(Part II will appear in the next issue)

If we were to ask today’s average Christian (whether he be Protestant or Catholic, intellectual or not) what he conceived to be the New Testament teaching concerning the fate of man after death, with few exceptions we would get the answer: “the immortality of the soul.” Nevertheless, this idea in just this form is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity. There is no point in attempting to hide this fact, or to veil it by means of a reinterpretation of the Christian faith. Rather it should be discussed quite candidly whether the concept of death and resurrection as anchored in the Christ-event (to be developed in the following pages), precisely in its incompatibility with the Greek belief in immortality, precisely in its orientation in Heilsgeschichte which is so offensive to modern thought, is not such an integral element of the early Christian proclamation that it can neither be surrendered nor reinterpreted without robbing the New Testament of its substance.

But is it really true that the early Christian resurrection faith is irreconcilable with the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul? Does not the New Testament, and above all the Gospel of John, teach that we already have eternal life? Is it really true that death in the New Testament is always conceived of as “the last enemy” in a way that is diametrically opposed to Greek thought, which sees in death a friend? Does not Paul write, “O death, where is thy sting?” We shall see at the end that there is at least an analogy, but first we must stress the fundamental differences between the two points of view.

The widespread misunderstanding that the New Testament teaches the immortality of the soul was actually encouraged by the rock-like post-Easter conviction of the first disciples that the bodily resurrection of Christ had robbed death of all its horror and that, from the moment of Easter on, the Holy Spirit has awakened the souls of believers into the life of the Resurrection. The very fact that the words “post-Easter” need to be underscored illustrates the whole abyss which nevertheless separates the early Christian view from that of the Greeks. All of early Christian thought is oriented in Heilsgeschichte, and everything that is said about death and eternal life stands or falls with a belief in a real occurrence, in real events which took place in time. This is the radical distinction from Greek thought.

If one recognized that death and eternal life in the New Testament are always bound up with the Christ-event, then it becomes clear that for the first Christians the soul is not intrinsically immortal, but rather became so only through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and through faith in him becomes so; then it becomes clear that death is not intrinsically the Friend, but rather that its “sting,” its power, is taken away only through the victory of Jesus over it in his death; then it becomes clear that the accomplished fact of resurrection is not the condition of perfection, but rather this condition remains in the future until the body is in fact resurrected, which will not occur until “the last day.”

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It is a mistake to read into the fourth Gospel an early diversion toward the Greek teaching of immortality, because also in it eternal life is bound up with the Christ-event. Within the bounds of the Christ-event, of course, the various New Testament books place the accent in different places, but common to all is the view of Heilsgeschichte.

I

Nothing shows more clearly than the contrast between the death of Socrates and that of Jesus (a contrast which was often cited, though for other purposes, by early opponents of Christianity) that the biblical view of death from the first is focused in salvation-history and so departs completely from the Greek conception.

In Plato’s impressive description of the death of Socrates in the Phaedo occurs perhaps the highest and most sublime doctrine ever presented on the immortality of the soul. What gives his argument its unexcelled value is his scientific reserve, his disclaimer of any proof having mathematical validity. We know the arguments he offers for the immortality of the soul. Our body is only an outer garment which, as long as we live, prevents our soul from moving freely and from living comfortably to its proper eternal essence. It imposes upon the soul a law which is not appropriate to it. The soul is confined within the body; it belongs to the eternal world. As long as we live, our soul finds itself in a prison, that is, in a body essentially alien to it. Death, in fact, is the great liberator. It loosens the chains, since it leads the soul out of the prison of the body and back to its eternal home. Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed. Although the proofs for the immortality of the soul do not have for Socrates himself the same value as the proofs of a mathematical theorem, they nevertheless attain within their own sphere the highest possible degree of validity, and make immortality so probable that it amounts to a “fair chance” for man. And the great Socrates, tracing the arguments for immortality in his address to his disciples on the day of his death, did not merely teach this doctrine: at that moment he lived his doctrine. He showed how we serve the freedom of the soul, even in this present life, in our occupation with the eternal truths of philosophy. For through philosophy we penetrate into that eternal world of ideas to which the soul belongs, and we free the soul from the prison of the body. Death is then only that which completes this liberation. Plato shows us how Socrates goes to his death in complete peace and composure. The death of Socrates is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror. Socrates cannot fear death, since indeed it sets us free from the body. Whoever fears death proves that he loves the world of the body, that he is thoroughly entangled in the world of sense. Death is the soul’s great friend. So he teaches; and so, in wonderful harmony with his teaching, he dies—this man who embodied the Greek world in its noblest form.

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And now let us hear how Jesus dies. In Gethsemane he knows that death stands before him, just as Socrates expected death on his last day. The Synoptic evangelists furnish us, by and large, with a unanimous report. Jesus begins “to tremble and to lose heart,” writes Mark (14:34). “My soul is troubled even to death,” he says to his disciples. Jesus is so thoroughly human that he shares the natural fear of death. Jesus is afraid, though not afraid, as a coward would be, of the men who will kill him, or still less of the pain and grief which precede death. He is afraid in the face of death itself. Death for him is nothing divine: it is something dreadful. Jesus does not want to be alone in this moment. He knows, of course, that the Father stands by to help him. He looks to him in this decisive moment as he has done throughout his life. He turns to him with all his human fear of this great enemy, death. He is afraid of death. It is useless to try to explain away Jesus’ fear as reported by the evangelists. The opponents of Christianity who already in the first centuries made the contrast between Socrates’ and Jesus’ death saw more clearly here than the exponents of Christianity. He was really afraid. Here is nothing of the composure of Socrates, who met death peacefully as a friend. To be sure, he already knows of the task which has been given him, to suffer death, and he has already spoken the words, “I have a baptism with which I must be baptised, and how anxious (or afraid) I am until it is accomplished” (Luke 12:50). Now, when God’s enemy stands before him, he cries to God, whose omnipotence he knows: “All things are possible with thee; let this cup pass from me” (Mark 14:36). And when he concludes, “Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt,” this does not mean that at the last he, like Socrates, regards death as the friend, the liberator. No, he means only this: but if this greatest of all terrors, death, must befall me according to thy will, then I submit to this horror. Jesus knows that, because death is the enemy of God, to die inherently means to be utterly forsaken.…

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Can there be a greater contrast than that between Socrates and Jesus? Like Jesus, Socrates has his disciples about him on the day of his death; but in sublime repose he discourses with them on immortality. Jesus, a few hours before his death, trembles and quakes and begs his disciples not to leave him alone. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who, more than any other New Testament author, emphasizes the full deity (1:10) but also the full humanity of Jesus, goes still further than the reports of the three Synoptists in his description of Jesus’ fear of death. In chapter 5, verse 7, he writes that Jesus “with loud cries and tears offered up prayers and supplications to him who was able to save him.” Thus, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus wept and cried in the face of death. There is Socrates, calmly and composedly speaking of the immortality of the soul; here Jesus, weeping and crying.

And then the death-scene itself. With sublime calm Socrates drinks the hemlock; but Jesus (thus says the evangelist, Mark 15:34—we dare not gloss it away) cries: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And with another inarticulate cry he dies (Mark 15:37). This is not “death as a friend.” This is death in all its frightful horror. This is really “the last enemy” of God. This is the name Paul gives it in 1 Corinthians 15:26, where the whole contrast between Greek thought and Christianity is disclosed. Using different words, the author of the Johannine Apocalypse also regards death as the last enemy, when he describes how at the end death will be cast into the lake of fire (20:14). Because it is God’s enemy it separates us from God, who is life and the creator of all life. Jesus, who is so closely tied to God, tied as no other man has ever been, for precisely this reason must experience death much more terribly than any other man. To be in the hands of the great enemy of God means to be forsaken by God. In a way quite different from others, Jesus must suffer this abandonment, this separation from God, the only condition really to be feared. Therefore he cries to God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” He is now actually in the hands of God’s great enemy.

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We must be grateful to the evangelists for having glossed nothing over at this point. Later, as early as the beginning of the second century, and probably even earlier, there will come people who will take offense at this—people of Greek provenance. In Christian antiquity we call them Gnostics.

I have juxtaposed the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus. For nothing shows better the radical difference between the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. Because Jesus underwent death in all its horror, not only in his body but also in his soul (My God, why hast thou forsaken me?), and as he is regarded by the first Christians as the mediator of salvation, he must be the very one who in his death conquers death itself. He cannot obtain this victory by simply living on as an immortal soul, thus fundamentally not dying. He can only conquer death by actually dying, by betaking himself to the sphere of death, the destroyer of life, to the sphere of “nothingness,” of abandonment by God. When one wishes to conquer anyone else, one must repair to the other’s province. Whoever wants to conquer death must die; he must really cease to live. Not simply live on as an immortal soul, but die in body and soul, lose life itself, the most precious good which God has given us. For this reason the evangelists, who none the less intended to present Jesus as the Son of God, have not tried to soften the terribleness of his so thoroughly human death.

Furthermore, if life is to issue out of so genuine a death, a new divine act of creation is necessary. And this act of creation calls back to life not just a part of the man, but the whole man—all that God had created and death had annihilated. For Socrates and Plato no new act of creation is necessary. For the body is indeed bad and should not live on. And that part which is to live on, the soul, does not die at all.

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If we want to understand the Christian faith in the resurrection, we must completely disregard the Greek thought that the material, the bodily, the corporeal is bad and must be destroyed, so that the death of the body would not be in any sense a destruction of the true life. For Christian (and Jewish) thinking the death of the body is also destruction of God-created life. No distinction is made: even the life of our body is true life; death is the destruction of all created by God. Therefore it is death and not the body which must be conquered by the resurrection.

Only he who apprehends with the first Christians the horror of death, who takes death seriously as death, can comprehend the Easter exultation of the primitive Christian community and understand that the whole thinking of the New Testament is governed by belief in the resurrection. Belief in the immortality of the soul is not belief in a revolutionary event. Immortality, in fact, is only a negative assertion: the soul does not die, but simply lives on. Resurrection is a positive assertion: the whole man, who has really died, is recalled to life by a new act of creation by God. Something has happened—a miracle of creation! For something has also happened previously, something fearful: life formed by God has been destroyed.…

Whoever paints a pretty death can paint no resurrection. Whoever has not grasped the horror of death cannot join Paul in the hymn of victory: “Death is swallowed up—in victory! Oh death, where is thy victory? Where, death, is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:54 f.)

II

Yet the contrast between the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul and the Christian belief in the resurrection is still deeper. The belief in the resurrection presupposes the Jewish connection between death and sin. Death is not something natural, willed by God, as in the thinking of the Greek philosophers; it is rather something unnatural, abnormal, opposed to God. The Genesis narrative teaches us that it came into the world only by the sin of man. Death is a curse, and the whole creation has become involved in the curse. The sin of man has necessitated the event which the Bible reports and which we call the redemptive process. Death can be conquered only to the extent that sin is removed. For “death is the wages of sin.” It is not only the Genesis narrative which speaks thus. Paul says the same thing (Rom. 6:23), and this is the view of death held by the whole of primitive Christianity. Just as sin is something opposed to God, so is its consequence, death. To be sure, God can make use of death (1 Cor. 15:35 ff.; John 12:24), as he can make use of Satan for the tempting of man.

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Nevertheless, death as such is the enemy of God. For God is life and the creator of life. It is not the will of God that there are withering and decay, dying and sickness, the by-products of death working in our life. All these things, according to Christian and Jewish thinking, come from human sin. Therefore, every healing which Jesus accomplishes is not only a driving back of death, but also an invasion of the province of sin; and therefore on every occasion Jesus says: “Your sins are forgiven.” Not as though there were a corresponding sin for every individual sickness; but rather, like the presence of death, the fact that sickness exists at all is a consequence of the sinful condition of the whole of humanity. Every healing is a partial resurrection, a partial victory of life over death. That is the Christian point of view. According to the Greek interpretation, on the contrary, bodily sickness is a corollary of the fact that the body is bad in itself and is ordained to destruction. For the Christians, on the other hand, an anticipation of the resurrection can already become visible for the time being, even in the earthly body.

That reminds us that the body is in no sense bad in itself, but is, like the soul, a gift of our Creator. Therefore, according to Paul, we have duties with regard to our body. God is the creator of all things. The Greek doctrine of immortality and the Christian hope in the resurrection differ so radically because Greek thought has such an entirely different interpretation of creation. The Jewish and Christian interpretation of creation excludes the whole Greek dualism between body and soul. For indeed the visible, the corporeal, is just as truly God’s creation as the invisible. God is the maker of the body. The body is not the soul’s prison, but rather a temple, as Paul says (1 Cor. 6:19): the temple of the Holy Spirit! The basic distinction lies here. Body and soul are not opposites. God finds the corporeal “good” after he has created it. The Genesis story makes this emphasis explicit. Conversely, moreover, sin also embraces the whole man, not only the body but the soul as well; and its consequence, death, extends over all the rest of creation. Death is accordingly something dreadful, because the whole visible creation, including our body, is something wonderful, even if it is corrupted by sin and death. Behind the pessimistic interpretation of death stands the optimistic view of creation. Wherever, as in Platonism, death is affirmed, there the visible world is not recognized directly as God’s creation.

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Now it must be granted that in Greek thought there is also a very positive appreciation of the body. But in Plato the good and beautiful in the corporeal are not good and beautiful in virtue of corporeality but rather, so to speak, in spite of corporeality: the soul, the eternal and the only substantial reality of being, shines faintly through the material. The corporeal is not the real, the eternal, the divine. It is merely that through which the real appears—and then only in debased form. The corporeal is meant to lead us to contemplate the pure archetype, freed from all corporeality, the invisible Idea.

To be sure, the Jewish and Christian points of view also see something else besides present corporeality. For the whole creation is corrupted by sin and death. The creation which we see is not as God willed it, as he created it; nor is the body which we wear. Death rules over all; and it is not necessary for annihilation to accomplish its work of destruction before this fact becomes apparent—it is already obvious in the whole outward form of all things. Everything, even the most beautiful, is marked by death. Thus it might seem as if the distinction between Greek and Christian interpretation is not so great after all. And yet it remains radical. Behind the corporeal phantasm Plato senses the incorporeal, transcendent, pure Idea. Behind the corrupted creation, under sentence of death, the Christian sees the future creation of the resurrection, just as God willed it. The contrast, for the Christian, is not between the body and the soul, not between outward form and Idea, but rather between the creation delivered over to death by sin and the new creation; between the corruptible, fleshly body and the incorruptible resurrection body.

Interpretation Of Man

This leads us to a further point: the Christian interpretation of man. The anthropology of the New Testament is not Greek, but connected with Jewish conceptions. For the concepts of body, soul, flesh, and spirit (to name only these) the New Testament does indeed use the same words as the Greek philosopher. But they mean something quite different, and we understand the whole New Testament amiss when we construe these concepts only from the viewpoint of Greek thought.…

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The New Testament also knows the difference between body and soul, or more precisely, between the inner and the outer man. This distinction, also present in the New Testament, does not, however, imply opposition, as if the one were by nature good, the other by nature bad. Both belong together, both are created by God. The inner man without the outer has no proper, full existence. It requires a body. It can, to be sure, somehow lead a shadowy existence without the body, like the dead in Sheol according to the Old Testament, but this is not a genuine life. The contrast with the Greek soul is clear: it is precisely without the body that the Greek soul first attains to full development of its life. According to the Christian outlook, it is the inner man whose very nature demands the body.

And what now is the role played by the flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma)? Here it is especially important not to be misled by the secular use of the Greek words, although these are to be found in different places even in the New Testament and although the individual New Testament writers’ use of terminology is never completely uniform. With these reservations, we may say that according to the use which is characteristic, say, for Pauline theology flesh and spirit of the New Testament are two transcendentpowers which can enter into man from without; but neither is given with human existence as such. On the whole it is true that the Pauline anthropology, contrary to the Greek, is also grounded in Heilsgeschichte. “Flesh” is the power of sin or the power of death. It seizes the outer and the inner man together. Spirit is its great antagonist: the power of creation. It also seizes the outer and inner man together. Flesh and spirit are active powers, and as such they work within us. The flesh, the power of death, entered man with the sin of Adam; indeed it entered the whole man, inner and outer; yet in such a way that it is substantially linked with the body in a much closer indissoluble manner. The inner man finds itself less closely connected with the flesh; although through guilt this power of death has more and more taken possession even of the inner man. The spirit, on the other hand, is the great power of life, the element of the resurrection; God’s power of creation is given to us through the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament it works only singularly in the prophets. In the End-time in which we live—that is, since Christ has broken the power of death in his own death and has arisen—this power of life is at work in all members of the community (v. Acts 2:17: “in the last days”). Like the flesh, it too already takes possession of the whole man, inner and outer. But here the situation is quite the reverse of that with flesh. While, in this age, the flesh has established itself to a substantial degree in the body, and rules the inner man, it is not in the same inescapable way; the quickening power of the Holy Spirit is already taking possession of the inner man in such a decisive manner that the inner man is “renewed from day to day,” as Paul says (2 Cor. 4:16). The whole Johannine Gospel emphasizes this point. There we are already in the state of resurrection; of eternal life—not immortality of soul; the new era is already inaugurated. The body, too, is already in the power of the Holy Spirit.

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Everywhere the Holy Spirit is at work we have what amounts to a momentary retreat of the power of death, a certain foretaste of the End. This is true even in the body, hence the healings of the sick. But here it is a question only of a retreat, not of a final transformation of the body of death into a resurrection body. Even those Jesus raised up in his lifetime will die again, for they did not receive a resurrection body. But the transformation of the fleshly body into a spiritual body does not take place until the End. Only then will the Holy Spirit’s power of resurrection take such complete possession of the body that it transforms it in the way it is already transforming the inner man. It is important to see how different the New Testament anthropology is from that of the Greeks. Body and soul are both originally good insofar as they are created by God; they are both bad insofar as the deadly power of the flesh has hold of them. Both can and must be set free by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit.

Here, therefore, deliverance consists not in a release of soul from body but in a release of both from flesh. We are not released from the body; rather the body itself is set free. This is made especially clear in the Pauline epistles. But it is the interpretation of the whole New Testament. In this connection one does not find the differences which are present among the various books on other points. Even the much-quoted saying of Jesus in Matthew 10:28 in no way presupposes the Greek conception. “Fear not them that kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.” It might seem to presuppose the view that the soul has no need of the body, but the context of the passage shows that this is not the case. Jesus does not continue: “Be afraid of him who kills the soul”; rather: “fear him who can slay both soul and body in Gehenna.” That is, fear God, who is able to give you over completely to death; to wit, when he does not resurrect you to life. We shall see, it is true, that the soul is the starting point of the resurrection, since, as we have said, it can already be possessed by the Holy Spirit in a way quite different from the body. The Holy Spirit already lives in our inner man. “By the Holy Spirit who dwells in you (already),” says Paul in Romans 8:11, “God will also quicken your mortal bodies.” Therefore, those who kill only the body are not to be feared. It can be raised from the dead. Moreover, it must be raised. The soul cannot always remain without a body. And on the other side we hear in Jesus’ saying in Matthew 10:28 that the soul can be killed. The soul is not immortal. There must be resurrection for both; for since the Fall the whole man is “sown corruptible.” For the inner man, thanks to the transformation by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection can take place already in this present life: through the “renewal from day to day.” The flesh, however, still maintains its seat in our body. The transformation of the body does not take place until the End, when the whole creation will be made new by the Holy Spirit, when there will be no death and no corruption.

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The resurrection of the body, whose substance will no longer be that of the flesh but that of the Holy Spirit, is only a part of the whole new creation. “We wait for a new heaven and a new earth,” says 2 Peter 3:13. The Christian hope relates not only to my individual fate but to the entire creation. Through sin the whole creation has become involved in death. This we hear not only in Genesis, but also in Romans 8:19 ff., where Paul writes that the whole creation even in the present waits longingly for deliverance. This deliverance will come when the power of the Holy Spirit will transform all matter, when God in a new act of creation will not destroy matter, but set it free from the flesh, from corruptibility. Not eternal Ideas, but the concrete objects will then rise anew, in the new, incorruptible life-substance of the Holy Spirit; and among these objects belongs our body as well.

Because resurrection of the body is a new act of creation which embraces everything, it is not an event which begins with each individual death, but only at the End. It is not transition from this world to another world, as is the case of the immortal soul freed from the body; rather it is the transition from the present age to the future. It is tied to the whole process of redemption.

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Because there is sin there must be a process of redemption enacted in time. Where sin is regarded as the source of death’s lordship over God’s creation, there this sin and death must be vanquished together, and there the Holy Spirit, the only power able to conquer death, must win all creatures back to life in a continuous process.

Therefore the Christian belief in the resurrection, as distinct from the Greek belief in immortality, is tied to a divine total process implying deliverance. Sin and death must be conquered. We cannot do this. Another has done it for us; and he was able to do it only in that he betook himself to the province of death—that is, he himself died and expiated sin, so that death as the wages of sin is overcome. Christian faith proclaims that Jesus has done this and that he arose with body and soul after he was fully and really dead. Here God has consummated the miracle of the new creation expected at the End. Once again he has created life as in the beginning. At this one point, in Jesus Christ, this has already happened! Resurrection, not only in the sense of the Holy Spirit’s taking possession of the inner man, but also resurrection of the body. This is a new creation of matter, an incorruptible matter. Nowhere else in the world is there a new matter, a spiritual matter. Nowhere else is there a spiritual body—only here in Christ.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Oscar Cullmann is Dean of the Theological Faculty of the University of Basel and Professor of the Sorbonne in Paris. He holds the degrees D.Theol., D.D. (Edin.) and D.D. (Manchester). This two-part article comprises most of Dr. Cullmann’s Ingersoll Lecture for 1954–55 at Harvard University. The complete text (including footnotes), copyrighted 1958 by Dr. Cullmann, has just been published under the title Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? by The Macmillan Company, with whose permission, as well as Dr. Cullmann’s, this excerpt is used. The British publisher of the same material is the Epworth Press of London.

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