What does it mean to believe in a consummation in eternal life by God? - Part 2

Part 1 

I will state again that these posts are the product of being extremely busy right now so they might not be as unified as I'd like to make them.  

In his presentation of the consequences or possibilities available to a person who chooses to believe in the Christian view of the Resurrection and eternal life Hans Kung goes on to further list things that are possible with it which are not possible in denial of it. 

What does it mean to believe in a consummation in eternal life by God as he showed himself in Jesus of Nazareth?  

To believe in an eternal life means - in responsible trust,in enlightened faith, in tried and tested hope - to rely on the fact that I shall one day understood, freed from guilt and definitively accepted and can be myself without fear that my impenetrable and ambivalent existence, like the profoundly discordant history of humanity as a whole, will one day become finally transparent and the question of the meaning of history one day be finally answered.   I need not then believe with Karl Marx in the kingdom of freedom only here on earth or with Friedrich Nietzsche in the eternal recurrence of the same.  But neither do I have to consider history with Jacob Burckhardt in stoic-epicurean aloofness from the standpoint of a pessimistic skeptic. And still less do I need to mourn as a critic for civilization, with Osawld Spengler the decline of the West and that of our own existence. 

No, If I believe in an eternal life, then in all modesty and all realism and without yielding to the terror of violent benefactors of the people [I suspect the word "benefactors" must be read ironically], I can work for a better future, a better society, even a better Church, in peace, freedom and justice - and knowing that all this can only be sought and never fully realized by man.

If I believe in an eternal life, I know that this world is not the ultimate reality, conditions do not remain as they are forever, all that exists - including both political and religious institutions - has a provisional character, the division into classes and races, poor and rich, rulers and [ruled]* remains temporary, the world is changing and changable.  

If I believe in an eternal life, then it is always possible to endow my life and that of others with meaning.  A meaning is given to the inexorable evolution of the cosmos out of the hope that there will be a true consummation of the individual and of human society and indeed a liberation and transfiguration of creation, on which lie the shadows of transitoriness, coming about only by the glory of God himself,.  Only then will the conflicts and sufferings of nature be overcome and its ongoings fulfilled.  Yes,  "all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep, deep eternity,"  Nietzsche's song in Zarathustra is here and here alone elevated.  Instructed by the apostle Paul, I know that nature will share in the glory of God:  The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons (and daughters).  It is not for any fault on the part of creation that it was made unable to attain its purpose, it was made so by God;  but creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God.  From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great at of giving birth;  and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free. 

One of the most telling of evidences that those who knew Jesus or those who knew those who knew people who knew him and were convinced of his resurrection really believed was their willingness to face persecution or death to spread the Gospel and to put into practice the moral teachings that, after all, got Jesus pursued by the authorities and killed.  Paul, who, before his conversion was one of the ones doing the persecuting, in one of the earliest available texts of Christianity, made that an explicit part of his arguments for belief. 

And as for us—why would we run the risk of danger every hour? My friends, I face death every day! The pride I have in you, in our life in union with Christ Jesus our Lord, makes me declare this.  If I have, as it were, fought “wild beasts” here in Ephesus simply from human motives, what have I gained? But if the dead are not raised to life, then, as the saying goes, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we will die.”

Paul was explicitly contrasting a popular view of paganism, found not only among Epicureans but which can be seen in many places in pagan literature and, especially, in the articulation of materialism throughout Eurasia with the world view, the conception of human experience and, indeed, the entire universe in Christianity.  David Bentley Hart, in one of his lectures or interviews, I can't remember which one, said that in contrast to modern Western lore, classical paganism was a dreary, gloomy view of life and that one of the accusations made against the early Christians was that their view of reality was apt to lead someone to have a far more cheerful view of life.***  Apparently there were kinds of cheer which, like so many contemporary Brits, they held were not allowed because they were not sour enough for their taste and they promoted equality that was not welcomed.  It's always been rather an odd thing, now much atheists care that other people believe other things which, if they were faithful to their ideological creed, they shouldn't be bothered by at all.  

I think one of the consequences of pessimism as manifested in the gloomy shadow existence after death such as was found in paganism and the presently recurring modernistic attraction to the dogma of the extinction of consciousness at death is that it leads to definite consequences in how we choose to live now.  I think part of the attribution of egalitarian democracy to the Jewish teaching of justice and the Christian ethic of universal love coming from Habermas and Kloppenberg and others is directly due to the form of Jewish-Christian belief that Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians and Romans.  I really am convinced that that is right, that, as Habermas said, it is the only source of nourishment for egalitarian democracy, even today in the modern period when so many other materialistic-atheistic-scientistic substitutions have been proposed, in some cases imposed and which have produced horrors to rival those of the classical and medieval periods.  When you believe in those things, when you believe that death is the end of things, you really don't have to worry about the consequences of what you do ever being paid by you, if you can work it the right way.  

And if you align yourself to a strong-man in power - as the so-called evangelicals do in such huge percentages in the Trumpian United States - or a despotic system such as William Barr and the Federalists dream of putting into place, you can commit any evil with impunity and, if you don't really believe in the Gospel or its equivalent, including an eventual accounting of your actions, then the only restrictions on the cruelty and depravity of your actions will depend on your personal predilections.  As we have seen, even among nominal Christians and, perhaps especially, nominal Catholics, a lot of them clearly don't believe in The Gospel or, ironically for the many lawyers who go to those abominable "red masses" in supposed memory of Thomas More, they demonstrate they most certainly don't believe in the Law of Moses.  

I will agree with those Catholic critics who note that so many, like William Barr's family, like others like Newt Gingrich, Sam Brownback, etc. who converted to Catholicism love the traditional authoritarianism of pre-Vatican II feudal Catholicism (and its continuation in the hierarchy even after Vatican II) as they openly despise The Gospel, the Prophets and those parts of The Law that call for radical justice and truth.   The Catholic right, the Catholicism of the likes of Raymond Burke are an abomination and a heresy against the Scriptures.  

One of the practical consequences of believing in the static view of reality promoted by materialism, atheism, scientism, classical paganism is that things tend to not get better, there is no more equal distribution of wealth, there is no struggle to make life better, there is no real caring about posterity except as limited by a personal, sentimental attachment to ones own children.  That is no way to make life better.  It's more likely that such materialists will wallow in whatever comfort they can make for themselves than try to improve life for everyone.   I think that's one of the reasons that the atheist, materialist, scientistic play-left has been such a notable flop in changing things, that and their seemingly inevitable attraction to foreign despots and their domestic and impotent daddy figures. 

*  There is a confusing typo in the printed translation at this point and I don't have the original German to check it against. 

** Before reading Hans Kung's three works dealing with the existence of God, the consequences of believing in Jesus and life after death, I hadn't really appreciated the extent to which the Catholicism I'd been taught depended on the first figure he dealt with in the beginning of the first of those books,  Rene Descartes, and that the resultant form of Christianity was not only a shadow of what is presented in the Gospels, the Epistles and, especially, in Paul, it is, in many points destructive of both religion and of our present human life. 

I trust Descartes in mathematics, in some points of natural philosophy, but I think lots of what he and some of the other figures of early modern science, Francis Bacon, for example, is the source of some of the worst parts of modernism such as the destruction of the biosphere.  Their utilitarian view of Creation is a disaster. 

***  One of the down-sides of listening to so many lectures and sermons online is that I tend to forget who said what.  I'm usually doing housework while I listen so I don't take notes.   

I think it was either Hart or Rowan Williams who talked about the common view of the afterlife in pagan belief and in some of the Old Testament as a presentation of a gloomy, terrible shadow existence.  They talked about the souls of those killed in battle in the Iliad departing wish shrieks of pain and despair and the declaration Achilles in the Odyssey of about the most miserable of humans being happier than the most fortunate of the dead.  

 Glorious Odysseus: don’t try to reconcile me to my dying. I’d rather serve as another man’s labourer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.

Maybe they were on their way to a stay in a purgatorial Hades to be purged for the sins they committed in life.  Maybe that's what they thought they heard as the warriors died.  In the Odyssey it's clear that Achilles hadn't been there long enough to be purged of his all-too human desire for revenge because right after that he tells Odysseus that he wishes he could come back to life to wreak the same kind of revenge that ended up with him being killed and he rejoices that his son is living the same kind of life. 

The influence of the ambient paganism on some of the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures is probably a lot stronger than we might like to think.  I think the modernist Christian tendency to accentuate those as a means of discounting the belief in an afterlife among them is probably not entirely valid.  I think those who interpret the talk about the dead "joining their fathers" as an expression of a belief in the afterlife is more likely true.  

It's clear that those Biblical Jews who chose to die instead of violating The Law believed in some consequences if they chose to violate the Law and live.  They certainly didn't act as if they shared the Homeric view of the afterlife as something worse than what Greek oligarchs would have considered to be the lives of the most wretched of human kind - and that is even with the Hebrew view of the least among us as being people cherished by God for whom the Law demanded justice and sustenance be given.   I think the Jewish view of the least among us is inevitably related to a belief in consequences of committing injustice, consequences if not in this life than in a life to come. And with those consequences in an afterlife, they must have believed there were consequences of following The Law that weren't fulfilled in this life.  But that's interpretation.