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The Death of Everyone: Robert Lifton, Christian Theology and Apocalyptic Imagery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Lucy Bregman
Lucy Bregman*
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Abstract

This paper explores an issue raised by psychologist Robert Lifton in The Broken Connection. Lifton believes the present threat of total extinction through nuclear war has drastically affected humanity's ability to reconnect life and death, and to make individual death meaningful. The death of everyone—as an imaginable possibility—defeats all expressions of “symbolic immortality,” affirmations of continuity and hope.

How has Christian theology met this predicament? Twentieth-century history has been so menacing and overwhelming that some theologians have found in apocalyptic-eschatological imagery the most appropriate framework to encounter that history and discern its spiritual meaning. Yet this imagery, even when de-literalized, provides at best ambiguous answers. Early twentieth-century theology—Schweitzer, Case—recognized the importance of apocalyptic thought for the New Testament, but easily repudiated this for contemporary life. In contrast, later thinkers such as Cullman, Brunner, and Moltmann make extensive use of eschatological imagery. However, they face the problem raised by Lifton: how to make “hope” vivid to readers already gripped by a future of possible universal catastrophe.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Fall 1986 , pp. 306 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1986

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References

1 Lifton, Robert, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 17.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 24.

3 Ibid., p. 339.

4 Ibid., p. 351.

5 Lifton would surely agree to this, but emphasize how, after 1945, the death of everyone could never again be entirely escaped as an imaginative possibility.

6 Two fine treatments of the historical imagery of immortality are Aries, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 1981)Google Scholar and LeGoff, Jacques, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar

7 Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1945;Google Scholar first German edition, 1906), pp. 368-69.

8 Ibid., p. 399.

9 Case, Shirley Jackson, The Millennial Hope: A Phase of War-Time Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918), pp. 237, 238.Google Scholar

10 Bultmann, Rudolph, “New Testament and Mythology” in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Bartsch, Hans W. (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

11 Cullman, Oscar, “Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead” in Resurrection and Immortality, ed. Stendahl, Krister (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 13–18.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., pp. 50-51. This problem of denial, wish-fulfillment, and a proper theological response to Freud dominates many twentieth-century theological treatments of death and afterlife. See, e.g., Küng's, Hans recent Eternal Life? (London: Collins, 1984)Google Scholar, which squeezes an enormous amount of material through the needle's eye of this one issue.

13 Brunner, Emil, Eternal Hope (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), p. 127.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., pp. 152-53.

15 Lifton, , The Broken Connection, p. 344Google Scholar, quoting Eisely.

16 Moltmann, Jürgen, Theology of Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).Google Scholar

17 Moltmann, Jürgen, The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).Google Scholar

18 Moltmann, Jürgen and Herzog, Frederick, The Future of Hope: Theology as Eschatology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).Google Scholar

19 Moltmann, , The Crucified God, p. 207.Google Scholar