Life Being a Concept

It seems inescapable that trying to figure out something of substance about Christianity--perhaps about any religion--leads to a time of decision.  Can it really be that a person finds out something about a religion and then plugs that something into the religion in question?  Can a person really find something new about Christianity and then incorporate that new thing into "the Christian life"?  Would that "Christian life" be recognizable?

I suppose any substantive outlook on this question would hinge on whether the supposed discovery is substantive in itself.  (I will not presume that any "discovery" that I or any other individual might make is original as well as substantive.)  But what might be more substantive than the question of "life" itself?  Is not Christianity about the "life" of the soul?  Can we see the matter of salvation or damnation as anything other than the life of the soul?

And if (as I'm sure cynics have offered through the ages) "life"--for good or ill--continues for the soul after death, then what is "eternal life" in distinction to "life"?  And if it is "death" to the soul to be under the judgment that flows from "original sin," who among us has ever really been alive?  The idea of receiving Life in Christ exists still, but that does not change the fact that the communal experience--Christian or not--within the culture that is entwined with Christianity concludes as a matter of mundane experience that there is the simple matter of being alive or dead.  You're born, and you're alive, and then you die, and you're dead.

Or you're not.  The teachings of Jesus are held to be fundamental by his followers.  I am treating as "the teachings of Jesus" the four canonical Gospels--minus the obvious artifices of beginnings, endings, and interpolations--and the Old Testaments writings (particularly in Genesis) to which he refers for support.  If the teachings of Jesus are fundamental, then no concept (no matter how obviously correct it might seem to us) can override those teachings.

That is why (as this blog has tended from the start) I must conclude that we are not alive.  "Life" is a concept, not a reality experienced by us.  "Life" is a good concept.  "Life" is a concept essential to our communal understanding of our existence as human beings.  "Life" is how we understand things; to us, even the stars are born, live, and die.  Certain of us will maintain that it is wrong and bad to personalize (or "humanize") things like the stars, but none of us is possessed of absolute certainty about whether the stars have consciousness--it is just that some of us maintain that personalizing "lifeless" entities detracts from the quality of our lives, either individually or communally.  There it is, invariably: the concept of "life."

But Jesus and his belief system do not speak so of life.  Inescapably, Adam's estrangement from God at the very first is a living death, and just as inescapably our only life is the communal life of the Kingdom of Heaven.  The "abundant life" of Jesus' teaching is identification with life overall--particularly as manifested in self-abnegation--not the "abundant life" of the twisted Prosperity Gospel.

And so I must reckon that "life" does not really exist.  That doesn't sound like so much fun--certainly not as much fun as making some religious "discovery" that can enrich the discoverer's life.  But we must decide that life really does not exist, if we are to address responsibly the demands of existence.

Is it not a debilitating burden on the soul, to embrace a "reality" that does not exist?  Life is denied even to the animals.  A young, frolicking creature (inasmuch as any of them get to frolick) is reaching for life, grasping at life, and yet no sober observer can believe that such rare, brief spurts of heedless energy are practicable for the species other than as training exercises.  Meanwhile the adult members of the species are ever on the alert against dangers--dangers all too real, with bad results often too horrid to imagine.  How can we darken our souls as to believe that this is the "life" of God's intention?

The teachings of Jesus are more fundamental, more important, than life.  They exist more than life--life being a concept, not a reality, for us.