“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

With these words in John 12, Jesus invites us to look at death in a new way. When a seed bears fruit, life has persevered. A truly dead seed would grow nothing. So for Jesus, death was the end of an outer form, but with the spark of life enduring within.

The simplest form of life is a single cell. Healthy cells reproduce by dividing. The old cell has not ‘died’ – it has not become defunct – but its form is no more. Remarkably, cells can be frozen and revived – and ancient cells, trapped in clay at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean for 100 million years, have been revived. It seems that they were not dead, but merely sleeping.

The writers of Bible days knew nothing of microbes. The only living creatures they knew were complex animals – multicellular organisms. They believed that life was a gift given by God. In Psalm 104 – which we should read remembering that the same Hebrew word can be translated as ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’ – we find:

When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die…
When you send forth your Spirit, they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.

Certainly ‘breath’, in the form of oxygen, is vital to all creatures more than a millimetre in size. Where there are living cells and oxygen, amazing things are possible. An earthworm split asunder can re-grow a tail, and there are some remarkable flatworms which have more extraordinary regenerative powers. The species called Dugesia can fully re-grow from any random part of its body, as long it has 10,000 cells (about 5% of its full body). A salamander can regrow a lost limb in 50 days.

How versatile are the cells in our own human bodies? The newly fertilised egg divides and divides again into a ball of ‘totipotent’ cells which can form any part of the body. Sometimes the embryo splits in two at this stage, and forms identical twins, with separate placentas and each enclosed in their own amniotic sac. Those cells which become the body itself enter a different state, known as pluripotent, which can form any body organ but not a placenta. If the cells split at this point, they can form identical twins with a shared placenta and sac. It’s also known that totipotent cells can join together again after splitting. This can result in a perfectly ordinary-looking human where a genetic test will show the presence of two different gene-sequences in different parts of the body. But when cells don’t split until later – about 13-15 days after conception – the embryo can form conjoined twins.

Agonising decisions are faced by parents and doctors at the birth of two heads whose bodies are not totally separate. Surgery can divide the bodies if there are sufficient internal organs to share – but when there are not, is it ethical to choose to separate the better-equipped twin knowing the weaker one is unlikely to survive? The clear command in Scripture not to kill (Genesis 4 & 9, Exodus 20) and St Paul’s warning in Romans 3 that we may not do evil in the expectation that good will follow, leads the Catholic Church to say that we may not intervene with an act which will certainly lead to the death of the weaker twin, even though the death of both is the likely consequence of inaction.

Conjoined twins also lead us to ask whether there are two persons present, or only one? The instinctive answer is that the presence or absence of a head and brain leads us to recognise whether there are two persons, or not. Studies on invertebrates and amphibians have shown that those creatures can function for a short time without a brain, but as mammals we are totally dependent on our brain stem’s ability to control the basic functions of our lungs. Our ability to think and relate to others depends on the higher parts of our brain. We recognise there are two persons present in the famous case of Abby and Brittany Hensel, born 1990 in Minnesota. They have a single body with separate heads and necks, and yet live a full life, having qualified as teachers and – each holding her own driving license – able to drive a car.

Scientific researchers have learned how to regress certain cells from an adult donor’s body into a pluripotent state. Since 2008, it has been possible to coax these cells to become human nerve cells, which link together to create cerebral organoids — tiny pea-sized blobs that self-organize into brainlike structures. Even the scientists recognise there are ethical questions about “how far is too far” with this kind of research. Should it be allowed at all? And if so, at what point must growth be halted lest a human consciousness develop?

Ethical issues also arise concerning any human body whose brain is damaged. We know, as I’ve already written about, that while we have an immaterial human spirit, our ability to express ourselves is mediated through the brain. Medical technology can keep a brain-damaged person alive. What happens when it is difficult to establish with certainty, in certain ‘vegetative states’, whether a brain has died with no possibility of recovery? In these cases of doubt, the Catholic Church regards the withdrawal of treatment, with the intent that the body should die, as unethical.

Further questions are posed about when the brain is ‘really dead’ by studies of Near Death Experiences. It’s not uncommon that a patient who has been clinically dead on an operating table, and then revived, returns with a tale which typically features certain elements: a journey through a passage of light, meeting deceased ancestors or a being of perfect love; a ‘life-review’ of their personal history, and sometimes an ‘out-of-body-experience’ of seeing their own body from above. The American engineer and pastor John Burke reviewed hundreds of case studies in his book Imagine Heaven and found that accounts from both American and Eastern cultures fitted more closely with what the Christian Bible would lead us to expect, than the religious traditions of the Far East. 

Medical science is now beginning to establish that these common tropes do occur in patients across all cultures, and that brain activity is sometimes measurable up to an hour after someone’s heart stops beating. With the latest technology we are sometimes able to resuscitate patients who seem to have been dead for hours, especially in cold conditions, and have them return to full consciousness. Perhaps the only possible answer to when the ‘human spirit’ is granted to an embryo which might twin, or taken from a body which might be revived, is “God knows what is going to happen and provides accordingly.”

The Bible teaches clearly that we have but one life on earth and then we face judgment (Hebrews 9). There are seven Bible accounts in which God’s servants raise someone from the dead: Elijah, Elisha, Peter and Paul each do so, and Jesus raises the son of the widow of Nain and the daughter of Jairus before commanding “Lazarus! Come forth!” in a moment of drama which seems to provoke his own arrest and execution. Notably, in all cases, except Lazarus, we are explicitly told it is a ‘young person’ who is revived – God does not reverse the curse of death for a life completed. These raisings are different in nature from the resurrection of Christ – those merely raised would die again, and face judgment like the rest of us.

What happens to us after death? Some parts of the Hebrew Bible seem pessimistic (Ecclesiastes 9, Psalm 146), that we are merely ‘remembered’ by God while our body is laid to rest below the earth. But hope that our being persists in some way after death is expressed in the Psalms (16, 83) and by the prophets (Isaiah 25, Hosea 13, Daniel 12).

Shortly before his crucifixion, Jesus promised his disciples that there were many rooms in his Father’s house, there would be a place for them there, and he would show them the way. Belief that there is life after death is integral to the New Testament. The Way to Heaven is Christ, the Resurrection and the Life, Himself (John 11). In Him, death is defeated and the Way to eternal life is open (John 3, I Corinthians 15). In Matthew 10 and Luke 12, Jesus encouraged us not to be afraid of bodily death. St Paul was caught up to the ‘third heaven’ (I Corinthians 12) and the Book of Revelation consists of a series of heavenly visions. If the spark of life survives the death of the seed, then the spark of the spirit will survive the death of the body. The best is yet to come! 

Revd Dr Gareth Leyshon is a parish priest in the South Wales Valleys, who read physics at Oxford and completed a doctorate at Cardiff (a study of the structure of distant galaxies) before entering seminary.

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