Karl: Theological Speculations
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Theology, extended to cover the religious aspects and commentary of Philosophy, although tangential to the main interests of this wiki, nevertheless crop up repeatedly throughout the Track 1 Exposition and to a lesser extent in Track 4 Current Culture. I have been drawn into repeatedly enunciating my views, which may appear somewhat contradictory.
A Propos Dreyfus
In Whooshup blog and elsewhere I have advocated a form of christian existentialism which I believe is close but not really close to Dreyfus Final Contingency on this question.
The primary issue I raise that he avoids is the meaning, not just of the crucifiction, which is problematic enough, but the existential meaning of the "Harrowing of Hell" by Jesus after his death and before his resurrection. This is a vexing issue, and most would rather it just went away, because there seems no way to address it sensibly.
Apology
I am a Christian of essentially orthodox persuasions. Orthodoxy, it should be noted, is that religious position upon which all three major historic strands, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, essentially agree. I am also an existentialist. I was a Christian before I became an existentialist, and there is nothing in the powerful thrust of existential thinking that persuades me to abandon orthodox views, even though it seems very few existential christians profess orthodoxy, so I suppose some explanation is in order.
Existentialists generally hold that reliance on intellectualization is an inadequate basis for a personal or communal belief system. Rather, lived experiences must be forwarded to validate one's position. Thus, an existentialist naturally expresses his or her beliefs in actions, and regards mere verbal expressions of reasoned belief as highly suspect and of little use other than to obfuscate the negative aspects of socialization. A ready example of this would be the "loyalty oath" or the "litmus test" which gets applied in political situations; religious credos follow the same trajectory. Thus the formalizations of Christian orthodoxy appear at first glance to be wholly antithetical to an existential posture.
But this caveat only holds if those formulations are considered by the existentialist as rational elaborations of a mental system. I find in orthodoxy, however dressed up it may be by rational gymnasts, quite irrational and utterly real. I find in orthodoxy that clearing around which gather the mysteries which, at least for me, adequately channel the spiritual, immaterial aspect of life into the reified, experiential sphere of human existence. Therefore, it is not a matter of rationally accepting, say, the Nicene creed, but rather of allowing that creed, in all its spectacular obscurity, to hold open a space to our inspection which is interpenetrated by such amazing depths of inscrutable but undeniable verities, welling up from farthest corners of our human primeval past, and flooding into our lives as barely discerned signs of God's work, tripping, lurching, falling into a future destination, whatever that may be. This is a thoroughly Heideggerian type of discourse, and I believe he always left this possibility open to follow. I welcome any objection.
Approaching Death and Hell
Our way of understanding death is deeply rooted in our sense of an underworld - pre-christian and post-christian. Heaven I find irrelevant, because there is no existential drama about it. If you go to heaven - no problem. Hell is far more compelling from the philosophical viewpoint, which is why it is so surprising so few modern philosophers (let alone theologians) want to deal with it directly, aside from naive allusions to "hell on earth." But that is a known hell, and it is the unknown hell that consternates us.
Jesus died for the living, and lived for the dead. This paradox of salvation turns around the axis of his execution in 33 AD and his subsequent three day trip to hell. This is where we find our own trajectory. If we desire to peer into the challenge he poses in life, we look at his sacrificial death as an endpoint. If we desire to look into death, we must grasp his life in death as our endpoint. The story here is that he, having passed like all other mortals into death, willfully trespassed into that underworld, presumably to size things up down there, and then re-emerged from the tomb three days later as a risen Christ, different in appearance than the former one, to traipse around Palestine bumping through walls into pop-eyed apostles for several weeks before disappearing for good and leaving a mysterious penchant for blurting out gibberish among his followers. Of course, this is so preposterous a story line it begs to be either laughed off or ignored as too embarrassing to bring up.
First, in our modern understanding, the dead no longer exist as anything other than slowly decaying flesh in the ground, that is, organic matter that is no longer "quick" in the old fashioned way of speaking, and is thus becoming inorganic matter through the agency of natural decomposition. Therefore to say anything sensible about the dead must be an exercise in forensic ecology, not formal theology.
Second, the word hell has two meanings, one, its proper name, "Hell" no longer being deemed real, but mythical. Therefore, any serious discussion of theology must eschew Hell, although we may permit ourselves the common denominator of "a hell such as ..." and fill in the blank with whatever our sensitivities find most abhorent: war, torture, slavery, holocaust, disease, poverty, etc. All conditions of living, that is, "quick" souls, not dead.
What are the available salient options available to us for understanding what happens after death?
1. Nothing - Our body undergoes material decomposition and our mind is utterly extinct. This is the scientific view, based on the fact that it is what we can reliably observe, and no believable scientific evidence exists for any other interpretation.
2. Reincarnation - Our soul is reborn into a different creature. All memory of our past is wiped out. A view found in pagan philosophy and entrenched in Hindu and Buddhist theology.
3. Shades - Our shade haunts the earth, or descends like a heavy vapor into the fissures of the earth and collects in a cavernous underworld below. This is what ancients of many stripes, and also many primitive cultures to this day, hold to.
4. Resurrection - Our bodies will be physically reassembled and a new life will be breathed into those new bodies in some remote time and place. Egyptians believed this, and so do most Christians and Muslims. It is more problematic but also prevalent in Judaism.
5. Eternity - Our disembodied or re-embodied souls will reside in one of two or three distinct spiritual locales, for example, heaven where things will be pleasant, hell where things will be unpleasant, or possibly a sort of purgatory where things will be so-so. These views overlap with others, but tend to be widely held except for those to whom the supernatural, the spiritual, and the infinite makes no sense whatsoever - scientists and materialists of many sorts.
