On the Ambivalence of Believing in Life After Death

On the Ambivalence of Believing in Life After Death February 8, 2016

Does believing in life after death make this life more precious and valuable or less so? Does it maximize our investment in this life or minimize it? Does  it motivate working to improve the situation of this world or does it invalidate such work?

Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus"
Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus”

That’s the question theologian Moltmann raises toward the beginning of The Coming of God. Here’s the relevant paragraph, in which he poses the question and probes the precariousness and ambivalence of belief in an after-life:

The thought of death and a life after death is ambivalent. It can deflect us from this life, with its pleasures and pains. It can make life here a transition, a step on the way to another life beyond–and by doing so it can make this life empty and void. It can draw love away from this life and direct it towards a life hereafter, spreading resignation in ‘this veil of tears.’ The thought of death and a life after death can lead to fatalism and apathy, so that we only live life here half-heartedly, or just endure it and ‘get through.’ The thought of a life after death can cheat us of the happiness and the pain of this life, so that we squander its treasures, selling them off cheap to heaven. In that respect it is better to live every day as if death didn’t exist, better to love life here and now as unreservedly as if death really were ‘the finish.’ The notion that this life is no more than a preparation for a life beyond, is the theory of a refusal to live, and a religious fraud. It is inconsistent with the living God, who is a ‘lover of life’. In that sense it is religious atheism.

But if we have ever been close to death and have escaped some deadly peril, we know the feeling that life has been given back to us. We feel new-born, and experience life here, in all its uniqueness and beauty, with freshly awakened and sharpened senses. We then suddenly realize with a blinding awareness what living really means. So the thought of death and a life after death doesn’t have to deflect us from this life; it can also give this life a new depth. It doesn’t have to make us ‘absent-minded’; it can make us wholly present. It doesn’t have to make us indifferent; it can make us fully and wholly capable of love.

But what about you? What do you think belief in, and thinking about, life after death does for you? Does it make this life more valuable and more precious and more filled with wonder–or less so?

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Image Source (Wiki Commons – Public Domain) 


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