Death, Resurrection, and Human Destiny: Christian and Muslim Perspectives

Response to Asma Afsaruddin

Response to Asma Afsaruddin GAVIN D’COSTA Iwould like to start my response with Professor Afsaruddin’s comment that ‘‘friendships do not travel with us into the next world’’ and her following citation from a h .adı̄th: ‘‘family and wealth come back and only [the dead man’s] deeds remain.’’ First, Sajjad Rizvi’s essay in this volume speaks of the ‘‘friends of God’’ as being part of the afterlife, and I wonder whether this difference of emphasis (individual and God; individual and friends and God) indicates a significant difference? If not, I would appreciate further explanation, from a Muslim point of view, of the different emphases on friendships and human love enjoyed and struggled over, both prior to the final judgment and after the final judgment. Second, I wonder if this difference of emphasis is also found in Christian accounts of these two states: after death and after the final judgment. Historically , friendship and love and the lack of love, as part of the created order, receive quite varied attention. For example, in a classic neo-Scholastic textbook, Joseph Pohle writes of the beatific vision in heaven: its primary object is the divine essence (an intuitive vision of the triune God); its secondary object is the contemplation of beautiful created objects outside of the divine essence.1 Here, good friendships, beautiful music and art, and all those created realities that participate in the glory of the divine reality are enjoyed eternally. We see this in the passages from Dante’s The Divine Comedy included in this volume. We see this in more radical ways in this volume’s essays by N. T. Wright and Miroslav Volf, who have pressed us to think more carefully about these created realities and their participation in ‘‘heaven.’’ Wright has called for a fuller account of all Creation’s participation in the new heaven and the new earth; Volf has pointed to the suffering and lack of forgiveness that requires attention if the language of love and friendship is to have any eschatological currency. Third, to drill a bit deeper into this issue, Afsaruddin writes of the penultimate state, the barzakh, which seems akin to purgatory, where the soul can earn 57 58 Surveys partial expiation for its sins. There is an interesting apparent tension, as she notes, between the Qurān’s teaching that ‘‘each individual is accountable for his or her sins only and that no one can bear the burdens of another or intercede for them’’ and Islamic notions of intercessory prayer. Indeed, it seems clear to me that, for much of the Islamic tradition, Muh .ammad does have the power of intercession; also, according to Rizvi’s essay in the present volume, Fāt .ima too has this intercessory power. For me, this raises important questions. If Muh .ammad has this particular power, how does he get it, and is it uniquely attributed to him? In principle, could others get it? If so, how? Again, with the Shiite tradition I sense that the powers of intercession between the living and the dead and between the dead and dead play a much stronger role. Fourth, in the Christian tradition, understandings of purgatory and what goes on with regard to intercession are equally complicated and marked by powerful tensions because some Christians rejected not only the abuses regarding indulgences but also, later, the very notion of indulgences (intercessions on behalf of those who had died)—and, eventually, purgatory itself. Indeed, Wright has imaginatively suggested that, had Cardinal Ratzinger written his book on eschatology during the Reformation, a lot of strife might have been avoided! As a Catechism Roman Catholic, I hold to the following on this matter: that the intercession of the living on behalf of the dead is legitimate, that seeking intercession of the ‘‘dead’’—the saints—on behalf of the living on earth and the ‘‘dead’’ in purgatory is legitimate, and that these doctrines are fundamentally aimed at articulating the social nature of our communal existence without denying individual agency and the power of love beyond death. Fifth, the notion of the Heights, Arāf, is very intriguing. If this is the state analogous to ‘‘limbo,’’ where good and bad deeds are in exact balance, then two questions arise for me. If the Prophet interceded, then the balance would surely shift and tip toward good deeds. But if this happens, do those souls from the Arāf then proceed to the barzakh to gain, through...