Christ and the Human Soul III

One of the concepts which must rise up within us when we speak of the relations of Christ to the human soul is that of sin and its debt. We know what the significance of the concepts of guilt and sin has in the Christianity of St. Paul. Our present age is, however, little adapted for a really deep inner understanding of the wider connections between the concepts ‘Death and Sin’ and ‘Death and Immortality,’ that are to be found in Paul's writings. This lies in the materialism of our times. Let us recall what I said in the first lecture of this course, that there could be no true immortality of the human soul without a continuation of consciousness into the conditions after death. An ending of consciousness with death would coincide with the fact, which in that case would have to be accepted, that man is really not immortal. The unconscious continuance of man's being after death would mean that what is the most important of all, that which makes man into man, would not exist after death. An unconscious human soul surviving after death would not mean much more than the sum of atoms acknowledged by materialism, which remain even when the human body is destroyed.