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When heaven and hell are conceived as starting on earth, the demythologizers argue, Christian ethics are bound to be sharply strengthened. Such a concept "imparts a tremendous value to human life here and now," says Boston University's Methodist Scholar S. Paul Schilling. The theologians also argue that a this-worldly heaven and hell are quite in keeping with the Biblical message. In Galatians 5:14 Paul says: "For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' " Scholars point out that the principal message of Matthew 25, which contains one of the New Testament's few references to heaven and hell, is that man's salvation is work in this world—work for others.
All the same, man cannot escape death—and the not yet disproved possibility of judgment beyond. On this issue, many theologians retreat into agnosticism. If man is sufficiently fulfilled on earth, says Dr. Albert van den Heuvel of the World Council of Churches, "we can leave it to Jesus to worry about the details." The Gospel, adds Dr. Edward Craig Hobbs of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, "offers a message for this life. If, by some chance, we should discover ourselves still conscious after death, we will probably receive a new set of instructions."
"Terrestrial Messianism." Whatever those instructions, theologians retain faith in a posthumous identity. Insists Catholic Scholar Riga: "An afterlife is simply basic to Christianity. Without it what would you have but a terrestrial messianism interested only in building up the city of man? That surely is not all there is to religion." Declares Stanford's Robert McAfee Brown: "If God is a God of love, if he is ultimate, that which he loves and sustains he will not simply discard." Jesuit Sociologist-Theologian Paul Hilsdale of California's Loyola University believes that the afterlife, whatever its form, must somehow preserve individual awareness. "Since I conceive of myself as a consciousness which is open to others in love," says Hilsdale, "I feel fairly certain that I will be able to think and to love in the next life. If this requires space, then there will be space. If it requires time, there will be time. I'm not so sure that it requires either."
Others see posthumous salvation in terms of some kind of cosmic evolution toward perfection. According to the late Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, man is evolving toward an "Omega point," or ultimate encounter with God. To Methodist Schilling, the phenomenon involves "the ongoing life of the whole person, not of the body in the physical sense, but of something equivalent to what a body is, a notion of renewal rather than mere survival, in ways that we cannot know. It is a matter of faith, but I think a reasonable and intelligent faith."