PAULA GOODER
‘The New Testament is both very clear and very vague’

The New Testament is both very clear and very vague about what happens when we die. It is clear about our ultimate fate but, frustratingly, much less clear about our immediate fate.

What I mean by this is that Paul, along with many of the New Testament writers, believed in the resurrection of the body into the new creation. The place where Paul talked about this extensively and carefully was 1 Corinthians 15. The Corinthians, it appears, did not believe in life after death. Although Paul does not say so explicitly, it is very likely that they – along with many Greeks of their era – believed in the transmigration of the soul (something that looks a little like modern views of reincarnation).

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul went out of his way to stress how essential believing in your own resurrection is to Christian belief. In short, his argument was that Jesus’ resurrection was the first fruits of all resurrection. If we do not believe that we will be raised, then we are saying that Jesus was not raised. If we say that Jesus was not raised, then our faith is in vain. In other words, for Paul, believing in our own resurrection is one of the load-bearing walls of faith. The rest of 1 Corinthians 15 asks questions about what our resurrection bodies will be like and how they will contrast with the bodies we have now…

Paula Gooder is a theologian whose books include Heaven (SPCK, 2011)

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MARTIN CAMROUX
‘I don’t have a clue what might be beyond death’

“Death”, the distinguished Catholic theologian Karl Rahner said, “is the absurd arch-contradiction of existence.” According to Shakespeare: “Life’s a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” Woody Allen said: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my art. I want to achieve it by not dying.” William Saroyan said: “Of course, everybody has to die, but I thought an exception would be made in my case.”

There are some things we know about death – that our physical body no longer functions, for instance. Our brain and heart and sight and personality and self-awareness and all that makes us unique comes to an end. But the things that we know are as nothing compared to the things we don’t. We try to fill in the gaps with thoughts of immortality, that the body is one thing, but the soul is another altogether, and just slips away and continues elsewhere. Behind this is the idea that death is nothing at all, that perhaps there is “unbroken continuity” as that absurd nonsense so often read at funerals asserts. Personally, I have spent enough time with the dying to say with some confidence that, to the contrary, death is very real indeed, and enough time with the grieving to know the pain of loss. When his son, Benjamin, died at the age seven, Ben Jonson wrote: “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; / My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.” The words “lov’d boy” catch the reality of anguish of death and loss; they move me to tears…

Martin Camroux is chair of the Free to Believe network and a retired church minister