Is There an Afterlife? | Neil Gillman

You know, you talk about an eschatological impulse that every culture has an eschatology that just wants to deal with the afterlife. How do we read this into human understanding? I'll tell you where this occurred to me. I was sitting in a doctor's office and picked up a copy of Time magazine and on the cover, big letters, the feature article of that issue was about five, six years ago, seven years ago. How will it all end? And I said, Oh my Lord. And then I read the article. It's a long article. And I still use it in my teaching. And apparently scientists, cosmologists, spend oodles of time and energy figuring it out, figuring out how will it all end? Now that they've solved how it all began, right, they got the big bang. How will it all end? And I read this whole thing, absolute fascination, and I said to myself, who cares? Why do they care? And I came to this mysterious conclusion, probably the most mysterious thing I've ever said in my teaching, which is if there's no beginning and there's no end, then there's no middle. And if there's no middle, we don't know where we are. So there is, I think, a need for structure. This I get from whatever I've read in anthropology. Anthropologists talk about religion as a structuring device. A noted anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who's at Princeton, says that the heart of religion is the tension between cosmos and chaos, and the purpose of religion is to order our experience of the world, which is to put structures in. So I have a very powerful sense within myself of the need for structures, and it emerges in the strangest kind of ways. I buy an appointment book, and I look at the book, and it says, Monday, February 25, and there's a blank page, and I feel tremendously uncomfortable because I want my page to read 7.45, 8 o'clock, 8.15, 8.30, to put appointments in. I want the structure of the day, because if there's a blank page and I have an appointment at 8, and I put that in near the top, what happens if I get an appointment at 7.30 and I have no room for it? Or go into a loft. Where do you sleep in the loft? Where do you put your sleeping bag? So I would go into a corner, and I would curl up in a sort of fetal position, and at least I'd have two walls, right? That's the need for structure. And we need structure in time. That's why we have minutes and days and hours and years. And eschatology becomes the largest structure, right? Because it establishes the end. And so you have these big debates within science, you know, is the universe expanding, or will it eventually begin to contract, right? And for a while they believed that ultimately gravity would overcome the Big Bang, and everything would contract, and then you'd get a big crunch. But then they gradually discovered that that's not happening, right? If anything, the universe is expanding and accelerating, so that it's all going to drift away after trillions and trillions and trillions of years, and there will just still be nothing at all. So how does the scientific eschatology of the universe, either expanding forever, contracting down to a big crunch, articulate with the Jewish eschatology of the world or of ourselves? I read the scientific eschatology with a profound sense of despair, almost, because there is no end. With good reason. Because it all fritters away, you know? Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And it doesn't deal with the fate of human beings. We will have vanished from this whole cosmic scheme long before the end. Read, in contrast, Isaiah. Now Isaiah talked about an end, right? But what will be the end? It will be an age where the entire world will recognize God as the God of the world, of the universe, where lambs will rest with lions, where people will turn their swords into plowshares, they will not teach war anymore, and there will be peace, there will be social justice, the world will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. So that's an eschatological picture. And it deals very much with human beings. And when you think of it, you read the headlines and you say, what in the world is the reason for warfare? Haven't we learned that nothing is ever gained? And every day people kill people. Over what? Over stupidities. And to dream of an age when there will be no more warfare. Now, this was how many years ago? It's almost 3,000 years ago. There was a dream of a world where people will not war anymore. Do you see that as a dream of the ravings of an individual or somehow really connected? No, it was canonized. It became, it's not only an individual who wrote a book back in the 8th century BCE. It became part of scripture. It was accepted as canonical, and it informed the great religions of the West. And it's still, to this day, it is read, it is read liturgically, it is studied, it is read. It's a living document. It's part of, it's me. It's my tradition, right? It's our tradition. But is there a truth value in it? There's a truth value as a vision, as a dream. But how many people 3,000 years ago were able to articulate a dream when people won't die in warfare? So, you know, eschatologically, this is not a dead vision. This is a vision which I, which at least some of us feel, should be at the heart of our diplomacy and our attempts to create a certain kind of world order to this day. And it's not. But those are two different views. One is that it should inform our efforts to impose it on this world or to correct the mistakes we've had. The other view that many take from religious perspectives is that's a view that God will impose on the world because human beings will never do it. Robert, who wrote the book? You tell me. Not God. Did God inspire it? Oh, this, I can't stand the word inspire. Inspire is the word that my students use when they don't want to use reveal and it's a weasel word, you know. Did God have anything to do with it? Yeah, but depends what, depends what you mean by God and it depends what you mean by anything and it depends what you mean by do. Those are all the words I use. Those are, I know, and define the terms. What kind of a God, you know, and anything, yeah, sure God had to do with it. Anything more than God. But God didn't dictate it from a mountaintop. Did God have anything to do with that verse more than anything else in the world? I think, I think that it was an image of, an image of God, the echad God, the exclusive God who, which is really at the heart, an image of a united world, of one cosmos, one ordered world, one grand unified theory, right? Which everything, history and nature and the human experience collaborate in one. And I think that was the vision. And apart from this anthropological view, I think there's a profoundly psychological view also which inspires eschatology and that is a sense of the world, of our experience in the world as flawed and a profound dissatisfaction with the fact that this can't be the whole story. I cannot believe God created me to die with a sense that my life experience was flawed. And there's a sense, I think, a need for creating out of this flawed world, a world where flaws have disappeared, have been vanished, where I have done my part in vanishing, in banishing the flaws in history, in nature and in human experience. And the reality is that God gave us the power to do that and it's so hard to do.