Bill Geddes (Letters, 11 March) need not be too envious of Christians who believe in future “reunions” with loved ones, for none of us knows what lies beyond death.
It didn’t take the early (western) church long to shift from an official belief in “the resurrection of the body” (Apostles’ Creed) to a more general “resurrection of the dead” (Nicene), and philosopher-theologians have been sniffy ever since about concepts of the afterlife that amount to little more than the resuscitation of corpses.
Logically, the only reasonable position on “beyond death” is honest agnosticism, although the innate demands of justice do seem to require some kind of “last judgment”, there being so much greed, inequality and unfairness in this world. Christians are justified, I think, in believing that God, who is love, can, does, and will “make all things new”. But in the meantime, perhaps it’s simply up to us to do what we can, before our own “end”?
Fr Alec Mitchell
Holyhead, Anglesey
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