Introduction
Kerk & Leven (“Church & Life”) is the leading weekly Catholic magazine in the Flemish region of Belgium. Since October 2025, on the invitation of the chief editor of the local edition of the parish of Olen, Cis Marinus, I have been writing a reflective article every two weeks from a philosophical and theological perspective, exploring Christianity in a scientific age.
12 November 2025
That You May Have Life in His Name
During the prayer vigil on the afternoon of All Saints’ Day, I served as a lector and read aloud a somewhat older text describing what would happen to our dearly departed. The author spoke of a crossing “over a great water,” and on the other side someone would be waiting for them with warm clothes. The passage was likely meant to comfort those who had recently lost a loved one. Yet the imagery struck me, as if the souls of the departed might still feel cold during their crossing.
Even afterwards, this fragment kept returning to my thoughts. It brought back memories of earlier years, when in secondary school we read the Greek story of Charon, the ferryman who carried the souls of the dead across the river Styx to the realm of Hades.
What stayed with me most at the time was that the fate of those souls was anything but enviable. Ordinary souls ended up in the Asphodel Meadows, a grey, misty plain. A shadowy, indistinct place where souls wandered without joy or pain, in a state that could scarcely be called consciousness. They retained only the faintest memories of their lives, fragments and images, but without any real emotions. A silent and monotonous existence, a kind of eternal shadow of their former life. Only their shadow remained, while their former personality or inner strength had almost entirely vanished. Yet it was not a place of torment or suffering, but rather of oblivion and emptiness.
In Greek mythology, this was the fate of the vast majority of people, those who had lived neither particularly good nor particularly bad lives. They received neither punishment nor reward. It was a state of “almost non-existence,” in which nothing happened or changed. A fate that was the same for everyone, whether one had been rich or poor, learned or not, without distinction.
Although the ancient Greeks believed that nearly everyone was destined for this same fate, they were not a gloomy people who sank into despondent silence at such an unappealing prospect. On the contrary, they brimmed with vitality and creativity. How different this was from the stories of my youth about heaven and paradise in Christianity! Even if these were seldom described in concrete terms, it was abundantly clear that heavenly bliss surpassed earthly life in every respect, and that the promise of this paradisiacal future gave people great strength and confidence in times that were sometimes difficult and harsh.
Yet over the years, certain things began to strike me. I have always found it remarkable that when people spoke about life after death, about God’s love being stronger than death, they often could not refrain from speaking in the same breath about hell and damnation. Belief in life after death seems always to go hand in hand with the conviction that not everyone will share in that bliss. In conversations about life after death, I noticed that people rarely spoke about their own life after death. People seldom expressed expectations about what it would be like, about the plans they might have, or about whom they would meet again.
What this makes clear to me, and where I would like to lead you, is that we approach the question of eternal life, of life after death, in a very different way from other questions. It is not a question like all the others. And that may perhaps set us on a new path.
To begin with: however firmly we may be convinced of eternal bliss after death, it does not seem to be something we actively look forward to. We do not make arrangements with loved ones beyond death. We do not say, “see you later.” Something holds us back. For some reason, even wanting to talk about it seems inappropriate. Eternal bliss may only be indicated in veiled terms and spoken of with due solemnity. Making plans that cross the boundary of death and discussing them with others, as one might do with a travel brochure about a planned journey to a distant and beautiful land, would be perceived as highly shocking, even sacrilegious. But what, then, are we to do with this eternity? Why is it that we so quickly reach an impasse here?
In our modern framework of thought, we tend to see “eternity” as “an infinite duration of time.” This image holds us firmly in its grip, even though it leads to paradoxes we cannot resolve. As in the surrealist painting La Durée poignardée (“Time Transfixed”) by the Belgian painter René Magritte, we must try to break through this pattern of thinking in terms of endless duration.
The key to doing so can be found in the world of thought of the Bible. In biblical language, “eternal life” does not refer to a life “outside” this life, a timeless existence without beginning or end. It refers to a new understanding of life here and now. It is not the quantity of life that is meant, but rather the quality of life in the present. The ancient Greek term aionios (eternal) does not mean “infinite in time,” but rather “belonging to another age,” the divine or coming world. In the biblical framework, “eternal life” refers to life lived from God.
The key to this biblical reading of “eternal life” is hidden at the very end of the Gospel of Gospel of John, in verse 31 of chapter 20, where the author notes that Jesus performed many other signs for his disciples that are not recorded in this book. But, he continues, those that are written down are there “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.” That is the essence of “eternal life”: to possess life “in His name.”
To live in His name, to live in eternity, to live in abundance, eternal life, these are all biblical expressions that speak of people who recognize and acknowledge God’s love in one another, and who are thereby united with each other. A connectedness that extends to all people, to all creatures, to the whole of creation. That is the heart of the story of the name He has made known, a story that we continue to tell.
Originally published as: van Biezen, A. (2025), Opdat u leven zult bezitten in zijn naam. In Kerk & Leven, edition 0485, 12 November 2025, p. 4.
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