GETTING RESURRECTION RIGHT

I’m back—from Europe, that is, from a part of Europe where religion remains vital—the countries of the former Yugoslavia—and where religious traditions meet, sometimes in peace and sometimes not. More on that in later posts. (If you would like an introduction to the complicated religious and political scene in the region, check out Jim Payton’s book, The Unknown Europe: How Eastern Europe Got That Way, Cascade Books, 2021.)  Before I left for Europe I had proposed a project. I envisioned it as a series of answers to the question: what needs to change in the contemporary church? I would like to get back to that project.

I had in mind two principal drivers for the project. The first is the apparent failure of the church to engage the culture. I’m speaking in the context of the church I know, the church in the US, especially the conservative wing of the church. What I have to say may not at all be true in other places in the world, where church looks different. But in our context, the church seems to be losing ground. 

The conservative part of the church has bet large on Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and Christian nationalism—the notion that the US is inherently Christian. Other religions may be tolerated, in this view, but Christianity must be given pride of place. As I write, thousands (although fewer thousands than expected) of largely evangelical Christians have gathered on the National Mall for a White House supported rally they’ve called: “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” The rally organizers claim, falsely, that the US was founded as a Christian nation. 

Whatever short-term successes this movement may claim, the future seems pointed in other directions. Christian nationalism exchanges fervor for truth. I am reminded of what St. Paul said of his own generation: “I can testify that they have zeal for God, but it is not based on knowledge.” A movement based on an anti-democratic and unhistorical premise is likely to fail.

There is more to be said about this—much more, and by commentators better informed than I—but it’s important to get before us the second driver for the project I have in mind: faithfulness to the traditions of the church. Here I have in mind as church the “one holy catholic and apostolic” church of the creed. The church has, I think, drifted from its moorings into a form of faith that is more transactional than biblical, more pagan than Christian, and it’s that aspect of the failure of the church that I hope to address in these pages.

These two drivers of the failure of the church are, of course, related. The churches that embrace Christian nationalism do so because they have drifted from the gospel. The church needs to find a new clarity about Jesus, about faith, about the scriptures, and about the Christian life. The project I am proposing is to name some of these things, not in any conclusive way but as a way of challenging the church to think again about what it means to be faithful.

I came to the idea of doing such a project in part in the course of reading of N.T. Wright’s bestselling new book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025). Wright’s premise in the book is that the church has taken a wrong turn. It has, in short, turned away from earth and toward heaven. Here’s how Wright begins his argument:

Most people today imagine that the point of Christianity is “to go to heaven when you die.” That’s what most believers believe. It’s what most unbelievers unbelieve. It’s certainly what journalists, broadcasters, and popular commentators think Christianity is supposed to be all about. They are all wrong. The point of Christianity is not that we should go to heaven. The point of Christianity is that heaven should come to us. “To earth,” in Jesus’s words. (God’s Homecoming, 3)

For this wrong turn, Wright mostly blames Plato or, rather, Plato’s later followers, the Middle- and Neo-Platonists (5). Wright claims that it’s Platonists rather than the Bible who taught Christians that what mattered is saving souls and getting to heaven. The old song, “This world is not my own; I’m just a-passing through,” sings a platonic tune. This is not the place to address Wright’s argument in any detail—I plan in a later post to review the book—but Wright’s concerns in the book point us toward the principal theme of this post: the need in popular Christianity to change its expectations of what is to come for both the earth and for we Christians ourselves.

In the course of his argument, Wright happens on a somewhat older book by the great Augustine scholar, Peter Brown. Brown’s little book, The Ransom of the Soul (Harvard University Press, 2015), is about changes in Christian expectations of the afterlife from roughly the time of Cyprian of Carthage in the 3^rd century CE to Julian of Toledo in the late 7^thcentury, the time covered by Julian’s book of Christian comfort, the Prognosticon. If Wright’s book is essentially a sermon about how the church has gone wrong and how it better get it right, Brown’s book is a subtle piece of historical analysis about how the church adapted to a changing world with changing expectations. It also deserves a fuller treatment, but for now I want to draw from it only where it begins, with Tertullian of Carthage and the early Christian expectation for the future.

Tertullian lived the century before Cyprian, from 160 to 240 CE. For Brown, he represents the last flowering of early Christianity, sustained by the blood of martyrs. “For Tertullian,” Brown writes:

the average Christian soul was a strangely subdued thing. As with Cyprian, the dim souls of the many were of little interest to him compared with the souls of the martyrs. But this was not all. The trajectory of the individual soul after death was not important to him. The notion of the afterlife was dwarfed, in Tertullian’s thought, by the idea of the transformation of the entire universe associated with the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. It was thought that this mighty transformation was about to happen. (24-5)

Pay attention to “soul.” Souls were important in platonic thought, souls, not bodies. When Brown says that for Tertullian “the average Christian soul was a strangely subdued thing,” he means that the journey of the soul didn’t have the outsized importance it does in platonic thought. Souls and bodies are inextricably linked. He comes close to the modern idea of the soul as merely a name for the inner life. The inner life cannot be separated from the outer life. Souls exist only in bodies. The ultimate human horizon is not death but judgment, and at the judgment souls and bodies will stand together as one before the judge.

Tertullian is not much concerned with what happens at death. He comes up with the idea of a refrigerium interim, a temporary respite after death in which the faithful who have departed enjoy “a refreshing period of rest in the other world, as delightful as the taste of cool water and of food shared, in shady bowers, with boon companions” (Brown, 27). But the refrigerium is not his focus. His focus is on the great transformation, the Resurrection, when the world will be fundamentally remade. In Brown’s words, “Tertullian imagined it to be so majestic, so radical, and so total as to make the interval between death and the Resurrection of the dead seem short and empty of significance” (25). It’s the immanence of this expectation that was slowly lost in the church. And if it’s to return to its roots, it’s the immanence of this expectation that the church needs to regain.

If we are to do so, we might begin by reconsidering resurrection. In considering resurrection, we have tended to focus on biology: how do the dead rise? Take John Updike’s unconvincing poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter” (he wrote it to win a prize and later mostly repudiated it). The first stanza claims:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

This is nonsense, as Paul in his great chapter on resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15, acknowledges:

But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”

He answers:

There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. ⁴⁴ It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. (I Corinthians 15:35, 40-44, NRSVue)

It’s not at all clear what Paul means by “spiritual body,” but you can be quite sure he doesn’t mean what Updike means. It’s not biology.

The context of resurrection in the New Testament is failure. The question overhanging the gospels was whether death, the death of Jesus at the hands of his enemies, counts as failure. As failure is how the disciples on their way home in Luke 24 understood what had happened in Jerusalem. They say to the stranger who joins them on their journey, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” The failure they so acutely express in that comment was in their way of thinking failure not just for Jesus but for Israel and for Israel’s God. Or so they thought until, at table with the stranger, they learn that death is not a final defeat but the beginning of victory. 

We do not entirely understand this—at least, I do not—but we understand, reading the Easter stories, that the resurrection of Jesus is not resuscitation but transformation and that we are included in this transformation. A new story has opened up, not just for Jesus but for all humanity. And because we are included in the story, faith—faithfulness, which is what faith means in the Bible—requires us to live out this new story as best we can, always trusting the grace of God.

In churches that follow the lectionary we read this week another resurrection story from Luke, this one in the first chapter of Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles. In the story (Acts 1:6-14), Jesus appears a last time to his disciples. They ask once again whether now is the time: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” They are expecting continuation of the earthly mission of Jesus, more along the lines of resuscitation than resurrection, Jesus continuing where he had left off. But such is not to be. Jesus disappears into the clouds. Two men dressed in white appear and ask the gathered disciples why they stand looking up toward the sky. In a much-misunderstood statement, they add, “This Jesus who has been taken from you to the sky will come in the manner you see him go.” 

The point is not that Jesus will someday ride in again on the clouds but that this risen Jesus will be present to them in the Spirit, and that in the power of the Spirit (1:8) the mission of Jesus will continue in them and, we should add, in us. The expectation is that we will be harbingers of that vast transformation that Tertullian “imagined . . . to be so majestic, so radical, and so total as to make the interval between death and the Resurrection of the dead seem short and empty of significance.” Resurrection is not about what happens after death but about what happens to the life we are living now. Are our lives doomed by death to be failures? Brief and forgotten? Resurrection’s answer is no. 

Resurrection is about this life. It is the raising up of this life. Not some future life, not the person we might have been had we not been flesh and blood, had we not done what we did, loved what we loved, lived as we lived. Not a new life in which we get it right. No, this life; it’s this life that resurrection promises to raise up.

Again, I do not know entirely what that means but at least this: this life matters. When Jesus is raised, it is his whole life that is raised. The risen Jesus is the Jesus who was born to Mary, who grew up in Joseph’s workshop, who was baptized by John, who taught in Galilee and Judea, who proclaimed the coming kingdom, who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, who was arrested, tried, and convicted, and who died on a cross. All of that is raised up. In a sense, as Jesus himself says, it’s the body of his work that is raised up, vindicated.

And so for us. It’s who we are and have been in our lives that is raised up. All of us, as it were. Resurrection is not living life over but the forever life of who we are in the eyes of God. I’m sure it’s more than that—I don’t profess to know what we cannot yet know—but it’s at least that.

And this expectation, rooted in the scriptures and the early church, is much more powerful than the going to heaven expectation of so much of contemporary Christianity. The expectation that on death we will be whisked away to heaven devalues life on earth. On that view, we leave what we have been behind. Our history, our struggles, the scars of life disappear; we become, well, angels of a sort.

If the expectation is only that we will one day be rescued into an entirely other kind of life, then this life does not matter. Then, I do not matter, not the I who writes this sentence. Then, it does not matter that I write this sentence. To be human doesn’t matter. It’s against this, this idea of the insignificance of human life, the failure of human life, that resurrection speaks.

If we are to recover the faith from what it has lately become, this is a good place to begin: with the promise that this life, this one earthbound life, matters for eternity.

Clay