Time&Eternity

278 notes to chapter 2
379. “Als Ereignis vollendeter Verhältnislosigkeit ist der Tod das genaue Gegenteil einer
Freigabe von so etwas wie einem unzerstörbaren Person-Kern und erst recht das genaue
Gegenteil eines sich selbst vollendenden oder essentifizierenden menschlichen Aktes. Im
Tod wird der Mensch vernichtet.” Ibid., 344.
380. For the sake of clarity, it is noted here that, in speaking of the immortality of the
soul, I principally mean immortality conceived on the individual level. This should be distinguished
from super-individual or pantheistic notions of immortality that occurred, for
example, in the idealistic tendencies of Romanticism, which, incidentally, sought to unite
numerous notions of immortality with ideas of resurrection (cf. on this Segerbank, Dödstanken
i svensk romantik). When Schleiermacher speaks of immortality at the end of his
second talk, Über die Religion, then he does so precisely in a polemic against a fearful concern
for one’s own individuality and as an appeal to the educated among those despisers of
religion “to annihilate their personality and to live in the One and All” [schon hier eure Individualität
zu vernichten, und im Einen und Allen zu leben]. Schleiermacher, Über die
Religion, 95–97; trans., On Religion, 100–101.
381. Jüngel says succinctly and conclusively: “there is no immortality of the soul” [eine
Unsterblichkeit der Seele gibt es nicht]. Jüngel, Tod, 152; trans., 120. Jeanrond warns of the
consequences of a dualism of body and soul (Call and Response, 55ff.). He criticizes official
Roman Catholic theology as it is presented, for example, in the Catechism of the Catholic
Church of 1993 (on the doctrine of the separation of the immortal soul from the body at
the moment of death, see ibid., nos. 366, 1005, and 1016): “It is sad that the countless
warnings by prominent theologians, including Roman Catholic ones, during the last few
decades were ignored once again, and an old and fundamentally non-Christian doctrine of
death was reaffirmed.” Jeanrond, Call and Response, 58. The Evangelische Erwachsenenkatechimus
1975 (532f.) is also not nearly as clear as Jüngel; it is more concerned with trying to
combine the hope of resurrection and the immortality of the soul than it is with trying to
contrast death as the end of all human activity with God’s action. Stendahl, on the other
hand, distances himself from notions of immortality with the argument that this is far too
large and, simultaneously, far too small (“Immortality is Too Much and Too Little”). Far
too large because it arrogantly glorifies the human being with individual immortality and
claims to know more than is useful. Far too small because it is far too egoistic, far too concerned
with one’s own self, one’s own family, or one’s own race, thereby forgetting that the
New Testament deals with something far greater than the concern about individual identity,
namely, with the advent of the reign of God. In his study of the various aspects of the
idea of eternal life, Küng does not deal in particular with ideas about the immortality of
the soul (Ewiges Leben?). He appears to want to assume a middle position when he says
that the human being does indeed die “as a whole, with body and soul, as a psychosomatic
unity” [als ganzer, mit Leib und Seele, als psychosomatische Einheit], but he distances
himself from a “total death” [Ganztod] (178; trans., Eternal Life?, 138). Cf. hereto also the
discussion of various concepts of the soul, as well as the reflections on immortality, in
Tysk, Evigt liv, 81–148. Ratzinger argues for the immortality of the soul, claiming, in his
own words, to “rehabilitate an originally Christian concept of the immortality of the soul”
[einen originär christlichen Begriff der Unsterblichkeit der Seele rehabilitiert], Eschatologie,
137.
382. Cf. Wittgenstein, “Tractatus logico-philosophicus,” 6.4312.
383. See above pp. 52–54, n. 363.
384. Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, 130.
385. Ibid., 138.
386. Küng points out that, already in 1794, the revolutionary Antoine de Condorcet
proclaimed “the abolition or a considerable postponement of death as the long-term goal