Harvard Divinity School

The Resurrection of the Soul

Author(s): John B. Cobb, Jr.
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), pp. 213-227
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School
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HTR80:2 (1987) 213 -27

THE RESURRECTIONOF THE SOUL *

John B. Cobb, Jr.

School of Theology at Claremont

After ImmanuelKant the issue of whetherthere is life after death moved to the
periphery in the writings of major Protestant thinkers. Of course, the great
eschatological images have continued to play a role. There have been discus-
sions of the resurrectionof the body and the immortalityof the soul showing the
differences in the anthropologiesunderlying the two forms of hope. But it is
usually difficult to determinewhat the theologian actually expects will happen
after death. The focus is on the symbolic value of these images or on their
existentialmeaning.
Yet the question of what, if anything, happens after we die has not disap-
peared from the range of human concerns. It has simply moved out of profes-
sional theology into other hands. Our sophisticatedequivocations on this topic
have contributedto our general irrelevanceto the religious interestsof our con-
temporaries.
I understandthe reasons for evasion all too well. The arroganceinherentin
the theological vocation-to speak of what we do not know as helpfully as we
can-comes to a certainpinnacle here. We do not know what happensat death.
To speak as if we knew, even when we stress that we are speculatingabout that
which we do not know, leaves us inwardly uncomfortable. But at least in my
own case, ambiguous assurancesand scholarly disquisitionsthat avoid taking a
clear position make me still more uncomfortable,as does refusal to addressthe
question. Some of my theological colleagues "know" that death is simply the
end and clearly announce their opinions. Such candor is admirable. But I do
not know that and see reason to doubt it.
The invitation to deliver the Ingersoll Lecture provides the opportunityto
state my opinions, uncertainas they are, as clearly as I can. In supportof these
opinions I can offer little argumentor scholarship. This lecture will be highly
confessional, and littered,I fear, with firstpersonpronouns.

*The Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality,delivered at the Divinity School, HarvardUniversity, 2

March 1987.
214 HARVARD THEOLOGICALREVIEW

On a matteron which our ordinarysystems of testing provide so little help,

some have argued that pragmaticconsiderationsshould be primary. To view
these as primarymay be going too far, but at the least they constitutethe context
of concern within which I approachthe issues. Accordingly, I shall devote the
first section of the lecture to brief comments on the pro's and con's of belief in
life after deathin termsof its effects on believers.
For me the balance tilts to the pro side of the argument. Nevertheless,believ-
ing what is beneficial to believe quickly evokes, also in the believer, the suspi-
cion of wishful thinking. The belief has to make sense in other termsin orderto
be sustained: it has to be relatively coherent with other beliefs. Indeed, it is
only among beliefs that have some initial plausibilitythat pragmaticconsidera-
tions can be genuinely operative. Hence, in the second section I shall consider
anthropologicalviews that rule out the possibility of life after death together
with my reasons for rejectingthem. I shall also outline anotherview, one that I
find convincing, whose implications are less unequivocal on the subject of life
after death.
The third section will consider the question of life after death again in terms
of this anthropology. I conclude in favor of the likelihoodthat there is continua-
tion of life beyond the grave. I call the form of life after death I find plausible
"the resurrectionof the soul."
The fourth section returnsto the question of the consequence of belief. If
belief takes the form proposed,does it matter? And if it matters,what would its
effects be?
A brief concluding section turnsto eschatology. What is the End? It surely
cannot be simply to live on everlastingly. I propose a different idea of "the
resurrectionof the soul" as a more trulyeschatologicalvision.

As a SouthernerI learned in my youth of a not uncommon practice on the

part of the cotton mill owners. In those days the mills in my part of Georgia
were not unionized. Obviously there were efforts on the part of unions to
change that situation,and there were nationallaws that gave them some support.
But the mill owners also had a weapon-religion. When union organizerscame
to town there was likely to be a lively revival as well. By focusing attentionon
life after death, the efforts to gain a little power in this world were made to
appear short-sightedand sordid. The Marxist view of religion as the opiate of
the people received remarkablyconcrete illustration.
The role of religion in securingacquiescence in social injusticeon the partof
the oppressedis not limited to Christendom.There can be little doubtthat views
of transmigrationhave worked this way in southernAsia as well. Wherepeople
see their lot, and that of all others as well, as the just working out of the conse-
quences of previous lives, resentmentis blunted. It is more importantto accept
 JOHN B. COBB, JR. 215

one's situationand performone's role well thanto seek to change the system.
Often belief in life after death is bound up still more directly with sanctions
enforcing the behavior and opinions favored by earthly authorities. The fear of
hell has been an importantmotive instilling conformity to social requirements.
Some of these requirementshave been real necessities, but many of them have
been little more than means to impose submissionon the victims.
There are also subtler negative effects of belief in life after death. Even
when this belief is in the form of the resurrectionof the body, it has tended to
downgrade this empirical body in this concrete natural environment. The
resurrectionof the body in the Christiantraditionhas rarelybeen taken to mean
the continuationor renewal of sexual activity, for example. When the doctrine
takes the form of the immortalityof the soul or transmigration,the dualism of
soul and body is marked, with the priority falling on the soul. Those who
believe that the freeing of the body from all repressionis essential to becoming
whole have good reasons for suspicion of virtually all forms of belief in life
afterdeath.
Freeing ourselves from fear of consequences in the beyond and focusing
attention on the here and now in all its concreteness and fleshiness can have
powerful liberatingand healing effects both sociologically and psychologically.
For this reason one could hold that even if there were considerableevidence for
life after death it would be betterto suppressit. A more moderateposition, one
with which I feel considerable sympathy, is that one life at a time is quite
sufficient. If we make the best of this one, we should be in better position to
deal with another,should it occur. Hence, it is wise to drop the topic and give
all our energy to the here and now.
The problemwith this solution is that not all the consequences of ignoring or
rejecting life after death are positive. At a very deep level the belief that we
should treatanotherhumanbeing as an end ratherthan simply as a means to our
own ends is bound up with the belief that we are dealing with anothersoul and
not simply a body. If people are only bodies, it is hard to see what is wrong
with slavery. Indeed, Whiteheadhas shown how it was the Platonic doctrineof
the soul thatover a period of two thousandyears undercutthe acceptanceof this
institution.
Statedmore generally, the presumptionin favor of humanequality arises pre-
cisely from the belief that humanbodies are ensouled. Simply as bodies we are
far from equal. The self-affirmationso importantto the oppressedas they assert
themselves against the oppressordepends on belief in the soul. In this way the
death of the soul in the Westernimaginationthreatensto underminemuch of the
best in the Western achievement. There is ample reason to be concernedfor its
resurrection.
Such resurrectiondoes not necessarily entail belief in life after death. We
can imagine a society which felt deeply the ensouled characterof humanbodies
216 HARVARD THEOLOGICALREVIEW

without believing that souls survived the death of the body. In this way no
doubt the most dangerousconsequences of the loss of soul in the Westernimag-
ination could be avoided withoutrenewal of belief in life after death. This pos-
sibility is largely hypothetical,but I mention it because, should it be realized,
my greatestworriesaboutthe deathof the soul would be eased.
From time to time, however, I hear another voice, one I cannot ignore. It
reflects Paul's cry that if there is no resurrectionof the dead, we are of all peo-
ple the most miserable. Perhaps,we are told, those of us whose lot has fallen in
pleasant places can contemplateextinction with equanimity,but for the masses
whose lives are chiefly deprivationand misery this is intolerable. And it should
be intolerablefor us as well, as we view the slaughterhousethat is history.
The debate does not end here. There is truthalso in the response that if we
learned to accept what is given to us here and now as the one and only reality,
history might cease to be a slaughterhouse. Certainlymuch of the fanaticism
thathas driven us to mutualdestructioncomes from our refusal to accept what is
as it is, our demand for something more. Yet for me that truth in the call to
accept the given and live it in full immediacydoes not silence the outrageor set
aside the importanceof the questionof life after death.

II
We cannot resurrectthe idea of the soul at will. The painful consequences of
its deathdo not suffice to restoreit to life. We can believe in the soul only if we
have an idea of the soul that makes sense in relationto other ideas we find con-
vincing. I, for one, cannotbelieve in the reality of the soul describedby Plato or
Descartes, because I cannot reconcile its existence with my own experience or
general belief system. Even if I really wanted to be persuaded, I could not
believe. This means I cannot entertainthose ideas about life after death that are
associated with those doctrines.
The dominant anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has
generally made any belief in life after death difficult if not impossible. It has
broken with the dualism of soma and psyche that left the sphere of the soul to
theology, and it has undertakento explain the functioningof the psyche by care-
ful examinationof the soma, especially the brain. The importantdiscipline of
physiological psychology has pursued this programwith many successes. For
orthodoxpractitionersof this discipline, the soul is necessarily epiphenomenal.
That is, events in the soul's life are exhaustively caused by events in the brain.
These brain events are purely physical and are to be explained in the matrix of
otherphysical events.
Probably the most influential school of philosophical reflection on these
mattersat the present time is psychophysicalidentism. The identists accept the
reality of the soul or psyche, but insist that it is not an entity distinct from the
body or soma. Psyche and soma are simply two sides of the same coin. In fact
 JOHN B. COBB, JR. 217

the implications are little different from those of epiphenomenalism,since the

identistsusually seek the deeper explanationof events in the somatic realm.
Among recent Protestanttheologians the dominant emphasis has been the
rejection of the immortalityof the soul as a Greek doctrine opposed to Jewish
modes of thought. In reaction against this doctrine there has been a strong
emphasis on the goodness of the body and the indissoluble unity of body, mind,
and spirit. Some have then gone on to speak quite seriously of the resurrection
of the body as a symbol of that for which they hope. But the absurdityof any
literal doctrine of the resurrectionof this body has meant that the overall result
has been to work againstbelief in life afterdeath.
Clearly if either epiphenomenalistsor identists are correct, or if body and
soul are as indissoluble as much recent Protestanttheology has taught, there is
nothingcapable of living or being given new life when the body dies.
There is a question,however, whetherthe evidence uncoveredby physiologi-
cal psychology supportsthe orthodoxyof thatdiscipline and the relatedviews of
philosophersand theologians. Some of its most distinguishedpractitionersthink
not. Sir RobertEccles has long arguedthat conscious humanexperience and its
decisions affect events in the body as well as being affected by them. He is a
dualist, claiming to follow Descartes, although his affirmationof interactionis
clearer than is that of Descartes. More recently Roger Sperry has been con-
vinced duringthe course of his studies of the right and left brainthat conscious-
ness is a causal agent in the course of events in the brain. He tries to avoid dual-
ism by using the part-whole model, considering consciousness as the whole
resultingfrom and affecting the neuronsas parts.
I am pleased thatempiricalevidence within physiological psychology mounts
against its historical, reductionistpretensions. But my own conviction that the
soul is not a mere by-productof bodily processes does not depend on the sup-
port of such scientists. Since it is clear that the orthodoxy of physiological
psychology has always been based on the dogma of modem science ratherthan
on empirical evidence, since that dogma is collapsing on all sides, and since it
runs contraryto my own experiences, I feel quite free to think it wrong. My
immediate awareness that my fingers, in the process of typing, are affected by
my thoughts and decisions suffices to assure me that my conscious experience
exercises a real agency in the world. I cannot prove that this appearanceof
agency is not an illusion, but so far as I am concerned the burdenof proof falls
on those who would argue that such fundamentalelements in experience are
illusory. And their very effort to prove it seems inconsistent with the dogma
they set out to prove. The problem for me is not belief in my own agency but
putting this together with other beliefs in a coherent whole. Neither Eccles'
dualismnor Sperry'spart-wholemodel works for me.
It is at this point that I am indebtedto Alfred North Whitehead. He has pro-
vided a way of understandingthe psyche and soma that seems true to my
218 HARVARD THEOLOGICALREVIEW

experience and fits the facts as othershave discoveredthem throughexperiment.

The key move is to shift from psyche and soma as substantialentities to psychic
and somatic events or experiences. Whitehead shows that these have much in
common;indeed, their differences are a matterof emphasisand degree. Psychic
events have a physical component. Somatic events have a mental component.
But, of course, the meaning of physical and mental when applied to events or
experiences is quite different from its meaning when applied to substantial
things. The physical aspects of events are their relations to other events. The
mental aspects are their relations to unrealizedpossibilities. Since both sets of
relations help to constitute all events, everythingis dipolar: physical and men-
tal.
Every event or experience is social throughand through. That is, it is consti-
tuted largely by relations to other events. Bodily events are related to other
bodily events, but also to psychic events. Psychic events are related to other
psychic events but also to bodily events. All of these relationsinvolve causality.
Past events are causally efficacious in present events, which means that they
participatein the constitutionof presentevents.
Perhapsit will help to considerwhat is takingplace as your experience in any
moment. It consists largely in an inpouring of stimuli from the brain and
throughthe brainfrom other partsof the body. But it is also deeply affected by
the influence of your past experiences, especially the most recent ones. As you
hear the end of one of my words you are influencedby the hearingof the begin-
ning of that word. Otherwise, you would not hear a word at all. And, indeed,
the hearingof earlier words making up the phrase,the clause, and even the sen-
tence must still be influentialif what I am saying makes any sense to you at all.
But your experience is not simply the vector resultantof these causal effects.
Experience is also activity. You do something with what comes to you, you
interpretand order it in some way. You make decisions. And those decisions
affect what happensin your body.
This transcendingof what pours into us from the past, this dimensionof orig-
inality, freedom, and decision, is something we tend to take for granted. Yet it
is quite mysterious. Whence comes the power to be more than what the world
constitutesus to be? It is here thatWhiteheadfinds the divine. Apartfrom God,
determinismwould reign unchecked. It is to God's immanence in us that we
owe our freedom.
In a world of events there is no underlyingsubstance, no substantialself or
person, to whom the events happen. There is only the flow of experience itself.
The soul is the succession of human experiences, each inheriting from past
experiences in the succession with some peculiar fullness. Conscious memory
is part of this inheritance,but certainly not all. You are the same person you
were yesterday or last week partly because you can recall experiences that
 JOHN B. COBB, JR. 219

occurredthen. But those experiences continue to shape who you are now even
when you forget them.

III
If the soul is like this, how are we to thinkof what happensat death?
First, traditionalargumentsfor immortalitybased on the natureof the soul do
not work. These argumentsassume thatthe soul is profoundly,even metaphysi-
cally, differentfrom the body. The presentproposalis that we think of the soul
as made up of the same kind of entities as are bodies, humanand others,namely,
events that have both physical and mental characteristics. Such events no
sooner happen than they are over. Far from being immortal,they are transient
in the extreme. Whitehead takes over from Plato and Locke the phrase "per-
petual perishing" to characterizeall worldly things. This applies as much to
psychic events as to somatic ones.
Second, a literal transmigrationof a soul makes no sense. Transmigration
implies that the soul is an entity underlyingthe flux of experience in a human
life and thus capable of separationfrom this life to become the basis for another.
If instead the soul is nothing more than the flow of personalexperience, there is
nothingthatcould transmigrate.
On the other hand, much that has been meant by the immortality and/or
transmigrationof the soul is not excluded from continuingconsideration. Let us
returnto the more general question of life after death. What could that be if the
soul is a flow of personal experience? The new form of the question would be:
Are there experiences after death that can be considered to be additional
members of the series constituting the soul? If so, their relation to those that
constitutethe soul when the body is alive must be similar to that of our present
experiences to our past ones. Are there, then, experiences after death that
rememberthose that occurred during this life and are otherwise influenced by
them in peculiarlyintimateways?
My most basic answer is that I do not know. But having said that, I shall
proceed with the speculationin two stages. First,are such experiencespossible?
Second, if so, are therereasons to believe they occur?
Among those who hold to the general view of the soul I have outlined, some
believe that such experiences cannot occur after the death of the brain. Their
reasons are straightforward.The complex and rich experiences that make up the
human soul have for their immediate environment the marvel of the human
brain. Indeed, humanexperience is primarilythe unificationof the many events
that constitute the brain or certain portions of the brain. An experience occur-
ring in a different environmentwould have to be fundamentallydifferent, since
it would be the unificationof quite differentevents. No such events could possi-
bly have the kind of relationto this sequence of events that the latermembersof
this sequence have to the earlierones.
220 HARVARD THEOLOGICALREVIEW

Whitehead'sown views are not so strict. There is no questionfor him of the

importantcontributionto humanexperience of the events in the brain. But there
are three ingredientsin an occasion of human experience that are not directly
dependenton the brain.
First, the relation of one momentaryhumanexperience to its predecessorsis
unmediated. To understandthe point, consider again your experience as you
hear the end of a word in its relationto your experience as you heardthe begin-
ning. One theory is that the earlier experience is "stored" somewhere in the
brainand then released to effectiveness. But thoughthis is plausiblewith regard
to events in the remote past, it is much less plausible with regardto immediate
predecessors. The earlierexperience of a fractionof a second ago seems to flow
into the presentone-not to be recalled from a memory trace. The brain, to be
sure, plays a large role in the productionof both experiences, but the relationof
the two is direct-not mediatedby the brain.
Second, there is the questionof extrasensoryperception. In comparisonwith
Bergson and James, Whitehead devoted little time to considering this.
Nevertheless, he saw and affirmedthathis basic conceptualitywas fully open to
it. He taughtthat every event is affected by all the events that have occurredin
its past. The only question is whetherthis influence is always mediatedthrough
contiguous events. That is, in the case that interestsus here, does your experi-
ence affect me now only as mediatedthroughbodily events in you, events in the
space between us, and bodily events in me? Or are there, in addition to these
routes of transmission, also unmediated effects? Whitehead's conceptuality
somewhat favored the latter alternative,but it left the question of there being
any significant "action at a distance" open to empiricalinquiry. In physics the
issue was primarilywhether gravitationis mediated througha field. Although
this is not really settled, the strongpreferenceof physicists is to avoid action at a
distance by postulatinga gravitationalfield. Whitehead accepted this, at least
provisionally, but he thought that there is evidence of unmediatedeffects in
"peculiar instancesof telepathy,and from the instinctiveapprehensionof a tone
of feeling in ordinary social intercourse."* Developments in physics since
Whitehead wrote, especially the evidence for Bell's theorem, have renewed
interestin the possibility that such unmediatedinfluences do play a role in phy-
sics, but for our presentpurposesthese issues are not essential.
The occurrenceof influences from others that are not mediatedby the brain
in no way denies the importantrole of the brain. Without doubt in all ordinary
experience, most of the content of consciousness is mediated by the brain.
Whitehead thinks of mediated and unmediatedfeelings as "hopelessly inter-
mixed." But the implicationcould be that when the brain activity has ceased,

*Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality (correctededition; ed. David Ray Griffin and
Donald W. Sherbure; New York:The Free Press, 1978) 308.
 JOHN B. COBB. JR. 221

the unmediatedinfluence is clearerand more effective.

Third, God is immediately present in the constitution of every experience.
God's role is complex. It is primarilythat of offering possibilities for creative
novelty, as indicated earlier. Yet this very offer also establishes the spatio-
temporal locus from which the world is appropriatedinto the experience.
Without this gift of God there is no experience at all. With it, there is. God's
role is thus critical for both the occurrence and the form of every occasion of
experience.
Once again, God's role in our experiences in this life is intimatelybound up
with the bodily characterof our existence. The possibilities God offers us are
those that are relevantto this embodied condition in all its particularityand con-
creteness. Nevertheless, God functions in all events whether or not they are
located in the humanbrain.
From considerationsof this sort Whiteheadhimself concludes that life after
death is possible. So far as we know, he did not investigate such evidence.
Indeed, he showed little interest in the possibility of such survival of death.
Most emphatically,there is nothing in his conceptualityto arguefor the fact of
life after death. What it provides on this issue is simple neutrality.
What then of evidence? Globally considered it is probable that the largest
amount of evidence is for something like transmigrationof the soul. I have
already said that in a literal sense this is quite impossible on the theory of the
soul I have offered. There is simply nothing to migratefrom one sentientbeing
to another. But within those culturesthat have been convinced of this doctrine,
a similar adjustmentin conceptuality has already taken place. Buddhists long
ago denied the existence of an underlying self or soul--atman-that could be
embodied in a succession of sentient beings. Nevertheless, Buddhistsin south-
ern Asia retained the doctrine of transmigrationin a transformedstate. For
them, just as personal continuityoccurs in one humanlife without benefit of an
actual ontological identity underlying the events, so also it continues beyond
death in quite different experiences. The identity is karmic. That is, the new
occasions inheritthe effects of the earlier ones with peculiarforce and determi-
nation.
The chief evidence for this view is "memory" of earlier lives. It seems that
some people do have memory-like experiences of events that occurred before
their birth. There are special psychic states in which these recollections are
most likely to occur, and these have been cultivatedespecially in India. Under
hypnosis such "memories" can occur more readily. It is difficult to determine
whether such memories are more than pure fantasy, but for those willing to be
persuadedthe evidence is reasonablygood.
To me the occurrence of such experiences is evidence that the unmediated
effectiveness of past experience in the present is not limited to contiguous or
very recent ones. I believe that the flooding in of more distant memories from
222 HARVARD THEOLOGICALREVIEW

my childhoodcan also representsuch unmediatedinfluence. Furthermore,there

is no radicalontological difference between the way I am relatedto my personal
past and the way I am related to the past of others. It is possible, though cer-
tainly rare for most of us, to "remember" events in the lives of others. This
apparentlyincludes the lives of persons in the remotepast.
I have used language that is quite differentfrom that of transmigrationin the
Buddhistsense. Yet one might take my statementsas justifying thatview. They
do not, and I can explain in a quite Buddhistway why I reject transmigration.
Each momentaryhuman experience is an instance of pratitya samutpadaor
dependentorigination. This means that it is constitutedby the coming together
of all other things and especially its immediateenvironment. Among the things
in the inclusive environmentthat jointly give rise to the experience are other
people including those long dead. Some of these may, for diverse reasons, play
a particularlyimportantrole in the arising of experience. Some of their experi-
ences may even be consciously "remembered."
If this is correct, then personal continuity in this life is a matterof degree.
Such personal identity as exists throughtime is based on the particularimpor-
tance for the present experience of one series of past ones. It is greatly
strengthenedin ordinarylife by the markedcontinuity of our bodies. But even
so it is far from absolute. When bodily continuity ceases, it will be further
reduced. If there were a new body involved, that would involve so radical a
discontinuitythattalk of some past personas being oneself in a previousembod-
iment is fundamentallymisleading. For this reason I deny the reality of transmi-
gration.
Let me add here that this is not a critique of Buddhism in general. On the
contrary, it is in agreement with many Buddhists who have demythologized
transmigrationat least as radicallyas many Christianshave demythologizedthe
resurrectionof the body. I have carriedthroughthe argument,not against Bud-
dhism, but against a growing popular movement in this country that takes
transmigrationmuch too literally.
While not justifying the doctrine of transmigration,the evidence that there
can be memory-like experiences of past persons strengthens the theory that
human experience has unmediatedrelations with much of interest and impor-
tance. Much that is experienced in this life only under very extraordinarycir-
cumstances might be experienced more vividly where the interventionof the
brainceased. We can imagine a rich social life on the partof such experiences.
But is there any evidence of their occurrence? In Christiancircles the evi-
dence normallyappealedto is thatof the resurrectionof Jesus. I accept this evi-
dence. But my relationto it is like that to all other evidence. Isolated elements
in experience that are discordantwith all the rest will not become part of my
belief system. If an isolated element is inherentlyconvincing, it may prompt
reconsiderationof the other elements in the matrix of beliefs, but if such
 JOHN B. COBB, JR. 223

reconsiderationyields no change, then the isolated element will at best be brack-

eted and ignored. Usually I assume that it is wholly illusory. Hence for me the
question of the evidential value of the resurrectionof Jesus depends on whether
such a resurrectionmakes any sense in relationto more clearly supportedbeliefs
and on whethersimilarevents are attestedelsewhere.
I have alreadyindicatedwhy I thinkthatwhile there can be no immortalityof
the soul there can be a resurrectionof the soul. It is not inconceivable that God
calls into being new occasions of experience that have strong continuity with
those of a person who has died. It is not impossible that such occasions of
experience be effectively felt by others who are still alive. That such feeling
could result in the projection of visual and auditory elements seems evident,
since such projection occurs readily in dreams. Hence seeing and hearing the
resurrectedJesus, as reportedin the New Testament, seems to me understand-
able. In addition, there are numerous accounts of other cases in which a
recently deceased loved one is seen and heard, sometimes before information
aboutthe person's deathhas been received. To me these stories are persuasive.
Another set of accounts that persuadesme that there is life after death is that
of deathbedscenes and near death experiences. The greetings by those dying of
loved ones who have died could be easily explained as hallucinatory, but
expressions of surprise at seeing someone whose death was not known to the
dying one are harderto explain. Similarly,the memory of leaving the body and
then rejoiningit, that is reportedby some whose heartshave briefly ceased beat-
ing, are not easy to dismiss.
Since I am speakinghere only confessionally, I am not tryingto amass objec-
tively convincing evidence. Others have undertakenthis task. But the amount
and kind of evidence needed is a function of the view of reality of the one to be
convinced. For some, the evidence is merely confirmatoryof already well es-
tablished beliefs. For others, no amount of evidence would have any effect.
One who is fully predisposednot to believe can always suppose that eventually
another explanation will be found. In my case, I do need evidence-but not
overwhelminglymore thanI need in other areas of thought.

IV
Thus far I have explained that some kind of resurrectionof the soul is con-
ceivable to me and that there is sufficient evidence to lead me to accept it. This
brings us back to the pragmaticissues touched on earlier. Does belief in this
sort of life after death make any difference now?
My judgmentis that it does. As I statedearlier,on balance I thinkthat belief
in life after death adds to the sense of the importanceof the humanperson. This
applies both to one's sense of one's own importanceand to the public sense that
all persons have a worth that cannot be fully measuredby their contributionto
society. The belief I am proposing does not supporta doctrine of the infinite
224 HARVARD THEOLOGICALREVIEW

worth of the humansoul or of the sacrednessof humanpersonality. But it does

argue that we cannot be measuredadequatelyby the usefulness or attractiveness
of our bodies or even by their capacity for enjoyment. It does not supportthe
full pretensions of humanism, but it does check the reductive tendencies of
much naturalism.
When we go beyond this to the range of the existentialeffects of the idea that
there is life after death, everythingdepends on the form that belief takes. If it is
supposed that life after death is more perfect than life now, then the absence in
that life of anythinglike our presentbodies certainlycan lead to depreciationof
the body here and now. On the other hand, if with Homer we picture life after
death as a pale and inferior continuation of this life, then there may be
heightened appreciationof the special opportunitiesand joys of fully embodied
existence. Or if life after death is picturedin terms of imposed punishmentsand
imposed rewards,then certainrequirementsfor insuringthe rewardsand avoid-
ing the punishmentsare likely to receive undue attention, seriously distorting
this-worldly valuation. On the other hand, if the punishmentsand rewardsare
picturedas inherentin the characterof the resurrectedsouls, this type of distor-
tion is unlikely to occur while the value of attaining emotional and spiritual
health can be enhanced. Depending on how life after death is conceived, it can
be a source of great comfort or of great terror. It can strengthenthe sense of
worth and rights that nerves for the struggle for justice, but it can also lead to
resignationto social injustice.
Given the great variety of possibilities and their markedlydifferent implica-
tions for life here and now, and given our near total ignorance,I find myself fal-
ling back on my understandingof God. I cannot imagine that God's grace and
judgmentwill functionvery differentlybeyond the grave thanon this side. Here
we experience God as both grace and judgment according to whether we find
God's call from moment to moment an opportunityor a disturbingthreat. I
assume it will not be so differentafter death. In this respect I like C. S. Lewis's
The Great Divorce. In that vision the possibility of leaving hell for heaven is
never closed. The suffering of those in hell is self-imposed. Francis
Thompson's image of the "hound of heaven" adds to this point another,that
God never gives up on anyone. Freedom,the possibility and necessity of deci-
sion, are inherentin creaturelylife itself, and that means also in life after death.
The idea that decisions made here and now unchangeablydetermine our des-
tinies in a life afterdeath has played a large and distortingrole in our heritage. I
cannot reconcile it with my understandingeither of God or of the creaturely
condition.
Another importantquestion is that of everlasting life. Taken straightfor-
wardlythis means thatpersonalexistence would go on forever. At one time that
seemed quite desirable to many people in the West as long as this everlasting
existence would be a heavenly one. But today many find it far more
 JOHN B. COBB, JR. 225

problematic, and I number myself among these. In India its negative aspects
have been in view far longer. The problem of salvation there has been to bring
personal existence to an end throughthe full realizationof oneness with Brah-
man or throughextinction of the last traces of clinging and illusion. In the West
the revulsion against everlastingness has led to efforts to formulate a salvific
End in nontemporalterms. Life Eternal,we are told, is a matterof qualityrather
than quantity. The fulfillmentof humanbeings will also be the end of temporal
passage.
The conceptualityhere offered provides no reason to suppose that personal
existence would go on forever. One may speculate that it will continue as long
as one desired thatit do so. When one ceases to cling to it, one may, as the Bud-
dhist supposes, be extinguished. Or one may think of its end in a somewhat
more positive way. Agreeing with Buddhiststhatpersonalidentitythroughtime
is not a metaphysicalreality and holding that personal continuity is a matterof
degree, one may conceive a lessening of this degree. In every moment even in
this life we come into being throughthe coalescence of many things. And what
we become in that moment enters into the constitutionof many things. There is
a special relationto certainpast events, and we project a special relationto one
set of future events, and this one sequence of events becomes ourselves as per-
sons retaining identity throughtime. But that tight connection to one route of
past and future events can lessen even in this life. We can be genuinely
empathetic with others. We can really care how we affect others. In short we
can move toward the reality of loving others as we love ourselves. We may
conjecturethat beyond death there will be a decline of some of the factors hold-
ing us tightly to one sequence of events in our self-identification. Perhaps we
can grow in love. Our need to be able to identify one succession of experience
as peculiarlyourselves may fade. Finally, it may disappearaltogether.

By now I should have succeeded in offending almost everyone. I have

rejectedthe wholly this-worldlyview that when we are dead we are dead. But I
have also rejected the transmigrationof the soul, the resurrectionof the body,
and the immortalityof the soul. The resurrectionof the soul I have offered in
theirplace is temporary,not everlasting.
I am aware of one objectionthat I do take seriously. My vocation is that of a
Christiantheologian, yet I have not shown explicitly how or why the resurrec-
tion of the soul is an appropriateform of specifically Christianbelief today.
That would be anotherlecture. I will only suggest now that I believe there is at
least some continuitybetween Paul's doctrineof the spiritualbody and my view
of the soul as being both mental and physical.
226 HARVARD THEOLOGICALREVIEW

It seems to me also that in the New Testamentthere are other images more
truly eschatological than those connected with life after death. I refer especially
to 1 Cor 15:28. In the End God will be "all in all."
Whether I am correct about the New Testament I will leave to others to
decide. But for me there can be no question that there is a great difference
between life after death and the Eschaton. Eschatology has to do with the last
things, whereas life after death is a continuationof creaturelyexistence. The
close association of these two topics has distortedreflection on both. The ulti-
mate problems of human meaning are not solved by the continuation of
creaturelyexistence beyond the grave. The ultimate solution can only be found
in our relationto God.
It may be that the relationto God will stand out with new clarity after death.
I like the image of the beatific vision. If after death we come fully into the
divine Light, for some that will be the fulfillmentof their hopes; for others, who
have been able to hide from that brilliance in this life, it will be misery. Or we
can shift to the language of love. Perhapsafter death we will know God's love
with a new intensity and inescapableclarity. For some this may be the fullness
of joy. For others, the inability to conceal from themselves the pain they have
inflicted and continue to inflict on the One who loves them purely may be the
height of misery. For the vast majority of us both of these images suggest a
mixture of heaven and hell. But they also suggest that the final importanceof
our lives is to be found in the relation to God. It is understandablethat those
who fully appreciatethe primacy of this relation here and now generally have
little interestin the survivalof death.
This is the case with Whitehead. I have indicatedhow slight was his interest
in whether there is life after death. It is even more true for such followers of
Whitehead as Charles Hartshome and Schubert Ogden. For them the only
importantquestion is the truly eschatological one. Finally, God is all in all, and
the meaningof our lives lies in what they contributeto God.
To appreciatewhat is meant here, one must understandthat in this tradition
God, too, is constituted by the inflowing of other experiences. That is, the
divine experience is not somethingoutside and self-contained. Instead,it is con-
stitutedby the creative unificationof all the creaturelyexperiences. In the world
these quickly fade, losing their immediacy and distinctive value. In the divine
experience, they remain forever in their immediacy and in the fullness of their
particularvalue.
In this vision there can be no tension between the service of God and the ser-
vice of creatures. What we do to the least of our neighborswe quite literallydo
to God. Whateverjoy or suffering we engender temporarilyin our neighbors
we engender forever in God. In God we are completely known, completely
loved, and thus completely forgiven. But the knowledge of forgiveness does not
remove the sting of judgment. The difference between what I do and what I
 JOHN B. COBB, JR. 227

might have done does not become less importantbecause I am forgiven. To

know ourselves as completely known and loved by God, to know ourselves as
forever alive in God, provides us the context of meaning within which the
ephemeral finitude of life can be celebrated and the penultimateimportanceof
history understoodand lived.
In our relationto God there is no distinctionof body and soul. Every cellular
event in our bodies lives on in God just as does every personal experience.
Here, too, we can speak of the resurrectionof the soul. But in this ultimatecase,
the resurrectionof the soul and the resurrectionof the body are united. It is in
the wholeness of our psychosomaticbeing thatwe live forever in God.