From Here To Eternity

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.