Beyond immortality there’s restoration

The resurrection strikes at the heart of the cold reality of the human condition.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A fine art painting depicts a risen Jesus hold a flag in one hand and raising his other hand above his head, against a dark background

Caravaggio's The Resurrection, detail.

Art Institute of Chicago, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

No one on the planet can pretend not to care about death or about a way to overcome it. The heart of the Christian message is that death has been overcome. This isn’t just about immortality. It’s about Resurrection: the triumph of life over death. If we want to see why that matters we need first to face the reality of death squarely and without flinching. The best person to help us do that is Martin Heidegger.

It is unfortunate that one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century is also among the hardest to understand. There are even philosophy professors who avoid Heidegger’s work and refuse to talk about it (his associations with Nazism and antisemitism don’t help either). Yet for all that, his fame and influence continue unabated. Why? Perhaps it is due to the bold way he points to realities at the heart of the human condition. Realities like death.

Nobody can avoid death. No matter how rich, healthy, successful, or famous you are, death comes to you as it came to everyone before you.

If you dare to open Heidegger’s most renowned work, Being and Time, you will find a description of human existence as being-towards-death. What on earth does that mean? It starts with Heidegger’s claim that time is part of our very essence. We are time-bound beings. And the way in which we are time-bound has a direction: the future. Anxiety about the future constitutes our existence. We never stop being anxious: about where our lives are going, whether we will achieve our goals and dreams, whether our loved ones will be safe and happy, even (for some) whether we will survive another day. Only the most downtrodden and dehumanised in society have lost this forward-looking drive. The rest of us live most of our lives in our own projected future. Earning money, getting engaged, buying a house, getting a secure job, raising children: almost everything we do is future-oriented.

Yet our ultimate future faces us all as a horrifying reality we can’t avoid, that we spend most of our lives trying to ignore. We are all going to die.

Nobody can avoid death. No matter how rich, healthy, successful, or famous you are, death comes to you as it came to everyone before you. The greatest emperors, the wealthiest entrepreneurs, and the most famous superstars in literature, music or art have no advantage over the lowliest peasant. Death is the great leveller. And what of all that achievement then? What does it mean?

Death puts an end not only to ‘worldly’ ambitions like the above, but also to more meaningful pursuits like love, family, and relationships. Whoever you love will die too. This was the terrible truth that the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy learnt. After decades of promoting family as the true meaning of life, he realised that he was simply passing the buck to the next generation. Unless each individual life had its own meaning, he had nothing to offer his children: like him they would end their lives six feet under the ground. He could neither stop them from dying nor give them a meaning to their lives that outlasted their death.

Heidegger said we should spend more time in graveyards. He believed that facing the inevitability of our death would make us live more authentic lives. No doubt he was right. But wouldn’t something else change how you lived your life? Namely, if you believed death was not the end?

There’s a point being made here that goes far beyond immortality: it is about the restoration of life by the author of life who defeated death.

The Christian tradition is founded on an event with a unique promise. Christians claim that Jesus defeated death by dying and rising again. This means that even though we still die we will one day rise with him and never die again. There is no greater hope on offer. Nothing could be more relevant, more urgent, more meaningful than this central Christian claim. It is equally relevant to someone gasping for breath on a sinking ship and to someone bursting with health in the prime of life.

If Heidegger is right, the Christian message strikes at the heart of the most horrifying and cold reality of the human condition. The event of the Resurrection has the power to transform every anxious future-oriented human being facing their inevitable death. The reality is cold and horrifying no more. Jesus’ death broke the curse of death and robbed it of its power. If we follow him in dying, we will also follow him in rising. Just as Jesus rose again (and because Jesus rose again), we will rise again one day and death will be no more.

But is the Christian claim really unique? Don’t other religions believe in life after death?

Not like this. Not bodily resurrection. We must not confuse the Christian claim with a general belief in immortality, though that is an essential part of it. Other religions hold that our souls continue after death. Some teach reincarnation, an endless cycle of birth and death. But there’s something more to the Christian claim. The Gospel accounts tell that Jesus died and was buried in a tomb. If all Jesus wanted to prove was that the spirit outlives the body, then his body could have remained in the tomb. No big deal: it’s just a dead body. His ghost could have still wandered around and appeared to people.

All four Gospel accounts begin their scandalous news with the inability to find Jesus’ dead body. Three days after he dies, the women go to his tomb, and the tomb is empty. When the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, he takes pains to prove he is not a ghost. He invites them to touch him. He eats breakfast with them. He walks among them as flesh-and-blood. There’s a point being made here that goes far beyond immortality: it is about the restoration of life by the author of life who defeated death.

That’s why the Christian teaching on immortality is unique: because immortality is just the beginning. It’s about far more than that. It’s about restoration to life in the world God made: the bodily world in which we live. God created it. He doesn’t want us to leave it after we die. He wants us still to live in it. Jesus’ death empowered us so that we can live in it forever.

Explainer

Culture

Digital

16 July 2024

6 min read

Tech has changed: it’s no longer natural or neutral

The first in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

A caveman holding a hammer looks at a bench on which are a broken bicycle and a laptop.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

My son was born in February last year and it seems that every day he is developing new skills or facial expressions and adorable quirks. Just the other day he was playing with some wooden blocks and when they inevitably fell over, he let out the most adorable giggle. As you can guess I immediately reached for my phone so that I could capture the moment. Moments like this happen all the time in the life of a modern parent- we want to share with our spouse, family, and friends or just capture the moment for ourselves because it’s something we treasure. And yet, in this series of articles I would like to consider this moment, and the thousands like it that take place in a technological society, and ask: is everything as benign as it seems?

There are two ideas that often come up whenever people talk about technology. The first is that technology is basically ‘neutral’, that technology only becomes good or bad depending on what you are doing with it. “Look at a hammer,” someone might say, “there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about this hammer, only the end result is good or bad depending on whether I’m using it to hit nails or people!” On this reading of technology, the only important questions relate to the consequences of use.

If technology is neutral, then the primary concern for users, legislators and technologists is the consequences of technology, and not the technology itself. The only way to ensure that the technology is used for good is to ensure, somehow, that more good people will use the technology for good things than bad people using it for bad things. Often this idea will present itself as a conversation about competing freedoms: very few people (with some important exceptions, see this article from Ezra Klein) are debating whether there is something intrinsically problematic about the app formerly known as Twitter, most discussion revolves around how to maintain the freedom of good users while curtailing the freedom of bad users.

We assume that these tools of social interaction like Facebook and Instagram are, in and of themselves, perfectly benign. We are encouraged to think this by massive corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining our use of their platforms, and at first glance, they seem completely harmless: what could possibly be the problem with a website in which grandma can share photos of her cat? And while the dark underbelly of these platforms has violent real-world consequences – like the rise of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred – the solution is primarily imagined as a matter of dealing with ‘bad actors’ rather than anything intrinsically problematic with the platforms themselves.

Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools.

The second idea is related but somewhat different: Advocates of modern technology will suggest that humanity has been using technology ever since there were humans and therefore all this modern technology is not really anything to worry about. “Yes, modern technology looks scary,” someone might say, “but it’s really nothing to worry about, humans have been using tools since the Stone Age don’t you know!” This view proposes that because hammers are technology, and all technology is the same, there is, therefore, no difference between a hammer and the internet, or between the internet and a cyborg.

This second idea tends to be accompanied by an emphasis on the slow and steady evolution of technology and by highlighting the fact that at every major technological advancement there have been naysayers decrying the latest innovation. (Even Plato was suspicious of writing when that was invented). Taken as part of a very long view of human history, the technological innovations of the last 100 years seem to be a normal and natural part of the evolution of our species which has always set itself apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in its use of technology.

Steve Jobs gives a good example of this in an interview he gave about the development PC:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condors used the least energy to move a kilometer. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list… not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation… But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a human on a bicycle blew the condor away – completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me… It’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with… It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”

Notice that Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools: one is more complex than the other but otherwise, they are just technologies that expand human capacity. “A Bicycle for our minds” is a fascinating way to describe a computer because it implies that nothing about our minds will be changed, they’ll just be a little bit faster.

And yet, despite the attempts of thought leaders like Jobs to convince us that modern technology is entirely benign, many of us are left with a natural suspicion that there is more going on. As a priest in the Church of England, I often have conversations with parishioners and members of the public who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed at some point (fairly recently) about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives. That modern technology is not simply the natural extension of the sorts of tools that humans have been using since the Stone Age and that modern technology is not neutral but in significant ways has already had an effect regardless of how we might use it. How do we respond to such articulate and thoughtful people such as Steve Jobs who make a compelling case that modern technology is neutral and natural?

I often have conversations with parishioners who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives.

Thinking back to that moment with my son when he giggles and I take a photo of him, at first glance it seems completely innocuous. But what resources are available if I did want to think more carefully about that moment (and the many like it) which suffuse my daily life? Thankfully there is a growing body of literature from philosophers and theologians who are thinking about the impact of modern technology on the human condition. In the next two articles I would like to introduce the work of Martin Heidegger, outline his criticism of modern technology, showing how he challenges the idea that technology is simply a natural extension of human capacity or a neutral tool.

Heidegger is a complex character in philosophy and in Western history. There is no getting around the fact that he was a supporter of the Nazi Party during the second world war. His politics have been widely condemned and rightly so, nevertheless, his insights on the nature of modern technology continue to this day to provide insights that are useful. His claim is that modern technology essentially and inevitably changes our relationship with the world in which we live and even with ourselves. It is this claim, and Heidegger’s suggested solution, that I will unpack in the next two articles.