This phrase has been in English poetry, prose, comedy and
film since 1892. It was first penned by Rudyard Kipling in his poem,
“Gentlemen-Rankers.” The poem was about enlisted men who came from upper class
backgrounds but had been demoted to the ranks in disgrace. They were cavalry troopers
of the British Imperial Army during the Victorian era. As early as 1902
students at Harvard and Yale Universities made fun with the chorus of Kipling’s
poem as the “Whippenpoof Song.” The later book and film of that title told of
American sailors at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in1941.
It isn’t just an idle phrase. Kipling’s poem referred to with the deadly
business of war: “To the legion
of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned, to my brethren in their sorrow
overseas.” Soldiers of any nation who served in Afghanistan or Iraq in recent years
would recognize the bitterness it expresses, perhaps as the prelude to PTSD.
Poetic phrases and titles can
be turned to other uses - redeemed, as it were, from the cruel bitterness to the
beautiful hope of life beyond death. Alister McGrath has done
so. Trained as a molecular
biologist and a theologian, he is now Professor of Divinity at Gresham College,
Oxford, as well as the
Andreos Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford,
and the President of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. In his writings, lectures and
interviews as well as an associate priest in Anglican parishes in the Cotswolds,
McGrath speaks of death and our Christian hope of life beyond death as the
dramatic passage from the realm of space-time to eternity. That is exactly what
the words and images of heaven and eternal life in our Christian scriptures
were trying to convey.
As soon as we were conceived we began to live in the realm of time and
space. But do we also at that moment begin life as an eternal soul? That is
often claimed by traditional Christian doctrines, but it isn’t a scriptural
idea. The Greek philosopher Plato was the first to use the term psyche, usually translated by the
Anglo-Saxon word soul. Plato stated
that the soul could be liberated from its imprisonment in the body by
philosophy. Greek mystery religions believed that the immortal soul, imprisoned
in the material body, was liberated by death. The early Enlightenment philosopher,
Descartes (1596-1650) held a similar view of human nature as a physical body
and an immortal soul. That concept of human nature became popular as biblical
scholars read Paul’s letters with references to ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. Many scholars
now believe that Paul meant that ‘to live according to the flesh’ meant no more
than to live on a purely human level without any spiritual dimension.
Alister McGrath puts current thinking about personal identity and hope
of life beyond death in relational terms. In his latest book Inventing The Universe: Why We Can’t Stop
Talking About Science, FaiTh and God, “(This) is a way of thinking that is
rooted in the Bible and sees the believer’s identity as rooted in and sustained
by their relationship with God…. Whether you think Christianity is right or
wrong, there is now way of getting way from one of its core ideas – that we are
in some way hard wired to think about, even long for God.” (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.) As Augustine
of Hippo put it in his Confessions ca.
400 CE: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they
find their rest in you.”
As both my wife of nearly sixty-five years and I move into our nineties
during the coming year, these issues are becoming of supreme importance to us.
In these precarious times, it isn’t merely the elderly who may voice such
concerns - and not just for Christian believers like us. People of every age of
differing religious traditions, or vague, uncertain faith, or even no faith at
all, may surely give thought to similar concerns. What is most important to
remember as we turn into a new year is that we were born into the realm of time
and space. Eternity, or whatever happens when we pass from this realm is not in
our control.
