From an email I sent in 11/2003:
Yesterday I watched somebody die. It wasn’t anyone I knew. It was a Vietnamese or Chinese fellow –perhaps about 70 years old. He passed out suddenly in front of me. I pulled him up on the sidewalk, thinking that he was having a seizure. Paramedics arrived and did everything that they were supposed to do, the electric shock, the CPR. Cardiac arrest prevailed. There was nothing beautiful, nothing picturesque, or quaint in that vacant glassy stare and the gurgling sound coming out of his mouth. I thought it was obscene and hideous. I hated the scene so much that I felt compelled to hit the computer and spill out some reflections.
I remember well the big occasion in my life when death paid a call. The summer of 96 was when everything seemed to implode like a crash-dummy test film in slow motion. For a period of time it seemed like death was inevitable – stage four lymphoma – a T-cell lymphoma that had spread to the liver and to the bone marrow. My good friend, Andy, the RN with the unbearable gift of double-speak and “positive” thinking (a pet peeve of mine) stayed with me, taxi-ed me to places, and visited me constantly. He refused to talk about it though, and couldn’t stand to have me make passing jokes about the lymphoma. People have different coping mechanisms. I’m glad that I’ve been given a sense of humor.
My dad used to hint around at catechetical inquisition – “Are things right with God?” I love Dad, but his mind has been saturated with the academic material of turn-of-the-century Princeton Theology. Whatever hasn’t come from Hodge or B.B. Warfield has drifted in from English translations of 19th Century Dutch Reformed clerics. The mind-set carries a psychological reward with it – security – a catechetical check list for avoiding eternal damnation – repentance and faith, spelled out in detail, with stages and culminating definitive content. I’m not sure how I evaded discussion with him, but I managed.
I guess I left Dad with the impression that I passed the catechetical check list. I’m reminded of Martin Luther’s expression of anger against anyone who would “make Christ into a new law” – Luther didn’t mince words – “love God and do what you will.” –
“Papal decrees are the devil’s excrement.” I think that post reformation academic Theology did exactly what Luther inveighed against when it formed its intricate absolute definitions. The Council of Trent was simply the other side of the same coin.
I can remember the Leukemia Society placing me into a “support group” that was led by a woman who was well versed in the latest “New Age” gobble-dy-gook. She was one of those thin energetic types who never blink their eyes. I was that woman’s nemesis. She tried to tell suffering frightened people that they just needed to think pretty thoughts and all would be well. It was all in their heads, she maintained – the person with the biggest smile wins the game and pain is your own fault. I wanted to slap that woman so badly, and took a sadistic pleasure in torpedoing her sweet fluffy feel-good talk.
Christianity is always being influenced by the “Zeitgeist,” the current wave of thinking. Today mainline churches often preach about the enduring qualities of love – well, that’s nice and there’s truth there, but when you’re lying in a hospital bed and seriously considering the inevitable cessation of your own heart and the decaying of your own brain cells, you really don’t care much about the enduring qualities of love.
I don’t believe in programmatic escapes from ugly reality, but even so, death as an expression of Divine displeasure or rejection has a haunting, abiding truth to it. Speaking personally, I’m not worried about any literal “lake of fire” but the thought of annihilation remains a nagging possibility. Indeed, for Wolfhart Pannenberg (a contemporary German Theologian) the real meaning of hell is nonexistence. This is why the resurrection of Christ was so central and so vital to him – the resurrection as more than a metaphor for the life of the church or a narrative arising out of nothing more than thin air to be interpreted as the eternal value of love – blah, blah, blah, pass the collection plate. Christianity, says Pannenberg (and I agree) is able to address itself to the deepest longings of the human spirit.
Pannenberg was never childish enough to try to advocate the Easter story as a simple resuscitation of a corpse. His thoughts are unusual and fascinating. Resurrection appearances are appearances “from on high” – as indescribable as Paul’s analogy of the difference between the seed and the plant. Pannenberg speculates that something like a portal opens up between two entirely different modes of existence.
I’ve never seen a Theologian do this before, but he delves into German Anthropology for back-up on the notion that existence beyond death is fundamental to human nature. He mentions “Weltoffenheit” (openness in relation to the world) – “Umweltfreiheit” (environmental freedom) – Pannenberg’s footnotes contain extensive quotes from H. Plugge and A. Jores in which these Anthropologists discuss the formation of indefinable “hope” within the terminally ill – a hope in a future existence that in many cases arrises without a well defined object, so that they can confront an end that is no longer thought of as a “pit, nothing.” This seemingly unreasonable hope has a transforming power, and the Anthropologists even use the term, “saving” effect.
For Pannenberg the hope is given substance by Christ
• not the abstract Christ of Bultmann’s Kerygmatic message, but the historical Jesus.
Pannenberg insists that there is just as much reason to believe in the resurrection of Jesus as there is that a human being walked on the moon. Isn’t that a curious assertion to be made by a Theologian who is still alive today?
Pannenberg is excessive here and there, but I believe he is more real and more comforting than advocates of reincarnation, or the immortality of the human soul, or, (worse than either of these) the idea that comfort in the face of death lies in believing that “loves lives on after you.”
• Phil
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