They worry that if universalism is true, we have no free will–and that therefor life is meaningless. But they are wrong. In universalism, it is assured that each of us shall arrive at heaven; but perhaps how and when we get there is up to us. In that is the story of each of us, our meaning. One may watch a play knowing it is a comedy or a tragedy, and therefor knowing that certain important things about the end are inevitable. Does that make the play meaningless? Does it spoil it for us? Indeed, perhaps the inevitability of a certain kind of ending is the very thing that gives the rest of the play its meaning.
ON THE NECESSITY OF A GENERAL RESURRECTION OF THE WORLD
In these grim and dangerous times the forces of darkness conspire to make us despair and write ourselves off.
The problem with a conservative, or should we even say mainstream Christian eschatology, is that it implies that whereas resurrection is understood as overcoming death, as the person coming back from the dead with new life and new existence, thereby defeating death, there is no such equivalent for the world as such. (By “world” here I mean the world God made, and which has been transformed or built upon by us in history for better or worse.) That is, the commonly held eschatological attitudes seem to imply not that the world will die and be resurrected, but that it will die permanently, and be replaced by a new world. Though this new Earth may be immortal, the one it replaced will be dead forever. But in that sense and problematically, death’s victory over the world will be sealed as permanent. The individual my rise from the grave triumphant, but the world he or she had lived in will have been condemned forever.
Religion thus often exhorts us to be better people, to give over this sin or that one, to be more loving, or faithful, or truthful, or whatever. It does not claim that moral perfection is possible this side of the grave, but does say improvement is possible, and commanded by God. But at the same time, any real improvement in the politics of the world, its economic or social structures, is usually rejected by religion as either being in vain, or even outright blasphemous: an attempt to force the coming of God’s kingdom before God’s own good time.
But are our deeds, great and small, in the course of human history of any consequence in the long run, or are they not? Do we have ultimately no place in the creation as actual creators, or as J.R.R. Tolkien might have put it, sub-creators? Or must we as a species be stripped clean of all history and reformatted with entirely new programs, rendering the previous ones not only forgotten but vanished without a trace?
I am not talking about “salvation by works,” but the salvation of works. Do our works, our lives, our history as a species, have meaning or not? Nor can this question be escaped by asserting our works have nothing to do with our salvation. Might not works be important in the eyes of God without saving anybody?
If there is not some form of continuity between the dead person or world on the one hand, and the resurrected person or world on the other, there is no resurrection. Parents having another child after the first one dies is no victory over death, and no salvation of the dead child. Nor will it undo their grief, no matter how much they may be rejuvenated or rejoice in their new offspring. The idea of healing the deep family wound simply by replacing the beloved is obscene.
Likewise, there is something profoundly nihilistic in believing in resurrection of the individual, but not of the world. Individuals do not exist as such, detached from the world, any more than we find healthy rosebushes floating about in outer space. What makes the rose what it is, is in part its connection to its world via soil, light, water and air, all the surrounding insects and microorganism that are a part of its life. Likewise, if we are, as St. Paul says, organs in Christ’s body, then it is true as Donne says that “no man is an island, entire of itself.” For the full salvation of the individual, the salvation or redemption—not mere replacement–of the world is needed.
If there is no new Earth, a resurrected Earth that is, a reborn Earth, then what we have is fertile ground for frustrated and vengeful fantasies of annihilation. The Christian eschatologist writes for himself permission to look upon the destruction of the world with glee, as if he will be standing aside with hands on hips, nodding in approval as an ancient enemy gets its comeuppance. (Christian eschatology is far too often a way of allowing a sickening misanthropy hide out in the open.) We give ourselves permission to shit on the creation, even to destroy it, because, after all, it is doomed to eternal nonexistence in any case.
It is deeply revolting and an offense to reason to assert that while charity to the poor is smiled upon by the Lord, the improvement of economic systems such that such charity is not so much needed is seen as some kind of impiety.
God’s creation was and is good. And it is to be saved. And if we as individuals are to be saved, what we have made in this world, however much may have to be cast into the flames either for destruction or purification, was not given into our power to make only for us to make it in vain.
But in effect, with this mainstream eschatology, it is implied that we are to be like transplanted rosebushes. In so far as we thought we saw God in the world around us, even though we were also conscious of its terrible corruption, we were apparently deluded.
If history is to be wiped out, then it was always and already meaningless. Everything we have ever done is of no significance. But if that is so, why the relentless nagging of scripture and conscience to do this thing and not do that thing?
A priority of being over doing I can understand and tend to agree with. But the annihilation of the deed is nihilism.
C.S. LEWIS’S PHILOSOPHY OF HELL AND A NEW WORLD
C.S. Lewis never wrote about politics very much, but in the eighteenth letter of The Screwtape Letters he has his devil, Screwtape, say the following:
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.
This philosophy could be seen as what has always been the dominant politics of the world—or the sin of pride in its structural or corporate manifestation—whether the rulers were soldiers, priests, hereditary aristocrats, or business people. Capitalism, with its “war of all against all,” its social Darwinism, is the locus of the Devil’s philosophy in the current age.
Many Christians simply accept Churchill’s dictum that history is “just one damned thing after another.” Whatever he meant by that, they see it as an essentially meaningless and contemptible series of events and eagerly await the Christ to come back and wipe it all out, taking us to heaven. They are disappointed in life, and want it to be punished. And for what they imagine to be their admirable otherworldliness, they think they shall be rewarded with a new world that has no connection to and very little similarity to this one.
What is a resurrection? It is a rebirth, a new person, but a person not entirely discontinuous with the old person. It is the old person who has died but is transfigured and reborn. Otherwise, there is no resurrection, but simply the death of one person followed by his or her replacement by another who is entirely someone else.
Thus it is, I believe, with the new Earth that is destined to be born.
The Christian’s approach to history should not be that of an unloving parent troubled by a chronically and seriously sick child, hopefully counting the days down to when that child shall die and the parent be presented with a healthy replacement. The parent wants the child to be saved, not replaced, and this is what we should want for the world—not just for the individuals within it.
Much of Christian eschatology, unfortunately, is simply a disguised desire for genocide, geocide, even.