chooses to join others in various forms of social grouping or that each of us is primarily and inescapably social, the fact remains that death is a shared experience that ironically unites or confirms us in some social dimension. Consistent with this, resurrection conveys a social or communal event, the raising up of those who have died.

Given this holistic and communal dimension, a typical theology cannot say much beyond the fact that our bodies will be transformed through the resurrection. This event is generally associated with the end of the world but not much more is specified. For the most part, the biblical imagery of the end time is retained and the philosophical description of immortality (sketched in the previous chapter) is used. The two are put together without a great deal of harmony, and the questions of the cremated woman’s sister are not often dealt with. The result is a not very satisfying explanation of the resurrection of the body in the context of the resurrection of the dead.

Some modern theologians, relying on insights and suggestions from human development studies, have tried to describe a kind of total human process that goes on in and during the experience of death. In these descriptions, the person (e.g., the cremated sister) acts as the primary agent, finally shaping her whole life project and emerging as a whole into an immortal, afterlife state. Viewed from an immortal perspective (God’s), this could be called a kind of resurrection or transition from one form of bodysoul life to a new form of bodysoul life. The resurrection in this sense would occur at death rather than in some future time. The communal dimension is expressed in the fact that who she finally becomes is influenced by and includes all the others who have been part of her life in any significant way.

This approach appeals to many people, although it does not seem to do complete justice to the biblical accounts/expectations of the resurrection of the dead, and it seems to minimize God’s active role in the process. It cannot really be called a typical theology of resurrection because not that many theologians today advocate such a view, but it is a new explanation that tries to answer consistently the questions raised above. Such a view draws upon a relational understanding of reality and will be developed more fully later.

One of the goals of a typical theology of resurrection is to affirm the value and dignity of the body, even if we don’t know very clearly what happens or will happen to it in the resurrection of the dead. One of the most concrete ways this value and dignity is expressed is by the reverence/care shown for the corpse. How this is expressed will vary from culture to culture, or from time to time within a given culture. The customary practice in our society of embalming and publicly viewing the body is one way of doing this, but it is by no means the only way. Variations from the customary practice, however, are sometimes interpreted as a variation from the underlying value. That seems to be the case with the sister. She interpreted her sister’s cremation as a violation of her dignity.

She may have had other concerns, depending on how literally she understood the resurrection of the body to be a raising of this bodily material. Of course, for someone who believes that God can and does create out of nothing, recreating or reconstituting the ashes of a person would not seem to be that much of a problem. This degree of literal belief, however, does pose another, real problem because it tends to equate resurrection with resuscitation and perhaps to overidentify the resurrection with what happens to the body. When people make this identification, they lose sight of the faith proclamation about resurrection and reduce this great and hopeful mystery to a problem of chemistry and biology.

Respect is shown to the corpse, not necessarily because this body will be enlivened again one day to function more or less as it did during the sister’s lifetime, but because the sister’s bodiliness, concretized in and through this body, remains an inseparable dimension of her very existence. We can’t relate as directly or intimately to her existence now as we used to, but her corpse (or ashes) gives us some point of contact, some focus for our attention. It is no longer who she is, but it is a reminder of who she was. Whatever transformation has taken place or will take place in her existence, it is a transformation of an actual life that this corpse was integrally part of as her earthly body. It is that past and future life which is valued, and this is expressed by showing respect to the corpse.

These points fit in with a relational view of reality and can be amplified by looking more closely at that view and asking: How would the resurrection of the body be interpreted in a relational approach?

The foundation for a relational interpretation is the relation of the body and the soul. Other terms could be used to describe these two primary dimensions of human existence and experience, but these are the customary ones. In the last chapter, the husband’s new experience of his wife’s presence was explained as a radical new relationship that she had assumed to the world through death. Instead of the world being for her, she was now for the world. It was mentioned that during her lifetime, she was the center of her existence and the world provided her with the material out of which she created her relationships, i.e., who she was to be, her selfhood.

In a relational view, this pattern is found in everything that is actual. But the actual things we know most about are ourselves as human beings. Our experience of being alive is an experience of centering the world around us, of bringing the world into relationship with us, from our perspective. We cannot not do this and be alive. Now, the organizing, coordinating center of our existence is our selfhood or soul. This has two dimensions. One is the general nature or character of the human soul. Whatever it is that makes the human soul human and distinct from all other life-centering forces, that is the general nature of the soul.

But this general soul never actually exists except in relationships because nothing is actual unless it is in relation. So the soul is human at one level and simultaneously personal or self at another level. The second level is the level of concrete experiences, of particular occasions of relationship. Thus, in a relational view, there is no such thing as an unrelated human soul or a soul related only in general to the world. Actually to be a human soul, it has to be in relationship concretely, specifically.

Obviously, this understanding is in conflict with the classic Greek notion that the soul could and should escape its relation to the body and exist body-less in a totally spiritual realm. Such a view is neither possible nor desirable from a thorough and consistent relational perspective.

It is the concrete relationships of the soul that are of initial interest here and that are most accessible to us. The nature of the soul as such is known to us only through these concrete relationships since that is the only way we know anything. And the most significant soul relationship is the relation to the body. The body is the immediate environment of the soul, the physical point of contact with the available material world. How this intimate relationship originates is not the prime concern here but rather how the soul and body function together. They function in an interdependent way.

This means that they provide something indispensable for each other (just as the world provides God with actual experiences and God provides the world with ranked possibilities from those experiences). The body provides the soul with concrete, limited, definite, specific material to relate to; the soul provides the body with order, direction, harmony, coordination. The body’s contribution to the soul comes in numerous ways, through sensations, impulses, perceptions, location, etc., all of which are filtered through the brain. The soul’s contribution to the body comes in numerous ways also, through memory, judgment, intuition, imagination, etc., all of which are filtered through the brain. In this sense, the brain is the meeting place of the soul and body.

These interactions occur so rapidly that we are not aware of most of them. We become aware only of large-scale, dominant, and relatively final impressions. Our feelings, our thoughts, our movements, our sensory perceptions -- each of these is itself a clustering of innumerable interactions between the soul and the body exchanged through the brain. In all of this activity, the soul is constantly relating to, experiencing the body as its body, and the body is sensing the world as a world for its soul. There is an intimate "withness" that characterizes the relationship.

This may be detected by the way we speak of ourselves as acting. We do not say that we see what our eyes see or hear what our ears hear, as if our experience and the organs of our experience were separate. We say that we see with our eyes or our eyes see; we hear with our ears or our ears hear. Our language is accurate. We are verbalizing one of our most basic, intimate, complex experiences, and because it is so close to us, because it is our self experiencing, we tend not to be aware of it.

One of the implications of this view is that in every occasion of experience the soul and body are experiencing together. They do not experience the same thing together, but they experience themselves being together; they experience their intimate interdependence. This experience is repeated countless times in every instant, but each time is new and reinforces all the previous times while opening up into the next time. Until death.

At death this interdependent activity ceases. Whatever causes the cessation, the result is that the bodysoul interrelationship ends. Does anything remain? Yes, and this is where the general nature or character of the soul comes in. What remains is the accumulation of previous bodysoul experiences. This accumulation is housed in the soul because the soul has a capacity for order, coordination, harmony, synthesis, etc. This is characteristic of the soul, whereas the body is an ordered, coordinated, harmonized vehicle for supplying the "stuff" of experience. The body in this active respect does not remain after death; it becomes a corpse. But the body, in the sense of the intimate supplier of the soul with the primary data of its experiences, remains with the soul.

To translate this into somewhat more concrete terms: the cremated wife’s life consisted of innumerable relationships or experiences. In each one, her bodysoul was the way she experienced; indeed, she was her bodysoul experiences. This means her experience was what her soul (self) experienced of the world her body provided. Put another way, her soul experienced the world that was her body, the world mediated by her body. These experiences were the relationships that constituted her life, and every one of those experiences included a bodysoul relationship.

How does this relate to the resurrection of the body? Initially, it means that the body that is resurrected is the body as experienced in the lifetime of bodysoul relationships to the world. This bodily experience is not every occasion that was shared by the bodysoul. it is rather those occasions that the soul retains, reaffirms, includes, remembers, etc. Put another way, the resurrected body is the relevant body in the soul’s experience.

This is the unity, the wholeness, the integral and inseparable oneness that has been affirmed in the biblical tradition. This is the only actual body there is, and it shares in the destiny of the soul after death. The material construct that was the active body before death is now the corpse, no longer actually related to the bodysoul person who has died, and no longer relevant to the future (immortal) bodysoul experience.

In this view, the resurrection of the body is immediate, and the soul is the prime agent. Through the experience of relating to the body, which is an accumulated experience, the soul preserves the body as an integral part of its own experience. The soul could not eliminate this experience and still be the soul because the body is too intimately and integrally part-of the experiences that constitute the soul. The unity is unbreakable, but is it immortal?

The bodysoul experience just described is the initial moment or phase of the resurrection of the body. It is the foundation for the next moment or phase of resurrection, that provided by God. As mentioned previously, God relates to everything and everyone that is actual. The bodysoul experience after death is an actual experience that God relates to fully. In this act of relating, God keeps the bodysoul experience actual, in existence, and does so in the way described in the previous chapters.

But more than this, God relates this "resurrected" bodysoul to all the other experiences that God relates to, including in this comprehensive network all those who have previously died. In the terminology being used here, God relates each resurrected bodysoul person to every other resurrected bodysoul person. This is something only God can do. The soul of each person can resurrect the body of that person through the accumulated, uniquely intimate relationship generated through a lifetime; God resurrects that same bodysoul person by including it in the accumulating, uniquely comprehensive relationship generated by God’s experience.

This is not just an addition to the bodysoul resurrection. Without God’s inclusion, the bodysoul experience could not survive. It would be neither immortal nor resurrected in the full sense of the general resurrection of the dead. Only that resurrection endures, and only that resurrection is God’s to effect. In this way, a relational view affirms both God’s primacy and the resurrection of the dead, not just the resurrection of the body. In fact, the resurrection of the body would be only a momentary experience, passing out of actuality almost as soon as it became actual unless there were a resurrection of the dead to sustain it. And only God can resurrect the dead.

In this view, however, the resurrection of the dead is an ongoing, ever-increasing event. There is no real interim state between a person’s death and the final resurrection. There is a continual process of inserting each person with his or her personal bodysoul resurrection into the accumulation of others who have died and are given immortality by God. This seems consistent with a relational view, but is it consistent with our belief? The full answer to that question can only be given by looking at the next two chapters on judgment and the end of the world.

At this point, it is sufficient to note the following. In this approach, the unity of the human person is maintained. This means that the value of the bodily dimension is upheld. Moreover, that value carries over to immortality, while the unity of the bodysoul person is simultaneously affirmed by explaining more carefully in what sense the body is united to the soul and remains united after death. Finally, the resurrection of the body is integrally related to the resurrection of the dead as God’s act whereby each individual is related to all others through God’s relational experience. Thus, at bottom everything of ultimate value derives from God, which is what any theology aims at proclaiming.

Practical Implication

In the case that began this chapter, the sister was disturbed that her sister had been cremated. According to the theological reflection developed here, there is no need to be disturbed. She might have other concerns, especially relative to her sister’s husband, but cremation itself does not affect the eventual resurrection of her sister. Her ashes have a value as a concrete focal point for those who knew her, but the resurrection of the body doesn’t pertain to this remnant as such. This may not be easy to explain to the sister, especially if her own convictions are tied in with a very literal reading of Scripture. Probably the most effective way to communicate with her is to invoke God’s power to raise up her sister. The relational view presented here affirms the same thing but explains it quite differently. If a further explanation were needed (or if she could really hear it), it would follow along the line presented above. The key points are that we live and die as whole persons and we are raised to immortal life by God alone along with the rest of the dead.

Part of her disturbance over the cremation also stems from her own valuation of the body and the care she takes of hers. These values are worth affirming. From a relational point of view, the body is important; in fact, it is indispensable. The body is not just an instrument, used rather mechanically to get on in life until we are freed from its restrictions. The body is how we relate to the world, and the quality of our relating is partly dependent on the condition of our bodiliness. This important role of the body generates a respect for it, both in life and in death, but cremation isn’t necessarily a sign of disrespect.

More than anything else, questions about resurrection should lead to a reaffirmation and clarity about the primacy of God. No matter how we understand or explain resurrection, we can’t resurrect ourselves. Only God can do so, and God does so only in relation to everyone else, i.e., the resurrection of the dead. God seems willing to do this; in fact, God virtually needs to do so to be true to the divine nature of relating to everyone and everything fully. Not to resurrect someone would be to let that person simply die, pass into oblivion. This would diminish God’s perfection or fullness because there would be one less relationship than there could have been. This seems to suggest that no one is every excluded from God’s relationship. That has direct implications for the next topic: judgment.

Chapter 3: A Wife’s Premature Death: The Question of Immortality

Experience

A thirty-five-year-old man is sitting in front of the fireplace in his home. It is about 10:00 P.M. The only sounds are the muffled sigh of the burning logs and the occasional wail of the wind outside. It had been cold earlier that day when he buried his wife who had died after struggling for three years against cancer. Their children were staying with his mother-in-law for the night. He welcomed the quiet, the stillness, the time alone. Just then the doorbell rang.

The husband had a pretty good idea who would be on the other side when he opened the door. He invited his pastor in and they sat by the fire, sipping coffee and sharing periods of silence together. The husband seemed to be in control of his feelings and wanted to reflect on what his married life, and especially the last three years, had come to mean.

He and his wife had been married for ten years. They met when he was a commercial airline pilot and she was a flight attendant. They found they had a lot in common, including a strong religious background. They created a deep, loving, compatible relationship and felt their marriage had been very blessed, particularly with their children.

About three years ago the wife had gone for a medical examination because she had not been feeling quite right. She seemed lethargic and had lost some weight. A series of tests revealed that she had cancer, and her prognosis was not good. That news was shocking to her. At first, she thought of not telling her husband. She herself didn’t want to believe it was true or that it was as serious as the doctors indicated. Probably something could be done upon further testing, or maybe if she went on some special diet or therapy, the cancer would clear up.

But she couldn’t hide her concern, and her husband sensed something was wrong. She hedged, not wanting to worry him or perhaps hear herself say it. This made her feel more uncomfortable, as if she were cheating on him, but she just couldn’t believe this was happening. She began to think that maybe God could intervene or that she could be a living sign of God’s miraculous power. Maybe God wanted to use her; maybe God was asking something very special of her. She didn’t usually think of God like this, but other people seemed to be used in this way. She became more and more confused; then she decided one day to go to her pastor.

She did not know him very well, but she had been impressed by him. He seemed sensitive, concerned, and "with it." Comments from other parishioners confirmed her impression. When she first went to him, she really didn’t know what she expected. She just hoped that he could help. He did.

They talked initially about her feelings and her reasons for not telling her husband. The pastor described the typical stages people go through when they are faced with an impending and untimely death. She quickly realized that she had been denying the facts or trying to bargain with God to remove them. Under the pastor’s skilled lead, she saw for herself that what she needed to do was accept her death. She also acknowledged that she couldn’t do that alone. She needed her husband. And the pastor pledged his support as well.

The first several months after she shared the news with her husband were very trying. They both felt awkward and self-conscious. They became overly sensitive to cliches like "over my dead body" or "drop dead" or when someone would say something about their children graduating from school or planning a career. In general, they were interpreting their lives in a very solemn and sad way.

It was a struggle but with their own good will, effort, and prayer, with the help of available resources, and especially the consistent support and presence of the pastor, they began to emerge to a new level of acceptance. They could speak about death openly. They talked with their children about what the future would be like without their mother; they grew in sensitivity and appreciation of one another and life and everyday events; and most of all, they deepened their experience of sharing one life with God.

Near the end of her life, while she was in the hospital, the pastor visited regularly and kept in touch with her husband. They both felt as though the pastor had shared their experience as fully as a third person could, and they knew his presence had kept their faith strong. When she died, her husband and the pastor were both present, just as they were that morning at the funeral liturgy.

Now that the long period of adjusting and waiting was over, the husband and the pastor wanted to be with each other, to put a final, personal closure on their experience. They knew they had been through something together that was very profound, very unique, something that would change both of them as few other experiences could. The husband seemed most in touch with what it was.

He mentioned that since she died, he had a new sense of his wife’s presence in his life. It was a very real presence, not just a memory of her or reminders of how she would say and do things. That too was present and painful, because she was no longer here in that way and never would be again. It was the "and never would be again" that clutched at his heart and thickened his throat and brought tears to his eyes.

But along with those deeply human reactions, there was this other feeling of her real presence. It was strange, although peaceful. And it was unexpected, almost like a gift. This experience led him to ask questions: Am I just imagining this or is there really a new kind of presence I share with her? Does she feel the same thing? Does she feel anything? What kind of experience do the dead have? Do we share in it? What really happens to us after we die? And when I die, will I meet her? Will we be united and know each other? The questions went unanswered as both the husband and the pastor sat before this mystery and stared at the fire.

Theological Question

The questions that the husband asked are all part of the general question of immortality or afterlife. The questions arose for him because of a new experience he had of his wife after her death. Even though he had anticipated her death, the actual experience was different. There were some feelings he had not expected at all. And these led him in a new way into an area of his belief that he had always affirmed and accepted without too much exploration -- immortality.

Now, however, immortality took on special importance. It was more than another item in the Christian creed or part of a general value system and interpretation of life. Now, immortality had to do with his wife and their relationship. Often we hear and analyze and affirm certain things, especially elements of our faith, and not really feel their significance until an actual experience makes them relevant to us. But in that existential moment, what we have previously heard or understood may not seem very relevant to the experience itself, or we can’t recall anything that may be pertinent from what we know. There is a continual interplay between our experience and our previous learning/reflection. Each helps us appropriate the other in a new way and perhaps see things we never saw before. Every actual experience is a new opportunity to affirm our faith and to understand what it means.

In this case, the question of immortality is threefold. First there is the question of fact. Are we immortal? Do we live on after our death? There is no clear proof to decide this question once and for all. Philosophical and theological arguments in favor of immortality are not self-evident. Everything depends on how the available evidence is interpreted, whether the interpretation comes from the nature of the soul or the promise of God or the resurrection of Jesus. Whether immortality is a fact or not is something we must decide upon. This is one of the reasons why death is threatening to many of us. We don’t know for sure if there is any life for us after death. We may believe it in faith or be convinced of it intellectually, but we don’t have absolute certitude. So when a loved one dies, we feel the question, as the husband did: Is my wife really alive and present or is it my imagination?

The second question about immortality, presuming there is an afterlife, is: What is it like? What is the experience of living after death? Are we conscious and if so, are we conscious all the time or intermittently? Are we conscious of ourselves only, of others who have died, of God? Do we feel space, time, size, location? Is our awareness clear and immediate and concrete or is it vague, dreamy, loose? Are there emotions? Do we change? Is it essentially a continuation of this life or is it a radically new, unimaginable experience? The questions are as extensive as our present experience of life because what we really are asking is how similar afterlife is to our present life.

Many people feel they get a glimpse into this experience when they read (or themselves experience) the accounts of near-death experience. These accounts are undoubtedly revealing and intriguing, but since the persons who had the experience did not fully die, it is hard to conclude much from them about the experience after death. The accounts are limited to beginning a transition from this life to an afterlife.

The third question is clearly related to the second. Is the afterlife connected with the present life? Do those who have died continue to relate to those who have not died? And if so, what is this relationship? How extensive is it? And is it reciprocal? In the first chapter, the grandmother expressed her conviction that she would continue to relate to her loved ones after her death. She envisioned a very close connection between this life and the next. In the present chapter, the husband indicates that he feels his wife still relating to him but in a new way. Is the grandmother’s expectation correct or only wishful thinking? Is the husband accurate or only imagining?

The aim of theology is to respond to these questions as clearly and accurately as possible. But this is not easy because theology doesn’t have much to go on. God has not been very specific about the experience of the afterlife or the connection between that life and this one. Much is left to our speculation, and speculation on the unknown can give rise to some very inaccurate conclusions. Nonetheless, these are important questions, and theology should have something helpful to say about them. It may even have something new to say.

Theological Reflection

Theology’s typical response to the threefold question of immortality is drawn from a combination of philosophy (mostly Greek) and theology (mostly biblical). Philosophy is used to argue that at least the soul is immortal. This is because the soul has no parts. It is, in a technical sense, simple, i.e., uncomposed. Hence, it cannot disintegrate or break apart or die. In this sense, the soul is immortal.

In addition, the soul is understood to be spiritual, i.e., it is not confined to the space-time context of matter. Although the soul is united to the body during a person’s earthly life, it is capable of transcending that relationship and existing apart from space and time altogether. Indeed, in the Greek conception of things, this was the goal of soul life: to escape the created world of space and time in order to abide in its proper state of contemplative perfection.

This vision of the ultimate destiny of the soul accented its quality as intelligent and self-conscious. It is the soul that sees, understands, intuits, speculates, and contemplates. These are taken as the highest perfections of the soul and are approximated only slightly in this life, but they may be exercised more fully in the next. In such a view, this life, especially in its material, changing, limiting aspects, is seen as negative. There is no loss in death because all the forces that inhibit the soul’s development are discarded. Death is a liberating event that allows the soul to achieve its own potential. Much of this negative attitude toward the material world infiltrated Christian theology, but it never entirely supplanted the biblical appreciation of wholeness and unity, as we shall see.

This cluster of soul attributes frames an image of what life after death may be like. It is unending because the soul cannot die. There is nothing in it that can disintegrate or be dismantled. Similarly, afterlife is unchanging. This does not mean inactive or static. It means that there is no shifting from one condition to another, from good to bad, better to worse, perfection to imperfection. Thus, there is no hunger, no illness, no weariness, no aging, no forgetting, no misunderstanding, etc. Within the range of experience proper to the soul, there is only that type of experience, but also within this range there is constant freshness, intensification, growth, satisfaction, delight.

The most important characteristic of afterlife derived from this philosophical view of the soul is that it is conscious. The afterlife is a fully aware experience. This means that our self-awareness, our consciousness that we are acting subjects/persons is also true of our afterlife existence. Thus, the deepest sense we have of ourselves as living beings in time is how we perceive ourselves all the time in the afterlife. Of course, it is hard to imagine an afterlife that would have much interest for us if it were not conscious. But from a strictly philosophical point of view, whether we want a conscious afterlife or not, the nature of the soul insures it.

On the whole, this view of the afterlife has not been terribly appealing to most people. It sounds so removed, so distant, so abstract when compared with the human experiences that mean the most to us. Sometimes this view has even led people to deny their best human experiences and to try to act in this life as if they were already in the next life. But apart from such aberrations, this vision of afterlife just seems boring and not very attractive. And that is understandable because this description does not present the whole picture. A typical theology of immortality, drawing upon divine revelation as well as Creek philosophy, does present the whole picture.

There is more to the human person than the soul. This is what God has revealed to us, and theology affirms it by remaining in touch with God’s revelation in Scripture. The decisive testimony for Christians, of course, in this regard comes in reference to Jesus and what happened after his death. This central mystery of Christian belief is not easily or totally understood, nor do the Scriptures present a unified, crystal-clear explanation. What they do say, however, is that Jesus truly lives after his death, and it is the same, whole Jesus who lives, although he is now in a radically new relationship both to God and to his friends.

The primary way the Scriptures describe this is through the language and imagery of resurrection, which in turn is based on the experience of waking from sleep or coming to consciousness from an unconscious state. This was not completely adequate to express the first believers’ experience of the event, but it seemed to be more adequate than any other language at their disposal. The first believers were limited by their actual condition too. Resurrection certainly implies that there is life after death, just as there is waking after sleep. And resurrection assumes that it is the same, whole person who lives just as it is the same, whole person who awakens.

Resurrection does not express quite so clearly or obviously that the resurrected one is in a radically new relationship with others. In fact, resurrection is more likely to suggest that a person is resuscitated, renewed, restored to the same, even if refreshed, relationship as before. The resurrection of Jesus is something other than this. Of course, what examples or language drawn from our experience in this life would be adequate to express an experience none of us has had? The challenge in using resurrection language is to remember that resurrection means a new relationship.

This is where the philosophical notion of immortality connects. Resurrection and immortality are not exactly the same. Immortality defines the nature, the essence of something (like the soul) because of what it already is. It will never die or cease to be. But something could be immortal without being resurrected. Resurrection refers to a particular way of becoming immortal -- not by nature but by a special act. The act is special because it is not necessary and because it cannot be performed by the one who is resurrected. Typical theology expresses these two characteristics of resurrection as grace and divine power.

Thus, the resurrection of Jesus means that God graciously raised Jesus from death to immortal life. In doing so, God bestowed on Jesus a new relationship, one we acknowledge by the title Lord. In the resurrection of Jesus, Christians believe, God also revealed the destiny intended for each one of us. Beyond these assertions, a typical theology of immortality can’t be much more specific. It can, however, speculate. If we were to speculate further about immortality using the general relational approach of the previous chapters, what else might we say?

In a thoroughly relational view, everything depends on the relations. As long as a person, like the wife, is in relationship (to her husband, to the pastor, to her children, etc.), she is actual or alive. But when she dies, her relationality appears to die with her. She is no longer an active, deciding, feeling, responding agent. This does not mean that her death has no meaning. As described in chapter one, her death has meaning for God, for herself, and for others, but it is the meaning of her life as lived. That is finalized at death. When the conditions that enable her to relate break down and stop functioning, she dies -- she ceases to be in active relationship.

In such a view, there is no natural, necessary immortality, as in the classic philosophical view. There is no aspect of the wife’s relationality that somehow transcends the structure of her relationships and continues to exist on its own. She is what her relationships have been, and apart from them she is no longer. This is another way of saying that death is the end of our earthly journey. We truly cease to become when we die.

If immortality is to be maintained consistently in this approach, it must come from a source other than the person who dies. The survivors cannot bestow immortality. Even if they could keep the wife alive in memory for a while, they themselves are mortal, and eventually the memory would fade as it is passed on. Whatever immortality this kind of action generates, it would eventually cease. What about famous people whose memory is kept alive and passed on, or others whose descendants culturally honor their memory without letting it fade? What is being remembered in these instances? The whole person or only selected moments, experiences, accomplishments? Surely the latter. So whatever immortality we can bestow on others is at best temporary and partial.

The same is not true for God. As chapter one pointed out, God relates to everyone and everything fully. God has a perfect, complete relation to everyone who lives. In the case of the wife, God knows her actual existence fully, more fully than she herself. God relates to her in all her relationships and keeps them alive in God’s awareness or experience. To speak in human terms, if God wanted to, God could reenact her whole life once it has been lived. Would God want to do such a thing?

The answer seems to be, yes. Why? In order to give back to us what we originally gave God -- our experience, our concrete existence. our selves, except that in this return gift, there is something new. During her lifetime, the wife’s experience was primarily an experience of her selfhood. This does not mean she was selfish or doted on her own feelings. It simply means that she was an acting, feeling, thinking subject. She was the center of her existence. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been a person at all but a certain amount of energy or matter that would have been part of the total world but in no sense identifiable as this woman.

To be a subject is to be centered, to have a core of experience from which to relate to anything else. This core or center is one’s selfhood. As relationships change, the experience of oneself changes, but throughout there is a centering core that remains our selfhood. We recognize this process in stages of development, maturity, crisis, transition, etc. Relationships weave in and around ourself, constituting our actual existence. Everything that a person, like the wife, is in relation to is experienced as happening to her. In one very real sense, the whole world pivots around her; the way she experiences that world is her existence, her life, her selfhood. This is not by choice or an option; it is the nature of life in a relational world.

Now, according to what was stated in chapter one, the way the wife experienced her world, i.e., the world as centered around her, is a contribution to God and through God to others. It is a contribution because it is a unique experience of the world that only this woman will generate, and so it adds to God’s total experience or relationship. This is what God gives back to us -- our experience, our selves as God experiences us. This is the radically new element that God provides, that God alone can provide, and that gives us immortality because nothing In God’s experience ever fades or weakens or disappears.

So in answer to the first question about immortality -- does it exist -- a relational view would answer: If it does, it’s only because of God. This may seem evasive. It is, insofar as our own desire for immortality dominates the question. But Insofar as the primacy of God dominates, the answer is very clear and emphatic. God alone is responsible for immortality because God alone knows our actual selves so perfectly that God could reenact it and give it back to us. If God were to do so, what would that experience be like?

It would be the exact reverse of the experience a person, like the wife, had while alive. While alive, her experience was centered around her selfhood. The world existed for her insofar as it provided the material out of which she fashioned her relationships. And those relationships are who she is. Now that she has finally become who she is, her actual life is for the world -- or more accurately, for God and through God for the world. During her life, she could never experience herself in this way because to be living Is to be the center of her own existence. So for the first time she can experience herself as only for others. This may also be described as a feeling of being-with others as they continue to experience their world (including her) for themselves.

Seen in this way, there is a radically new relationship established after the wife’s death. It is a relationship that is possible, in its full sense, only after her death. If she is freed from anything through death, it is not the world as such, as the Greeks thought. It is the direction of her relationship to the world. Instead of the world being for her, she is now for the world. And she is for the world not as an element like any other (as one atom is like every other atom), but she is for the world precisely in her unique, actual, finalized experience. She cannot know what this is, but God does and that is what God gives back to us, something we cannot give ourselves. The reversal of relationship does not change her final experience of herself but situates it differently -- not in the particular series of occasions that constituted her life but in the ongoing mixture of occasions that constitutes others’ lives.

The reversal of relationship cannot be accomplished by the wife or by anyone else except God. Both God and others, however, have different contributions to make once the relationship has been reversed. God gives the wife back to herself as a whole because only God has experienced her as a whole. Others give her back to herself concretely, in particular, definite aspects because that is how they experienced her. God, of course, also knows what this experience is because God experiences everything and everyone fully. But because these concrete, actual experiences were initially generated in relation to particular persons, those persons can more effectively give them back to the wife. Thus, the particular feelings of her husband for her, what it is about her that especially delights him, how he would feel when she was around -- these types of experiences are brought into greater relief and intensified within the whole that God alone can give back to her. In this way, through God and others, the wife experiences herself anew; she has a radically new relation to the world; and she becomes immortal because God constantly reenacts her life experience even if others do not.

From this perspective, it is clear that her immortal life has a connection with this life. What that connection is, including the possibility of reunion with her husband when he dies, will be explained more fully in chapter five. Underlying this whole relational view is the conviction that everything is always related to everything else. The form of the relationship may alter, even radically; the quality or level of the experience in the relationship may change, even radically; but everything is interrelated or interdependent.

The foregoing is admittedly speculative. It seeks to be consistent with a relational view of life and to affirm what our faith reveals. In summary, we can say that an afterlife is not automatic or necessary or natural. It requires a special act of God. That act is manifested in the life of Jesus. What is described biblically as the resurrection may also be described as a radical reversal of a person’s relationship to the world. Instead of the world being for us, death enables us to be for the world, and God gives us back to ourselves in this radically reversed relationship. In doing so, God gives us back to ourselves as a whole, while those we related to in life give us back to ourselves concretely and specifically.

In this whole explanation, God is the primary and indispensable factor. Without God, most of our experience would simply be lost once it had occurred. Without God, there would be no possibility of genuine immortality. Without God, there would be no lasting connection between this life and the afterlife. If this is true as presented in the theological reflection above, does it shed any light on the husband’s experience and questions?

Practical Implication

The husband’s dominant feeling after the funeral was a new presence of his wife to him. He didn’t expect that and wasn’t sure if it was real or his imagination. Such an experience leads directly to the relational explanation offered above. From that perspective, when his wife died, he should have expected to feel her presence in a new way because she is in a new relationship to him. Death enables her to become fully for him (and others). This does not mean she wasn’t for him during her life. It means that while she lived, she was necessarily the organizing, unifying center of her life. From that indispensable core of her own becoming, she could be for him. Now that her becoming has ceased, she can be for him totally. Whatever that is specifically, he is feeling it both as real and as new.

There is another important aspect to this new experience. It is ultimately made possible by God’s gracious power to bestow immortality. If the husband is experiencing his wife now as immortal, it is because of God. But God’s causality in such an event is not external, remote, or predestined. It is like everything else in this view: relational, present, intimate. So, the husband is experiencing not just his wife in a new way but God as well, and he experiences God in a new way because his wife’s death, immortality, and presence are made possible only by God’s relational activity.

Finally, it could be suggested to the husband that his experience of his wife is not just receptive. His reaffirmation of her, his memory and feeling for her, his reenacting her presence is also a contribution to her immortal experience. He gives her back to herself in many specific, concrete ways, all of which let her know what she contributes to him. This knowledge is not like acquiring new information, which is characteristic of life before death. Instead it is a sense or feeling of what she has become for him. Without him, she would not know that concretely. And without God, she wouldn’t even be.