(Ir)religiosity

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I ran across an interesting post yesterday over at Shuck and Jive raising the question of death and the prospect of facing death without belief in some sort of afterlife. The comments on the thread are really interesting even if the conversation devolves substantially toward the end.

At the same time I ran across the post I was reading Catherine Keller‘s process/poststructuralist review of Jürgen Moltmann‘s The Coming of God. At the risk of making too many tangential references and creating needless meta-connections, I want quote from the review at length as I think it speaks to not only the question of resurrection and afterlife but the larger issue of how we are to situate eschatology and human history.

Keller has her finger on the main problem (there are many).  Despite the ontotheological traces with which such a supernaturalist view is replete, it decidedly posits an ahistorical, nontemporal reality which supersedes, I would even say subsumes, the present.  Not to mention it provides a neat, terminally optimistic answer to the tragicomic nature of the human condition where the past is conveniently erased.  The problem, as Keller points out elsewhere in the essay, then becomes one of either rigid individualism in relation to the purpose of an afterlife or ontological essentialism in relation to human nature.  Rather than trying to write an equation where we can escape death itself Keller argues that we should, like Paul, strive to overcome the sting of death.  Here is the quote.

It does come down to the life/death relation. Moltmann pits life firmly against death, as he pits eternity against history and salvation against judgment. But perhaps Christians must learn to live more wisely and more gracefully with death. This would entail accepting the tragic dimension of the universe: the likelihood that the past evils cannot be redressed but remain in themselves incorrigible or pathetic. Tragic loss may be irreducible, as Kathleen Sands argues in her critique of feminist theological receptions of Christian eschatology, which also tend towards terminal optimisms. It may be treatable not by miraculous restorations but by the restorative activity of history itself—that is, in precisely the sense that time can heal if we let it. The mothers of the dead in El Salvador with whom I have communicated do not, as I hear them, wish for a literal and supernatural resurrection but for a far less selfish outcome, for the realization in history of the hopes for which they struggle, a realization not at all Utopian and absolute but of a decency that would have allowed their children to live full lives and die nontragic deaths. Is it possible that whatever we as a species cannot render resonant with our hopes, God cannot fix for us?

Perhaps then it is not death itself that should or can be overcome, but the sting of death. The path of this distinction is narrow. But no matter what tragedy confronts us, we may each choose to live a life centered in a widening spiral of relations and not in itself. By thus not seeking to save our projected future selves, we may find our present ones saved—in the lively interactivity of a past that will be remembered, a present that feels worthwhile, and a future that remains an adventure into mystery. Such a path, unlike does not expunge tragedy from the universe. But it can relativize, heal, and even transfigure its effects. It guarantees no afterlife solutions; indeed it teaches release from the clinging to separate individualities that demands them in the first place. We legitimately intuit the persistencies of re-membered lives and their unquenchable spirit communing among and ahead of us.

Might a counter-apocalyptic Christian eschatology suggest an alternative to [the] neo-apocalyptic sense of finality as well as to mere rejections of apocalypse in favor of banal, endless, linear time, what we might call a counter-apocalypse? It would glimpse the new beginning, sometimes amidst the endings, and so orient us to a process “always already” well underway, yet not already realized—indeed perhaps never finally and terminally realized. Why in the name of eschatological beginning, hope and opening should we close history down for an abstract, deathless eternity? Why not instead dis/close the inexhaustible, mortal timefulness that is our creaturely place? Why not open up the infinite complexity of time and space rather than assume we already know them well enough to leave them behind?

[The neo-apocalyptic] wants it both ways: attentive present life and expectation of nontemporal eternity. I am just not convinced that even the most faithful humans can or should handle anything more, cognitively or practically, than the disclosive and limited enactments of the basileia within history. Because I cannot imagine a natural world that does not unfold temporally, that is, through processes of “natality and mortality,” Moltmann’s Coming of God appears after all as a supernatural new Jerusalem descending from above, which, despite the author’s own prior christology of divine suffering and pneumatology of earthly life, does not merely transform but replaces this world with the next, as it replaces death with life, the basileia with the final glory, time with eternity.