God is Red

The problem of integrating secular, chronological planetary history with the narrowly conceived sectarian view of history as defined by the experiences of the Hebrews and later the Christians has already been discussed in chapter 7. As Arnold Toynbee says, the difficulty is that of viewing a map of the Mediterranean and pretending that it is a map of the world. But this restricted history must have a meaning and, indeed, the purpose of restricting the data is to ensure that the events of the Old Testament and subsequent Christian history are seen as the definitive events of our species, whether in fact they are or not.

Individual Christian believers are probably not very concerned about the truth, validity, or applicability of this theological contention because it is an abstraction that has no practical bearing on their lives. It is also so commonplace in Western culture as to be uncritically accepted as a pillar of universal truth. Because the secular, political version of this restricted history suggests that Western Europeans, particularly North Americans, are God’s people working their way toward Judgment Day when their sins will be forgiven and their successes applauded, average Christians simply believe that history belongs to them. What concerns individual believers most is the promise of eternal life that is the denouement of the historical process—the whole reason that we take history seriously.

Two radically different propositions have been used to explain individual life and the hereafter within the Christian tradition and because there has not been a clear statement about the afterlife, they are inevitably confused and taken as interchangeable. The Greeks developed early the idea of the immortality of the soul. Sometimes this doctrine was linked to reincarnation as in Plato’s philosophy and sometimes it was taken as a matter of cosmic economy. The original Christian doctrine seems to have been the resurrection of the body—the reconstitution of physical form in a glorified version as an award for faithful service. Presumably this new glorified body would be freed from the defects that presently plague us, and presumably the new body would be free from the temptations of the flesh which constitute one of the major barriers to achieving this new state of existence. Over the course of Western history these two interpretations of the nature of the afterlife have ebbed and flowed with the Greek idea of eternal life generally achieving more popularity. Neither idea has been carefully thought out and articulated in any intelligent format although Oscar Cullman made a valiant effort to do so a generation ago.1

Popular Christianity today borrows a bit from each side of the spectrum and the conception of the afterlife seems to be a matter of denominational preference. Some people believe they will reach a heavenly city, its streets paved with gold, and there they will be inducted into a heavenly choir and spend eternity singing the same kind of flattering hymns as they have occasionally sung here on earth. A few televangelists believe that they will be appointed to govern large groups of humankind, that they will be asked to judge their fellow Christians and all pagans (raising the question whether one person’s heaven is another person’s hell). In general, most visions of heaven promulgated by North American Christians have a startling resemblance to suburban middle-class life in America sprinkled with occasional nods toward the Deity when necessary.2

This version of heaven is hardly credible and poses certain conceptual problems of no small magnitude. If the afterlife has no difficulties such as we experience in our lives on this earth, how can life be possible and who would want to experience it? There are no polar opposites such as good and evil, hot and cold, pain and pleasure, wisdom and ignorance. Instead we will all partake of the nice things without the bother of unpleasant things. A strong word in defense of this belief must be acknowledged. Near-death experiences of thousands of people indicate that the afterlife existence may indeed have something of this flavor, although it does not seem to have any connection with any recognizable religion that we follow today.

The radical cleavage between the two forms of existence is notable because it results in a somewhat strange posture toward death among Christians. Because life after death is so pleasant, life here is so difficult for most of us, and eternal life is our reward for being good here, one would think that the great majority of Christians would look forward to death as the final passage into a better world. If any religious people would not fear death, one would suppose, it would be Christians. But such is not the case. Of all the peoples in the world, perhaps Christians and the peoples they dominate and influence fear death more than any other part of human existence. Oral Roberts, as we have noted, wanted no part of it.

Some of this fear of death derives from the message of Christianity itself. Death was early considered as unnatural to the creation and as an evil presence resulting from the disobedience of Adam in the Garden of Eden. In the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul saw death as the primary fact of human existence that had been negated by the obedience of Jesus in his mission to humanity. The logic of this idea is consistent but depends upon the historical reality of Adam and the necessity of cosmic retributive processes that, as we have already noted, are modeled after an Oriental courtroom and not taken from any observable process of the natural world. Additionally, we do not emotionally participate in the Fall of Adam or the Redemption of Jesus except insofar as we experience these things within the context of the Christian church. But the point is that Christ has not overcome death as the many preachers have declared because no one is exempted from its presence and effect.

Throughout all of Christian history, death has formed a focal point for the tangible confrontation between the people of God and the reality and powers of this world. Many people have faced death with no fear and a calm demeanor that is admirable, and their religious beliefs seem not to have helped or hindered them very much. Because eternal life was the reward particularly reserved for the believing Christian, it was not long before a whole theological network of ideas grew up around death. Traditional Roman Catholic doctrine built into the idea of confession the possibility of cancelling past sins through forgiveness by receiving the sacrament, and hence one could live a scandalous life and still reach heaven intact by reserving baptism until one’s death bed or in receiving the Last Rites which wiped away all previous sins and prepared one to depart directly for heaven as the body stopped functioning. The Spanish, in slaughtering Indians, would have a priest standing by with Holy Water available as they disemboweled pregnant Indian women. If the fetus, exposed momentarily to the outside world, breathed or showed signs of life, the priest could baptize it before the soldiers smashed its head against the wall, thereby giving it an immediate audience with the Lord. Priests used to accompany the Iroquois war parties who ravaged the Huron villages in Canada in the 1600s and baptize Hurons who were in their death throes. Therefore, baptism has been understood by Christians as a mechanical entrance into the next life.

Heavily involved in the Christian concept of death has been the assertion of a day of judgment when the good and evil deeds of people would be evaluated, the good going to heaven and the evil and unbaptized people going to hell or to some intermediate place where they can congregate until released. Perhaps it was this judgmental aspect of the religion that helped to create the fear of death, for if individuals are not certain that they had lived a good life and were reasonably certain that an eternally burning hell awaited them, death would appear as a final insult of major proportions. Exactly how much of the Christian description of the afterlife depended on the other Near Eastern conceptions of life after death is not certain because the imagery of the apocalyptic vision in the New Testament seems indistinguishable from other non-Christian versions of that period.

If the focus of the religion was concentrated on the afterlife, the life of the present world necessarily took a secondary importance in the religions of the Near East. Instead of the world being the arena in which real events and personalities played themselves out to produce a meaningful and irreversible history, the events and actions of this world had a “testing-ground” aspect to them. What counted was the next life, not this one. While this thought was comforting to people caught in the lower reaches of the religious, social, economic, and political pyramids, these religions appear to be simply control measures for manipulating large populations and not a realistic appraisal of cosmic reality. In the last analysis, personal responsibility became a responsibility to the set of behaviors that would guarantee eternal life and not an ethic that would enable people to deal justly with their contemporaries.

One cannot emphasize too carefully this aspect of Western religious tradition for it was in the overemphasis on eternal life that people became separated from participation in the life cycles of the natural world and death became something to be feared. The Protestant Reformation did not improve on the early Christian and contemporary Catholic conceptions of death and the afterlife. Salvation became confused with other doctrines, in particular with the idea of predestination and the prior selection of the elect. Justification by faith alone offered no certain guidelines of living the faith. It was then that people reasoned that God would certainly bless the elect in this life as well as in the next one, and the accumulation of wealth, by whatever means possible, demonstrated that an individual or family was among the elect.

The idea of a preselected group of people who were known by God through eternity as “His People” and who, without any apparent talent or worth, were to have eternal life, presented the ultimate in cosmic injustice. It meant that the majority of people were condemned to live essentially meaningless lives and to be punished simply for the status that had been given to them at the beginning of time. It was not difficult to secularize this doctrine of the elect so that it placed religion in a role in which it simply endorsed the social and economic status quo and admitted anyone who was able to accumulate wealth—by any means possible.

The Christian doctrine of life after death had another extremely unfortunate aspect. The soul was believed to live on while the body, which was considered gross and evil, was left to decay, although it would apparently be glorified during the turmoil of the Second Coming. At any rate, by conceiving that it was possible to separate soul from body, Christians then created the most terrible of tortures to be perpetrated on those people who were suspected of heresy. Theologians believed it was proper to crush the physical body if it meant saving the immortal soul. Thus the Inquisition spared no torture in its efforts to get people to recant their heresies and confess their sins. The Inquisitors were assured that they were saving souls even if they were destroying people in the process. Many of the genocidal acts the Westerners committed against the Indians can be laid directly on the doorstep of religious fanatics who saw conversion and death as the only viable solution to the Indian problem. Near Eastern religions had centuries of practice before and after Europeans came into contact with American Indians.

In the field of secular knowledge, there is evidence of the great impact of Christian ideas about life after death. Social scientists simply project common beliefs of Westerners onto the relics of non-Western peoples, interpreting many structures and artifacts as if they represented an obsessive concern with the next life. Legends and traditions are also twisted to fit into the pattern of Western thinking as if the quest for immortality were universal. The Egyptian pyramids have generally been understood as the efforts of Egyptian pharaohs to achieve immortality in spite of the plain evidence. While some of the smaller structures of the later Egyptian period might have been used as tombs, the period of time required to build the large pyramids precludes them as resting places for individual pharaohs. The most complete Egyptian tomb yet discovered, that of Tutankhamen uncovered by Howard Carter in 1922, was a tomb cut into living rock in the Valley of the Kings and not in a pyramid.3 Many of the objects found in the tombs were favorite possessions of the pharaohs indicating the belief that they needed these possessions in their journey to the next life. In the Christian religions, the afterlife is not an extension or natural continuation of this life but an event to be feared.

When we examine American Indian tribal religions, we find a notable absence of the fear of death. Burial mounds indicate a belief that life after death was a continuation of the life already experienced. Personal possessions, familiar tools and weapons, cooking utensils, and quite frequently food were placed near the body so that it would be sustained in the next life. It was not contemplated that the soul would have to account for misdeeds and lapses from a previously established ethical norm. All of that concern was expressed while the individual was alive. Some tribes viewed entrance into the next life as almost a mechanical process to which everyone was subject, a natural cosmic process to which all things were bound.

Many Indians perceived not only that the next life was a continuation of the present mode of existence but also that the souls of people often remained in various places where they had died or suffered traumatic events. People visiting the Sand Creek location where the Cheyennes were massacred under Colonel Chivington have told me that they can hear the cries of the women and children who are still living near this dreaded place. Indians receiving bones from museums for reburial tell about spirits of the departed speaking to them during the reburial ceremonies and thanking them for helping to get their bones from the museums so they can rest in the Mother Earth. Some decades ago I attended a burial in a Christian cemetery at Mission, South Dakota. After the body was in the grave and the several mourners were still standing at the grave, an old woman stepped forward and put an orange on the grave. The Episcopal priest who had conducted the service rushed over and took the orange away, saying, “When do you think the departed will come and eat this orange?” One of the Sioux men standing there said, “When the soul comes to smell the flowers!” No one said anything after that.

The Indian ability to deal with death was a result of the much larger context in which Indians understood life. Human beings

were an integral part of the natural world and in death they contributed their bodies to become the dust that nourished the plants and animals that had fed people during their lifetime. Because people

saw the tribal community and the family as a continuing unity regardless of circumstance, death became simply another transitional e-

vent in a much longer scheme of life. Some tribes made up medicine bundles containing bits of hair of the deceased, flesh or claws of the animals and birds most closely related to the family, and other inti-

mate things of the deceased. This bundle was kept in the family dwelling for a year after the death and treated as if the person was

still present with the family. In that way the trauma of losing the person was extended over a period of time and people could be comforted that, while the deceased was not visibly present, he or she was spiritually and emotionally present.

Most tribes were very reluctant to surrender their homelands to the whites because they knew that their ancestors were still spiritually alive on the land, and they were fearful that the whites would not honor the ancestors and the lands in the proper manner. If life was to mean anything at all, it had to demonstrate a certain continuity over the generations and this unity transcended death. At a treaty-signing session in the Illinois country in 1821, the Potawatomi chief, Metea, spoke of this continuity as the basic reason for his reluctance to cede the tribal lands.

A long time has passed since first we came upon our lands, and our people have all sunk into their graves. They had sense. We are all young and foolish, and do not wish to do anything that they would not approve, were they living. We are fearful we shall offend their spirits if we sell our lands; and we are fearful we shall offend you if we do not sell them. This has caused us great perplexity of thought, because we have counselled among ourselves, and do not know how we can part with our lands.

My father, our country was given us by the Great Spirit, who gave it to us to hunt upon, to make our cornfields upon, to live upon, and to make our beds upon when we die.4

This idea of identity and continuity of life lay behind the posture of many of the tribes as they approached the whites. It could be said to be a more fundamental reason than any other for the Indian resistance to white invasions of tribal land a century ago and even today. Young Chief Joseph, the famous Nez Percé leader, remained at peace with the white settlers until they began to invade his valley. When he was finally forced to fight to protect himself, he recalled the promise he had made to his father as the older Joseph lay dying.

My son, my body is returning to my mother earth, and my spirit is going very soon to see the Great Spirit Chief. When I am gone, think of your country. You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country.

You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few more years and the white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.5

Some people have regarded this speech of the older Joseph as merely symbolic of Indian religion, but we must recall that for tribal people symbolism is not the communicative image of Westerners but the expression of a reality that Westerners often refuse to acknowledge. This conception of land as holding the bodies of the tribe in a basic sense pervaded tribal religions across the country. It testified in a stronger sense to the underlying unity of the Indian conception of the universe as a life system in which everything had its part.

It is doubtful, however, if any of the tribal religions considered life after death to be radically changed from the life they were living. Chief Seattle, on signing the Treaty of Medicine Creek in 1854, gave a famous speech in which he summarized his beliefs about the nature of the lands his tribe had given up. If ever an Indian could have been said to have anticipated D. H. Lawrence, Albert Camus, and William Carlos Williams, Seattle’s speech would certainly merit first consideration. In it he distinguished between tribal beliefs and the attitude of the Christians who were taking control of the land—at least in a legal sense.

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. …

Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander way beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. …

Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.6

Again we see the fundamental conception of life as a continuing unity involving land and people. One might be tempted to suggest that as land is held by the community, the psychic unity of all the worlds is made real. We are not faced with formless and homeless spirits in this idea but with an ordered and purposeful creation in which death merely marks a passage from one form of experience to another. Rather than fearing death, tribal religions see it as an affirmation of life’s reality.

A story of rather recent vintage from the Cheyenne people enables us to see more fully the communal nature of death in the tribal context.

A young man named Hugh Boyle had been killed by the Cheyennes. The authorities demanded that the Indians give up the murderers to justice. The Indians tried to settle the matter. According to their ideas, the death of Boyle might be compensated by the payment of ponies. They offered to give up a great number of horses, raising each bid as it was rejected, until the payment proposed was calculated to beggar them if it was accepted. To the ponies they added all their wealth in blankets and such other evidences of riches as an Indian may possess. They were finally made to understand that the white man did not accept a property atonement for the spilling of blood. The negotiations were carried on for some time and with difficulty, for the reason that few white men know the Cheyenne language. … The intercourse with the people was carried on through mixed-bloods of the tribe, and it was finally made clear to them that they must give up the slayers of Boyle. But they could not give them up to die the death that kills the soul as well as the body. They believed, in common with most Indians, that when a man died his soul left the body with his last breath, and that in case a person was hanged, the soul was confined in the body with the rope. They would defend their young men from such an awful fate as was involved in the hanging by the white man’s justice. The crime they neither denied nor defended. An ultimatum being sent them that they must bring in the murderers, they sent word back that a Cheyenne was not afraid to die, but would not submit to being hanged; that the two young men, Head Chief and Young Mule, would show the whites how a Cheyenne could die.

They appointed a date for the affair, September 13, 1890, and they intended that it should be magnificently spectacular. They were to bend their necks to the white man’s justice, but they proposed doing it in a fashion that would impress the soldiers and the people at the agency. Special Indian Agent James A. Cooper had asked for troops, and one troop of the First Cavalry had been sent to the agency to make the arrest of the two men by force if necessary. The Cheyennes gave up diplomacy when the troops arrived, and word was sent that the two Indians would give themselves up and be ready to die. They appointed to die with their weapons in their hands. They would shoot at the soldiers, and the latter would have to kill them in defending themselves. The proposition was a rather startling one, but there was nothing to do but accept it. An attempt to arrest the men in their camps would assuredly have precipitated a bloody conflict. The proposition of the Cheyennes was for a spectacular form of suicide, and the matter was arranged on this basis. The Cheyennes accepted it all as a matter of course. The young men went about their affairs as usual, unmolested, and spent much time in visiting with and saying good-bye to their relatives. The night before the date set for the finish, there were solemn dances, in which the Indians all took part. They were to meet death as warriors and there was no reason why they should be mourned for.

The morning of the appointed day the two men were anointed by the medicine men. They painted and decorated themselves with great care, and wore all their finery. Their best horses were chosen for the ride to death, and the animals were devoted to the same fate that was to be meted out to their masters; for it was unlikely that they could escape the hail of bullets that would be sent at the doomed men. Thus, attired and mounted as warriors should be, the two rode down the slope from the northeast to the agency, where the troops were drawn up.

The agency is located on a flat, with a rather sharp declivity across Lame Deer River. The flat is almost surrounded by elevations, and on the ridge to the west the Indians, probably every one on the reservation, were assembled to see the young men demonstrate to the whites how a Cheyenne could die. Beside the agency office the troop of cavalry was drawn up; alongside of them stood the agency Indian police, close to their headquarters. The agency people were scattered about, out of what might be the line of fire when the shooting began. Never was a stage so set for so spectacular a tragedy.

At the time appointed for the coming of the men, they appeared at the top of the hill to the northeast, and dashed down the hill at the best pace their horses could make. As they rode they sang the death-song of their people, and before reaching the level ground they began shooting into the ranks of the soldiery and Indian police.

The fire was answered at once, the cavalrymen firing rapidly, but ineffectively. The Indian police, or one of them, made better practice, for one of the Indians went down with his horse in a heap just as he reached a little clump of bushes. The bullets of the police and soldiers could not find the other man. They fired at almost point-blank range, but his life was charmed. He rode shooting and singing past the cordon of troops and policemen, out beyond the agency, then turned and rode deliberately back. He had passed the troops a second time before the fire of the soldiers and the police was effective.7

The primary concern of the Cheyenne community was the preservation of life. When, however, it was evident that the men could not be saved, the concern shifted to preserving human dignity. The young men perfectly reflected the tribal belief, for they did not fear death, only a meaningless death that would discredit their community and violate their religious beliefs. The symbolism of dying as warriors was not something that extended beyond the grave as in the Germanic vision of the afterlife in which warriors were rewarded for their exploits by continual feasting and access to beautiful and pliant maidens. The Cheyenne response can only be understood as an affirmation of life, not as preparation for a radically different type of existence. Immortality is secondary to integrity of tribal existence in the present, and we find not a cringing fear of death but a religious community so strong as to virtually shrug off death as an enemy.

It is probably in the idea of the death song, which was found in many of the tribal religions, that the idea of death can adequately be understood. The death song was a special song sung as a man faced certain death. Often it taunted his enemies who were in the act of killing him. More often it acted as a benedictory statement by the individual to summarize and conclude his time of existence. Rather than being a feverish preparation for death it was the final affirmation of the meaning of individual existence, for it glorified the personal integrity of the person. It individualized his tribal membership in a manner bringing credit and meaning to his life as a tribal member.

One of the most famous death songs was that of Satank, the famous Kiowa chief who was being taken as a prisoner to Texas for trial after a raid against the Army. As he tore the manacles from his wrists and stabbed one of his guards Satank chanted,

O sun, you remain forever, but we Kaitsenko must die.

O earth, you remain forever, but we Kaitsenko must die.8

Here we find no cringing to confess sins and imagined failures. The specific events of one’s life as judged by external standards pale beside this basic affirmation and acknowledgment to the rest of creation that finitude is but a role drawn by a person in this form of existence.

The singular aspect of Indian tribal religions was that almost universally they produced people unafraid of death. It was not simply the status of warrior in the tribal life that created a fearlessness of death. Rather the integrity of communal life did not create an artificial sense of personal identity that had to be protected and preserved at all costs. Many other examples could be used to show the Indians’ attitude toward death. The Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma had their own courts in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Occasionally a member of the tribe was sentenced to death. Upon the passage of the death sentence, the condemned would be informed when and where the execution would take place. He was then released to spend his remaining days with his relatives. As the day approached he would perform any obligatory religious ceremonies, say goodbye to his relatives, and on the appointed day report to the place of execution to be killed. While this behavior was common among Indian tribes, how many Christians fully believing in the hereafter would act in comparable manner?

Some tribes had special ceremonies to be used in conjunction with the dead. The Lakota, or Sioux, for example, had a ceremony in which the sacred pipe was used, and the souls of the recently departed were kept with the tribal community to be purified and eventually released.9 In a tragic interference with the tribal religion, the government banned this ceremony in the 1890s, causing a great trauma among the people. The Iroquois had special ceremonies in conjunction with their New Year’s celebration in which the dead of the past year were remembered.10

In general we could say that the afterlife was not of overwhelming concern to people of the tribal religions. Vague references to the lands of the spirits, descriptions of the Milky Way as the path over which souls traveled, and concern for the departed spirits remaining, which was prevented in some tribes by burning of personal possessions, probably indicated distinct beliefs of certain tribes. No highly articulated or developed theories of the afterlife were ever necessary, and certainly none projected a life radically different than that experienced on Earth.

Some additional distinctions between tribal conceptions of the afterlife and Christian ideas can be drawn that will be particularly helpful. It is very difficult to distinguish between ideas that are primarily Christian and those that are the result of the speculations of Greek philosophy, and perhaps by reviewing one of the more recent controversies in Christian theology, we can find a way to understand the Christian posture toward death.

Oscar Cullmann, a brilliant Christian thinker, wrote a little book titled Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? He was bitterly attacked by his fellow Christians for having introduced somber and defeatist ideas into the Christian doctrine of the life to come. What Cullmann did was draw the necessary distinctions and conclusions from an examination of ideas that were primarily Christian and those primarily Greek. The differences had been blurred by generations of Christian ministers who preached popular sermons of reassurance to their congregations and used the framework of Greek philosophy to engage in speculative ventures about the afterlife.11

The distinction between immortality of the soul and the peculiarly Christian ideal of the resurrection of the dead is a vital one. Immortality is a Greek philosophical idea that originates primarily from the thought and teachings of Socrates. The Greeks regarded the body as only the outer garment of the soul. As a mutable part of man, the body prevented the soul from moving freely into the realm of eternal essence that for Socrates, and even more so for his disciple Plato, constituted the real world beyond that of sense perceptions. The soul was thus basically imprisoned in the body and became tainted with materialistic things because it was unable to remember its previous existence in the world of pure ideas.

For the Greek philosophers the task of the individual was to free his soul from its bondage to the body. This release could be effected in a number of ways, the pursuit of knowledge of the world of ideas being the most sublime, and every approach seemed to be based on the conception of man as the rational animal. Upon death, for the Greeks, the soul was released from the body. Cullmann placed a great deal of emphasis in his book on the distinction between the deaths of Jesus and Socrates, pointing out that death was a welcome visitor for Socrates but a dreaded and tormenting experience for Jesus.

Cullman found that death, in the Christian context, was a feared foe. Death was an event to be avoided at all costs, because it meant the cessation of identity. Cullman suggested that all men naturally fear death and that the Greek rational approach to the termination of life served only a select few who had become so enamoured of their philosophy that they could welcome death as a natural conclusion to the journey of the soul in a world in which it was a stranger.

The great innovation of Christianity, according to Cullmann, was that it preached a message of bodily resurrection in which the totality of human personality was to be reconstituted. Death was understood as the destruction of all life created by God, not the shedding of the body by an indestructible soul. Jesus’s resurrection meant that God had prepared a special existence for his followers, which was apparently not available to those who had not heard or those who had but did not believe. Resurrection on the last day was therefore a singularly revolutionary concept in religion. Other religions had foreseen a continuous existence after the death experience and purported that the spirits or souls of individuals had some measure of permanency beyond the grave. Christianity was the only religion to confront directly the question of total personality survival, and it found in the fact of Jesus’s resurrection a basis for overcoming the agony of death experienced by the majority of men.

Cullmann’s thesis is as revolutionary today as it was when first published nearly four decades ago. It is, perhaps, the most strenuous analysis of the problem, and Cullmann grounded it well in Biblical thought using a minimum of philosophical argument and analogy for his conclusions. It is doubtful if the majority of contemporary Christians would support or believe Cullmann’s distinction between immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead. Most people who believe themselves to be Christians are thoroughly Greek in their beliefs concerning life after death.

Tribal religions show an almost total absence of concern about either doctrine. Both doctrines would appear to tribal peoples as separating the body and the spirit of man in a detrimental manner. A majority of the tribal religions simply assume some form of personal survival beyond the grave. As Chief Seattle remarked, death is merely a changing of worlds.

Christian cemeteries reflect a curious mixture of belief, and one cannot say for certain whether they are based on the premise of the bodily resurrection or on the idea of the immortality of the soul. The use of stone gravestones indicates a determination not to allow the body to become a part of the soil. Waterproof caskets and other devices designed to preserve the body for as long as possible may indicate a belief in the resurrection of the actual body of the departed. However, the monuments to great individuals may mean that there is a desire to perpetuate people of stature in the human memories that could be interpreted as honors to great souls.

Lame Deer, in his autobiography, remarks that the old Indian graveyards had markers of wood because it was felt that the body and the wood would both return to the earth as intended. He contrasted this attitude with the granite headstones to illustrate the distinction between Christian and Indian attitudes toward death. In the very old days many of the tribes employed various means of burial, almost all of them aiming at the return of the body to the earth.12

Strangely enough there has been habitual conflict over the interment in Christian cemeteries of nonwhite peoples. During the Korean War, a Winnebago Indian, Sergeant Rice, was killed in action, and his body was returned to Sioux City, Iowa, for burial. But the good Christians in Sioux City forbade his burial in a cemetery reserved for whites. To the great embarrassment and grief of the family, the body remained unburied until finally accepted for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. The newspapers frequently feature stories of similar incidents involving African Americans, Indians, Chicanos, and Asians. One can only conclude that the Christian religion and its promise of the afterlife is not meant for nonwhites; Christians either do not believe in resurrection, or they exclude nonwhites from their heaven.

According to Cullmann, death has been conquered by Jesus on behalf of all humankind. As the belief in the afterlife has eroded in Western civilization, a further twist has been added to the concept of death. Western peoples avoid mention of death at all costs. Insurance peddlers always speak of taking out insurance “in case something happens.” The implication, of course, is that pending an irrational and arbitrary action of God, every good, tax-paying, white citizen will live forever. This belief is rarely articulated as a formal doctrine, but we cannot help but recognize it as the fundamental approach of contemporary Western peoples toward death. If the Christian religion is a victory over death, why do Western peoples who have had the benefits of the Christian religion for two thousand years fear death? Toynbee once described death as totally “un-American,” an infringement of each individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.13 As a subversive activity, death has recently come under examination by Western thinkers attempting to chart out the possible parameters of the problem. Rollo May, for example, suggests that the American preoccupation with sexual activity may in part be a response to the finality of death and the incessant concern for new sexual freedoms might be efforts directed toward a deliverance from death anxiety.

Regardless of how we attempt to explain it, the fundamental distinction between tribal religions and the Christian religion, including secular Western attitude toward death, must revolve around the conception of creation. For the tribal people, death in a sense fulfills their destiny, for as their bodies become dust once again they contribute to the ongoing life cycle of creation. For Christians, the estrangement from nature, their religion’s central theme, makes this most natural of conclusions fraught with danger. Believing that they are saved and interpreting this salvation as accumulating material possessions, Western people cannot accept death except as a form of punishment by God. The Christian facing death often cries out to God, “What have I done?“ The priest or clergyman has only the relentless logic of theology to present. Death is feared and rarely understood. People somehow want to see the death of their loved one as part of God’s plan (i.e., God needed Elvis to sing in heaven).

It is in the face of death that Indian tribal religions have their magnificence. Big Elk, an Omaha chief, delivered a funeral oration in 1815 at the death of Black Buffalo, a fellow Omaha, and counseled his fellow chiefs as follows:

Do not grieve. Misfortunes will happen to the wisest and best of men. Death will come and always out of season. It is the command of the Great Spirit, and all nations and people must obey. What is past and cannot be prevented should not be grieved for. … Misfortunes do not flourish particularly in our path. They grow everywhere.14

While death is truly a saddening event for people of tribal religious traditions, it is an event with which every person and nation is faced and not an arbitrary, capricious exercise of divine wrath. Even today this attitude persists in Indian societies, and the natural grief occurring with the loss of a loved one is rarely translated into personal feelings of guilt, inadequacy, or sin, which appear to plague Westerners. The community regroups and continues to exist; while individuals are lonely, they are not alone.