Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? – by Oscar Cullmann

Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?

by Oscar Cullmann
D.Th, D.D., Professor of the Theological Faculty of the University of Basel and of the Sorbonne in Paris.

Chapters
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Last Enemy
Chapter 2: The Wages of Sin: Death
Chapter 3: The First-Born from the Dead
Chapter 4: Those Who Sleep
Conclusion

Preface

The present work is the translation of a study already published in Switzerland, (Mélanges offerts à KARL BARTH à l’occasion de ses 70 ans [pubi. by Reinhardt, Bâle, 1956][Theologische Zeitschrift, N. 2, pp. 126ff]. See also Verbum Caro [1956], pp. 58ff.) of which a summary has appeared in various French periodicals.

No other publication of mine has provoked such enthusiasm or such violent hostility. The editors of the periodicals concerned have been good enough to send me some of the letters of protest which they have received from their readers. One of the letter — writers was prompted by my article to reflect bitterly that ‘the French people, dying for lack of the Bread of Life, have been offered instead of bread, stones, if not serpents’. Another writer takes me for a kind of monster who delights in causing spiritual distress. ‘Has M. Cullmann’, he writes, ‘a stone instead of a heart?’ For a third, my study has been ‘the cause of astonishment, sorrow, and deep distress’. Friends who have followed my previous work with interest and approval have indicated to me the pain which this study has caused them. In others I have detected a malaise which they have tried to conceal by an eloquent silence.

My critics belong to the most varied camps. The contrast, which out of concern for the truth I have found it necessary to draw between the courageous and joyful primitive Christian hope of the resurrection of the dead and the serene philosophic expectation of the survival of the immortal soul, has displeased not only many sincere Christians in all Communions and of all theological outlooks, but also those whose convictions, while not outwardly alienated from Christianity, are more strongly moulded by philosophical considerations. So far, no critic of either kind has attempted to refute me by exegesis, that being the basis of our study.

This remarkable agreement seems to me to show how widespread is the mistake of attributing to primitive Christianity the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul. Further, people with such different attitudes as those I have mentioned are united in a common inability to listen with complete objectivity to what the texts teach us about the faith and hope of primitive Christianity, without mixing their own opinions and the views that are so dear to them with their interpretation of the texts. This inability to listen is equally surprising on the part of intelligent people committed to the principles of sound, scientific exegesis and on the part of believers who profess to rely on the revelation in Holy Scripture.

The attacks provoked by my work would impress me more if they were based on exegetical arguments. Instead, I am attacked with very general considerations of a philosophical, psychological, and above all sentimental kind. It has been said against me, ‘I can accept the immortality of the soul, but not the resurrection of the body’, or ‘I cannot believe that our loved ones merely sleep for an indeterminate period, and that I myself, when I die, shall merely sleep while awaiting the resurrection’.

Is it really necessary today to remind intelligent people, whether Christians or not, that there is a difference between recognizing that such a view was held by Socrates and accepting it, between recognizing a hope as primitive Christian and sharing it oneself?

We must first listen to what Plato and St Paul said. We can go farther. We can respect and indeed admire both views. How can we fail to do so when we see them in relation to the life and death of their authors? But that is no reason for denying a radical difference between the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the dead and the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul. However sincere our admiration for both views, it cannot allow us to pretend, against our profound conviction and against the exegetical evidence, that they are compatible. That it is possible to discover Certain points of contact, I have shown in this study; but that does not prevent their fundamental inspiration being totally different.

The fact that later Christianity effected a link between the two beliefs and that today the ordinary Christian simply confuses them has not persuaded me to be silent about what I, in common with most exegetes, regard as true; and all the more so, since the link established between the expectation of the ‘resurrection of the dead’ and the belief in ‘the immortality of the soul’ is not in fact a link at all but renunciation of one in favour of the other. 1 Corinthians 15 has been sacrificed for the Phaedo. No good purpose is served by concealing this fact, as is often done today when things that are really incompatible are combined by the following type of over-simplified reasoning: that whatever in early Christian teaching appears to us irreconcilable with the immortality of the soul, viz. the resurrection of the body, is not an essential affirmation for the first Christians but simply an accommodation to the mythological expressions of the thought of their time, and that the heart of the matter is the immortality of the soul. On the contrary we must recognize loyally that precisely those things which distinguish the Christian teaching from the Greek belief are at the heart of primitive Christianity. Even if the interpreter cannot himself accept it as fundamental, he has no right to conclude that it was not fundamental for the authors whom he studies.

. . . . . . . . . . .

In view of the negative reactions and ‘distress’ provoked by the publication of my thesis in various periodicals, should I not have broken off the debate for the sake of Christian charity, instead of publishing this booklet? My decision has been determined by the conviction that ‘stumbling-blocks’ are sometimes salutary, both from the scholarly and the Christian point of view. I simply ask my readers to be good enough to take the trouble of reading on till the end.

The question is here raised in its exegetical aspect, we turn to the Christian aspect, I would venture to mind my critics that when they put in the forefront, they do, the particular manner in which they wish themselves and their loved ones to survive, they are involuntarily giving grounds to the opponents of Christianity who constantly repeat that the faith of Christians is nothing more than the projection of their desires.

In reality, does it not belong to the greatness of our Christian faith, as I have done my best to expound it, that we do not begin from our personal desires but place our resurrection within the framework of a cosmic redemption and of a new creation of the universe? I do not underestimate in any way the difficulty one may experience in sharing this faith, and I freely admit the difficulty of talking about this subject in a dispassionate manner. An open grave at once reminds us that we are not simply concerned with a matter of academic discussion. But is there not therefore all the more reason for seeking truth and clarity at this point? The best way to do it is not by beginning with what is ambiguous, but by explaining simply and as faithfully as possible, with all the means at our disposal, the hope of the New Testament authors, and thus showing the very essence of this hope and — however hard it may seem to us — what it is that separates it from other beliefs we hold so dear. If in the first place we examine objectively the primitive Christian expectation in those aspects which seem shocking to our commonly accepted views, are we not following the only possible way by which it may perhaps none the less be given us, not only to understand that expectation better, but also to ascertain that it is not so impossible to accept it as we imagine.

I have the impression that some of my readers have not troubled to read my exposition right through. The comparison of the death of Socrates with that of Jesus seems to have scandalized and irritated them so much that they have read no farther, and have not looked at what I have said about the New Testament faith in the victory of Christ over death.

For many of those who have attacked me the cause of ‘sorrow and distress’ has been not only the distinction we draw between resurrection of the dead and immortality of the soul, but above all the place which I with the whole of primitive Christianity believe should be given to the intermediate state of those who are dead and die in Christ before the final days, the state which the first-century authors described by the word ‘sleep’. The idea of a temporary state of waiting is all the more repugnant to those who would like fuller information about this ‘sleep’ of the dead who, though stripped of their fleshly bodies, are still deprived of their resurrection bodies although in possession of the Holy Spirit. They are not able to observe the discretion of the New Testament authors, including St Paul, in this matter; or to be satisfied with the joyful assurance of the Apostle when he says that henceforth death can no longer separate from Christ him who has the Holy Spirit. ‘Whether we live or die, we belong to Christ.’

There are some who find this idea of ‘sleep’ entirely unacceptable. I am tempted to lay aside for a moment the exegetical methods of this study and ask them whether they have never experienced a dream which has made them happier than any other experience, even though they have only been sleeping. Might that not be an illustration, though indeed an imperfect one, of the state of anticipation in which, according to St Paul, the dead in Christ find themselves during their ‘sleeping’ as they wait for the resurrection of the body?

However that may be, I do not intend to avoid the ‘stumbling-block’ by minimizing what I have said about the provisional and still imperfect character of this state. The fact is that, according to the first Christians the full, genuine life of the resurrection is inconceivable apart from the new body, the ‘spiritual body’, with which the dead will be clothed when heaven and earth are re-created.

In this study I have referred more than once to the Isenheim altar-piece by the medieval painter Grünewald. It was the resurrection body that he depicted, not the immortal soul. Similarly, another artist, John Sebastian Bach, has made it possible for us to hear, in the Credo of the Mass in B Minor, the musical interpretation of the words of this ancient creed which faithfully reproduces the New Testament faith in Christ’s resurrection and our own. The jubilant music of this great composer is intended to express not the immortality of the soul but the event of the resurrection of the body: Et resurrexit tertia die . . . Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi. And Handel, in the last part of the Messiah, gives us some inkling of what St Paul understood by the sleep of those who rest in Christ; and also, in the song of triumph, Paul’s expectation of the final resurrection when the ‘last trumpet shall sound and we shall be changed’.

Whether we share this hope or not, let us at least admit that in this case the artists have proved the best expositors of the Bible.

Chamonix

15^th September 1956

Introduction

If we were to ask an ordinary Christian today (whether well-read Protestant or Catholic, or not) what he conceived to be the New Testament teaching concerning the fate of man after death, with few eceptions we should get the answer: ‘The immortality of the soul.’ Yet this widely-accepted idea is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity ll-read Protestant or Catholic, or not) what he conceived to be the New Testament teaching concerning the fate of man after death, with few exceptions we should get the answer. There is no point in attempting to hide this fact, or to veil it by reinterpreting the Christian faith. This is something that should be discussed quite candidly. The concept of death and resurrection is anchored in the Christ-event (as will be shown in the following pages), and hence is incompatible with the Greek belief in immortality; because it is based in Heilsgeschichte it is offensive to modern thought. Is it not such an integral element of the early Christian proclamation that it can neither be surrendered nor reinterpreted without robbing the New Testament of its substance? (See on the following also O. Cullmann, ‘La foi à la résurrection Ct l’espérance de la résurrection dans le Nouveau Testament’, Etudes théol. et rel [1943], pp. 3ff; Christ and Time (1945), pp. 231ff; Ph. H. Menoud, Le sort des trépassés [1945]; R. Mehl, Der letzte Feind [1954]).

But is it really true that the early Christian resurrection faith is irreconcilable with the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul? Does not the New Testament, and above all the Gospel of John, teach that we already have eternal life? Is it really true that death in the New Testament is always conceived as ‘the last enemy’ in a way that is diametrically opposed to Greek thought, which sees in death a friend? Does not Paul write: ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ We shall see at the end that there is at least an analogy, but first we must stress the fundamental differences between the two points of view.

The widespread misunderstanding that the New Testament teaches the immortality of the soul was actually encouraged by the rock-like post-Easter conviction of the first disciples that the bodily Resurrection of Christ had robbed death of all its horror, (But hardly in such a way that the original Christian community could speak of ‘natural’ dying. This manner of speaking of Karl Barth’s in Die kirchliche Dogmatik, III, 2 [1948], pp. 776ff, though found in a section where otherwise the negative valuation of death as the ‘last enemy’ is strongly emphasized, still seems to me not to be grounded in the New Testament. See 1 Corinthians 11:30 [on that verse see below, pp. 34, 37]). and that from the moment of Easter onward, the Holy Spirit had awakened the souls of believers into the life of the Resurrection.

The very fact that the words ‘post-Easter’ need to be underlined illustrates the whole abyss which nevertheless separates the early Christian view from that of the Greeks. The whole of early Christian thought is based in Heilgeschichte, and everything that is said about death and eternal life stands or falls with a belief in a real occurrence in real events which took place in time. This is the radical distinction from Greek thought. The purpose of my book Christ and Time was precisely to show that this belongs to the substance, to the essence of early Christian faith, that it is something not to be surrendered, not to be altered in meaning; yet it has often been mistakenly thought that I intended to write an essay on the New Testament attitude toward the problem of Time and Eternity.

If one recognizes that death and eternal life in the New Testament are always bound up with the Christ-event, then it becomes clear that for the first Christians the soul is not intrinsically immortal, but rather became so only through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and through faith in Him. It also becomes clear that death is not intrinsically the Friend, but rather that its ‘sting’, its power, is taken away on/y through the victory of Jesus over it in His death. And lastly, it becomes clear that the resurrection already accomplished is not the state of fulfillment, for that remains in the future until the body is also resurrected, which will not occur until ‘the last day’.

It is a mistake to read into the Fourth Gospel an early trend toward the Greek teaching of immortality, because there also eternal life is bound up with the Christ-event. (In so far as John’s Gospel is rooted in Heilsgeschichte, it is not true, as Rudolf Bultmann wrongly maintains, that a process of demythologizing is already to be discerned in it.) Within the bounds of the Christ-event, of course, the various New Testament books place the accent in different places, but common to all is the view of Heilsgeschichte. (As Bo Reicke correctly maintains, ‘Einheitlichkeit oder verschiedene Lehrbegriffe in der neutestamentlichen Theologie’, Theol.Zeitschr., 9 [1953], pp. 401ff.) Obviously one must reckon with Greek influence upon the origin of Christianity from the very beginning, (All the more as the Qumrân texts show that the Judaism to which embryonic Christianity was so closely connected was already itself influenced by Hellenism. See 0. Cullmann, ‘The Significance of the Qumrân Texts for Research into the Beginnings of Christianity’, Jounr,. of Bibl. Lit., 74 [1955], pp. 2I3ff. So too Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament [1955], Vol. II, p. 13 note.) but so long as the Greek ideas are subordinated to the total view of Heilsgeschichte, there can be no talk of ‘Hellenization’ in the proper sense. (Rather, it would be more accurate to speak of a Christian ‘historicization’ [in the sense of Heilsgeschichte] of the Greek ideas. Only in this sense, not in that employed by Bultmann, are the New Testament ‘myths’ already ‘demythologized’ by the New Testament itself.) Genuine Hellenization occurs for the first time at a later date.