Chapter 8:
Sources of Christian
Hope
Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin has been perhaps the most eloquent apostle of Christian hope in
recent years, discerning in the evolutionary process an increasing
convergence and complexification that will finally result in the Omega
point, the consummation and terminus of history foreshadowed in Jesus as
the Christ. Yet how can we be certain that this final convergence will
yield the full personalization of man instead of his collectivization or
destruction? Does God guarantee a final victory? Can we have the
confidence that God will finally bring about the triumph of good, no
matter how badly we fail him? If so, its coming is inevitable, and we
need not strive to bring it about. Then the risks of this world lose
their seriousness, for there is no ultimate risk. If the good triumphs
no matter what, the sufferings that God allows us to endure on the way
lose their meaning because he could have accomplished his purposes
without them.
But what if, on the
other hand, there is no final triumph of good, and we simply face the
bleak prospect of more of the same? It is all too easy to dismiss
Teilhard as a facile optimist, without penetrating to the root of his
desperate vision. Teilhard was deeply sensitive to the growing
hopelessness of modern man. Without the assurance of tomorrow, can we
go on living? Hope releases the energies of man, and the lure of a
better future is the only reason for any striving. Individual,
particular, proximate hopes, however, must be situated within an horizon
of ultimate hope. For all the hopes and strivings of man are unmasked
as utter vanity if the final end of the universe is simply a wasting
away into nothingness.
The logic of the
situation seems inexorable: without hope, we are lost and still in our
sins. This hope requires an ultimate horizon which must be both real
and good, for otherwise our hope is based on an illusion. But an
inevitable triumph of good undercuts the seriousness and risk of the
human task, and gives the lie to its manifold sufferings.
Here metaphysics
fails us. Any metaphysical necessity that might be adduced to give us
confidence in our future would be too heavy-handed. We would simply be
reduced to passive spectators before its inexorability. As Paul wrote,
“Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?” (Rom.
8:24). That
which we “see’’ by metaphysical insight should be included under this
ban. Hope means trust in a future which is to be acted out in our deeds
and efforts. Metaphysics may enable us to see whether this trust is
reasonable, but it cannot be its basis.
Hence in this chapter
we must leave metaphysical certainties and venture forth tentatively,
sketching possible alternatives about which no final decisions can be
made, exploring the bases of hope, first for ourselves, as grounded in
the possible survival after death, and/or in the ongoing life of God,
and then our hope for the future of the world.
In Whitehead’s
philosophy the soul is a series of momentary events or actual occasions
supported by the body (particularly the brain) and coordinating its
activities. It is not an enduring substance and does not necessarily
survive the death of the body, as most have interpreted Plato to teach.
On the other hand, Whitehead’s metaphysics does not preclude such
survival. “It is entirely neutral on the question of immortality, or on
the existence of purely spiritual beings other than God.” 1
Subsequent process
theologians have been deeply divided on this point. Charles Hartshorne2
in The Logic of Perfection and Schubert Ogden3
in “The Meaning of Christian Hope” have forcefully argued against any
subjective immortality, holding that as objectively experienced by God
our lives are wholly preserved and cherished forever. Without denying
this objective immortality, David Griffin has examined the possibility
of subjective survival more positively,4 and John Cobb has
speculated about the possible interpenetration of such souls in the
hereafter in ways that overcome their possible self-centeredness.5
Marjorie Suchocki has also explored ways in which we may live on
in God which are quite different from these conceptions of the
immortality of the soul.6
I find disembodied
survival questionable, simply because the soul is so dependent upon the
body. The body is its means for sensing and perceiving. All of its
action is expressed through the body it coordinates. Quite probably all
of its memory, and other subconscious activities, are provided for the
soul by subordinate living occasions within the brain. Bereft of all
these capacities, the soul might still be able to exist, but in such an
impoverished state that it hardly seems worthwhile.
The situation might
be quite different if the ongoing life of God were to provide the
support for these continuing occasions of the soul which it had been
accustomed to receive from the body. Whitehead briefly speculated on
this possibility:
How far this soul
finds a support for its existence beyond the body is: —another
question. The everlasting nature of God, which in a sense is
non-temporal and in another sense is temporal, may establish with the
soul a peculiarly intense relationship of mutual immanence. Thus in
some important sense the existence of the soul may be freed from its
complete dependence upon the bodily organization.7
In that case God
might mediate to the soul the memory of past experiences from his own
experiences of those events, and possibly even his perception of present
events. God could also mediate the free actions of such souls to one
another, taking care to harmonize any potential conflicts by means of
conceptual supplementation, thus overcoming any evil consequent upon the
free actions of many actualities acting in concert. On earth these free
actions are communicated directly to supervening occasions, creating the
risk of conflict and evil. But this freedom may well be possible within
the perfect harmony of heaven, if God can neutralize the potential
outcomes before they are able to produce any conflict.8
But is such
subjective immortality needed? There seem to be three factors which
impel man to look for life beyond the grave: (1) the preservation of
values achieved, (2) the redemption from evil and suffering, (3) and the
non-acceptance of the extinction of the self. Let us consider each of
these factors in turn.
The first is the most
insistent. What is the point of it all if it all ends in nothing? Our
achievements may live on in the memories of others, but this is a very
fragmentary and transient immortality. Eventually they too shall
perish, as well as all traces of our existence. It is only a matter of
time. If we survive death, then what we have experienced and achieved
will survive with us. But to what extent? Rilke suggests that such
earthly experiences and achievements would be remembered like the
discarded playthings of our childhood, if at all. If, however, God
perfectly remembers all that has happened, or better, is still
experiencing in his ongoing, everlasting present whatever is past to us,
the values we now cherish will be better preserved in the divine
experience than they would be in any subjective immortality we might
enjoy. Our own personal immortality is not needed, if all our achieved
values are objectively immortal as cherished within the divine
everlasting experience.
The second reason,
concerning redemption from evil, really has two aspects. On the one
hand, we may ask whether the guilty can be received by God; on the
other, whether there can be any recompense for the suffering of the
innocent.
Some interpret the
saying that God’s experience “is the judgment of a tenderness which
loses nothing that can be saved”9 as meaning that God only
preserves that which is good, discarding the evil as incapable of such
preservation. That interpretation ignores the very next sentence: ‘It
is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world
is mere wreckage.”10 It also ignores the teaching of
the apostle Paul, that we sinners are justified by grace, that we are
accepted despite our unacceptability. If only the good that we do is
received into God’s experience, then most of what we are would be
forever lost. God experiences all that we are and do, even though much
of that causes conflict, evil, and suffering, not only to others but
also to God.
This is all possible
within the divine experience because God has all the inexhaustible
resources of conceptual possibility to heal the wounds inflicted by
actuality. Here we may gain a dim impression of Whitehead’s point by
recourse to works of the imagination. Art and poetry can transform the
dull, ugly, irritating commonplaces of life into vibrant, meaningful
realities by inserting them within fresh and unexpected contexts. The
dramatic insight of a Sophocles can suffuse the grossly evil deeds of
Oedipus the king with high tragedy by skillfully weaving these actions
with choric commentary into an artful whole. These deeds would be
horribly shocking to witness in actuality, yet in the drama this evil is
transformed into tragic beauty. Likewise, the disciplined imagination
of speculative reason can surmount the interminable conflicts between
man and nature, mind and body, freedom and determinism, religion and
science, by assigning each its rightful place within a larger systematic
framework. The larger pattern, introduced conceptually, can bring
harmony to discord by interrelating potentially disruptive elements in
constructive ways. Since God’s conceptual feelings as derived from his
primordial nature are infinite, he has all the necessary resources to
supplement his physical feelings perfectly, thereby achieving a maximum
of intensity and harmony from every situation.
We may object that
imagination is not enough. Certainly it is not enough in our
experience. Our limited imaginations are easily overwhelmed by the
insistent persistence of determinate actuality. But such actuality is
itself limited. Could it not in turn be overcome and transformed by an
infinite, inexhaustible, divine imagination?
This is a redemption
that God experiences, but do we experience it? We could, if
there were an objective immortality of the consequent nature.11
Then it would be true that ‘‘the perfected actuality passes back into
the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal
actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience.”
12 But God’s everlasting concrescence would have to be completed
for it to pass back Into our world, and it is never complete. Whitehead
never attempted to resolve this problem, and it is not clear that it
could ever be solved.13
In the closing
chapter of Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead discusses the final
ideal requisite for the perfection of life, “Peace.” It involves the
tragic beauty that God creatively experiences in redeeming the world
from evil, but it is not the direct experience of this redemption.
Peace “is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty.” 14
We trust, without directly experiencing, this Beauty as that which
ultimately makes it all worthwhile.
But is this enough?
Coupled with the refusal to accept the extinction of the self is our
frequent craving for the direct experience of compensation for any
Innocent suffering we have endured; if not now, at least in some life to
come. But is this not a sign of that “restless egotism” that Peace is
designed to overcome?15
It might be thought a
just precept that each one should suffer for his own sins. This runs
counter to the whole of Christian experience, however, rooted in the
image of the suffering servant of the Lord depicted in Isaiah 53
as suffering on behalf of the sins of others. It runs counter to the
meaning of Jesus’ death as disclosing to us the depths of God’s
solidarity with the world, that he suffers the pain and destruction
caused by the evil we inflict. Even though God is able to transform
this suffering into joy by Imaginatively suffusing its evil with tragic
beauty, the fact remains that his initial experience of the world
involves all the pain and loss that the conflict of its many actualities
produces. God cannot ignore this conflict by blunting his perceptions,
and he is acutely aware of the clash between what actually is and what
might or ought to have been.
It might just be
barely possible to insist upon this precept that each should suffer for
the evil he inflicts, if the self endured to experience the result of
its own actions and decisions. But within a Whiteheadian cosmology
built upon momentary occasions, this is not possible. No occasion ever
experiences the outcome of its own actions. What it experiences is
bequeathed to it by others, for good or ill, and the results of its
decision affect subsequent occasions, never itself. What we as
momentary selves experience can never be that which we have done.
The quest for
subjective immortality may simply be a disguised affirmation of the
substantial, enduring self of traditional thought. Whitehead’s
meditation upon Peace combats this tendency. It is the quest for a
Harmony of Harmonies that can utterly transcend the limits of any self.
“It results in a wider sweep of conscious interest. It enlarges the
field of attention. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest – at the
width where the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred
to coordinations wider than personality.” 16 If every self is
thoroughly bound up with the past world it experiences, and the coming
world it affects, so that it is constantly drawn out of itself to the
other, this widening of concern beyond the self is most salutary. It
cannot dwell exclusively on the intrinsic value it achieves for itself
without introducing an arbitrary narrowness. Only by transferring its
concern to “coordinations wider than personality” can the self affirm
the values it is inextricably bound up with. Experience at its widest,
its fullest, its deepest, its most adequate, is God’s. It is that to
which our concern should be directed, not to some future state of our
own selfhood.
This line of
reasoning is put forth tentatively, for on these questions there can be
no final dogmatism. Yet it should be emphasized that this argument does
not merely seek to reconcile us with the secularity of contemporary
experience which wishes to renounce all other-worldly concerns as
distracting wishful thinking. It is governed by a religious concern
asking whether subjective immortality is ultimately desirable in the
eyes of God. If the prolongation of the self beyond the life of the
body is ultimately restrictive, then we should lose it in order to find
our lives merged within the life of God. Perhaps in this transfer of
concern from our own life to God’s we may discover this final Peace.
Prescinding now from
questions of immortality and the life of God, what hope can we
reasonably have for the overcoming of evil in this finite, temporal
world of everyday experience?
The first thing that
must be said is that this future is most risky and uncertain. Classical
theism, for all the difficulties it might have with present evil, can be
serene in the confidence that someday God will wipe out all evil. After
all, he is all-powerful, and needs only to assume full control of the
world to make it conform to his will. Process theism, by relinquishing
the claim that God could completely control the world in order to
overcome the problem of present evil, cannot have this traditional
assurance about the future. We are faced with an ineluctable dilemma:
Either God has the power to overcome evil unilaterally, and he
should have already, or he does not, and we have no guarantee
that he will ever be able to. Process theism has chosen to embrace the
second horn of this dilemma. God cannot guarantee that evil will be
overcome simply because he is not the sole agent determining the outcome
of the world. It is a joint enterprise involving a vast multiplicity of
actualities responding to his cosmic purposes. Since all these
actualities are free to respond as they will, it is conceivable that
most may all elect to frustrate the divine aim. The world could
possibly generate into near chaos. There can be no metaphysical
guarantee against such a catastrophe.
On the other hand,
there is a strong pragmatic ground for hoping in God, and that lies in
the evolutionary advance of the world during the observable past (that
is to say, during the past eighteen billion years or so). Up until now
God seems to be able to elicit ever richer forms of complexity from the
world, and there is all the reason to expect that he will be able to
continue to do this in the future.
This hope, however,
need not be especially comforting to the human race. Many, if not most,
species have become extinct in the course of this evolutionary advance,
and there is good reason to anticipate that this may be our fate as
well. Then we would be defeated, though not God. The human
experiment would have failed, but God could continue on his quest for
more intensive forms of existence, if not on this planet, then elsewhere
in the universe. Earlier in the history of mankind this danger of
extinction was not so evident, but it threatens our generation on every
side, particularly in terms of nuclear annihilation or ecological
suicide.
In the face of these
dangers, can we have any confidence in the power of God to sustain the
human enterprise? Here I think we can find renewed meaning in the death
and resurrection of Jesus as a profound symbol of hope. If our analysis
of Jesus’ death is correct, this event signified a defeat for God by the
forces of evil, so much so that God was not able to comfort Jesus in the
hour of his deepest need on the cross. That experience of despair wrung
from Jesus’ lips the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The forces of evil conspired to defeat God, but he was able to triumph
over evil in the end by raising up Jesus as the Christ. This
resurrection of Christ can be the basis of our hope in God for a human
future. The forces of evil could conceivably overwhelm God. Against
that there is no metaphysical guarantee. But against such attacks God
has hitherto emerged victorious, and what he has already done he can do
again. Because we remember Christ’s resurrection we can reasonably put
our trust and hope in God for our future.
Note that this hope
based on the resurrection is quite different from the traditional hope
in subjective immortality. Many, following Paul, have argued that if
Christ be raised from the dead, we shall be also. The cogency of that
argument depends wholly upon the first-century expectation of the
general resurrection of the dead in terms of which Paul and the early
Christians interpreted their experience of the risen Christ. That
expectation also had to interpret Christ’s singular resurrection as a
preliminary manifestation of the general resurrection very shortly to
follow. This keenly anticipated event never took place. Hence we have
used a very different framework of interpretation, that of evolutionary
emergence, in order to interpret Paul’s experience of the risen Christ.
This interpretation
of the risen Christ does not rest upon any concept of a disembodied
soul. It is precisely because the risen Christ has a body constituted
by his disciples that he can live and act. Our interpretation is
entirely neutral on the question whether there can be any subjective
immortality for us, since the resurrection of Jesus as Christ with his
church was such a singular event, and did not necessarily require
subjective immortality as generally understood. It is most unfortunate
that the question of personal immortality became so inextricably bound
up with the question of the resurrection of Christ, because as
immortality has become questionable in our age, so has Christ’s
resurrection. But the two issues stand on very different logical
grounds. Whether there be subjective immortality or not is peripheral
to the Christian faith. Insofar as resurrection is understood in terms
of immortality, it is perhaps an optional belief for the Christian
faith. But the resurrection of Christ as the emergence of the church is
hardly optional. It is the heart of the New Testament proclamation and
the basis for our life in Christ. It may well be also the grounds for
our hope in the future of mankind.
Notes
1. RM, pp. 110-11
2. Charles Hartshorne, “Time, Death, and Everlasting Life,” The
Logic of Perfection (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1962), pp. 245-62.
3. Schubert Ogden, ‘The Meaning of Christian Hope,” Union Seminary
Quarterly Review 30 (1975), 153-64.
4.
David Griffin, ‘‘The Possibility of Subjective Immortality in
Whitehead’s Philosophy,” The Modern Schoolman 53/1 (November
1975), 39-57.
5. John Cobb, “What Is the Future? A Process Perspective,” in Hope
and the Future of Man, ed. Ewert H. Cousins (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1972), pp. 1-14.
6. Marjorie Suchocki, “The Question of Immortality,” Journal of
Religion 57/3 (July 1977), 288-306. See also our joint essay on
‘‘A Whiteheadian Reflection on Subjective Immortality” in Process
Studies 7/1 (Spring 1977), 1-13, showing that the way God
experiences through me (by means of the subjective form of my
satisfaction) may be the same as my experiencing in God.
7. Al, p. 267.
8. The technical details of this proposal need to be worked out in
terms of Whitehead’s principles. This may prove to be impossible, for
they seem to require a direct objectification of God’s temporal
experience which, unlike his nontemporal experience and the experience
of actual occasions, never reaches the completion required for
objectification.
9. PR, p. 525.
10. Ibid., italics added
11. Cf. Ibid., p.47.
12. Ibid., p. 532.
13. See A. H. Johnson’s report, ‘‘Whitehead as Teacher and
Philosopher,” Philosophy and Pheno-menological Research 29
(1968-69), 373.
14. Al, p. 367.
15. ibid.
16. Ibid.,
p. 368.
Posted June 13,
2007
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