The Crucified lives. What does "lives" mean here? What is concealed behind the diverse time-conditioned ideal types and narrative forms which the New Testament uses to describe it? We shall attempt to convey the meaning of this new life with two negative definitions and one positive.
No return to this life in space and time. Death is not canceled but definitively conquered. In Friedrich Durrenmantt's play* Meteor a corpse (faked, naturally) is revived and returns to a completely unchanged earthly life - the very opposite of what the New Testament means by resurrection. Jesus' resurrection must not be confused with the raisings of the dead scattered about in the ancient literature of miracle workers (even confirmed with doctors' attestations) and reported in three instances of Jesus (daughter of Jarius, young man of Nain, Lazarus). Quite apart from the historical credibility of such legendary accounts (Mark, for instance, has nothing about the sensational raising of Lazarus from the dead), what is meant by the raising of Jesus is not just the revival of a corpse. Even in Luke's account Jesus did not simply return to biological earthly life, in order - like those raised from the dead -to die again. No, according to the New Testament conception, he has the final frontier of death definitively behind him. He has entered into a wholly different, imperishable, eternal, "heavenly" life: into the life of God for which - as we have seen - very diverse formulas and ideas were used in the New Testament.
Not a continuation of life in space and time: Even to speak of life "after" death is misleading; eternity is not characterized by "before" and "after." It means a new life which escapes the dimensions of space and time, a life within God's invisible, imperishable, incomprehensible domain. It is not simply and endless "further", "further life," "carrying on further," "going on further." But it is something definitively "new"' new creation, new birth, new man and new world. That which finally breaks through the return of the eternal sameness of "dying and coming to be."' What is meant is to be definitively with God and so have definitive life.
Assumption into ultimate reality. If we are not to talk in metaphors, raising (resurrection) and exaltation (taking up, ascension, glorification) must be seen as one identical, single happening. And indeed as a happening in connection with death in the impenetrable hiddenness of God. The Easter message in all its different variations means simply one thing; Jesus did not die into nothingness. In death and from death he died into and was taken up by the incomprehensible and comprehensive ultimate reality which we designate by the name of God. When man reaches his eschaton, the absolutely final point in his life, what awaits him? Not nothing, as even believers in nirvana would say. But that All which for Jews, Christians and Muslims is God. Death is transition to God, as retreat into God's hiddenness, is assumption into his glory. Strictly speaking, only an atheist can say that death is the end of everything.
In death man is taken out of the conditions that surround and control him. Seen from the standpoint of the world - from outside, as it were - death means complete unrelatedness. But, seen from God's standpoint - from within, as it were - death means a totally new relationship ; to him as the ultimate reality. In death a new and eternal future is offered to man, to man - that is - in his wholeness and undividedness. It is a life different from all that can be experienced ; within God's imperishable dimensions. It is therefore not in our space and our time, not "here" and "now" "on this side." But neither is it simply in another space and another time; a "beyond," an "up there," an "outside"or "above" "on the other side." Man's last, decisive, quite different road does not lead out into the universe or beyond it. It leads - if we ant to speak metaphorically - as it were into the innermost primal ground, primal support, primal meaning of world and man; from death to life, from the visible to the invisible, from mortal darkness to God's eternal light. Jesus died into God, he has reached God; he is assumed into that domain which surpasses all imagination, which no human eye has ever seen, eluding our grasp, comprehension, reflection or fantasy. The believer knows only that what awaits him is not nothing, but his Father.
The clause I took out of this to include in the title, "eternity is not characterized by "before" and "after" and the point that to even talk about those in relation to what is talked about in the New Testament is misleading might be something that those inclined to scoff would scoff at but I can point out that the very same concepts confound cosmologists who try to conceive of what happened "before the big bang" when not only matter and space came into being but, according to the very relativistic physics that forced the concept of the Big Bang as a necessity, time started, as an aspect of the same event in which the universe came into being. The speculations into that would seem to be as many as the cosmologists want to create, oddly they seem to create such scenarios as match their own preferences, to order, as it were. One of the most popular is to claim that there has been an infinite number of universes that either exist simultaneously, some creating universes continually to express each and every possible variation in activity within our universe. Where the energy to create these stupendously many and stupendously detailed universes comes from is apparently unconsidered in such acts of continual and entirely unparsimonious creation. It is, in terms of known physics and reality, absurd, yet there it has been considered a legitimate part of science in all its absurdity, not even being considered a scandalous invention of ideology imposed as science, which it is, since that ideology is atheism.
Another of the current scenarios to avoid an absolute beginning of our one and only known universe is to invent an infinity of incarnations for our universe which oscillate between existence and non-existence - atheists are prepared to invent an infinity of entities with which to try to destroy the idea that God created the universe. George Ellis, prehaps the most eminent living cosmologist has noted that such stuff is based in a violation of the rules and methods of science. Science cannot see even to to the origin of this universe and,presuming current physics is valid, the beginning of time,space and matter.
Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?
Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.**
In another article (behind a paywall, alas) he has pointed out that it is entirely likely that the oscillating form of infinite multiverses, in a series, would likely need not only the incredibly improbable level of fine tuning that our universe requires for us to exist but that an infinite regress in the past and into the future would require infinitely fine tuning, I presume of a level of improbability that reaches into infinity, in order for the cycle to be sustained and to overcome such things as quantum fluctuations that would arise in such an infinite series of fluctuations - there would already have had to have been an infinity of them before ours and an infinity of them after ours for it to be infinite. I don't recall if it was Ellis or someone else commenting on his article who said that such a scenario would mean that there was never an initial creation event during which those infinitely precise fine tuning would have been set in which is extremely odd, unless you are going to maintain they are an attribute of a substitute for a divine creator, which seems to rather defeat the purpose that the largely atheist cosmologists, their motive in coming up with centuries of such stuff.
And that also doesn't account for the persistence of that fine tuning during what would have to be the intervals in which, I assume, time, space and matter would not exist between the epochs of existence. What could such a non-time-non-space-non-matter be? Assuming that "fine tuning" would have to exist as what gets talked about so casually and undefined as "information" where does it reside in such perfect form as to be able to sustain this infinity of incarnations of our universe through its infinitude of incarnations without one going wrong and so ending that series. If it happened even once the entire scheme breaks down because there would be no recovery and if that is a possibility it would have had to already have happened in one of that infinity of incarnations in the series before it had reached the one we experience now.
It's fun to think of the problems the atheists have laid for themselves as they scoff over the Christian account of the Resurrection and its implications for us and our experience though the Christian accounts have something that the modern cosmologists do not have, they have testimonial evidence from people who claimed to have encountered the risen Jesus whose own lives were changed, credibly by that experience. Even the most insanely insistent atheist cosmologist would not claim to have any experience of their schemes which rest on the most abstuse of abstract mathematical speculation which their fellow cosmologists capable of grasping their tenuous equations widely disbelieve, though many of them have their own pet schemes to get by the inconvenient problem of the origin of our experienced universe.
So the language which, no doubt, the detractor of Christianity would use in an attack is no more outrageous than that demanded by ideological atheists within science, only I think theologians, good ones, being typically better at doing philosophy than ideological atheist cosmologists are less likely to get trapped in a maze of their own construction. It is quite possible for a theologian confronted with them to point out that an infinite God is more than capable of creating an infinite number of universes and the infinite fine tuning that such a system is theorized to require to keep going. It's when you try to fit such ideas into physics that you are likely to work yourself into a corner you can't get out of except by recourse to dishonesty or defeat.
* Durrenmatt wrote a number of plays for radio, some of which have been done in English but which I can't locate a recording of. I would certainly give a link to this one if I could find it, though it isn't on the list. There are a few of them on Youtube, in German, Spanish and other languages.
** I found this passage in the interview with Ellis to be especially satisfying because it's something I concluded about the demands Stephen Hawking made which I've noted here a number of times, that he wanted to bring back science to the standards of pre-Copernican era.
Horgan: Physicist Sean Carroll has argued that falsifiability is overrated as a criterion for judging whether theories should be taken seriously. Do you agree?
Ellis: This is a major step backwards to before the evidence-based scientific revolution initiated by Galileo and Newton. The basic idea is that our speculative theories, extrapolating into the unknown and into untestable areas from well-tested areas of physics, are so good they have to be true. History proves that is the path to delusion: just because you have a good theory does not prove it is true. The other defence is that there is no other game in town. But there may not be any such game.
Scientists should strongly resist such an attack on the very foundations of its own success. Luckily it is a very small subset of scientists who are making this proposal.
Sean Carroll, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss have been obviously doing their science out of ideological reasons, to support their preferences, that seems to happen quite often when it's a committed atheist who is doing the science. When they can operate outside of the requirement of actual, demonstrable observation the sky and infinitely beyond are the non-limit. In the necessarily more modest but unbounded limits of the life sciences, that has also been the case among those who practice Evolutionary Psychology and its predecessor, Sociobiology as well as others. The impossibility of actually observing the actual facts of the evolution of life, the lives and deaths of individuals, communities, entire species, which of the offspring of them survived and reproduced successfully in larger numbers than their fellows, THE REASONS FOR THE VARIATIONS IN REPRODUCTION RATES, all of those are forever-lost in the undocumented past but that very unknowable nature of the problem has been a happy hunting ground in which ideologues of all sorts have claimed science for whatever purpose, malignant or benign, they want to harness it for.
Indeed, George Ellis was right when he warned of the danger of science that insists on breaking the rules of science, something that has seemed to be a danger whenever they are released from the requirements of observation, measurement, logical analysis and a rigorous modesty in making claims for their statements.
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