This page contains the significant statements by members of SBA to the post Eternal life – why? The conversation has many good insights about an “afterlife”.
Sandra Snook – Opening Post
I’ve pondered a lot about what seems to be a very human goal, and often the primary goal of being a Christian, attaining eternal life. It seems most just accept that this is an end (or not end, literally) that everyone would want. But really? My mere existence of 6 ½ decades on this earthly realm cannot remotely prepare me for the concept of eternity. I don’t think there is anything I would want out of an eternal existence. Even more so if it were in a spiritual body. I think I’d spend eternity seeking out the experience of feeling a breeze on my skin, the touch of a loved one, the soft fur of my cat, the lick of my dog, the aroma of fresh baked cinnamon rolls. So much of life’s pleasures are wrapped up in our sensory experiences. And who to spend it with? I don’t think there is anyone (including myself) that I would want to spend eternity with. What is the appeal? I’ve asked Christians this, and I’ve yet to ask anyone who seems to have thought about it even a little bit. There is just a knee-jerk reaction that, of course, everyone wants eternal life. While I’m not ready to leave yet, I have no interest in experiencing eternity. That honestly feels like hell whether there is fire and brimstone or harps and clouds. Does anyone else think about this?
Responses
Amen. The Christian heaven is the second least desirable destination, with the Christian hell being the only thing worse. I’d rather have oblivion than either of these two options. I think the best would be reincarnation with a limited life span and time between lives to contemplate the soul’s progress. Hopefully on the next planet not everybody will be a brainless sheep.
Personally, I do wish for immortality, even though I know I can’t attain it. I’m an organism — as such, I have a very strong innate impulse to not die. You must admit that, objectively speaking, it’s a certainly an adaptive impulse. And I feel it in my bones. It’s the tragedy of conscious creatures like ourselves to know that we will never have that which we want the most: immortality. There is a time in the future — a real time that can be measured on a calendar — when I will not exist. I will be entirely gone. If anything in the world bothers me, that bothers me.
And I see so many ways people try to convince themselves that it isn’t true! People believe in heaven, or reincarnation, or that fame will allow them to live on somehow, or that so long as they’re remembered they’re not really gone, or a million other specious rationalizations. When I look out at the history of religion and literature and art, I see people all over the globe going to extreme lengths to try to convince themselves that there’s some way they can avoid their own inevitable end.
And yet when you ask people, many people claim that it doesn’t bother them. That immortality would be a burden anyway. That even though they would give anything in the world to not have to die today, that there will still be a day in the future when they believe they will be content to fade away. I honestly don’t know — maybe they’re fooling themselves, or maybe they’ve discovered something I haven’t.
The best essay I’ve found on the topic is this video from Tale Foundry.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/CuVsq9nlNJ0?rel=0
Ruth D. Everything ends. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but even if I did, it couldn’t last forever, just by the nature of existence. For something to be truly eternal, it would have to be unchanging, and that doesn’t describe any part of me that I’d recognize as “me”.
Michael Waddell Thanks for answering me Michael. I think I wasn’t hearing your point until you offered that, for you, to be truly eternal you would have to be unchanging, otherwise it would not be describing a ‘you’ that you would recognize. May I offer another viewpoint I have thought about?
When I was teaching Respiratory Care, as part of the lab that went along with understanding the different ways we take in/change (convert)/make therapeutic use of, etc., fluids, we needed to cover Changing States of Matter. For example water (liquid) can evaporate, changing to a gas, where it may also condense back into a fluid. Outside the body water as fluid can change to a solid (ice). There is also the peculiar ability of dry ice to go through sublimation, going from solid directly to a gas without experiencing the fluid state. The point is that at no point in any of those states was it ever other than H2O – the waterness , in some sense, was always recognizable as itself. That was phase one of an Aha moment I had right in the middle of lab (students often have no idea what’s going on in the teacher’s head!) The other thought I had in a reverie once was to ask if we must always contemplate eternity as a function of time? Could the broader meaning encompass ‘limitlessness’? It opened up the possibility that corporal death may make possible the release of a force, or potential, that changes state while retaining some identity, experiencing limitlessness. I’m admittedly getting off into the weeds here, but God has been described as limitless consciousness. I can understand several of Jesus’ teachings through a perspective of being able to move through an altered state, to directly have my ‘presence’ at release experience the collective presence of Supreme Consciousness, to both still be recognizable and yet merged. It let me read the mythic truth within Genesis of God’s breath enlivening the most basic of materials – dirt- into a living being. Which is more the us? The dirt or the breath?
It is a paradox that one can be afraid of dying, yet also reject a desire for immortality. I share your desire to not die NOW – or in the foreseeable future, please. Yet, I have been with people transitioning to death (my mother comes foremost to mind) and when it can happen in a secure, safe environment, with time to “get your affairs in order,” many people are ready to go. I think many people just avoid thinking deeply about what eternity really means. Forever and ever, amen.
Sandra Snook Oh, I think I disagree, Sandra. There are people I would spend an eternity with, definitely! I agree that most of our humanly pleasures are wrapped up in sensory experiences, but I think if there is another plane of existence after this one, it’s entirely different from what we experience now.
I don’t suppose I believe in a traditional concept of heaven and hell, especially not hell. But I do have to say (without sounding New Age) that the topic of near death experiences has been fascinating to me. I find myself believing that our consciousness evolves in ways we cannot comprehend. I think there are mysteries that we cannot even begin to answer. You pose some very interesting questions!
Teresa M Teresa – https://youtu.be/JKkiPVpbOEc?si=HVYkWuJm9ciz4YNE
Teresa M I too find the near-death experiences concept fascinating. Serious scientists at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies have been investigating the phenomena and collecting data for years. There are numerous documented examples of people emerging from these experiences aware of events that took place while they were “gone,” events that they could not possibly have known about absent something “paranormal” involved. The suggestion is that perhaps consciousness exists apart from the physical brain. If so, does this “consciousness” persist following death of the physical body? Is that what eternal life is all about? Darned if I know but the studies are compelling.
Yes, I have thought about it. I really don’t expect an afterlife. But the idea of reward is even unrealistic to me. I feel like our rewards are in this life and usually because we have achieved some good thing. We can reflect on the value of that accomplishment or relish the completion of a difficult task!
Well, one can take the biological reductionist, evolutionary reductionist tack and explain the desire for immortality in terms of a biological aversion to death, and instinct for survival ingrained in our genome by evolution. To my mind that’s bit superficial. Freud used the term “Eros” to describe a drive not merely to live, to maintain one’s survival, but to be creative, through sexual reproduction, and socially, the social creation of our existence. And Freud’s colleague Otto Rank posited what he termed the urge to immortality, a desire to permanently remain a part of life, often expressed through creativity. I think that Freud and Rank were on the right track here, but didn’t go deep enough, shall we say.
I subscribe to a pancreativist and panexperientialist (the more familiar term is panpsychist) conception of life and reality as fundamentally a creative, experiential, relational, teleological, axiologically purposive, lively process. Hegel called this process Spirit (Geist), and Whitehead called it creativity. Along with Hegel and Whitehead I conceive it to be ultimate reality. By “ultimate reality” I don’t at all mean something supernatural. Rather, on my understanding it’s the ultimate ground and nature of nature, and of our biological lives. It’s nature’s ontologically fundamental process and drive toward creativity, experience, value-experience, and actuality. Freud’s Eros, I would argue, is fundamentally this ontological process and nisus. And the urge to immortality stems from it, from an ontological instinct, as it were, to participate and embody its endless striving. That is, the instinctual desire to live is the natural universe’s own striving and activity toward actualization in our individual entity.
Human beings then give form to this ontological drive and desire to be a part of the infinite, endless creativity and vitality of a creative and lively universe by imagining an afterlife where they’ll continue to persist incorporeally forever. The urge for immortality finds its conceptual expression in religion’s notions of eschatology, and heaven. Of course this hasn’t always been the case. Religions in antiquity weren’t concerned with an afterlife, they were more interested in this-earthly well-being and flourishing. Rather than being focused on postmortem salvation, antique religions consisted of rituals to obtain the favor of the gods that were the mechanism for ensuring the welfare of one’s community. This focus on flourishing lives in the here and now rather than pie in the sky when we die was another expression of the same life instinct, an instinct that goes down all the way to nature’s depth dimension, its fundamental creative and experiential process. Religion is essentially a way of consciously engaging this ultimate reality, but often with beliefs, such as the belief in immortality, that get it wrong.
In short, on the view I’ve just articulated the idea of, and desire for immortality is metaphysically ultimate, not merely a construct of religions unconsciously motivated by an evolutionary life instinct. Evolution, and the life instinct it’s programmed into us are a biological expression of the experiential creativity at the base of nature. Eros, the lust for life, infinite life, is something inherent in the very ontology of the world.
Lust for life I get, but as you state, the focus on an afterlife/eternal existence, that is a relatively new concept relative to the overall timeline of human evolution. To me, wanting to see “how the story ends”,” may be a natural feeling, but immortal existence? I just don’t desire it.
Sandra Snook I agree. I think the big driving force is hell not heaven. Church had to invent hell because “come hang out with us for eternity” was a marketing failure.
Sandra Snook I don’t fancy an immortal postmortem existence either. And although I think that the idea has an ontological basis, I view it as a misconception, an instance of an erroneous understanding inspired by a veridical intuition.
It’s worth noting that attainment of some God-given future state is not unanimously considered a primary goal among Christians, and it’s very possible that it was hardly on the radar for very early Christians. In the Gospels, phrases like “eternal life” or “kingdom of God” often don’t mean “going to heaven when you die.” They’re more about living in the reality of God’s rule right now — a kind of life that starts in the present, not after death.
When Jesus talks about or models the kingdom, it’s often tied to tangible, human experiences: shared meals (the parable of the great banquet in Luke 14:15–24), physical touch and healing (Jesus touching and cleansing the leper in Mark 1:40–42), forgiveness (the anointing of Jesus by the sinful woman in Luke 7:36–50), and restored community (Jesus dining with Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1–10). In those moments, people are already experiencing what “life in God’s reign” looks like — it’s not abstract or otherworldly, it’s embodied and social.
It’s mostly later, especially in Paul’s letters and then in early Christian thought, that “eternal life” becomes more about a future existence. That shift probably came from a mix of apocalyptic expectation and Hellenistic philosophical influence, which made spiritualized, otherworldly hope more appealing and intelligible.
So your discomfort isn’t strange — it’s arguably closer to the outlook of Jesus’ earliest followers, who seemed to imagine life with God not as endless time, but as fully renewed life, with all its embodied goodness, made whole.
Incidentally, I’m currently reading The God We Never Knew by Marcus J. Borg (recommended to me by Ruth D. on this forum), and he’s primarily concerned with this exact tension, between the (now) traditional idea of believing in the present for the sake of some future heaven, versus entering into God’s presence and life now — a transformation of awareness and relationship in the present world, not an escape to another one later. I’m only about a fourth of the way through the book, but I’m finding it well worth the read – reminds me a lot of Robert Farrar Capon’s book on the Parables of the Kingdom (Capon’s argument being that the Kingdom is present, not future).
Schaun Wheeler Early Jesus-followers quite fundamentally entertained the hope of immortality. But not a disembodied immortality; rather, they had notions of bodily transformation and resurrection, they believed that they and the resurrected dead who were “saved” would receive immortal spiritual bodies. This belief had already developed before Paul converted. And recall that Jesus taught that the resurrected would be “like the angels”.
Thanks for the book recommendation, Schaun (and Ruth D). I think this topic rose to the top of my pondering this week because I just reread John straight through, preparing to read Mendez’s book, and that Gospil certainly seems to focus on eternal life as the goal. And all the evangelicals I know, thats all they talk about to be honest – getting saved so you can be raptured and live forever.
Sandra Snook I find it’s often worth reminding myself that evangelicalism (particularly the U.S. flavor) is among the newest of all renegotiations of Christianity out there. The very concept of a rapture isn’t even 200 years old yet – it’s not biblical in the slightest.
Regarding John – many of the “eternal life” passages in that text look like talk of a future state because that has become the common assumption, but that doesn’t mean those passages hit their original readers the way they hit us. Even if we take the poster-child scripture for belief in a future heaven – “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16) – we can see that the future view isn’t necessarily the view intended by the text.
The key phrase is pas ho pisteuōn eis auton echei zōēn aiōnion, which – as far as I understand – literally reads “everyone who believes in him has eternal life.” The verb echei is present tense, indicating possession now, not a future event. So even in this verse, John frames eternal life as something believers already possess through faith in Jesus.
When you place this alongside John 3:36 (“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life”) and John 5:24 (“whoever hears my word and believes… has eternal life”), the pattern is pretty clear: the Gospel repeatedly presents eternal life as a present, participatory reality — not merely a postmortem reward. It’s the life of the age to come breaking into the present: a transformed participation in God’s reality.
In other words, yes, “eternal life” can be read as “life that lasts forever”, but it can also be read as “life that is of a quality or nature that exists (past, present, and future) forever” – in other words, the kind of life God offers. At the risk of making the idea too pithy: “eternal” can be seen as a sort of name or designation for God – “eternal life” is “God’s life”…or, at least, the kind of life that God has to offer.
Thanks for these thoughts – I’ll have to ponder them. I do wish I knew Greek, but it’s sure nice to be around all these new friends who do!
Sandra Snook Of course early Christ-believers were not monolithic, they held a variety of convictions about salvation and eschatology, but one can generalize that they were apocalypticists who, contra Schaun, did in fact think that the full fruits of their faith, their immortality, would be realized in the future, at the eschaton; and the proto-orthodox, folks like Paul, certainly believed that salvation is not an instantly done-deal after conversion, that it’s a journey that won’t be completed until Jesus returns and the faithful receive their imperishable glorified bodies (and Paul’s beliefs weren’t original, they’re beliefs that Christians had already developed early on, well before his conversion, and that he took up and promoted).
Charles Bledsoe Yes, I wouldn’t presume to generalize the beliefs of so many people from so long ago. My comments were restricted to pointing out that while many specific passages in the gospels are commonly interpreted today as saying something about about a future state, there is no reason to assume that that same interpretation would have been imposed nearly as often or as consistently by the people who were first writing and reading those passages. There were certainly many beliefs at the time about a future state. I don’t think we have the evidence to make the case that the specific passages in the gospels – even the ones in John – were talking about that future state.
Schaun Wheeler Some early Christ-believers apparently didn’t look forward to a future resurrection, but that was because they were Gentiles who believed in a Platonic eschatology, in which we possess immortal souls that when we die continue to exist in a discarnate way. These Christ-believers then were not looking forward to being raised to immortality in the future, but they were still looking forward to future disembodied immortality as Platonic souls.
I would also argue that belief in immortality is always inherently forward and future-looking. Those who subscribe to the belief envision an unceasing future existence for their personality, either in resurrection bodies, or as incorporeal souls. Even if they believe that they already enjoy the state of immortality their expectation is still a future-oriented expectation of existing without end in the time ahead.
And if immortality was a real thing it would be diachronic, it would take place over time, reaching from the now into the future. Immortality is necessarily futurality. And the dream of immortality involves a hope or expectation for the future.
At any rate, even those early Christ-believers, such as the Corinthians with whom Paul had some issues, who believed that their present state was already a state of fully realized salvation, and that they had already been blessed with the full scope of the benefits of salvation, including immortality, likely were not in naive denial about their physical mortality and looked forward to a Platonic kind of athanasia to be realized in a postmortem future.
But all of this is somewhat of a digression. The topic of the thread concerns belief in the reality, not the question of the futurality of immortality; and also the desirability of immortality. Although it’s taken different forms, and undergone changes, there isn’t really any question that Christianity, and its soteriology, has always featured a vision of human immortality. Personally, I find this to be one of the problems with Christianity. Like Sandra, I don’t fancy the idea of living forever, especially in a disembodied form. I prefer the Whiteheadian idea of objective immortality, of only living on as an object of experience and memory in the mind of God, not as a continuing experiencing subject.
Spending my time as I want now. I was a special education teacher at a high school in Helena, Montana.
Schaun Wheeler I have for more than half my life viewed heaven and hell as here-and-now choices, rather than an eternal reward or punishment. My life experience appears to demonstrate that. I don’t worry about the reality of an afterlife, any more than I worry about a Rapture, or any of the other doctrines with little to no scriptural support, even if you take the Book literally.
Sandra Snook Yup. Goofiness, and a waste of time, imo. Jesus was talking about here and now transformation. I like that a lot.
Phil PhuD (aka Phillip S. Kott)
I think there are many world religions that don’t promise eternal life. To a certain extent Christians invented and perfected the concept (although there may have been Jewish sects ahead of them on the invention part). Pascal’s wager questions why anyone would not believe in God because if true, believing gives one eternal life in heaven and disbelieving eternal life in hell; if false, one simply disappears whether of not one believes. (Pascal was a brilliant mathematician, who gave up math for Catholic theology.) I was taught that the Jewish tradition gives a similar reason to believe in heaven: If you don’t, you won’t get in. Pious Jews are less likely to believe in hell than Christians.
Yes, that’s an approach I used to take, but I’m now at a place in this life where prevaricating like that no longer matters. But it’s a stand many still take, and I understand why. I just think if there was a real God who knows everyone’s true heart, that would not be an effective strategy. As I don’t believe in hell, I’m not worried about ending up there either.
Another understanding of the desire for immortality that can be drawn from the Whiteheadian philosophical perspective I subscribe to is that our existence is fundamentally about value-realization, the embodiment of axiological possibilities, and so the idea that death is absolute extinction, that all of the value we’ve come to embody in life will perish when we die is something we’re deeply averse to, and that aversion is something people sometimes negotiate by entertaining wishful beliefs about an afterlife. The religious belief in immortality is a way of resolving the emotional distress that results from the thought that the value we represent isn’t permanent.See lessLikedReply1 like
Fortunately I don’t believe in the possibility of an afterlife (on ontological grounds), because if I did then I’d have to entertain the disturbing question: Is it possible that the ancient Greeks and Israelites were right, and the afterlife resembles the dreadful fate experienced by the dead in Hades and Sheol; a static, bleak, gloomy state, an inactive and vegetative form of existence in a shadowy netherworld? Personally, I would prefer annihilation.
If the next five years are anything like the last five years, then my quality of life is likely to rapidly decline (though I think retirement is definitely slowing the progression of ageing). This is the source of my frenetic retirement activities; some of the things I wish to do may not be in reach in a relatively short period of time. I have no desire to leave, but I don’t think I want to live forever, either. A group of us reading Borg’s books got an opportunity to question him regarding his views of traditional Christian doctrine, including the afterlife. He asserted that he thought all of us would be resorbed back to the Creator in a massive unity, citing as evidence that the most holy times of his life were the times when he lost all sense of self and was completely in the moment and invested in others. I liked that, but I don’t think he found it as humorous and ironic as I did that Borg seemed to be saying “resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.” He did not think distinct personalities in the afterlife were a thing, and I tended to agree with him. I like the vision of returning to the One, and it makes the ideas of the Gnostics look pretty palatable (except for the insane arrogance of “knowing”). So, I will live as if this is the only life I get, at least as an individual, and I will suck the marrow from it, clinging until my grip is loosened by age and infirmity, with no expectation of an eternity, but living with others as if there is one. It would be an interesting surprise to discover something on the other side of the veil. I tend to agree with Bart that the righteous are described as earning an afterlife, but the sinners are simply destroyed, in Jesus’ vision. I should be good either way. I can say that I don’t fear eternity any more than I desire it.
Derik Reed Well said, “So, I will live as if this is the only life I get, at least as an individual, and I will suck the marrow from it, clinging until my grip is loosened by age and infirmity, with no expectation of an eternity, but living with others as if there is one. It would be an interesting surprise to discover something on the other side of the veil.”
I do believe my atoms will disperse into the universe and in that way I’ll have eternity (so no embalming or vaults – need to let my atoms free, baby! Maybe a mushroom suit burial…).
It seems more likely to me that there are some forms of parallel universes or states formed via quantum and other mechanisms we don’t know about yet. It’s cool, I think, that our atoms are not touching each other except via energy, yet we feel a corporal body. So much we don’t understand. I’m sad I won’t be around to learn all the secrets of the universe, but, like you, I am focusing on enjoying the here and now.See lessLikeReply
Sandra Snook love it. Hey, is the mushroom suit idea a reality? I like it. I’ve been thinking cremation with illegal, unmarked scatterings. I don’t want to tie up any ground with a physical memorial. LikeReply
Glenn Siepert – Content Creator for Bart Ehrman
Ah this is such an interesting thought. I’ve spent a lot of time looking back on the “Evangelical theology” of my youth and have come away with similar wonderings – an eternity in what I was taught heaven would be like sounds like absolute hell. No Yankee baseball to watch in the Summer? No pets (“they don’t have souls”, I was taught!)? No pizza? Video Games? Punk bands? Just songs to Jesus all day and night … sounds like a lame party that I was supposed to be excited about, but secretly kind of dreaded.
These days (and this is just where I’m at) I see “God” like an ocean and all of us like individual waves – all the waves are different and yet all the waves are the ocean. We are all connected and connected to or part of “God”. And when the wave “dies” or “crashes upon the shore” after old age or a battle with cancer, etc. it doesn’t cease to exist as much as it just falls back into the greater ocean to support the other waves that are still roaming or have yet to be. And so in that way, when we fall back into the ocean we continue to exist and be connected in the same way we are now – just on a different plane of existence.
Anyways. That’s a quick glimpse of the many thoughts your ponderings brought up for me. Thanks for sharing!
Glenn Siepert I like that image – thanks for sharing it.
Glenn Siepert me too. Love that idea of being a part of the whole thing. What Is, is how I mostly name God nowadays, anyway.
