Life unbound
Spirit-Grace-Faith-Metanoia-Kingdom: yes, we’ve now elaborated, pretty much in full, the basic formula of the Gospel, the truly wonderful “good news” proclaimed by our hero, Jesus of Nazareth, back in the day. So what more could possibly be left for us to say?! Well, as we’ve already seen something of, things can go badly wrong, and if we’re not careful, we can find ourselves barking up the wrong tree, chasing after things that go in precisely the opposite direction to where we really want to be going, things that bind us up rather than set us free. So, let’s be careful!
Back in Chapter 3 you might have noticed me doing just that, choosing my words oh-so carefully, contemplating the possibility that Jesus had muddled up two different predictions he was recorded as making before his death, his own resurrection and the coming of the Spirit. The question I was dodging in the process was whether Jesus’s resurrection really happened, as his followers claimed it did. My suggestion was, effectively, as you’ll recall, that it didn’t really matter either way, because the other prediction, the coming of the Spirit, was far more significant, and moreover, to this day, actually verifiable!
So, believe it if you want—that Jesus rose from the dead—although seeing it allegedly happened a long time ago, there is no obvious way of verifying it now. But wait; yes, be careful. Think about why you would want to believe such a thing in the first place. Among the formally prescribed beliefs of Jesus’s followers that gradually emerged in the decades and centuries after his departure, the resurrection did, indeed, come to be a central one. The notion was that, in some very real sense, Jesus had, in rising from the dead, broken the power of death over human life, so that we can now, by repenting and being forgiven by God for our sins, rise again ourselves and live forever after we die, in the eternal happy afterlife popularly known as Heaven. Here we bump into the famous doctrine of future final cosmic judgement, a belief common to many, although not all, religious traditions. Judgement Day is coming sooner or later, so look out—if you don’t repent now, you’ll still be resurrected after you die, only to face an eternity of torment in the very opposite of Heaven, a.k.a. Hell! There’s potentially quite a bit at stake here, therefore: we find ourselves thinking that if we let go of our belief in Jesus’s resurrection we might be also letting go of any chance we have of getting to Heaven, or at least of escaping eternal misery in Hell.
Let’s tease out this notion a bit more, this alleged connection between Jesus’s resurrection and the prospects of our own personal resurrection. This is how the story goes: it begins, as I’m sure you know, back in the primordial Garden with our original ancestors, Adam and Eve, the first humans, eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, getting themselves expelled from the said garden by an angry, punishing God, and cursed, for good measure, with mortality. In recent English translation, here are some of the actual words allegedly spoken:
“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” [Genesis 3:17-19]
I kid you not! “For dust you are and to dust you will return”: death, mortality comes into the world, into human life, on this account, as a curse or punishment by the great God on high. Help!
Much later, a few short years after Jesus’s final departure, the great apostle Paul, possibly the first person to have written extensively about the significance of Jesus’s life and teachings, put it this way:
“… sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned …” [Romans 5:12]
The “one man” being Adam, of course—Eve doesn’t seem to count at this point. Paul then enunciates the formula which reverses the death curse:
“… because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore, just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.” [5:17-19]
“Christ”, meaning “anointed one”, “Messiah”, “Saviour”, is the title Paul was in the habit of adding to Jesus’s name, encapsulating the thesis he is putting forward, namely that Jesus, through his death and then resurrection, circumvents the primordial death curse, thereby winning for us the possibility of an eternal happy afterlife.
It’s a beautiful thing, and who, indeed, wouldn’t want to believe it? The great news is that it is, as we’ve already seen, and as we’ll see again shortly, actually true—just not in the direct, literal way it is usually understood, rather in a new and better way. The problem is that none of the specific details of the traditional story are actually true. As we saw in Chapter 1, we humans evolved over millions of years, we weren’t created in a once-off creation act; so there simply never was a primordial perfect Garden, we did not have original parents called Adam and Eve, there never was a judgemental creator God who no sooner created us than cursed us the first time we put a foot out of line, then gratuitously cancelled the curse a long time later by sending Jesus.
But we certainly do sin, and sin is the problem, the greatest challenge of human existence—as I’ve said repeatedly—our natural-born sinful selfishness which continually drags us down, seeming now to threaten our very survival as a species. Then the wonderful Gospel formula which Jesus opens up, propelling us through the Metanoia, resolving our selfishness, helping us become better, more selfless people: this is the new and better way in which the traditional story is true, that through Jesus we stand to win something we don’t have to wait till we die for, namely an amazing new life right now, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, involves a mini spiritual death and resurrection on an almost daily basis!
This “new and better way” I’m trumpeting does not refer to, has no reliance on, Jesus being resurrected for forty or any number of days, however; and, moreover, it says nothing at all about our prospects for an afterlife, happy or otherwise. Nevertheless, it’s true that we humans have thought about, worried about what is going to happen to us after we die just about forever. Virtually every religious tradition has been vitally concerned with it in one way or another, certainly not just Christianity; many have imagined a story like the traditional story we outlined above, with a capital G God who creates us, judges us for our sin of some description, then eventually provides a means for our salvation, so we can return to a Garden-like state of bliss after we die instead of ending up in a Hell-like place of eternal torment. Why, exactly? Why have we historically been so obsessed with our prospects for a life after death—especially seeing there has never been any hard cold evidence that there even is one? Well, by an amazing irony, it turns out that it may be something to do with the one thing we are focussing on more than anything in this letter, humanity’s number one all-time problem: yes, our natural-born sinful self-centredness. How so?
Well, probably the most significant way our natural-born self-centredness plays itself out in our lives is that, on one hand, we crave acceptance by others, we want to be liked, loved, respected, considered, admired, thought well of; and conversely, we fear being rejected, disliked, unloved, isolated, lonely, alone. Even when we’re seeking to exercise power and control over others, it is their liking and respect, or at least subservience, that we really want to get our hands on. Desire for acceptance, fear of rejection: this deadly duo, flip sides of the same self-centred coin, exert a profound psychological compulsion over our lives, driving our thinking, imagination and behaviour in all sorts of ways. There’s nothing essentially wrong with wanting to be accepted by others rather than rejected, of course, but when we pursue acceptance in a purely self-centred way, as is very natural for us to do, there’s every chance our behaviour and actions will, sooner or later, only serve to cause real harm both to others and to ourselves.
This is the psychological context in which beliefs about the afterlife, about Heaven and Hell, have emerged in human history: not merely that we desire acceptance and fear rejection, but that our desires in this regard are frequently frustrated as the result of our naturally self-centred motivation, thereby frequently fulfilling our fears. Frustration of desires and fulfilment of fears: nothing in life vexes and excites the human imagination more deeply. Furthermore, when we reflect on the fact that Hell has typically been conceived of as a place or state of eternal, inescapable rejection, and Heaven, conversely, as a place or state of eternal, assured acceptance, surely it is then at least plausible that the two places or states in question have been unconsciously conjured up in our imaginations as the ultimate fulfilment of our deepest fears, on one hand, and our deepest desires on the other?
Sorry to sound so unrelentingly Marxist—or do I mean Freudian?! But, yes, what I’m suggesting is that our historical concern about our prospects for an afterlife, including our specific beliefs in Heaven and Hell and the sort of judgement that will get us to the one place or the other, is generated, shock-horror, by the very thing this letter sets out to unfold the solution to, namely our natural-born self-centredness. Even when our concern is not just for ourselves but for our loved ones, or for others whom we care for or identify with in some way: even then it may be ourselves we are primarily thinking about, when we desperately miss them and long to be reunited with them one day.
The real test of whether this shocking hypothesis is true is, I believe, in the application of that very solution in our lives: when we open ourselves up in faith to the Spirit, let go of our self-centred desires and fears, and start to focus our attention instead on becoming better, more selfless people, do not our fears and desires about our ultimate future indeed fade into the background and become more or less irrelevant? In my experience they definitely do. I find that when I shift my attention away from myself, away from my almost ever-present, underlying fear of rejection and desire for acceptance, onto real and vital concern for others, I find myself, in that moment, able to be perfectly content with simply not knowing what will happen to me, if anything, after I die, in the assurance that I have, in a very real sense, found “Heaven” already now, as I experience the amazing reality of connectedness with the world that comes into my life through opening myself up to the Spirit. And with faithful persistence and practice, that beautiful moment can morph into the habit of a lifetime!
The reality is that our historical obsession with the question of what happens to us after we die has sent religions of all stripes down the wrong path, setting themselves up, as we noted in the previous chapter, as gatekeepers of a happy afterlife, arbitrating on who gets a ticket and who doesn’t, keeping people guessing about their ultimate future. In Christianity, as we’ve seen, we have the over-weening focus on salvation, the process of being formally forgiven by God for our sins, thereby escaping eternal alienation in Hell after we die, instead gaining a foothold in the other much more warm and fuzzy place. “Just build my mansion, next door to Jesus, and tell those angels, I’m coming on home!”—the irresistible lyrics of the old Gospel song.
Don’t get me wrong: nothing I have said here necessarily precludes the possibility that a happy afterlife of some sort indeed awaits us beyond the grave, or, for that matter—taking us back to where we started this chapter—that Jesus really did rise from the dead after he died. These questions remain open, regardless of our motivation for wanting to believe in them, regardless also of the machinations of religious doctrine and practice. It has been with great fear and trembling, in fact, that I have written these words you have just read, not wishing to hurt or offend you in anyway, not wishing to pull the rug out from under your most cherished beliefs and hopes about the future of your life. So, please, by all means, do believe these things if you want to. But then, I encourage you, simply let them go, and embrace instead the far greater reality you can experience right now, the wonderful life in the Spirit, a life of selfless cooperation with and service of others, that Jesus pointed the way to back in the day—you won’t be disappointed!
Commentary 5
Gospel formula—Spirit-Grace-Faith-Metanoia-Kingdom? Sounds suspiciously like a version of the famous Ordo Salutis of reformation theology. And it is, essentially, I think you’ll find—minus the mystifications!
As for Chapter 5 of Paul’s letter, I’ve already quoted verses 12 and 17-19 above, so you can probably see where I’ll be going with this commentary. Paul starts the chapter on what I’m immediately (and predictably!) going to say is the wrong foot:
“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.” [1-2]
Justification: “meaning God declares a person righteous and forgives their sins through Christ”, as Gemini AI once said to me, reflecting the conventional understanding. But justification is an empty theological category from the outset, as we’ve already noted, there being no actual God who judges us then later provides a way back for us into their good books. It’s all, rather, about sanctification—that is, Metanoia—which Paul describes beautifully in the next verses:
“And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” [3-5]
Yes, real hopefulness, optimism that comes to us through the Spirit, keeping us going in the face of the afflictions that life inevitably throws up, especially as we set out along the Metanoia road. Paul is really getting at something here, which he couches, however, in terms of an ultimate rather than a proximate hope, “hope of sharing in the glory of God” (verse 2 above) beyond the grave, which we can be absolutely assured of, since “while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (verse 8), and being thereby “justified by his blood, [we] will be saved through him from the wrath of God”.
Again, there is no such God from whose wrath we need to be saved, whose glory we will one day be granted the privilege of sharing in. And hopes of reward in the afterlife have notoriously motivated all sorts of injustices and atrocities in human history, everything from social control and manipulation to murder and mayhem. Why? Because, as I have pointed out above, our hope of “sharing in the glory of God”, and concomitant fear of “the wrath of God”, are basically self-centred, and therefore ripe for manipulation by unscrupulous leaders and dangerous ideologies. Let’s just stick with the proximate hope then, the quiet hopefulness and optimism, for ourselves and for the world, that we can experience and act upon now, which real selflessness breeds, as we, as Jesus says, “love [our] enemies, do good to those who hate [us], bless those who curse [us], pray for those who mistreat [us]” (Luke 6:27-28).
Paul goes on in his chapter to expound his marvellous conception of Jesus as the “new Adam” (as later theologians have put it): a fresh start, a second chance for our species, having blown the first one badly. Yes, the transformation the Metanoia brings about in individual lives and in humanity as a whole is a radical discontinuity in our evolution—tantamount, in fact, to the emergence of a new species. Paul can see that Jesus is bringing profound change to the world, and he naturally interprets it in terms of the worldview in which he is embedded. But it is not physical death that Jesus, the second Adam, overcomes, winning for us “eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (verse 21); rather spiritual death—the death-in-life now of remaining bound up, imprisoned in the closed circle of our natural-born selfish selves—winning for us, thereby, unbounded, free, you might even say eternal, life right now. Happy days!
Paul himself is still bound up with the old God and the old language—“judgement”, “condemnation”, “trespass”, “justification”, “obedience”, “righteousness”—when, in fact, the Gospel is quintessentially about freedom and liberation. Hopefully, nevertheless, despite the old way of thinking that was dragging him back, Paul did come to experience true Gospel liberation in his life. I’m reminded of the old hymn, referring to the episode recounted in the book of Acts[1], where Paul and his offsider Silas were thrown into prison, then an earthquake comes along and breaks their shackles:
“My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth and followed Thee.”[2]
After further negotiations with the authorities, Paul and Silas eventually did walk free, to keep following Jesus—a marvellous tale of liberation which I commend to you wholeheartedly!
[1] See Acts 16:16-40.
[2] And can it be, that I should gain? Charles Wesley, 1738.
