Oscar Cullmann's
Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?
The Internet Edition
Completed January 2002
I first encountered Cullmann's work in my first year at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. I had for some time been convinced that the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body from the dead (so authoritatively stated in our early creeds) was in direct opposition to the pagan notion of the inherent immortality of the human spirit or soul, a notion held today by the vast majority of Christians. While my friends who embrace process thought assure me that these two views are not mutually exclusive, I am not convinced.
The Christian tradition, anchored in God's unique revelation in Jesus Christ as proclaimed in the New Testament, has affirmed the doctrine of the resurrection from the dead from the first century. The Apostle Paul makes allusion to the idea in his first letter to the Thessalonians before following up with the definitive Christian statement on the "end times" in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians (perhaps only the Christ Hymn of Philippians 2 has found a closer place in my heart).
Paul's declarations are essentially Hebrew in origin (Paul was, of course, a Pharisee by training and remained a devout Jew his entire life) and carry with them certain ideas concerning the nature of the human soul. To the Hebrews, Paul, the early Christians, and Jesus himself (another devout Jew), each person is a human soul, created by God. Each person is in sin, and sin brings on death. God is by very nature LIFE, and death therefore is separation from God. What a miserable fate! Is there a finer, more concise definition of hell than that of total separation from God? This does not rule out other definitions for Hell and damnation, of course, but it does seem to be a powerful - and quite Biblical - view.
God's grace in Jesus Christ thus becomes so important...essential. We cannot escape death on our own, and therefore cling to the coming into the world of the Incarnation (again, see Philippians 2). By conquering sin and death through incarnation, life, crucifixion, and resurrection, Jesus Christ performed the greatest act in the history of the cosmos...the defeat of death, the great enemy of God and creation. Thus, those who are in Christ will rise from the dead on that great day of Christ's return, to live and reign with him eternally in the fully reconciled and transformed creation. This is the promise of Scripture which has been properly termed "the Christian Hope".
The Greeks of the New Testament era were not from the Hebrew tradition, but were pagans, alternately worshiping an abundance of false deities and engaging in Platonic philosophical discussions. The world into which Christianity was born was a Hellenistic world, dominated by Plato and paganism.
One of these pagan ideas was the belief that the human body was little more than a shell, housing an eternal life force alternately called a spirit or a soul. (Quite obviously, what Paul meant by those terms was very different.) At death, then, the spirit was free to fly away into the heavens to whatever gods truly existed, or to float down into the nether regions for eternal punishment.
The Good News that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and had conquered death once and for all made little sense to the Greeks, who viewed death not as an enemy to be conquered but rather as a friend to be embraced. Hence Paul's frustration with the philosophers in the Acts of the Apostles. No, Christians maintained that each person, each body, was a soul, is a soul, and of sacred worth.
The Church maintained this doctrine strongly in its earliest years, although pagan ideas always lurked in the background. St. Augustine's powerful influence combined Biblical tradition with Greek thought, and redefined our terms to a degree. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came the rise of "premillenial dispensationalism", which had been unknown to Christians dating back to Paul. As the premillenialists so strenuously embraced the idea of a "rapture" (the faithful will vanish one day, rather than rise with Christ's return), pagan ideas seemed more attractive. While others have decried the cancer of extreme fundamentalism (perhaps second only to pluralism as the greatest enemy of contemporary Christians), I will merely say that the greatest victory of this movement has been its injection of pagan notions of the soul into the Christian dialogue.
On April 26, 1955, Oscar Cullmann, a theology professor at the University of Basel and at the Sorbonne in Paris, delivered the Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man at Harvard University's Andover Chapel. The lecture was subsequently published as IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL OR RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD?: THE WITNESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Cullmann, a traditional Reformed theologian, was at the time a well known New Testament scholar, noted especially for his works on the early Church.
IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL OR RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD? was to be his finest work, proclaiming the Christian truth in a culture which had forgotten it. It not only affirmed my own views but challenged them and enhanced them as well. He states the traditional Christian view far more capably and eloquently than I ever could. This book is not for the weak at heart, for the truth it espouses is far more exciting than any pagan notion of flying spirits...it is the Good News that Jesus Christ has conquered death and is alive forevermore...and because he lives, we too shall live.
I present this Internet edition of Cullmann's brief masterpiece to the Church with the prayer that the Church may experience renewal in examining the work, that the Body of Christ would be built up, that we could recapture some of the sense of urgency of the early Church, and that some may come to know Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father now and forevermore. Amen.
Rev. Keith H. McIlwain, May 1998
Internet Edition completed January 2002
Links to other sites on the Web
Chapter 1: The Last Enemy
(Socrates and Jesus)
Chapter 2: The Wages of Sin - - Death
(Body & Soul - - Flesh & Spirit)
Chapter 3: The Firstborn from the Dead
(Between the Resurrection of Christ and the Destruction of Death)
Chapter 4: Those Who Sleep
(The Holy Spirit and the Intermediate State of the Dead)
Rev. Keith H. McIlwain's Home Page
IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL OR RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD?:
THE WITNESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
by Oscar Cullmann
was first published in 1958 in London by Epworth Press.
© 1958 The Epworth Press.
© 1998 / 2002 mcilwain@penn.com
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