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Immortality Or Life
By Hans Hofmann

Being alive is the eternally renewing source fountain of immortality.-Rabindranath Tagore

MUCH can be said, much has been said, much has yet to be said on this problem of the immortality of man. A theologian who is skeptical about this concept, as I happen to be, can choose many different ways to approach a discussion of it.

One may think of the difference between the static concept of immortality over against the dynamic awareness of life. One should make a distinction between the Greek, and even more important, the Hellenistic concept of the soul separated from the spirit and body of man, over against the Hebraic insistence on the wholeness of man. One can charge that history proves the concept of the immortality of man to be a quietistic if not irresponsible escape from facing the problematic reality of daily life, and contrast this with the prophetic emphasis in the Old Testament and the evangelical admonition concerning responsible involvement in this world and time of ours.

Perhaps most convincing and striking is the approach which the, late Dutch theologian and expert in phenomenology of religion, G. van der Leeuw, took, namely, to set over against the concept of immortality the Biblical understanding of resurrection. ¹ In a little monograph, he points out that the problem of immortality is not merely one to be faced upon the occurrence of death so that one may either die more easily, having a belief in the immortality of the soul. as Socrates did, or have to face death with fear and trembling. This latter would occur, when, as Oscar Cullmann has pointed out, one does not believe in the immortality of the Soul; ² or when, as Harry Wolfson has stated it, one faces death with fear because one believes in the immortality of the soul and thus is frightened the imminent judgment on his life God. ³

¹ Gerardus van der Leetow, Unsterblichheit oder Auferstehung, Theologische Existenz Heute, Nr. 52.
² Oscar Cullmann, Immortatity of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, London, The Epworth Press, 1958.
³ Harry A. Wolfson, "Immortality and Resurrection in the Philosophy of the Church Fathers" (The Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man at Harvard University for the academic year 1955-1956), published in The Official Register of Harvard University, Divinity School Lectures and Book Reviews, vol. LIV, no. 7, 1956-57, pp. 6-40.

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I

Our approach to the problem has a very precise point of departure. It may be described as the relevance of the concept of the immortality of man to the situation of bereavement with its pastoral and theological implications. We do not intend to meditate upon how one can die or how one can, on sober theological reflection, prepare somebody else to die. We propose to investigate how those who have lost someone close to them can be enabled to endure not only this loss but the sudden realization of the problem of death while they are still living. While this is a delicate and somehow even embarrassing point of departure, it is for that very reason a crucial one.

Perhaps nowhere in the whole area of pastoral care is the Christian Church more insecure, uncertain, and almost utterly irrelevant than in the funeral parlor. It is trivial but not obsolete to point out the strange and dishonest atmosphere, artificially created with the help of the sweet odor of flowers, melancholy music, and the anesthetic effect of the soft voice of the minister, who attempts, at least for the moment, to make us immune to the full impact of the hurt involved whenever someone is taken away from us. It is not only pagan but actually morbid to place in the service such a tremendous emphasis on the corpse-a worship of what was, with its escape into memories in order not to face the hardship of the future. This atmosphere even seduced Johann Sebastian Bach to open his otherwise wonderful Passion According to St. Matthew with the anthem, "Kommit ihr Toechter, Helft mir Klagen," translated, "Come, OYe Daughters, and Help Me Deplore." But, in proclaiming the death of Jesus Christ in the Christian Church, it is not our business to identify sentimentality with the hardship suffered Jesus, even if this were possible for us. Rather, we must rejoice in the might of the resurrection following such a total obliteration of life. Otherwise, we rob the death of Jesus Christ of its actual and redemptive meaning for us degrading it to the level of a mere historical event.

Please allow me to deal with some specific psychological implications of this strange human behavior in the face of bereavement in "Order that we may be able later on to evaluate their theological significance. Here, I refer to the excellent study Professor Linde-

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mann of the Harvard Medical School and Professor Fairbanks of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge . ⁴

II

The most obvious psychological phenomenon caused bereavement is that of shock, resulting from the realization that our interpersonal life-organism is either hampered, damaged, or dissolved the sudden disappearance of one of its components. It becomes apparent that we can no longer live the way we used to live. The routine of daily life together is suddenly disrupted and changed. This means that while we are still under the relative stupor of bereavement, we are forced to reorient and reorganize our own living. Our dependency shifts from the external and concrete object to our, inward image of the deceased. We lack in our life-expression both dominance and support, and feel frustrated since their former object or subject is taken away from us.

This makes a re-evaluation of the past life together mandatory, and causes an immediate and strong feeling of guilt. This, not only as to the deeds of the past in which we may have wronged or hurt the one who is gone from us, but perhaps even more strongly do we feel guilty about all the opportunities which we have missed to express to the beloved one our true feelings of appreciation, love, and respect. This guilt feeling becomes sharply aggravated since it is clear that our chance of remedying the situation is definitely gone. We feel not only frustrated but paralyzed, facing the brutal fact that as much as our past interaction with the deceased one is relevant to us, we see no way of doing something about the one who is dead, or especially of doing something about our own feeling of inadequacy and failure.

This may coincide with our impression of the life-expression of the dead one. We may be under the painful awareness that he was himself not able either to fulfill his life, or at least to arrange his life in a way which allowed him to make up for passed failures and misdeeds or to compensate for lost opportunities for bringing fruition into his own life-awareness.

It is thus not only the shock of the unpredictability of death which is unbearable to us, but even more so the implication which this has for our present daily life experience and existence. We are obvi-

⁴ For some of the results of this study see: Lloyd Foster, Erich Lindemann, and Rollin J. Fairbanks, "Grief," Pastoral Psychology, vol. 1, no. 5, June 1950, pp. 28-30.

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ously not sure that present day existence is in itself meaningful and rounded out, nor is there any assurance given that we may still be allowed to make up for it in any future day. From this point of departure, Reinhold Niebuhr argues that we die not because we sin; on the contrary, we sin because we die.

Apart from the problem of whether the foregoing understanding of sin is correct-which is doubtful, since it confuses sin as separation between God and man and its subsequent results in human behavior-the real question concerns itself with the meaning of death. Is death solely a relatively harmless transition and hence an almost irrelevant limitation, or does it constitute the absolute terminus of all that we can claim or dispose of? If the latter be true, it is logical that we may try to presuppose this and arrange our life accordingly. This means that we accustom ourselves to live constantly under the imminent possibility of death and arrange our life accordingly. Some medieval monks made it a rule not to salute each other With anything but the memento mori in order to help each other to be constantly aware of the threat of death, and to live daily in a way which would allow them to meet death prepared and with a stoic serenity.

It is most instructive that in the firm structure of the medieval Weltanschauung this consideration of death was nothing but a practical admonition. In the middle of the twentieth century it becomes a cry of despair, as Paul Tillich puts it; and in existentialism a "striking preoccupation with failure, dread, and death as one of the essential characteristics of existentialism." ⁵ Indeed, Heidegger conceives human existence as a being-toward-death. The anxiety resulting from this existence is not merely a fear of death but also the futile attempt to establish, to replenish, and aggrandize our existence at least in the eyes of others in order to hide and stubbornly deny the possibility of death as the absolute limit of our possibilities. Heidegger's advice is to see through and deny for ourselves such popular escape mechanisms, and to decide to live courageously facing death, and to evaluate any decision and self-awareness in the sight and under the scrutiny of its relative value against the consideration of ultimate death.

Both Jaspers and Marcel attempt to diminish the absolute threat of death man's transcending his imminent existence through a

⁵ Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism front Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York, Meridian Books, 957, p. 21.

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rather obscure and, in Marcel's case, more, and in jasper's case, less, Christian way. They speak of transcending out own life situation through relating ourselves in hope to an absolute, and through reflection to a transcendental entity which itself is not threatened death or destruction.

Although Heidegger's advice to conceive our existence as constantly directed toward death, and from there to be critically re- evaluated, gains much actuality in these decades under the shadow, of the hydrogen bomb, it seems to me that the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre recognizes the human problem of death in an even sharper and move radical fashion. White Heidegger conceives total human existence as under the heavy cloud of false heroism, Sartre with Gallican incisiveness despises anything that will give rise to a morbid melancholia. On the contrary, he takes the imminence of death as a challenge to fulfill the moment as well as we are capable: He argues that it is not so much our difficulty that we must live in a manner which makes us able to die, but on the contrary, that we, must realize that our life is threatened death. We should integrate this courageously and clearly into our life awareness, but then depart from this and choose to unfold our life in a fashion that makes it become meaningful and enjoyable in itself, here and now. He wants us not to prepare ourselves for a smooth death, but to decide to live such a satisfied and fulfilled life that we will then be able to die, as the Old Testament describes it, "old and satisfied." This means that as much as Sartre agrees with Heidegger's attempt to understand the human existence realistically in the light of death, he comes to an opposing conclusion, namely, that the death awareness must become a realistic life element in man but should not over shadow man's life; rather, it should intensify his striving after life. If, at the beginning, we called death a cleavage in our life awareness, Sartre would agree with us but would demand that this cleavage be seen as a source of livelihood.

III

In his play, No Exit, ⁶ Sartre accurately describes man's inability to live or to die if he does not dare to choose himself. He is emasculated if he does not dare to let the past be dead, take fullest advantage of the present, and let the future take care of itself. Sartre con-

⁶ Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, and Three Other Plays, New York, Vintage Books, 1955, 1-47.

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ceives a vicious circle. He who cannot totally posit himself in a decision can never face death because death ends his possibility to make up for halfhearted, compulsive, or dependent decisions. The very mundane but striking description of hell is centered on the fact that four people have to live their lives, and more than this, have to live them together. The whole predicament consists of the. simple fact that they cannot face each other since they cannot face themselves; they cannot trust each other since they do not trust themselves; and that they are even unable to reach each other for they are helplessly land hopelessly entangled in a dishonest escape from their own life situation. But the climax appears when they suddenly discover that they have the ability to step out of this situation. Then the one to whom the opportunity is given finds himself unable and too cowardly to take the risk of leaving hell behind for life. He is unable to live and thus finds that to live forever, to be immortal, is merely prolongation of the embarrassing failure of his own existence.

As much as we agree with Sartre in his insistence on daily life existence being the primary problem beyond the problem of death, it is nevertheless doubtful whether any human being on his own has the resources and strength not only to take death for what it is, but to choose himself. At least for most of us the authorship and objects of choice are unclear and hopelessly entangled in environmental predicaments. As a matter of fact, from the viewpoint of the Christian faith, as well as common human experience, we have to deny flatly Sartre's fundamental presuppositions.

The physicist Pasqual Jordan in his book, Der Gescheiterte Aufstand, 7 calls our present age and the two centuries preceding it the "era of ideologies." With the exception of natural science which resolutely departs from all postulated and theoretical concepts in order to build solely upon empirical evidence, he says that the rest of human knowledge has been confused and led astray each of the reacting abstract ideologies which had no other basis than their theoretical postulates, for which they nevertheless claimed absolute authority. The results of the ideological age are bitter wars and revolutions whereby only concepts are shifted; while the continuity the constructive unfolding of life, the evolutionary movement, been hampered. The conclusion is very obvious: we are less

⁷ Pascual Jordan , Der Gescheiterte Aufstand, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 956 pp. 120 ff.

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and less able to experience real life, since we are more and more preoccupied with living according to preconceived ideas and with seeking their realization, rather than with experiencing life as such. In this light, death is of course, a most hated event since it terminates consciousness as the basis of our ability to conceptualize without guaranteeing the realization of our ideologies. We have many ways of life but we have no way of participating in an ever-growing and continuing life. To avoid this realistic acceptance of the breakdown of our ideological concepts, we overdo them, and project our thought structures even beyond death, and produce, without any realistic basis, concepts of a life after death or the immortality of man.

The problem is not that we have rational concepts and theories- we cannot think or communicate without them. The real problem, is whether we are in danger of identifying our understanding, our concepts, and theories of life, with the reality of life and thus of living concepts instead of being able and willing to let the experience of living challenge our thought structures.

The real test of this comes with death. If we live our own theories, then death becomes the final and catastrophic realization that we never lived at all, as frantic as we were in striving to make our concepts all-encompassing. However, we really live, and this only surprise, when we participate in a life awareness which can even stand the change of death, but will surely not end with our own understanding of life. It is true that from an ideology of life there is no exit, either into real life or into death.

IV

In the light of this, we may be ready briefly to study life awareness in the New Testament. At no point whatever in the New Testament is the fact of mere existence, or being physically alive, identified with the reality of life as such. The whole impact of the New Testament kerygma lies in the fact that whatever we may think on our own about life structure and the meaning of life, we will have to give it up, we will have to turn from it, "repent," in order to be confronted with surprising newness and reality of life. The cross means not only death but the absolute destruction of human life awareness as it may be described philosophy, ethical structure or a religious assurance of the continuity of our own life. Over against this, Easter means an absolute and striking newness of life

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which, as such, not only walks through the closed doors of our life awareness but defies victoriously, time and again, all our concepts of life. It leads us out of our ideology of life.

In the New Testament, life comes through death. Pentecost makes Baptism the symbol of the death of our self-structured ethical or religious life in order that we may be born again into a life which shall never again be our own possession nor the plaything of our theoretical assumptions. In his book, The Courage to Be,8 Paul Tillich attempts to describe not only the present predicament of man, but also to show that this predicament may give rise to a constructive moment out of which we may break through into openness toward life. The nature and ethos of this new life cannot be precisely described for otherwise it would again be subject to our concepts and categories. But nevertheless we may at least note that it appears to be the exact opposite of any life which has been described conceptually and ideologically.

This is to say that the new life is unself-securing. By this we mean that it is full of the confidence that it is ultimately and totally secured, that it makes no attempt whatever to carve out its own self-securing little corner upon which we may be able on our own to fix life.

It is utterly unself-conscious. That is, it does not reflect upon its own, but in a childlike fashion is merely self-expressive. Through interaction with the environmental life-expression it becomes aware of itself as a unique part of the total, and experiences itself spontaneously as it contemplates itself merely retrospectively in order to be more fully open and confident.

It is recognizable in the absence of underlying fear. While it may be frightened an oncoming problem or situation, since the new life does not have to justify or constitute itself, this fright is not dealt with as a thing in itself. Fear is dissolved in a new realization of the 'actual proportions of this threat, overpowering as it may appear to us, when compared with a life which has been proved able to break through death and hell.

It is keen and sensitive in its outreach. While mere biological growth and expansion may be governed solely the law of balance between vital strength and environmental restraint, thus leading to Darwin's famous "survival of the fittest"; life through death means

⁸ Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1952.

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to encounter and establish a relationship with the One whose life we share together and in its specific uniqueness in and for our given situation. This should not be confused with a weak and utterly permissive caricature of love which is so often substituted for Christian love. On the contrary, exactly because the sure awareness that life is always shared between us leads to a realism never caught either egoistic or masochistically altruistic motives or fears.

The sharing of life which is the backbone of all true communion is the primary necessity in order to experience life through death, which thus even in view of all impediments, problems, and threats will not be destroyed. This produces the assurance, humbling as well as strengthening, that the experience of life is never produced entirely one's own vitality nor is it an exclusive gift of our heritage or environment. The continually renewing and cathartic realization that what promotes the openness toward life is lasting, does not exclude the other and destructive possibility that a denial of the self-expression of life not only leads to death but in itself is death. In this context, death takes on an entirely new and more serious characteristic: it is no longer an awesome possibility but a concrete and specific judgment as well. Life through death takes death seriously as the inevitable and inflexible executioner of all that is no longer rooted and meaningfully integrated in the course of life.

V

This leads us to the consideration of whether death may have a purifying mission for our life awareness. Does not life itself can for a continual abolition of all that has petrified and become an obstacle to the freely unfolding development of life? Death should therefore not only be regarded as the absolute and unquestionable enemy of life, but should be ordered to yield up its positive and indirectly constructive meaning. Death means, in this sense, not the abolition of freedom for the life struggle but exactly the opposite: the liberating force which throws life from the static over into the dynamic. Tagore says,

There are people who have a static concept of life and thus only long for a life after death, since they are interested exclusively in continuance but not in fulfillment; they are happy in the illusion than the things to which they are used will last forever. In their thought, they identify themselves fully with their usual environment and with

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all that they have collected. The necessity of leaving the all means death to them. They forget that the true meaning of life is to live beyond, the constant growing beyond oneself. The fruit sticks to the stem, the shell to the flesh, the flesh to the stone as long as the fruit is not ripe. As long as this is so, it is not ready for further life development. ⁹

The meaning of life through death where death is a necessary function of life itself, where life frees itself from stagnation, has to be considered in its medical, psychological, philosophical, and theological implications.

Medical authorities voice their growing concern that where the medical ethos, concentrated on the mere postponement if not the abolition of death in the physical realm, becomes an end in itself, there the real problem arises of whether mere physical survival constitutes sufficient value to justify such an all out battle against death. Where there is an utter absence of life meaning in the existence of a patient, there the death instinct not only successfully counteracts the medical attempt for survival, but makes its very goal meaningless. Death is such a sore point in the medical self-confidence not only for the challenge of its physical implications, but precisely because it goes far beyond the realm of the physical survival alone.

The emotional significance of life through death lies in the act that the true fruition of life is impossible as long as man is not able to let go. The whole natural rhythm of concentration and relaxation, of productivity and rest depends on the emotional willingness to receive justification and satisfaction for our existence apart from and beyond our achievements. Only when we are ready to leave to the past that which belongs to the past, to let the dead bury the dead without guilt and sentimental regret, only then are we truly open for the oncoming newness and surprise of life. It is, ironically, all too true that when we clutch in our little hands what we believe to be the meaning and foundation of our life, we not only destroy life's ability to develop but we also close ourselves to all that might be given to use. Whosoever wants to save his life will lose it, and the only way to gain it is through death.

In the realm of reason and intellect, this means clearly that we will have to forsake the moment of certainty and absolute truth as far as our insights and findings are concerned. This pragmatic relativism should not be confused with nihilism, since it only implies that what-

⁹ Rabindranath Tagore, Flustern der Seele, Freiburg im Breisgau, Hyperion Verlag, p. 45.

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ever we may discover as relevant is related to our given circumstances and point of development, but must be left open to the challenge of further findings and deeper insights. It depends on our inner security and genuine humility whether we can be open for the true impact of that positivism in which we are not allowed to judge the world of apparent existence our preconceived notions and theories, but to depart experimentally and conclusively from that which in the world of existence permits us to draw our own derivations and hypothetical truths. Relativism as it is established in the world of science has to be expanded into the world of philosophy too. That such relativism may be constructive and responsible, instead of degenerating into a total disintegration of thought and experiment, calls for our confidence and ability to relate it to an absolute point of absolute reality without postulating this reality according to our own wishes or attempting to define it speculatively according to our own thought structure.

Translated into theological language, this teaches us that the point to which everything in its structural interrelatedness has ultimately to be related is always the deus absconditus whom we can never know nor capture in our own understanding. It is precisely his own unpredictable self-revelation which condemns all our concepts of God and life, not even permitting us to designate any event or person in history as the final revelation. In this sense, any given theological concept as well as any religious experience contains in itself not only limitations but necessarily the seeds of its own dissolution. The life-giving spirit of God is the very same which condemns our unwillingness to die to our own theological or religious beliefs. Sin is thus the stubborn self-defense of man over against the self-revealing God, and death is the ever-threatening consequence of our cutting ourselves off from life in order to preserve our own life awareness. In this sense, death is necessary to life as a life function. When Sigmund Freud discovered the polarity in the human self-awareness between the instinct for survival and self-establishment and the death instinct, he certainly put his finger on a very fundamental life question of man, but he deprived himself of the very depth and impact of his own discovery because he futilely attempted to integrate it into his fatalistic biologism. ¹⁰

¹⁰ Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, London, International Psychoanalytic Press, 1922.

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VI

Now we have to ask ourselves seriously whether such an understanding of life and death is really possible for any human being without his losing an appropriate self-confidence in his specific existence. To this the answer must be a clear and unqualified "No," in order to escape the individualistic failures of traditional pietism and rationalistic liberalism. In this context it is necessary to reconsider the significance of communion. We do not use the term "belonging" since we do not believe it is either a mere biological necessity for the physical satisfaction of the partners, nor are we here interested in the purely emotional aspect where feelings are exchanged and experienced in mutual process of adjustment. Furthermore, we do not use the term "community" since this would limit it only to the sociopolitical facet of human living together, as much as we recognize the importance of a continual exchange and interaction of different social groups and circles of diverse political creeds.

Here we concentrate on the most basic aspect of communion, which is a religious one. At this point, we may refer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Sanctorum Communio. ¹¹ Life is received, experienced, groomed, and fulfilled as living together. The Church is forever in danger of becoming an institution where individuals want to receive life cheaply through a magic misunderstanding of the liturgical and sacramental aspect of the Church. Even in the early centuries, the sacrament was misunderstood as a pharmacon athanasias, a medication toward immortality. Thus, the Church was understood as the place where the individual could accept either a magic device which promotes his spiritual life, or train his moral conscience and ability for happiness toward an ideal of the self as a moral hero of stoic emotional equilibrium. In opposition to this selfishly individualistic misunderstanding of the Church, there was always a trend in the history of the Church to go to the other extreme, namely, to define the Church merely as a gathering of those enlightened people, who, on their own, know the meaning of religion and inspire each other to be trained toward an even more ideal life together.

Both outlooks contain a grain of truth but exaggerate it and hence lose the broader reality. It is true that life has to be experienced

¹¹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, Munchen, Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1954.

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first the individual and only upon this can it be shared with others. It is impossible that life or its structure and meaning may be received or taken over from another human being or an institution. But, as soon as this leads us to believe, on the other hand, that life begins with the individual's awareness of life, then we end with the illusion of the enlightened mail who, being basically good, merely shares with his brethren the overflow of his insights and moral values.

Now, communion is the event in which God's own breath of life makes man recognize that the bare fact of his being alive is significant in itself and is based on the other fact that God not only gives life but lives in him. This recognition, arising from God's intervention in man's own life through the Holy Spirit, is not merely a chaotic or instinctual upheaval in mail's self-awareness, but is rather his confrontation with the precise intention of God's own life-giving. God has revealed this in past actions which are recorded in the Holy Scriptures those who were not only momentarily moved them, but were thus brought into a new relation to their environment and in turn had a distinctive influence on their world. This process finds its culmination at that point in history toward which God's breath of life, the Holy Spirit, points continually: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ literally personifies the life intention of God. His Baptism signifies the radical and ultimate giving in to death and loss of all that we may claim on our own; his life brings about the death of man on his own; and the resurrection, as well as Christ's lasting life afterward, are now really life coming out of death and therefore a new and clearly God-given life. Such life does not have to seek its own perfection or individualistic fulfillment, for the spirit now dwells in mail to realize the all-encompassing life-intention of God himself.

Man's God-given awareness of his being alive as participation in God's own life and being governed this involves, first of all, a radical and cutting moment of judgment upon man's natural entanglement in his background and environment. This judgment clarifies the absolute and unquestionable primacy of his life relation to the source of life in God. At this point, we have to challenge and revise Tagore's remark with which we have prefaced our thoughts. As true as it is that being alive phenomenologically points to the source of our lasting life; we also have to be careful that we do not misunderstand this, and forget the radical reorientation which this source of immortality causes in us.

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Communion is therefore the place where we continually help each other to re-examine our lives as to whether they really are cleansed from all misleading and illusory attempts to understand the source, structure, and meaning of our life as other than a factual self-expression of God's life in our own existence. Communion is where we help each other to die to all our concepts, feelings, words, and deeds which, taken on their own, separate us from the life intention of God. This happens when we come together in order to reconsider our common life, with all its unique ramifications for personal existences, and when we reconsider this in confrontation with the expressly worded life intention of God as it is witnessed to those who have found their lives reoriented through God's action. However, this is not to be understood in the sense that we may take their human words and advice as the ultimate word of God.

The purpose of preaching and hearing the word, and of expressing it sacramentally, is precisely that we may bring our own lives together with the historically bound and limited life awareness of others who, with us but before us, belonged to God. Therein we ask that God will produce and clarify his contemporary intention for our lives and living together. This means living out of continual death to our own ideas and feelings about life. It also means living under a continual life judgment so that we may eliminate everything, be it of the highest religious or moral quality, that stands as an obstacle to God's self-revelation through the new understanding of our lives for each other. As God realizes himself through the lives, experiences, and actions of human beings, this in turn gives the realistic assurance and basis of their participating in God's own everlasting life. We have to be brutally frank in telling people that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in man which as such warrants its own survival. Life, since it is always relation and relationship to the source of life (whether this relationship is consciously accepted or denied), depends on being rooted in a life which is lasting. This is expressed perhaps most clearly and simply when Jesus Christ says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but 'has passed from death to life" (John 5: 24).

VII

As we reflect on our findings, it becomes evident that the situation of bereavement is certainly not the occasion in which the problem of

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life or immortality can be most effectively clarified. This is not because the psychological shock of bereavement makes it almost impossible for those who are left behind to consider anything of a broader and deeper context than the given situation of death, sorrow, and the most immediate steps to be taken in order to restore normal life adequately.

Bereavement is only one incident among others which forces us to reconsider the foundation of our life. Within the communion of those who love each other since they are born out of and carried the love of God, we can help each other to appreciate anew the undebatable evidence that death as such is solely a biological and historical manifestation of the fact that all life that is not the living out of God's own life is dead even before a medical doctor affirms the actual biological exitus. This is death as judgment. Its positive equivalent lies in the possibility of helping those who are consternated the event of losing one of their loved ones to reconsider their life situation in the light of the livelihood and love expressed those who, in their mutual communion based on the communion with God, are able to face their own death courageously and to see beyond the disconcerting reality of death.

It goes without saying that such courage, strength, and decisiveness is most needed in a time when the social economic, and political ideologies have their power backed up the threat of physical extinction. In this time of totalitarian terror and ruthless economic competition, a group of people who do not strive to impress their environment through their own qualities of wealth, intellectual brilliance, and personal achievements is urgently needed. Their secret is the rediscovery of their purely human ability to live meaningfully, and to express their meaningful life in constructive living together. Here, realism consists of the ability to survey events and threats in their appropriate proportion and to deal with them as to their own importance, but always under the clear vision and assurance that they have no ultimate value or consequence nor can they ultimately shake our own life-awareness.

Bereavement is therefore the most merciless test of our outlook upon life. It makes it apparent whether we escape into illusions of our own as to our individual survival, whether we complacently pity ourselves in an overemphasis upon the emotional or material suffering caused the departure of one of our own. But also, bereave-

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ment can constitute the moment when the Christian communion reasserts itself spontaneously to fulfill its essential task; namely, to declare, reveal, and unfold the life reality which is more awful than physical death for us if we do not participate in it, but so much more mighty that death and complete isolation can never shake it. Needless to say, in the circumstances of bereavement, words alone are the least potent means for such a proclamation, especially if they are not incarnate in attitude, in humble and inconspicuous deed, but above all, in the expression of love which does not depend either on our own personality or upon the attractiveness of those who need us.

Bereavement may well become the experience through which we may happily forsake our speculations and futile guess work about our own immortality or life after death in general, leaving this up to the one whom we trust as our living Father in Heaven. Limited in life time and space and also our understanding, we may joyfully experience the fact that where we are enabled to give the life which we abundantly receive, there we are reassured that such life will not end with that which we call our own existence. The transition from deadly life to a life which is not threatened death is not bound to the hour of our own physical death but is the challenge of the ever-present God to our present understanding of life.