Explainer

Creed

Easter

Resurrection

26 March 2024

5 min read

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.

Essay

America

Conspiracy theory

Creed

Politics

10 May 2024

7 min read

MAGA’s sorting of America

What would Bonhoeffer make of the rogue creed?

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A red baseball cap, with Make America Great Again written across it, sits on an open bible.

Natilyn Photography on Unsplash.

“Ten years is a long time in the life of every human being.” So begins Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. For him, the decade in question was 1933 to 1943. The place, Germany.

The original essay, penned to mark the new year of 1943, reflects on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s ascendancy to power through democratic machinery. The piece was sent to an inner circle of Bonhoeffer’s friends. “Are we still of any use?” asks Bonhoeffer. There’s a question I can relate to.

And so, I’ve returned to these modest words again and again these last few years. They’re prophetic, a jolt of honesty born of resilient hope. Not unlike Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, both could be modern epistles.

Their prophetic edge is clearer with eyes on our own situation. 2024 is not 1968 or 1933. As an American citizen, we have our own “decade” to reflect on in the United States. And that is the decade of MAGA, or “Make America Great Again.”

What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community.

Just 10 years ago, Trump wasn’t sitting in courtrooms. Back then, he stood on a stage to address the Conservative Political Action Conference. He wasn’t a candidate, but a businessman, reality TV star, and disrupter of status quo.

It was at that 2014 meeting Trump uttered that now ubiquitous slogan. Near the end of the speech, less rambling and sharper than his stream-of-consciousness rallies today, the line appears, “we need to make America great again.”

Trump wasn’t the first to use it, that was Reagan in 1980. Then, like now, it evoked a sense of nostalgia, of “good old days” that never were. But nostalgia is powerful, primal. It allows us to persist in the illusion that, for example, the social order of Jim Crow America was somehow more moral and upstanding than our present situation. As if lynchings, mob violence, and political inequality vanish in the mists of our longings. This is and can only be the imagination of white supremacy.

Trump didn’t invent the slogan, but perhaps he was the first to tap into its deepest lode in the bedrock. What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community. Now, “MAGA” is its own qualifier. We have “MAGA Republicans” and “MAGA Rallies” of the “MAGA faithful.”

Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this.

And where have churches been in these days? Hans Ulrich calls the church a “place of reversal” a place where rogue creeds and words ought to be emptied of their power, where a different public is constituted around the wine, bread, and water. But the lines of MAGA are drawn straight through our churches in America.

Caleb Campbell pastors in Phoenix, Arizona. I asked him recently his thoughts on the impending election, and how it would affect his church. Most churches have already been sorted, he told me. In 2020, churches fractured from within, torn from the pandemic, protests, and the Presidency. But now, there has been a sorting, and settling. The partisan lines, those borders the church is empowered to transgress, are sadly reinforced.

The lasting power of “Make America Great Again” over the last decade is significant. Among practicing Christians, the story we tell about America in our churches has theological consequences. And every church tells this story, implicitly or explicitly, in speech or in silence. And rather than emptying the rogue creed “Make America Great Again” it would seem that in and among many churches across America, it has been given an ample charge of theological authority.

MAGA trades in all the elements of a seemingly eradicated virus called fascism. A mythic past, demographic anxiety, authoritarian rule, all elements converging and colliding in American life. And curiously, the one thing that gives fascism its strength is a failure to remember.

And perhaps this is why Bonhoeffer’s letter, read on the rising tide of anti-democratic platforms, speaks so directly to us. It holds space for a necessary exercise of remembering.

“Who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer asks in the wake of Hitler’s ascendancy. Even the Confessing Church, organized to resist the Nazification of the German evangelical church, soon folded. Pastors either took the oath of loyalty, or enlisted. Time had proved how most attempts to stand firm in the Third Reich had collapsed in on themselves. Such failures mark our day, too.

Bonhoeffer answers his own question in a way that is instructive for us. He surveys all the failed responses to Hitler’s rise. For example, there’s the “reasonable ones” who simply think better answers and clearer communication win the day. Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this. Even more stalwart, institutional efforts fail here. In the torrent of raw information sewage flowing with conspiracies, algorithms, and slogans, reason isn’t enough.

Private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

There’s the ethical fanatic, who tries to “meet the power of evil with purity of principle.” Many in days like ours are earnest in their convictions, but white-knuckling principles is satisfied not with responsibility but with keeping to some arbitrary vision of integrity that prizes its artificiality, confusing the arbitrary refusal to cede principles with responsible action. There’s those of conscience who, Bonhoeffer notes, can never know the difference between a bad conscience (which can be strong) or a deceived conscience.

The path of duty seems attractive, until we recognize that “just following orders” is the justification of every functionary in Trump’s MAGA machine. And of course, freedom, which can side with the wrong to prevent the worst and so lose its own solid footing. When all else fails, Bonhoeffer holds out private virtue as that last course of action. Not to be confused with monastic retreat, private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

If all these routes are taken off the table, we find ourselves in position to recognize a bitter truth: we’ve made resisting Trump a good business. Good for convincing stakeholders to fund new ventures, good for justifying ourselves as a moral opposition. After 10 years of MAGA, it’s true that we have assumed much about democracy that can only be realized by vigilance.

Our democracy is a spectacle, not a process. It is an oligarchy of represented interests, not a democracy of representatives. And Trump? The ethos of greatness has always been tied to the former, not the latter. And it is in this situation, not uncommon throughout history, but novel for us who face it, that we can receive the question, “who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer’s question resounds.

If the resistance of reason, principles, duty, or virtue fail, then what? Bonhoeffer’s insistence is that responsible action is “nothing but an answer to God’s question and call.”

Does this mean only Christians can save the world? That Christians are inherently “better” or “righteous” in politics? No. But ten years of MAGA would seem to suggest that this belief continues to animate the evangelical political machine. This is not Christendom; living “in answer to God’s question” means that Christians, simply by virtue of the story we confess and participate in, point to the One who saves.

The singular answer Christians give, of a witness to God’s call, is a window into the story in which the world may find its salvation and hope. Logics of inclusion and exclusion are shattered in the event of reconciliation. There’s a politics in these wider horizons that can heal the bitter contempt that marks our present situation. And sure, Bonhoeffer’s conclusion may strike some as trite sentimentality, of veiled Christian piety that belongs anywhere but politics or the public square. But that’s precisely it.

The Christian story creates a public with its own politics. And this doesn’t mean the church is a counter-society, set up against the world, rather, it is precisely in our participating with fellow citizens in the mess of political process where such a witness can be given and made. There is a free responsibility to this presence. This is not Christian dominance, Christendom 2.0, or MAGA visions of authoritarian power dressed up in Christian rhetoric. This is something more modest, and yet deeply radical.

A decade of MAGA ought to have taught many of us much more than we currently know. And such learning can only happen once we stop incentivizing and normalizing assaults on democratic machinery that come to us as a spectacle for our consumptive entertainment. There remains a way to stand firm, a way that resists necessities and immediacies, primarily because it has the audacity to confess the truth that the world is already reconciled, it just doesn’t know it yet. And nowhere is this ignorance more concentrated than in the retributive, ascendant vision contained in the phrase, “Make America Great Again.”