From The Inner Life (Volume 1 of Inner Land: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel), this week’s featured book.

The question of life and death is bound to concern us more than ever before: war has brought death to so many who were in the prime of life; hunger, unemployment, and shame have led to increased suicide; men and women have been killed in street battles and political conflicts; and crime against life has increased atrociously, as has crime against the life of unborn children. While the question of life and soul is one that people have wrestled with throughout the ages, the seriousness of the present time should make everything else drop into the background so that we can concentrate fully on what soul, spirit, and life mean to us.

Is it not one of the most astonishing facts that death should overcome life? Children cannot understand death. Least of all can they see how it is possible to kill people in the service of a higher cause. But even apart from this, to children the thought that human life can one day come to an end is always unreal and contrary to the truth. The unnaturalness of dying is too remote from the simplicity of their affirmation of life. For the same reason, the heathen of old with their zest for life believed in the immortality of the soul. Likewise Goethe, who was very much akin to them, declared his life conviction to Eckermann: “I agree with Lorenzo de Medici that all those who have no hope for a life beyond are dead to this life as well.”footnote Life itself witnesses to its own invincible power. Hope is the hallmark of all living things (1 John 1:2).

Photograph by Gabe Palmer / Alamy Stock Photo.

As long as we want to deny that life is eternal, everything that belongs to life remains cloaked in tormenting riddles. Eternity remains the deepest longing of the human spirit. When we know that we are immortal beings, everything we experience is great and understandable; when we see ourselves as mortal, it all becomes dark and futile (Wisd. of Sol. 9:14–18). If there is no other future and no other world (which is bound to be victorious because it is the better world), then the injustice that prevails makes nonsense of human existence by giving final victory to “the worst of all possible worlds.”footnote

In the inner and outer circumstances of life, every living person can learn to recognize this other world (Rom. 1:18–20). Fichte has declared that we only need to rise to the consciousness of a pure, moral character to find out who we ourselves are and to find out that this globe with all its glories, that this sun and the thousands of thousands of suns that surround it, that this whole immense universe, at the mere thought of which our sentient soul quakes and trembles – that all this is nothing but a dim reflection in mortal eyes of our own eternal existence, which is hidden within us and which is to be unfolded throughout all eternity. And the other way around, this is the truth given to humankind since primeval times: our so very small world can be nothing else than a likeness – bungled, it is true, but nevertheless recognizable – of a bigger, truer, and more genuine world that is not limited by time and space. Our small world belongs to this bigger one and must correspond to it once again. For all of us, there is “the moral code within us and the starry heavens above us”footnote to bring home a living intimation of this fact of eternity.

Our life has its roots in eternity (Wisd. of Sol. 2:23). Its nature presumes imperishability. In space, the human spirit goes far beyond all comprehensible limits. And similarly, the absoluteness of the moral demands it makes knows no limit. The most certain of all certainties known by our spirit is this: that the ray of truth, the power of life, and the demand of the holy “thou shalt” come to us continually anew from a living world that lies beyond all space and nevertheless embraces all space. With this energy that comes from absolute authority, the human spirit follows the stream of time long before the beginning and far beyond the end, going outside all boundaries (1 Cor. 2:4–5). This is the spirit’s most crying need: the origin of all things before the beginning of time and the goal of the future at the end of time.

The thirsting soul pants for its original fountain-head and for the estuary toward which it streams (John 1:1–3, Rev. 21:6, Ps. 42:1–2). If it has awakened to consciousness of its true self and its divine destiny, it perceives in death an enemy of life, an enemy that is unnatural and that fights against the very nature of things. And it sees the same in every-thing else that tries to sully and destroy the clarity and purity of the eternal (1 Cor. 15:26). Everything in our present time and in our earthly space that opposes the soul’s holy “thou must” and “thou shalt” must and shall be overcome (as the soul ultimately believes it will be) by the kingdom of God at the end of all ages and beyond all earthly things (Heb. 12:26–29). The “heavenly kingdom” of the other world intervenes in temporal and earthly life as the power of the future world. It wants to transform life here and now according to the image of what is beyond and to come (1 Tim. 4:8). This happens as soon as and as long as the soul lets faith rule in it, whenever and wherever that may be (Tit. 3:5–7). This other life, which is already possible here and now, means freedom for the soul. But there will never be any such soaring of a free soul as long as an atmosphere antagonistic to life both robs it of its breath and obscures its view into the eternal and everlasting.

The freedom and power of a believing soul goes so far that it expects – with the prophetic Spirit – a holy transformation to justice and unity (Rom. 8:11). It expects this also for every detail of material existence in space and time. It is in the hope of the kingdom of God that the soul discovers its life. To the soul, the end of all the ways of God is unity in a tangible and visible form (Rom. 6:23). For that reason, the Bible traces the death of the body back to the fact that sin as separation – as division and isolation – has brought a fatal breach into the living cohesion of creation (Prov. 8:35–36). To the soul, evil is a power hostile to life, one that carries with it the danger of eternal death by separating us from God and from one another (Ezek. 18:4–13). Sin is crime against life and love. That was the reason why the first son born to those human beings who separated themselves from God inevitably became his brother’s murderer (Gen. 4:3–16, 1 John 3:14–15).

Nevertheless, the ancient scriptures of truth maintain that it is impossible to extinguish the life that God has given us out of his own nature. From generation to generation, physical death comes to everyone as a consequence of separation from God. The body does indeed die when the soul leaves it. The body that is left behind without the soul must fall to dust. Death can never deny that its nature is to separate by division and disintegration, and this it has proved since the very beginning through man’s separation from God. Yet death is not annihilation.

The writings of both the Old Testament and the New Testament speak again and again about the souls of the dead. Every living soul has a capacity for future life (Rev. 6:9). All vital movements of humankind look to the future (Rev. 20:4). Whenever the soul comes to new life in the Spirit, it waits for God’s future (James 5:7–8). And even if the soul cannot believe wholeheartedly in the coming kingdom, faith tries to salvage this or that small fragment of the world-to-come and then clings to it all the more passionately (Heb. 11:13–16). If people are not yet ready to fight and die for the final kingdom of love and justice, they cling to a communistic state of the future or a Third Reich of national freedom and racial alliance. And in the same way, a remnant of faith in immortality and the other world emerges again and again, even in the most unbelieving, and this they can never lose entirely. Something in our being is meant to continue as an active force forever. Our divine home calls us homeward. The spirit wants to return to God, in whom it has its origin (Eccles. 12:7). And though God himself is not yet recognized, there is at least an attempt to represent a little of his infinite significance even when it is done by idolatry.

Today, too, we have every reason to recall the faith in eternity and infinity that characterized the early Christians. If we want truth and seek it regardless of the unfounded prejudices of our time, we must and will recognize that here among the early Christians a glimpse into ultimate reality is given (John 6:68).

In the face of this reality, no living soul can maintain its opposition. For here the soul is face to face with the life-giving Spirit of Jesus Christ. Those who believe in Jesus will live even though they die (John 11:25–26). And the day is coming when they will awake and arise to a perfect life in an immortal body (2 Cor. 5:4–5).

Footnotes

1. Johann Peter Eckermann, 1792–1854, Conversations with Goethe.
2. Schopenhauer, 1788–1860, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 2, chapter 47.
3. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, Critique of Practical Reason.