The Living Dead: Fantasy and Fear, Holiness and Hope

By Barry L. Callen

People readily form religious beliefs out of their imaginations, fears, fantasies, and bloated egos. The paranormal is now nearly the norm in the world of popular entertainment, threatening traditional systems of belief. Are today's "walking dead" real zombies? Are the aliens actually here? What's keeping you awake at night? Are masses of overscheduled and frustrated people spiritually deceased even though still breathing? Who's lurking in the shadows, demons of destruction, a loving God seeking our highest well-being, or nothing but our twisted imaginations? How we fragile humans long for safety, ecstacy, community, meaning, and "salvation." We must beware, however. Numerous charlatans have it all for sale! By contrast, there still is the man Jesus who has paid the highest of prices and is offering all we need as a free gift. In him, insists the Christian faith, death has died and we've been set free to be "possessed" by the Spirit of Jesus, thus becoming the living dead. Receiving this gift takes faith, of course, but faith not contrary to reason. In fact, it may be the most reasonable and satisfying thing we could ever do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666744040

Book preview

PREFACE

They were both alive when the big ordeal was over. Even though their hearts had to be stopped for a full hour during the highly experimental surgery to separate their heads, these infants both made it. Dr. Ben Carson, a pioneer pediatric neurosurgeon, led the team of over fifty medical specialists crowded in one surgical suite to work this miracle.¹ Were these babies dead? Yes, by usual standards, for at least sixty minutes. Afterwards, their little hearts were successfully restarted. They now were separated children, the living dead. Amazing!

That’s medicine. What about life’s biggest issues, the ones that transcend our physical existence? Is there any way for the perishable to become imperishable, for life to be whether or not our hearts are still beating? Are many people on the streets of today spiritually dead while their hearts are without disease? Is there a surgeon who can repair this damage? Many make claims. Are they all charlatans?

The subject is everywhere. It ranges from surface silliness to ridiculous rumors, from the truly frightening to the theologically rich, from the ghosts of yesterday to visions of angels in tomorrow’s heaven. On a recent river cruise up the Mississippi River, my wife and I encountered two examples of the subject, and then two more after we got home. The subject is the business of being dead, or alive, or both, or neither.

On a tour stop in Memphis, Tennessee, many onboard our riverboat chose to visit Graceland where Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, supposedly is buried (1935–77). I say supposedly because that very evening none other than Elvis joined us back on the boat. He sang and swayed his hips for us in two full concerts just as he had done for millions of adoring teenagers years earlier. He certainly looked and acted very much alive. And yet, I think actor may be the appropriate word.

Then on a stop in Chester, Illinois, Popeye the Sailor Man was standing on the beach waiting to greet our arrival and have our pictures taken with him. He still had his silly pipe, can of spinach, bulging biceps, and constant wisecracks. He had been created in 1929 by a cartoonist in this little town. Ever since then he’s always seemed more alive and capable than any normal person, even though he’s never really existed except in our cartoon-loving imaginations. And yet, he really was standing there on the beach and we have a great picture to prove it.

Once home from these confusing contacts, we went to church as usual, encountered our friends Bill and Gloria Gaither, real people, and gladly sang their beloved song He Lives! It’s about a man of long ago known to have been executed by the Romans. Was he still alive on that recent Sunday in Indiana? Those in that sanctuary really believed he was.

We believed the resurrection of Jesus more, I hope, than the millions later that day who chose to watch The Walking Dead on TV. These zombies are deliberately dramatized as horrible, either clearly not real or actually lurking in the shadows somewhere just behind us and hungry for our very flesh!

How strangely we people mix our memories, imaginations, entertainment tastes, fears, fascinations, and religious beliefs. Who is real and alive, or at least once was, or never was, or we hope never will be? By God’s sheer grace, could there be someone who always was and always will be alive, once actually killed and yet continuing to be alive forevermore? If there is and his name is Jesus, how does he relate to us humans who live such a short time? Is today’s Christianity really an extension of the ongoing life of this Jesus or only a dead religious shell of life that once was and maybe could be again?

Are there ways in which we moderns are dead while still breathing? Could we be enlivened much more than we are while we’re on the way to our inevitable deaths? Oh to be a real member of the Living Dead! I think so, although membership involves a new creation, participating in the holy life of God that is deathless, life that’s both immediate and eternal.

The language, images, and films featuring the paranormal are very much part of the everyday experience of today’s younger generation. They dominate much of popular entertainment and are influencing how spirituality now is being conceived by the public. Such social preoccupation often, and very awkwardly, crisscrosses with classic Christianity. There are hungry zombies on the one hand and on the other eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ, being possessed by the Spirit of Jesus, encountering demons, angels, spirits of the dead, etc. Confusion is common and understandable.

These pages review today’s popularizations of the paranormal and identifies the key contemporary questions and options for dealing with the spiritual world. It then, without apology, highlights Christianity as the preferred faith option. Finally, such highlighting requires theological clarifications about Christianity. These are necessary for proper understanding of this faith tradition in today’s setting. The result I trust is a careful presentation of the heart of Christian spirituality presented in a manner styled for the contemporary mind and accessible to the casual reader.²

An Early Disclaimer

I need to share a disclaimer for the reader’s sake, and for my own reputation. These pages aren’t an exercise in morbidity. I haven’t written another Egyptian Book of the Dead supposedly revealing the magic spells that can guide the deceased safely through the afterlife. I have no interest in highlighting the arena of ghosts and night monsters coming to haunt the guilty and sleepless. Nor is this book intended as a playground for wild imagining, fearing, projecting, believing things generally beyond all rational belief. I don’t watch The Walking Dead. I’m going to argue, however, that in some important senses the dead indeed are still walking with us.

My first book decades back was titled Where Life Begins.³ Two college girls bought their copies and then, with me happening to be present but unknown to them, were returning them to the store and insisting on their money back. I overheard one say, I read it and learned absolutely nothing about good sex and having babies! She was right and got her money back. The book was about new spiritual life as envisioned by Christian faith. This time, I suppose, I need to be clearer up front about my intentions.

These pages aren’t another adventure into science fiction, although wormholes are theoretical possibilities according to many of today’s scientists—an amazing way of changing times, places, and realities. Admittedly, I’m not a Protestant finally enamored of the idea of purgatory, nor am I a Christian ready to shock denominational leaders by opting for belief in reincarnation.

Who, then, am I? I’m a simple Christ follower trying to take seriously a central fact of the New Testament. It’s the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and his promise that we may join in the glory of that new life, both later and even now. I’m someone aware of the many dead-ends now filled with frustrated travelers and hoping to point to a path that actually leads to life eternal.

1

. Dr. Ben Carson was director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in

1984

at age thirty-three and a candidate for the presidency of the United States in

2016

. The story of this surgery is dramatized in the

2009

TV biographical film Gifted Hands.

2

. For an extensive presentation focused much more historically, see Callen, Authentic Spirituality.

3

. Callen, Where Life Begins.

1

VOODOO AND VAMPIRES

It did just happen, really. My wife and I were aboard a lovely cruise ship that sailed from Florida to California by way of the Panama Canal. For eighteen days all of us were made to spit each morning into little plastic tubes with bar codes and before breakfast stare at a little screen that greeted us by name and flashed our body temperature. We had to wear face masks and trackers around our necks for electronic recording of all social contacts. The cruise director kept reassuring us that it was all for COVID protection.

Rumor had it, however, that this mass of personal data was being beamed to a hovering craft high above that was planning to render us senseless and transport us to its distant world for further analysis. A magician in our ship’s theater dramatized how easily eyes can be fooled and brains twisted into missing the obvious. Was he one of the monitoring aliens? Had God earlier appeared in our world as a flying saucer (see Ezek 1 and 37¹)? Would our families ever see us again? With our DNA maybe altered, would they know us if they did? Our ship was the Viking Orion. I couldn’t make out the lettering on the hovering craft. What’s really real?

There’s a widespread and persistent human fascination with the occult, the paranormal, visitors from outer space, the possibility of a fountain of youth, patterns and prophecies we think we see in star arrangements, and schemes proposed for our becoming immortal. This fascination often institutionalizes into formal religious traditions seeking for their faithful connections, communication, protection, salvation, safety, ecstasy, survival, meaning, and more. Each claims to perceive and provide great realities unseen by most others and not available otherwise.

A professor of mine tried humorously to define one party of Jews prominent in the time of Jesus. The Sadducees, he announced, didn’t believe in a resurrection of the dead. So, they were sad-you-see! Was this party of Jewish leaders the future dead although the presently alive without hoping as they should’ve? Can believing in a renewed tomorrow renew today or is that all mere fantasy? There seems to be a fine line between fact and fantasy, fear and hope. Locating and honoring this line is difficult but crucial.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a grand exploratory effort based in California. By searching the farther stretches of outer space, it’s been attempting to see if we humans really are alone. Powerful telescopes are looking for deliberate signals sent our way from any form of intelligent life and from anywhere outside Earth’s tiny little corner of things.

SETI represents the perennial human situation in relation to God or gods or whatever is or isn’t out there. We mortals naturally wonder, watch, listen, wait, and report variously on what or who we think has appeared or been heard from, or for some reason has been frustratingly silent so far. Does God exist? If so, how amazing or awful is she/he/it/they? We wonder and wait, and often claim that we really know, or at least desperately want to, and maybe need to.

Who are we pitiful humans in relation to whatever else there is? What does the spirit world, whatever’s alive among the supposed dead, intend for our present problems and eventual future? Should we be afraid or thrilled, uninterested or horrified? How can we receive answers to these constant questions? They are big and persistent and have been with (haunted?) our fragile humanity since before recorded history.

An episode in season 4 of the television detective series Father Brown features a small traveling jazz group stranded during its England tour. The lead singer is from Haiti, a beautiful woman whose former lover back home was a voodoo priest. Suddenly he arrives to reclaim her from an English rival in the band. He planned to eliminate the rival by using a poison that’s lethal in a certain quantity but has a sweet spot. That spot is a lesser amount, just enough to slow the heart and disperse the soul, rendering someone apparently dead, although actually neither quite alive nor quite dead.

The star of the series, Catholic priest Father Brown, is given a nonlethal dose. When he miraculously recovers, just prior to the beginning of his autopsy, this comment is made: You’ll be the priest that came back from the dead. It will be great for the numbers in your parish! Resurrected priest? Miracle? Really close call? Voodoo? Only a drug’s sweet spot, a narrow escape from a ghostly and terrifying world? An area of deadness that’s still alive? A pinch of life controlled by the dead? Mere entertainment? Somehow reality? Do we really know? Such questions persist wherever humans are.

We’ll Have to Get Out of the Box

The myth apparently originated in ancient Egypt. Is it only a myth? As the saying goes, cats have nine lives. This strange fact has been repeated as common wisdom across multiple societies and during dozens of centuries. Here’s an animal that supposedly can’t be kept dead for long, or so we keep saying. A cat is the living-dead-living one, unless of course such common wisdom is somehow wrong. This unclear situation of life and death, beings dead and yet managing to live again, even if not fully, seems everywhere even in today’s most modern of cultures. How odd. Any truth in it? Why doesn’t it just get swept away by our advanced sophistication?

I certainly do it and think most people do. If I can’t see, touch, smell, or otherwise understand something, I decide that either it’s not real or at least can be ignored. The whole spiritual world seems distant, different, not substantial, and therefore maybe not real, of no concern for rational people. God often gets dismissed these days as an irrelevant idea at best. It’s simpler and safer to stay in our little human boxes where we think we can be sure of what’s real and what’s not. Still, the paranormal never seems to go away as a persistent possibility, tempting, worrying, alluring, maybe even actively pursuing us.

Not believing in life existing beyond death can bring deep sadness to humanity. On the other hand, believing in what maybe isn’t real surely is less than intelligent. Life as we humans know it clearly is very fragile and all too brief. We don’t want it that way, and at least some of us strain to envision and claim that it’s not. We worry, tease, and joke about the subject of the living dead, whatever that is, because we’re nervous, unsure, hopeful, clearly curious, and maybe cautiously actually prepared to believe.

We are spiritual beings who long for a faith in the beyond, a faith that somehow works for us. We want to believe in something (Someone?) that’s bigger than death and outlasts the grave. We wish to look below the surface of things and see into the world of the spirit, the paranormal, the supernatural, the otherworldly. We seem to want and even need such faith, such extended sight, some hope that there’s more out there and it’s not mere irrational fantasy.

A taxidermist makes clear that he doesn’t kill animals. He gives them a glorious new existence after death, making them look their ideal best and rendering them forever safe from all disease and predators. Sure, but is that enough for us humans? What about actual resurrection, fresh life that’s real after a definite death? Not likely, the cynic says, and yet maybe, we hope cries our hearts. We humans live in a world full of disease, predators, and death, and we long for a Savior who can and wants to give us an ideal existence for the long term. We never stop our searching, our believing, depressing as it often is. As far as human history goes, this longing seems always to have existed.

Let’s join the current searching by recalling an odd piece of history. Hannibal was a great military commander of ancient Carthage, now Tunisia, a truly fascinating fellow. He became a brilliant field tactician and major thorn in the side of the Roman Empire. His brilliance lay in his arsenal of nutty (genius, out-of-the-box) battlefield antics. Hannibal saw possibilities others never thought of and achieved amazing things because he dared to act accordingly.

Once he intimidated foes by riding into enemy territory on an elephant. He won a naval battle by lobbing clay pots full of venomous snakes on the deck of his opponent’s ship. The opposing sailors at first laughed at the pots, and then things became less funny when dead pots began disgorging living snakes. Hannibal won one fight by tying wood to the horns of oxen, setting the wood on fire, and sending the oxen charging into battle. The Romans were disoriented by this blazing diversion while Hannibal’s army snuck around back and ambushed them.

Thinking and acting in unusual and unexpected ways can make impossible things suddenly possible, or make things go very wrong. Who knows what can happen once outside the limitations of standard thinking? For instance, why not look for the best of real life among the once and maybe still dead? Why not expect to find the truly dead, spiritually speaking, among those who appear to be still alive, at least physically?

Maybe we’re premature when being modern sad-you-sees. No resurrection? How about risking a little faith? The spirit world, if there is one, might exist just beyond our usual sight. For a long time humans tended to think that our home planet was flat. Why not? What could be observed with our limited senses led any rational person to such a conclusion. So, what’s still beyond our yet-limited abilities to perceive all of what’s real beyond the immediate present, the close by, the mere material things of life?

To find out we’ll have to get out of our boxes of very restricted perceptions and become willing to look beyond and admit new possibilities. While requiring faith, these possibilities may be very real. We might have to check with the scientists to learn whether this piece of common wisdom is actually true. Brain, hair, and skin cells are always dying, but fat cells apparently are eternal.

What should we make of vampires, myths, mummies, aliens, and claimed empty graves? Has the wall between the living and the dead been broached? Rebirth, resurrection, and reincarnation. Are these false hopes or actual facts? Continuing conversation between the living and the dead certainly is a tantalizing thought, and clearly good movie entertainment (mostly horror these days). Is there any truth to it all? We can’t be sure, not absolutely. After all, we’re only human.

We should be slow to judge the many people who exercise no faith beyond the factually provable. Nor should we quickly write off the many who claim visions, dreams, and sightings not experienced by most others. Reality likely is more than we currently understand. Religion is everywhere that humans are because we humans tend to sense that there’s more out there, and somehow we can and should be experiencing it.

Should we try to control whatever is out there by our sacrifices and virtue, or maybe be possessed by it until we’re no longer ourselves? Is the presumed farther and deeper reality something to be feared or quite the opposite? The questions are many, asked universally, and sampled here. They are seen in many of the great films.

The 1982 film E.