Liturgy Christian Anthropology Essay rev

The Soul, the Body or the Whole Person? Christian Anthropology’s Major Makeover – published in Liturgy 33,#1:19-25 (2017) I The Introduction to the Episcopal Church’s new burial liturgy, “Enriching Our Worship” insists that the body or the cremains of the dead ought to be present at the funeral. The warrant for this is Christian belief in the incarnation and the bodily resurrection of the dead. 1 Above all, “the Christian liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy,”2 patterned directly on Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is safe to say that today, these ideas are commonplace, and that Christians’ objections to other patterns, particularly bodiless memorial services, are based on these norms. Indeed, the editors of “Enriching Our Worship” desire to banish memorials and personal “celebrations of life” to non-Christian non-worship spaces and times. Behind these norms, almost every discussion of Christian understandings of the person for the past decades has emphasized that Christians are holists, not dualists when it comes to incarnation and embodiment. That is the primary reason for the preference for whole-body burial, for the presence of the dead at his or her own funeral. Along with this goes a contemporary stress on death as disruption and loss for the mourners, and attention to the presence of God in their sorrow While these ideas and practices may seem uncontroversial today, this pattern was not an earlier emphasis. In fact, based on funeral sermons and advice manuals for pastors right up until the middle of the twentieth century, some of these themes would have seemed foreign and even offensive. It was unquestioned that the person consists of soul and body. The funeral director dealt with the body, the preacher with the soul. Too much emphasis on the body in American society’s practices was castigated as pagan. The soul was the real person, the person who mattered to God. Sermons preached at funerals did not argue for this understanding; they assumed it. It was the norm that lay behind all the specific things pastors said at funerals, and the messages conveyed by songs and poems which supplemented sermons. To support this theme, preachers had a rich emotional imagery of natural transitions, so that the soul was actually part of a regular, expected and universal order ordained by God. Due to this universality of soul-focus, the connection to Easter was simply not found in sermons and worship, especially since “bodily resurrection” would have distracted worshippers from the focus on immediate after-death soulish destiny. Significantly, when the dead were directly addressed in sermons, it was in their heavenly abode, never to the body lying in the church. This view is now castigated as platonism, by those who find its dualism un-Biblical, or sub-Christian. Recent writers on funerals, especially Thomas Long, would be mystified or offended by such dualism, not to mention the content of most of the sermons that supported it. They are deeply outraged by memorial services that under the guise of “celebrating a life” substitute disembodiment of memories and images instead of the physical presence of the dead. “We are no longer persuaded that funerals are about the embodied person who has died… they are disembodied souls floating in the gnostic ether.” 3 But this was precisely what an entire earlier tradition claimed was not “gnostic” or “ether” but our true Heavenly home. How did we get to the point where a view of persons denigrated implicitly by older traditions is now upheld as more authentic? In this essay, I examine the older view, then turn to a vigorous and famous challenge based on theological opposition to it, an attempt to claim that a more holist view of the person is the more authentically Biblical understanding. In this essay, I will be arguing in juxtaposition to the eloquent claim of Long, who with Thomas Lynch has emphasized again and again that the funeral needs the body present, needs the dead as a participant in his or her own funeral . While Long and Lynch nostalgically want a return to embodied funerals, I look at the messages sent by the sermons, songs and poems of such traditional funerals. These tell a different story, because in spite of the presence of the corpse, the real person was always the soul, and anthropological dualism reigned supreme. II Were you to have asked any Christian, clergy or layperson, what happens at death, up through the middle of the twentieth century the initial element of the answer would have been very predictable: the soul separates from the body, and leaves it behind. Death was a transition, but not a loss, and in the dying of Christians, it was to be a smooth and hopeful transition into a new mode of being. Again and again, the hopeful quality of Christian death, and therefore of funerals, was stressed, although by our standards the messages and atmosphere sound gloomy. 4 Preachers who presided at funerals where the death had been expected, and the life of the deceased unproblematic in his or her faith, could rely on this smooth transition model and elaborate by intense use of certain imageries. For example, the separation of soul from body was in reality a homecoming, a return to a place or state that resembled one’s home from childhood. Pictures of peace, protective maternal presence and simple piety bound this image into sermons at funerals. For the dead, the soul was Home at last, for “Heaven is a HOME and death a Homegoing.” 5 Jesus, whose original home was Heaven, could have been homesick most of his life on earth; he was eager to return to his Father’s house. 6 Another set of images for peaceful, expected transition were drawn from nature. For example, the caterpillar goes into its cocoon and emerges a butterfly. Birds migrate. Flowers grow out of the shade toward the light. So popular in sermons were these images of natural immortality that they suggest an idea of death followed by afterlife as the final stage of growth rather than an ending. The poem once read at funerals and still treasured as among America’s 100 Favorite Poems expresses this well: “The Rose Still Grows Beyond the Wall” tells of a rose bush that grew from the shady side, up through a crack in the wall and into sunlight on the other side. Shall claim of death cause us to grieve And make our courage faith and fall? Nay! Let us faith and hope receive – The rose still grows beyond the wall.7 Natural immortality of this kind, it was claimed, has been the hope of humans everywhere and at all times, a basic universal that Christianity supports but did not discover. Motifs such as these were the mainstay of funeral sermons up through the first half of the twentieth century. They were buttressed by philosophical grounding such as with the famous series of the Ingersoll Lectures on “The Immortality of Man” at Harvard, begun in 1896, and the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh. In 1921-22, philosopher of religion A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, delivering his Gifford Lectures on “The Idea of Immortality,” expounded his version of dualism. He clearly viewed himself as a Christian philosopher of religion, although he included ideas from the Ancient Hebrews and Asian religions in his discussion. His conclusion: To the spiritually-attuned mind, “physical death ought to appear no more than an incident in life, an event to be accepted as naturally as sleep. It should bring with it no depressing suggestion of finality.”8 While mourning the dead might be a natural human response, it had no religious value for Pringle-Pattison. For Pringle-Pattison, “Unbelief in death…seems to be the necessary characteristic or concomitant of true spiritual life.” 9 This was translated and appropriated in endless sermons that sometimes went so far as to maintain that Jesus’ death on the cross was anything more than such a natural transition- at least as a dying and death sequence. To an extent that seems utterly outrageous to many of us, this form of “unbelief in death” was extolled as an ideal. The body might have been present at the funeral, but what the worshippers heard and sung was an utter contradiction to the lesson Long, Lynch and the “Enriching Our Worship” editors hope it taught. What disrupted this traditional dualism? Disrupted and disputed and in many instances discarded it, so that it gets labelled platonism and contrasted rhetorically with the authentic Christian understanding of persons as holistic? What killed natural immortality at least in theological training, and in funeral sermons as well? For if one reads through anthologies of funeral sermons dating from the 1970s on, and in a few cases even earlier, there is little room for caterpillars-into-butterflies, and absolutely no one would uphold “unbelief in death” in the positive sense Pringle-Pattison meant. In the second half of the twentieth century, even the stodgiest pastor believed in death. Today’s funeral sermons center on the experience of loss and grief, from the perspective of the bereaved. Indeed, one book’s subtitle Preaching to Mourners, might well be the title for all post-1970s anthologies of sermons and pastoral manuals for funerals. Mourning is no longer considered irrelevant or devalued, for at death a real transition has occurred in the lives of those who survive. Cullman: Resurrection vs. Immortality A dramatic shift in Christian anthropology precedes current focus on mourners, and came about at the level of ideas and images. This change was extremely unwelcomed in some of its implications. It starts at the highest level of theological sophistication, proclaimed at the Harvard Ingersoll Lectures. Oscar Cullmann’s famous essay, “Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?” was delivered in 1955. For a lecture series whose topic was “The Immortality of Man” it must have been a shocker, and Cullmann made the most of his shock-value. In the 1965 edition of the published lecture, along with others on Immortality and Resurrection edited by Krister Stendahl, is an “Afterword” of Cullmann’s response to his outraged hearers and readers. His reply: “Is it really necessary to remind intelligent people today…that there is a difference between recognizing that such a view was held… and accepting it?” 10 Put bluntly, Cullmann argued that dualism is simply not in the Bible. The Biblical authors, of both Old and New Testament, were holists. They took death not as a transition to natural immortality, but as an enemy of God and an enemy to themselves. They hated death, they feared it, they felt about it the way many cancer sufferers today hate cancer. To die was to be lost to God, and to be swallowed up by God’s enemy. Cullmann took on not just Pringle-Pattison, and not just Plato – but Socrates himself, the icon of heroic, wise dying revered by Christians and non-Christians down through the ages. “Can there be a greater contrast than that between Socrates and Jesus?” asks Cullmann, focused on their dying. Socrates, calm and assured, drinks the hemlock in sure and certain hope of his soul’s immortality. Jesus prays to be spared his impending death. He turns to God with all his human fear of this great enemy, death. He is afraid of death… He was really afraid. 11 He accepts his Father’s will, but means: “If this greatest of all terrors, death, must befall me according to thy will, then I submit to this horror.”12 Jesus knows that “Whoever is in the hands of death is no longer in the hands of God, but in the hands of God’s enemy.” 13 This is the meaning of Jesus’ forsaken cry in the Gospels. “He is now actually in the hands of God’s great enemy.” 14 I lay out these repetitive Cullmann quotes in order to give readers a sense of their shock value. Jesus is not afraid of Pilate or his human enemies, he is afraid of death. It worked. It worked to cut through many generations of Pringle-Pattison assurances that death was as “natural” as sleep, and for Christians a non-event. That all the “horror,” “terror” and “enemy language from the passages above is Cullman’s, not the New Testament’s, did not seem to matter. Cullmann’s exaggerated rhetoric still has immense power to disrupt expectations about Christians and death. Cullmann’s anti-dualism position was and continues to be taken up by many Christian writers. In the words of Henri Nouwen, “Death does not belong to God. God did not create death. God does not want death for us. In God there is no death.” 15And this means exactly the opposite of what Seth Pringle-Pattison would have thought it did. IV Cullmann is still with us in a very positive way. Long and Lynch’s criticism of memorial services with no bodies depends on the critique of platonism that Cullmann led some 60-plus years ago. To these contemporary experts on funerals, a memorial service has a contrived “unbearable lightness.”16 It spiritualizes and makes death less real than our memories of the person we try to memorialize. Another way to see this is to say, after Cullmann, natural immortality started to sound New Age. This may be an anachronism, as Cullmann gave his lecture about 30 years in advance of what became identified as the New Age movement. But while all those analogies of caterpillars into butterflies, migrating birds and growing plants looked too smooth, peaceful and natural for Christian funerals, they retained their appeal elsewhere. Both natural immortality and “homesick Jesus” belonged to an era when dualism was unquestioned. Once questioned, the borders of what counted as appropriate Christian images for death shifted. Quietly,the use of these and especially of poems that endorsed them, dropped out of Christian funerals. New Age, as an explicit designated alternative to conventional Christianity, picked them up and used them. While most advocates of what became New Age ideas and practices would insist that they were holistic in their approach to mind-body integration, when it came to ideas and images for death, they could sound just like Pringle-Pattison. “There is no death,” announced Elisabeth Kübler-Ross at a public lecture, and in her writings after her initial work On Death and Dying. There is no loss, there is only a transition from caterpillar to butterfly. Exiled from post-Cullmann Christianity, this view really has found a home. The advantages of natural immortality are not just in its long philosophical pedigree, but because it can be illustrated. Kübler-Ross displayed a children’s stuffed caterpillar that, when turned inside out, became a butterfly!17 When Cullmann wanted to cut “resurrection” from such universal longings for a soulish transition, he may have hoped to exclude all themes images from the authentic Christian message; What God did for Jesus is truly outside nature, a unique once and for all divine act. This may have set a Christological norm for funerals, but it also excluded, intentionally, the favorite images and analogies that had given sermons their emotional weight. With the end of natural immortality Christians lost a lot of imagery that had worked and continues to work to suggest transitions. This changeover has also highlighted another purported strategic feature of New Age natural immortality, something present all along in Pringle-Pattison and his fellow platonists. That is, none of these images and ideas are Christocentric the way Cullmann insists we Christians should be. Indeed, once alerted to this criterion, it is striking how few of the older funeral sermons’ ideas and images are truly focused on Christ, his death and resurrection. No one could detect that any model for the funeral was an Easter liturgy. Even from denominations with the most formal patterns for worship, such an association is simply missing . Why should Easter be there, when universal natural immortality of the soul is the underlying message? Christ may have provided an historical proof of this in a special way, but he came to prove what people had always known by intuition anyway. This argument appeared in older sermons, and there would be little incentive to dwell on Jesus’s own death when one held this conviction. For pre-Cullmann preachers, this was not a betrayal of the cross or an embrace of platonism. For a good proportion of contemporary persons, participants at a memorial service, too much focus on Christ might seem narrow and exclusivist. And so celebrations of life look back to the past of the person, and the memories of the mourners. Cullmann’s heavy-handedness when it came to presenting death was almost (but not quite) matched by his insistence on resurrection, a miraculous act of God, as the sole Biblical teaching. Did he believe in an embodied resurrection at the end of history? Remember his “Afterword”: this is what the Bible says, take it or leave it. So, one might say, some left it, and in doing so moved into either New Age, or religiously vacuous contemporary memorials. In defense of Cullmann, there are certain deaths where his message seems unequivocably appropriate. These are funerals and memorials for children. At one time these were considered easy to preach because the pastor could be assured that the dead child had been free from serious sin and was at play with Jesus and other children in Heaven. But for persons today, here the impact of death as enemy becomes most real, most compelling. There is nothing good to say about the death of a child. We do not want anything good to be said about the death of a child. A well-known poem reflects the post-Cullmann understanding: “On a Child Who Lived One Minute” Into a world where children shriek like suns Sundered from other suns on their arrival, She saw the waiting face of evil, But couldn’t take its meaning in at once, So fresh her understanding, and so fragile… A blackness tiptoed in her And snuffed the only candle of her castle.18 And, in the words from a memorial service for a newborn, written by a friend, There is evil in the world, and temporarily, it has won a battle Against us.19 The second quote is followed in the liturgy by a strong affirmation of Jesus’ victory over death, but the tone of this lament memorial is utterly different from that of a natural immortality sermon. Overall, it is Cullmannesque in its insistence on death as enemy. Why do these examples seem so powerfully Cullmanesque? Because whatever Seth Pringle-Pattison upheld as the truly spiritual disbelief in death, lives cut short suddenly and horribly challenge such a benign view. Even as he gave his lectures in 1921, the churches of Great Britain hung plaques of those local persons killed in the Great War (World War I to us). The lists of names are appallingly long, the ages of the dead run from 17 to late 30s. The reality of these deaths hung heavy over the countryside. It may have been these deaths, rather than Cullmann or any other theological insiders which tilted the scales against dualism and natural immortality. You wish that the families and friends of all those dead young men could have come to the Gifford Lectures. Would they have found hope and understanding? Or, would they stood and with one voice protested: “No, we believe in death! It is all too real for us!” V We have said almost nothing about the “whole person” view which supposedly replaces dualism. It is easy to find diatribes against platonism. This is linked to a celebration of the goodness of creation, the material, embodied, time-bound and limited world that for a card-carrying platonist is second-rate. But there is a cost to this kind of celebration of natural embodied life. An eloquent and succinct expression comes from Nicholas Wolterstorff, grieving the death of his adult son: In our day we have come to see again some dimensions of the Bible overlooked for centuries. We have come to see its affirmation of the goodness of creation. God made us embodied and historical creatures and affirmed the goodness of that. We are not to yearn for timeless disembodiment… But this makes death all the more difficult to live with.20 This, one can say, is the shadow side of Cullmann’s makeover. Although there was precious little in his own essay that affirmed “the goodness of creation,” or that even mentioned Jesus’ enjoyment of friends, parties and daily activities, this affirmation implies that there is something deeply wrong and off the mark in the indifference of Pringle-Pattison to nature as the realm of human growth. Perhaps in practical Christian worship, natural immortality’s poetic images of butterflies and rose bushes made up for this. But without these, with resurrection alone as a unique miraculous act of God against God’s worst enemy Death, ordinary deaths may be indeed “all the more difficult to live with.” I have in the past written critiques of Cullman, followed the footsteps of many Biblical scholars, church historians and theologians in deconstructing his rhetoric. But to read older funeral sermons, unabashedly dualist and unmindful of the presence of the body while the message was of soul’s homecoming, I cannot help but wish, “Oscar Cullman, where were you when you were needed? Wasn’t your message what those bereaved people in the pews really needed to hear?” The story of funeral liturgies and preaching cannot be simplified into nostalgia for the good old days when bodies were present but when Christians were told to disbelieve in death. Notes 1. “Enriching Our Worship 3” Prepared by the Standing Commission on Litrugy and Music (New York: Church Publishing, Inc., 2007) 2 2. ibid., 1 3. Long, Thomas G. Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) 33 4. Bregman, Lucy. Preaching Death: The Transformation of Christian Funeral Sermons. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011) 5. Shepfer, H. Reed When Death Speaks. (Burlington Iowa: Lutheran Literary Board, 1937) 43. 6. ibid., 42 7. “The Rose Still Grows Beyond the Wall.” Anonymous, sometimes attributed to A. L. Frink. I found more than 75 websites for this. 8. Pringle-Pattison, Seth A. The Idea of Immortality. (Oxford, 1922) 208 9. ibid., 208. 10. Cullmann, Oscar, “Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?” in Immortality and Resurrection, edited Stendahl, Krister. (New York: Macmillan Co, 1965) “Afterword” 47-53. 11, ibid., 15 12. ibid., 15-16 13. ibid., 16. 14. ibid., 17. 15. Nouwen, Henri, A Letter of Consolation. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982) 75 16. Long, Thomas and Lynch, Thomas, The Good Funeral: Death, Grief and the Community of Care. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2013) 105 17. This lecture was given in the 1980s, reflecting her views from about 1976 on. 18. Kennedy, X.J. “On a Child Who Lived One Minute,” New Yorker, March 8, 1958. 19. Schneider, Greg, “A Responsive Reading for Hans Peterson,” private communication. 20. Wolterstorff, Nicholas Lament for a Son. (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 1987) 31. Lucy Bregman is Professor of Religion at Temple University. She is the author of Preaching Death: The Transformation of Christian Funeral Sermons (Baylor University Press, 2011) 12 Bregman