message, while it certainly stretches the mind and imagination and is in fact, for our finite minds, quite unimaginable in its realization (as were the incarnation and the resurrection before they actually happened in history), is an absolutely essential part of the good news we are called to proclaim, and it should be consciously at the heart of our personal and liturgical prayers, as it was in the early church.
Once again, it is Christ’s resurrection that is the core of this proclamation. This, as I’ve been saying and as we know, is true dogmatically, with respect to sin, death, and salvation. But it is also true philosophically, in the following sense—and I think this is an important point. Christ’s resurrection is the great reality within history that is manifestly supernatural (his incarnation was likewise supernatural, of course, but not manifestly so, not publicly—only to Mary and Joseph). His miracles are supernatural too, of course, and point to the reality of who he is, but they don’t have the utter and absolute strangeness as has his own resurrection from the dead. His resurrection does not arise in any way from within historical conditions as such, or from natural law or causality. It is absolutely sui generis, a demonstration of power that is not human and so can only be divine. Those who deny it or who call it a myth cannot contest this, they can only claim—with no historical evidence whatsoever to support their claim—that it did not happen.
Here is not the place to develop this point, but it should be for believers a source of tremendous reassurance and hope: in Christ, God has manifestly penetrated our human sphere and has acted as nowhere else in the course of history, and the nature of that action being what it was, we have every reason to believe that what those who experienced it declared to be its significance—that is, redemption and the offer of eternal life to those who hunger for it—was and is true. Similarly, if such supernatural power has turned nature inside out once, we have every reason to believe—even if we cannot imagine how he will do it—that the Lord, at his return, will have the power to upturn and renew his entire fallen creation. Heaven will be joined to earth—to this earth, our earth. “And I saw,” writes John on the isle of Patmos, “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying anymore, for the former things have passed away’” (Rev 21:2–4).
III
Let me now bring to your attention some of the peculiarities of what the Bible does tell us about life after death. The subject is vast, so I can only touch on a few points. When a believer dies, he/she goes to be with the Lord. Paul longed for this. “Now we know,” he writes to the Corinthians, “that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling . . . so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life . . . We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:1–2, 4b, 7–8). And to the Philippians he writes: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain . . . I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body” (Phil 1:21, 23b–24). The state referred to here—the state of “being with Christ”—appears not to be that of resurrection. The general resurrection will happen at the Lord’s return, not before. It would seem that the state being referred to here—and the place being referred to—is what is called elsewhere “paradise,” or the “third heaven,” where Paul at one point was transported in the Spirit (2 Cor 12:2–4). The word has the connotation of a garden, a place of bliss and rest in God’s presence, as in the words of the risen Lord to the church in Ephesus reported in the book of Revelation: “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is the paradise of God” (Rev 2:7b). It is presumably the paradise where Jesus went immediately upon his death, and where the believing thief on the cross would go to join him (Luke 23:43).
In this state, the mortal body has been left behind, the incorruptible body has yet to be given. The human spirit, inbreathed by God, is the soul—the form, if you will—of the body, its vital structure and animating principle. At death it has been separated from the body, which has now become a cadaver—“I” am gone from what was my body, that decaying flesh is no longer “me.” This bodiless state of the human person is impossible for us to imagine, yet Scripture does seem to reveal that it is a stage between our physical death and our ultimate state, our resurrection, when we will be clothed with a spiritual body. Personal identity is retained and recognizable, and communion in love—with the Lord and with those who are his—characterizes this new form of reality; but the plenitude of redemption, the fullness of our hope, when, as Paul writes to the Romans, “the creation itself will be liberated from the bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21)—this plenitude is not yet present. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul declares to the Christians in Philippi. “Already—even now,” he might have added, and surely after our death, when the soul is released from our earthly body. But the plenitude is still to come. “And,” he writes, “we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Phil 3:20–21).
For the Christian, eternal life cannot properly be conceived without a body, for the body is an essential part of God’s good creation, the means by which the soul—the body’s inner life—expresses itself. Material and spiritual reality are not to be disconnected in a Cartesian manner and set in opposition, as the modernist mindset insists on doing. They are interlocked as a single reality. God, who is Spirit, has created and sustains a material cosmos, and he is immanent within every particle of it, even while being absolutely transcendent to it. Spirit animates materiality and, from a Christian point of view, materiality cannot be properly conceived apart from Spirit. The plenitude of created human being cannot be imagined apart from corporeality, but it must be a corporeality that is incorruptible, not subject to decay, animated entirely by the life-giving Spirit that is God. In a word, the ultimate perfection—the complete realization—of a human person is not an immaterial immortal soul but a spiritual body, as Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 15.
This transformation will be wrought by the power of God at the moment of Christ’s return. Paul longs for this, it is the source of his hope, that for which he “presses on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:14). “We ourselves,” he writes elsewhere, “who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved” (Rom 8:23–24a). And finally, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s extended treatise on the resurrection, he declares: “So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:42–44). The perishable, he insists, cannot inherit the kingdom of God: “For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality . . . then the saying that is written will come true (here he quotes from Hosea 13:14): ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’” (1 Cor 15:52a, 53, 54b).
IV
To conclude, a brief word on the final judgment. “A time is coming,” says Jesus in John’s Gospel, “when all who are in their graves will hear his—the Son of Man’s—voice and come forth, those who have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:28b–29). Jesus, echoing a text in Daniel 12:1–3, is presenting himself here as the eschatological Judge entrusted by the Father with the authority to exercise judgment at the time of the end, that is, when he returns
