The first significant issue I want to address—although arguably the second-most important—in our world of “knowing” and “believing” is what I’ll call “the finish line.” The older I become, the more conscious I am that “the finish line” is closer and the more I wonder what is on “the other side” and if there is an “other side.”

We are preoccupied with the finality of death just because it seems so ultimately conclusive. It’s the end of anything we can recognize as “life” and for that reason language fails us in trying to talk about anything that lies “beyond” death.  In spite of that, the belief in and hope for that “something more” is among the most tenacious of human longings and shared, in one form or another, by many cultures and religions. As Harry Emerson Fosdick often pointed out, when one sees the same idea, belief, or observation “popping up” in various cultures and religions, one should pay careful attention because there is likely profound “truth” to be discovered there.  And so am I doing here.

• I don’t pretend to know what, if anything, lies beyond this life.  I am familiar with all the theological and philosophical arguments, as well as the problems they seek to address. For example, because our language and, consequently, our thought patterns tend to be dualistic, we tend to view ourselves as a body/soul dichotomy, a concept which we have inherited largely from the Greeks and which finds its way into Biblical language—e.g. “to be absent from the body and be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8).  On the other hand, for the ancient Hebrews and for modern scientists, the picture of humankind that predominates is holistic: both see persons as psycho-physical beings and regard as inconceivable the idea of a disembodied spirit—a point of view that, I confess, resonates with me.  So how shall we think of an existence in the Great Beyond?
• The Biblical promise of resurrection—i.e. the account of the resurrection of Jesus, which Paul affirms and assures to the faithful in 1 Corinthians 15—has the virtue of being compatible with a holistic view of persons. Like all other conceptions of life beyond death, however, it is unpicturable and unimaginable, although some would argue that there are, perhaps, analogies in nature and human life of one kind of existence as a preparation for a new, very different and inconceivable kind of existence—e.g. the fetus in the womb, the caterpillar in the cocoon. While there is nothing overpoweringly convincing about such analogies, they do, perhaps, provide a window into that persistent human hope.
• Of course, if one is prepared to accept the “authority of scripture” as the unequivocal “final word” on this issue, or any other, then even raising the questions that this post is intended to explore is largely superfluous.
  • As I have noted in the About Me page of this blog site and in other posts from time to time, there was a period in my life—growing up as I did in a conservative Baptist family and a fundamentalist church—when that was true for me.
  • But my journey has been a long and thoughtful one since then and while I have great respect and awe for the amazing decades and centuries long process by which the Hebrew/Old and Christian/New Testaments came to us, that process was composed of oral traditions passed from generation to generation, and written texts—some of which we have and some of which we can only deduce as likely sources for what now exists—copied multiple times, combined,  and redacted, some included and some rejected, to form the accepted canon we now have.
  • So unless one is prepared to accept inerrant isolated “proof texts”—without concern for literary or historical context, differing interpretations, other contradictory/questioning/or unsupportive texts—then many theological issues, including the one that is the subject of this post, remain open to debate, to serious conversation, and to the thoughtful musings of questioning minds.
  • So do Biblical points of view and assertions deserve to be considered relevant to what is or is not beyond “the finish line?” Of course, because they are the “core” literature of the Hebrew and Christian religions. Do they comprise the “final word” on the subject? Obviously, for many people they do but I think it is clear by now that at this point in my journey, they are for me important, but not conclusively “final.”
• With all of that said, I must move to a very different plane of reflection and confess that little is so persuasive for me personally as the intuition and stubborn logic that claws itself to the surface of my questioning mind and my longing-to-be-believing heart when I think about such persons as the several of my dear friends and members of my family—if I start naming names, I will leave out someone important—who have passed from this life. I accept that they are gone from my world of time and space, have mourned their absence from my life, and cherished their memory, but that is not enough—in no sensible world can such fair spirits as these be exhausted by a mere three-or-four-score and however many years.  Surely there must be “something more.”
• Of course, that opens the door to the question of whether this is, indeed, a sensible world and whether I am merely fantasizing to feed an empty wish. But beyond referencing, as I said in the previous post, that there may well be a reason that it is crucial to human existence that we look for order in our experience, that we make some “sense of things,” I’ll leave that for another day. 
• To move beyond those parenthetical remarks and follow my train of thought, Frederick Buechner in his book, Whistling in the Dark, A Doubter’s Dictionary (pp. 55-56), observes that “one of the great uses of funerals (is to) . . . . celebrate the life by all means but face up to the death of that life. Weep all the tears you have in you to weep because whatever may happen next, if anything does, this has happened. Something precious and irreplaceable has come to an end and something in you has come to an end with it. Funerals put a period after the sentence’s last word. They close a door. They let you get on with your life.” Then, playing off of occasions when Jesus compared death to sleep, apparently intimating that death is no more permanent than sleep, Buechner observes, “But if death is the closing of one door, . . . it is the opening of another one” (Italics mine). 
• In a Baccalaureate sermon at Mars Hill College in 2003, my friend, the late John Claypool, used a similar metaphor in the story of a friend facing death from terminal cancer who recalled that from his childhood forward, he had faced with fear and trepidation every impending movement from one stage of his life to the next. In retrospect, he had learned that each transition brought growth and a new perspective on life. What he had learned, he said, was that “Every exit is also an entrance. You never walk out of one thing without walking into something else.” In applying this to his own death, he believed that in leaving the world of space and time, there was “something beyond” for the growth of his spirit, that the Great Not Yet awaits us, full of new possibilities.

Every exit is also an entrance: it is a compelling and hopeful metaphor, but one drawn, of course, from our experience in this hopefully “sensible” world of space and time, of cause and effect, as are all of our attempts to describe the indescribable that lies beyond us in the Great Mystery.  When our own time comes to depart this life, each of us will learn if it is so. Suffice it to say that it provides a point of reference for a hope that, in my best moments, I try to keep within my grasp.

In the next post—or two—I want to explore, from the perspective of my own  wrestling with it,  what I think is conceivably the most existentially significant issue in this world of knowing and believing.  I hope you will want to reflect upon it with me.