Deserving Immortality – Maverick Philosopher

I lately aphorized:

Which is better: to inquire whether there is immortality, or to live in such a way as to deserve it? Both are good, but the second is better.

A childhood friend and committed Christian offers this well-crafted comment:

You are meant for immortality but cannot live in such a way as to deserve it. The only thing you can “do” in this regard is step aside and let the only person so qualified for this task (of deserving a living survival from death) substitute for you. Your willingness to step aside to let this uniquely qualified individual do the thing that only he can do will change you. Until that change you are incompletely made as it were and are qualified for going from death to death. God sees our unfitness to be fully in his presence. When the substitution takes place, God sees the substitute’s fitness as an attribute of our soul and we are accepted into God’s presence. This is immortal life. This is possible for any man.

The substitute is qualified and ready. The transition event pivots on our willingness to either use our free will as though its purpose is to allow us to be established as independent from the presence of God or to accept God’s purpose in equipping us with this free will which is to accept freely this offer of substitution, admit our inability to make ourselves fit to be fully in God’s presence, and submit to the process of substitution and be born again.

Note first that the comment is consistent with the truth of my aphorism. I asked which is better: to examine the question of personal immortality or to live in such a way as to deserve it. It should be obvious that while both are good — the first as an instance of the Socratic principle that the examined life is better than the unexamined life – the second is better. The second is better even if nothing we do or could do suffices to secure for us personal immortality. In other words, the second disjunct does not presuppose the possibility of attaining immortality 'on our own power' and as our just desert. One can live so as to deserve immortality even if one does not, in the end, deserve it.

Nevertheless, it is a very important question whether, if there is personal immortality, we can secure it by our own efforts. The Christian answer is in the negative. As a result of the Fall, we are so out of right relation to God that nothing we could do could restore us to right relation. Adam's sin condemned him and his descendants to death. The Platonic notion that man is naturally immortal, in virtue of the immortality of his soul, is foreign to Christianity. Immortality was a supernatural gift in our prelapsarian state, and, after the Fall, it became a gift again only because of the substitutionary sacrifice of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, agnus dei qui tollit peccatum mundi.

My old friend is suggesting that all we can do is confess our impotence in bringing about our own salvation and accept exogenic assistance, substituting for our own vain efforts the Savior's efficacious efforts. One comment is that, while my friend was brought up Catholic, he now seems perilously close to the Protestant sola fide, a a doctrine I have never understood. How could faith alone suffice? Works don't count at all? Nothing we do makes any difference? As I understand the Catholic doctrine — which strikes me as balanced where the Protestant one is unbalanced — there is no soteriological bootstrapping: one cannot save oneself by one's own efforts alone; still, works play some role, however exiguous that role may be.

As a philosopher, however, my problems lie far deeper than this intramural theological dispute, having to do with the exact meaning of the Fall, and the sense and possibility of Trinity and Incarnation. My friend is presupposing the truth of Christianity. But for a philosopher, the truth of Christianity is a problem, not a presupposition.

And so once again we are brought back to the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem, the tension between the need for autonomous understanding and the need to accept, faithfully and obediently, Biblical revelation. The Bible-based believer has his truth and so sees no need to inquire; the philosopher, however, well disposed as he may be to the claims of revelation, cannot help, on pain of violating his own nature and integrity, inquiring whether what the believer calls truth really is truth.