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of the Midwinter Series. I want to welcome you particularly to University Presbyterian Church on behalf of myself and also Sam Williams, who could not be here this evening. You all may remember when you were here last year that we were just finishing up the renewal of this building and the organ, and so we're very glad that we have all this wonderful space for welcoming you to this evening. I'll just remind you that the reception is on down this hall in the fellowship hall following the lecture, and there are restrooms on either side of the hall as you go down.

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Please join me now in the opening sentences that are printed in your bulletin. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is my light.

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I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Let us pray. Loving and gracious God, we come before you because you have graced us and called us your own. And so we gather this evening as your people.

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We thank you for the church that calls us into community and offers us the opportunity to be more together than we could ever be alone. We thank you for Austin Seminary, where many of us have been educated and have been loved and nurtured in the faith. And we thank you for these who come now to offer their wisdom and their knowledge to us during these lectures. We pray that you would bless them and that you would bless all those who hear.

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We thank you for calling us together. We thank you for your guidance, but most of all, for your love that you have shown us in Jesus Christ. We pray in his name. Amen.

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. Good friends, our scripture reading this morning comes from 1 Corinthians chapter 15, beginning at verse 12. Hear the word of the Lord. Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?

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If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.

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For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

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But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being. For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.

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But each in his own order, Christ, the first fruits, then at his coming, those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

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For God has put all things in subjection under His feet. But when it says, all things are put in subjection, it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under Him. When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under Him, so that God may be all. and all.

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Thus ends the reading of Holy Scripture. For more than half a century, the annual midwinter lectures at Austin Seminary have been a special time for scholarly presentations, alumni, alumni gatherings, and meaningful conversations and fellowship. Those of us who reside here at the seminary, students, faculty, administration and staff always eagerly anticipate these days so chocked full of enjoyable events.

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We renew relationships of longstanding and often we make new friends. We reminisce, we gain new insights, and we share new dreams. It is indeed a special time.

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So welcome to all of you as we begin another experience of the tradition of the midwinter lectures at Austin Seminary. I am confident that these days will prove intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding for us all. Before proceeding now to introduce our lecturers for this year, I take this opportunity to express publicly the profound appreciation of the entire seminary community to University Presbyterian Church for once again hosting this initial lecture of our midwinter lectures. The relationship between Austin Seminary and University Presbyterian Church

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has been fashioned over many years and has taken various forms, all of which have been positive and have deepened our ties. Tonight, we are again thankful for the gracious hospitality of this congregation. We are especially grateful to the pastors and staff for working to ensure that the myriad details have been attended to which are necessary to make an evening like this so pleasant and memorable. Judy, we thank you very much.

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I now have the happy privilege of presenting two of our lecturers and introducing the third for our opening presentation. Our E.C. Westerfeld Lecturer for 2001 is Dr. James F.

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Childress, Kyle Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Medical Education at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he has taught for three decades. We're pleased that Professor Childress' wife, Marcia, is present with him. Dr. Childress, would you and Mrs.

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Childress stand and let us welcome you? Dr. Childress's theme for his series is Theology and Bioethics. His first lecture will be tomorrow at 10:15 a.m.

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in the Seminary Chapel. Our 2001 Robert F. Jones lecture is Dr. Dorothy C.

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Bass. She is presently serving as Professor of Theology and Director of the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, which is a Lilly Endowment project based at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana. Dr. Bass, will you please stand and let us welcome you.

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The theme for Dr. Bass's lectures is Gathered, Washed, Nourished, Sent. Her initial lecture will be tomorrow morning at 8.30 A.m., also in the seminary chapel. The Thomas White Curry Lectures were established in 1952 by the Tom Curry Bible class of Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas.

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The lectures and the publications resulting from these lectures have been a veritable treasure of theological and biblical insights and germinal thought, including H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture and Christian Stindahl's Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Our 2001 Thomas White lecturer is Dr. Robert W.

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Jensen. Dr. Jensen presently serves as Senior Scholar for Research at the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, a position he has held for almost three years. For ten years prior to his coming to CTI, however, Dr.

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Jensen was Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, before officially retiring and being elected Professor Emeritus. But many of us first encountered Dr. Jensen earlier than his years on the faculty at St.

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Olaf. Namely, during the 20 years he served on the faculty of Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he taught in the field of systematic theology. I, like many others, came to know Professor Jensen through his numerous publications during his teaching career. He is author of approximately 20 volumes, among them being Visible Words, The Practice and Interpretation of Christian Sacraments, and The Triune Identity, The Christian Interpretation of God, and His Own Systematic Theology, and over 100 scholarly articles.

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Through his writing, he has been a source of substantial and seminal theological thinking, and helping interpretation of the church's tradition, at times his writing has been provocative and at times reassuring, at least to me. Professor Jensen was born and baptized A Lutheran and was reared in a pastor's family, his father serving as an ordained minister in the Norwegian Lutheran Church. And I have learned only this evening that his father was pastor in Oak Cliff,

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Dallas and that he also pastor near Waco, Texas. So he has deep roots in Texas. Dr. Jensen himself was ordained in the American Lutheran Church and presently is a clergy member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

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While Professor Jensen's loyalty to the Lutheran Church will never be in doubt, He has long been, and still is, active in ecumenical work and discussions. He was the co-founder and is the associate director. of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology.

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He is also a longtime member of the Avery Dulles Colloquium on Dogmatic Theology, as well as a member of the Paul Ramsey Colloquium on Public Policy. Our Curry Lecturer is a graduate of Lutheran College, Iowa, and Lutheran Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He earned his Doctor of Theology

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degree in systematic theology from the University of Heidelberg in Heidelberg, Germany. Dr. Jensen is married, and his wife, Blanche, is here with us. And she, too, has roots in Texas.

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She served as a counselor for Lutheran students here at the University of Texas. Mrs. Jensen, would you please stand and let us greet you. Professor Jensen's theme for his lectures is on thinking the human.

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His initial lecture is entitled Thinking Dead. Professor Jensen, welcome to Austin Seminary and the University Presbyterian Church. President Shelton, brothers and sisters, it is an honor to give the Curry Lectures, and I thank Austin Seminary for it. is also a pleasure to spend some time in Austin.

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We spent part of the morning on the drag so that Blanche could point out to me where this happened and where that happened. It's a very different town now, but some vestiges of Blanche's Austin apparently are still to be found. The 3 essays I will lay before you tonight and then in the subsequent days are all provoked by a common feature that many of the most ordinary notions we use and must use to interpret our humanity to ourselves, whether within Christian talk and its theology or outside of it, are simply hard to think. simply hard to get into our heads.

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There is, for example, and this is the first lecture, no way to talk about Christian life without regularly talking about death. We just had a sample from Paul. But the more I ask myself what exactly I have in mind when I use the word, the more dubious it becomes that I have anything much in mind. Or again, Christian theology could perhaps get along without the notion of consciousness, but not in the contemporary situation.

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And the elusiveness of the notion of consciousness has become a scandal in a whole complex of scientific and other disciplines. As for freedom, There is no way to do Christian preaching and catechesis without talking about it. Yet, especially in the Western Church, we have spent two millennia excommunicating each other on the subject.

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There are plenty of other such notions, and some will appear in the book the sponsors of this lecture want me to make, but I have just three lectures, and so those are the three. I will lay before you. I begin with death partly because that was the first one to worry me, I suppose because I am older than most of you, but also because theology and philosophy both have given it a key role in human self-understanding. Notoriously, we are the animals that know we are going to die.

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Now, mention of philosophy introduces a warning I have to make. I taught philosophy for some years before switching definitely to being a theologian. And in preparing these talks, I've found myself reverting to the persons and style of philosophy more than any of you who may have run into my more recent writing will have expected. But I promise, if you hang in there each time, you will find that I do get around.

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to Christian doctrine. And indeed, some of you may think that I get around to it much too regularly and bluntly, bringing in the doctrine of the Trinity as the solution at the end of each lecture. I can only say that it is indeed my conviction that such things as human death and freedom and consciousness cannot, in fact, be thought well. except by thinking first of the Triune God, and only in that context of us human creatures.

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I'm thinking death. A theologian must, of course, have something to say about death. And so in my writing, I have evoked the fact of death in many contexts. But the more I have lately thought about it and thought about what I was doing when I did that, the more I realized I did not well know what I was doing.

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The more I have pondered the fact of death, the more central to our understanding of ourselves as human persons, that fact has seemed to me, and the more resistant to thought, it has seemed to me. Let me put the puzzlement the way I first formulated, which I am sorry, was in the jargon of philosophy, and indeed in the jargon of the most jargonish of philosophers, Hegel. The thought of death seems to be-- now, this is Hegel's language, which I will promptly translate.

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The thought of death seems to be a concept for which using Hegel's German word no vorstellum is available. Translating that word vorstellum, Hegel had in mind the picture, the representation of something It goes with a concept, so as to bring that concept into the actual flow of our thinking. And the thought of death seems to be a concept for which no representation can easily be found.

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I mean, I can perfectly well say, I will die, and Jones will die, And these are surely proper sentences. So that dot, dot, dot will die looks like being a properly formed concept. Yet with at least the first of those propositions, I will die, no image can be paired.

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Or at least that's the way the matter first presents itself. The only pictures, mental representations, that seem available to accompany the concept of my own death are, in fact, of some continuation of consciousness in death, which is, of course, to say they are not images of death at all, but of a mode of life. We think of entering into a void, We think of experiencing the absence of our own existence.

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We think of the supervention of unconsciousness. We think of what one might call absolute sleep. But all of these, of course, are modes of consciousness, not of being dead. Now, I've left immortality, of course, out of that account.

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The modern doctrine Is it someone's death is simply the end of that someone? And that's what I've been trying to think. For that is where my reflections too must start, both because we are all of us willy-nilly, inescapably modern, and because the modern doctrine or something close to it is where the Bible too starts.

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Now the Bible does not remain with its starting point, though it never repudiates it. And that has to be the pattern of our reflections also. The sheer end of someone is easy to think in the third person. First there is Jones, and then there is only an erstwhile organism.

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which is not Jones. But in the first person, that only makes A twist. From my point of view, my corpse is indeed just a leftover. What ends when I die, if there is no immortality, is my consciousness.

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But it is precisely the ending of my consciousness that seems impossible to think. Indeed, it is a point on which the religions all more or less agree that consciousness, my awareness that I am, really cannot simply be terminated. Even though, according to some religions, it will cease to be individual and those who eventually attain blessedness, we sometimes talk about finding out when we die, whether this general religious conviction is true. But of course, if there is no immortality, I will not find that out, since there will be no eye to make the discovery.

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The born from which no traveler returns is even more problematic than that. There is no way to enter it either. For by what would be entering it, eye cease to enter anything. So the sophisticated and unsophisticated pictures that we summon up when we try to think about dying, without supposing immortality, all fail.

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All are, in fact, images of some kind of consciousness which is supposed to be not there. The insight that has held me in fascination since it became fully clear to me is this. The ending of my consciousness is for me the same as there not being anything at all.

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Indeed, as there never having been and not being and never going to be anything at all. And then we have to drop that for me, just because it is me who's non-being. I am trying to think. The cessation of my consciousness, the sheer ending of it, if it happens,

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is something like the retroactive vanishing of all reality, the sheer occurrence of nothingness. And that cannot be thought as beings vanishing merely for my consciousness. For the point is, my consciousness is no longer extant to provide such a reference point. The non-being which occurs at my death cannot in fact be put in perspective, it cannot be made relative to anything, for that anything would have to be me, which is not.

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And that is, finally, the thought of the ending of my consciousness cannot finally be distinguished. from the thought of there just not being, or ever having been, or ever going to be anything at all. Within the religions, it has therefore always been said that the ending of my consciousness in the first person cannot happen. But the impossibility of thinking of my consciousness secession, the impossibility of doing that, is not necessarily a comfort.

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Most religions posit something that could be called an afterlife, but some religions have been appalled by the vision and have seen salvation precisely in rescue. from having to live on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Until ancient Israel's faith became in the message of the great prophets, fully eschatological, became faith in the act of God to transform everything. And so opened the hope of resurrection, which we will see is something different than an afterlife.

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The fact of death was for ancient Israel, as Gerhard von Rath, the great Old Testament scholar, notoriously once remarked, a strange theological gap. in Israel's faith and scriptures, and one which she seems deliberately to have maintained. Sometimes, indeed, Israel said explicitly that the dead have nothing further to do with God, which to be consistent with her doctrine of creation should have meant that the dead simply are not. And if I may put it so,

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For much of ancient Israel's history, that's what she tried to think. But not even Israel could quite achieve the thought. So she prohibited calling up the dead, but did not think it impossible. Think of the story of Saul and the Witch of Endor.

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Israel's unwillingness to deal with the dead as fellow creatures, as related to God as we are, even while not being able to deny the reality of the dead, is not to be understood simply as a primitive stage of her religious development. There is, of course, a conventional explanation. The continuance of the nation provided sufficient immortality, so long as Israel's self-awareness was dominated by each individual's identity with the nation, and so long as the nation's own survival could be counted on.

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But such generalities are true of any actual people only in the particular people's own way. And in Israel, they are true in the way of her faith in creation and of her eschatological self-understanding. It was given in Nuche already with the call of Abraham. Now, the Bible tells us fairly comprehensively what it means when it says that God creates what is not Himself.

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instead of, say, making it or birthing it. To create is not to make a thing, not even a big and beautiful thing like the universe. To create is rather to begin, sustain, and fulfill a history. Now, a history

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is a history only in that it has an end. Creation is a single something, the world, the creation, and a single something other than God. Only in that this history that we call creation will come to some conclusion beyond which it does not simply continue. And that is one of the chief theological ideas worked out in the later religious history of Israel.

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And the same is true of individual creatures. Since what I am is a history, I am not myself a specific and singular person, except as I will come to an end. The father of his country, Could, you know, have turned out at the last minute to be the great betrayer of his country?

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We don't know. Until he comes to some end. As a creature, I am only in that someday I will not be. Now the exilic prophets call Israel to a future not to be accommodated within the story I just told.

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A chief feature of that future is that in God's ending of things, all Israel, Abraham and Moses, and the prophets, the lot of them. All Israel may live eternally. Just so, until then, Israel's faith had to consider the dead as dead.

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For before any living creature is called into life, it simply is not, and when God withdraws His breath, as all the Psalmists say, it returns to the dust. If it just sneaks past and keeps on going, never was a creature to begin with. But now, by this long detour, I have simply, through Israel, brought us back to that unthinkable thought. of my sheer end.

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Is there now a way in which I can actually think the identity of my death? with all creations non-being. That's going to be the end of this, appropriately, I suppose. But here I want to plug in a deter, an excursus.

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For at this juncture appears the 20th century's greatest and most typical philosopher. The one who can tell us the most about the century we live in. And he is also the most sinister philosopher of the 20th century. A philosopher without whom no lecture on death would be complete.

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It will be profitable for me to take a few of my minutes for Martin Heidegger. The early work that made Heidegger famous, Being and Time, is an extended effort to interpret the peculiarity of death, which I have just been sketching, that you can't think of it's happening and have any substance to your thought, to interpret that as a good thing. by itself, as itself our salvation. I must, of course, summarize Heidegger brutally, but that's probably a good thing.

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He makes a lot more sense in summary than he does when you read him. My death, according to Heidegger, is the one possibility, the one thing that may happen to me, the one possibility that I cannot ever make actual, that I can't ever turn into an item of the world. For to make it actual, I must cease to be.

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And so, of course, cease to inhabit a world. Which, said Heidegger, is to say, My death is the one possibility, the one open, beckoning future that I cannot strip of its character as possibility. If going to China is a possibility for me when I get there, it is a possibility no longer.

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Not so with death. So far, Heidegger's analysis simply presents us with another version of the same twist. I started out with. But Heidegger construes this analysis as in itself, in what he calls existential translation, that is to say as preaching, because he was a preacher, as itself a message of salvation.

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Since my death is pure possibility One possibility I can never change into simply something there. Then if I live by explicitly facing death and moving toward it, if I undertake my own death, my life becomes pure openness to possibility. I am delivered from my dependence.

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on the way things go. It is often said that Heidegger's project in being and time, his great first book, was the interpretation of finitude, that's to say that I'm not God, and freedom, as to gather the specific character of human life. And death, he says, is the one place where these two go together, where I am both finite and free.

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That is to say, where a human being can be specifically human. Finite beings are finite because they are bounded by circumstance, and so unfree, unless my way of being amid the circumstances is precisely that I give up the self determined by them, unless I intend to die, unless I live by the knowledge that what can finally, and so at any moment, be there for me. is exactly my non-being.

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I suggest that this gospel, it finds in the character of death that I've been sketching, the possible salvation of human life is the gospel of the century we have lived through. For that Heidegger supported a movement whose armed branch wore the death's head as their emblem, the Waffen SS, and the rest of the SS, was no coincidence. National Socialism indeed lived for death. It did just what Heidegger said we should do, welcome our own nothingness. Now, no doubt it did these things far more crudely than Heidegger had in mind. But the popular version of any religion is always a little cruder than what the founder had in mind. The question is whether the religion's founder finds he or she must repudiate the popular version, and Heidegger never did that.

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Later, he may or may not have regarded his early support of Nazism as a mistake. But already, when he proclaimed that it was the future of Germany, the movement's character was there to be seen in all its love of death. The slaughter of the Jews was undoubtedly Nazism's greatest crime, but it did not take that to show the movement's infatuation with death. so much and no more about Heidegger. He is not a good guy to hang around with. What I have to do to get on with it, sharing the modern and indeed in one way biblical understanding of death as the end, is to do what Heidegger rejected to doing and that is to talk about God. For it is the thesis of this talk, and of those to follow, that the hard anthropological ideas, and now we're on death, can be made to work only within a robustly theological and indeed specifically Christian theological context. So I will, from now on, be talking explicitly of the God of the Christians.