THINKING ABOUT CHRISTIAN HOPE

What happens when we die? 

Perhaps we should ask the question in a more abstract, more overtly theological, way: what is the shape of Christian hope? I come in part to these questions because they have been forcefully raised by the popular New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright in his latest bestseller, God’s Homecoming (2024). In the book, Wright does two things. First, he kicks the biblical props out from under the long-held view that when we die our souls go directly to heaven (provided, of course, we are the right side of whatever creed we hold to). He argues—this is conventional wisdom among Bible scholars—that the Bible seldom, if ever, speaks of “soul” as a part of us that survives death or “heaven” as a place where souls go to live after the body dies. Those ideas, Wright says, were imported into the faith from the outside. 

Having deconstructed that long-held popular version of Christian hope, Wright then attempts to describe what the Bible does teach about life after death (see my comments here on Wright’s (dubious) habit of reading the Bible as if it all says one thing). I’ll come to some of what he has to say below, but I intend this post not just as a review of Wright’s work (see my God’s Homecoming review here) but as an opportunity to face full on the question that all of us face, along with Wright: what happens when we die?

To raise this question is to touch the third rail of church theology. We don’t talk about it much. Too many things can go wrong in those sorts of discussions. It’s too close to us. And it’s hard to be honest when we think differently about something so fundamental as this. We have our set rituals: scriptures, prayers, words, liturgies, theologies, often fumbling theologies. At funerals, we duly trot them out. But how do we mean them? When we stand together at the edge of the grave of someone we love, what hopes, what thoughts, what questions rush through our minds?

Different thoughts and questions, I suspect, one from another. For some of us the pictures of heaven are literal truth. Our loved one has passed from one life to another, from earth to heaven, from sickness and disability to exuberant health, from the community on earth to the community in heaven. We borrow the last verse of Isaiah 40 to imagine our loved one mounting up with wings like eagles, running and not growing weary, walking and not becoming faint. For others of us these pictures of the world beyond are Kodachrome, not quite real. The words of liturgy and sermon are at best hopeful metaphors, ways of speaking, but the truth we know lies before us in the casket about to be lowered in the earth. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.” At every funeral doubts take up as much space as beliefs.

It has always been so, I suspect. In a delightful little book, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (2015), Peter Brown dallies on the triclia at the catacombs of San Sebastiano in Rome. The triclia was an outdoor banquet facility where 3^rd century Christians gathered to remember their dead. There they celebrated with a meal they called a refrigerium, in Brown’s apt description, “a feast of refreshment and good cheer” (Ransom, 51). These early Christians left hundreds of graffiti on the walls, many of them prayers to the dead to remember those still living. Keep us in mind, these prayers said, expressing the longing to keep intact the community between the living and the dead. But as they ate together and remembered, what did they think? For some, perhaps most, they imagined their dear departeds close by, if in another dimension; in this they differed little from their pagan neighbors and ancestors. For others, the refrigerium must have seemed an act of memory, a pious way of honoring the dead. Hopes and doubts.

This is what makes our questions about death and life after death so tricky. We risk offending those who believe one way and inviting the scorn of those who believe differently. And so, I’ll try to tread softly.

IS DEATH AN ENDING OR AN INTERRUPTION?

In thinking about the shape of Christian hope, there are two words to which we must pay careful attention: “death” and “resurrection.” For the first, the central question is what dies when we die. It’s the question of endings: what does death end? For the second, the question is continuity: in the resurrected life, what of who we are goes on?

Begin, as we must, with death: when we die, what dies? In God’s Homecoming, Wright has a forthright (sorry for the unintentional pun) answer to that question: 

Perhaps we could put it like this. Bodily death finishes off the old psychosomatic “you.” To cling to it, or to imagine a soul that is a personal possession, something other than the indwelling spirit, is to sidestep the co-crucifixion of which Paul speaks in Galatians 2:19–21. Perhaps it is even to cherish a little pride after all. (God’s Homecoming, 295)

When we die, we die, Wright says. Death “finishes off the old psychosomatic ‘you.” Full stop. The idea that some part of us continues, our soul, say, he rather ungraciously condemns as a prideful sidestepping of the crucifixion. 

As it turns out, Wright doesn’t quite mean what he says. To understand what he means, it’s important to grasp what Wright regards as the canonical view of the afterlife. He claims, tracing this out through much of 2^nd temple Jewish thought, that the Jews who believed in resurrection had in mind a three step process: first, this life as we know it, flesh and blood existing in time and space; second, death, the end of all that; and third, resurrection, a restart of what we had before, our bodily existence on a renewed earth. Death, the middle term in this scheme, is not an ending but an interruption. After the interruption, our lives continue on into forever, transformed, yes, but in crucial ways, the same. Time continues. We make new history. We live new days.

Wright’s 14^th and last chapter in God’s Homecoming is largely about what happens in the middle. If our “old psychosomatic” self ends at death, how does what we are, our essential self, carry on? How are we preserved until the resurrection? Wright’s answer, as I understand it, is that our relationship with the Spirit of God continues. Once in relationship with God, that relation partakes of eternity. In a sense, God knows who we are. God raises us up.

It’s this that permits Wright to say that death is an ending. For a time after death we exist, as it were, notionally, only in God, but then we are raised up, renewed and transformed, to once again stand upon the earth, and so our bodied life begins again.

Despite his many claims to the contrary, in this respect Wright’s view of the afterlife falls in line with popular Christian theology—the theology he condemns as “platonic.” If death is an interruption, not an ending, then this life, this earthly, contingent, biological life loses both its humanity and its eternal value. And in trying to be biblical, we stray from the Bible. If we wish to recover the heart of biblical thinking about resurrection, we need to begin with recovering the concept of death as an ending. 

RESURRECTION REIMAGINED

Wright doesn’t say much about resurrection in God’s Homecoming. For Wright’s take on resurrection, we need to turn to what I’ll call his big resurrection book (its over 800 pages), The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), the third volume in his enormous Christian Origins and the Question of God. The big resurrection book is mostly a long tendentious historical discussion about what 2^nd temple Jews said about resurrection. Wright argues resurrection for 2^nd temple Jews (including the New Testament writers) nearly always meant bodily resurrection. It meant that one day we will again stand in our reconstituted and transformed bodies on the renewed earth, breathe the earth’s atmosphere (cleaned up), eat earth food (organically grown), and go about our business one day after another after another after another. 

It takes only a moment’s reflection to realize that such a life would not be anything like what we know of human life. In such a life there can be no real history, no story, no coming to be, no reaching of a goal or, for that matter, not reaching a goal. There would be no goals, because you can’t have a goal unless you can fail to reach it. This view of the resurrected life fails the test of every kid who ever thought about heaven and asked, “Who wants to hang around playing the harp all day forever?” Well, no one, actually, not even harp players. Or, the question of a departed friend: “Will there be competitive sports in heaven?” Does heaven accommodate not only the thrill of victory but the agony of defeat? Will resurrected Spurs be able to squander 29 point leads to the (perhaps infernal) Knicks? 

I say this in jest, but only partially so. The issue is that human existence takes its flavor from the sort of world in which we live, a world of growth and decay, achievement and failure, life and death. The Bible is not unaware of this. When read against the literature of the time, the story in Genesis 2-3 is about what it means to be human. Pared down to its essentials, the story is about a choice between knowledge and death or no knowledge and no death. Knowledge in the story—“the knowledge of good and evil,” which seems to include a capacity for abstract thinking, to think ahead, to plan—comes with knowing that we will die, that our lives are bounded. The question in the story is not whether living creatures die. They must die if life is to go on. That’s biology. It’s not biology that’s important in the story but death as something that overshadows ourlives. Faced with the choice of knowledge, even if comes with knowing that we die, or no knowledge, even if it comes with the prospect of life, it’s knowledge, always knowledge, that we humans choose. Not just Eve, who was only the first to so choose, but all of us. And so we should. In the Mesopotamian stories (Adapa, Gilgamesh), faced with the possibility of living forever, humans are advised to turn it down. Better to live as humans than as an immortals. (On this, see also Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.)

So if we are to make sense of things it’s best to begin with death. Our lives have and should have, in the words of Julian Barnes, “a sense of an ending.” All of this is illustrated in fascinating and various fashion by Jesus. When Jesus dies, is his work done? Well, yes and no. I’ll come to the no presently, but it’s important that we first hear the yes. In John’s account of the crucifixion, Jesus says, just before he dies, “It is finished” (John 19:30). Done. In his prayer in John 17, he says that he has done what he had come to do: “I have brought you [the Father] glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do” (17:4). In Luke’s account, this is the point of the ascension: the earthly life of Jesus is complete. He vanishes into the clouds. The Easter appearances are at an end. Something has changed.

Death speaks to the boundedness of our days. We are given these days, these days only. Death answers yes to the question about whether our life is finite. Resurrection says no. It says that there is more. More for Jesus; more for us. 

EASTER STORIES

But what more? It’s this question that is mooted in the gospel stories of the resurrection of Jesus. The stories tease us with accounts in which it appears that the risen Jesus will pick up where he left off: more resuscitation rather than resurrection. The later gospels do more of this than the later gospels. The accounts in the earlier gospels are minimal, still marked by mystery. Mark gives us only a young man in white announcing that Jesus has risen; not Jesus himself. The women to whom the young man speaks run away terrified. Matthew fills out the story with Jesus briefly meeting his disciples in Galilee. “On seeing him,” Matthew tells us, “they bowed in worship, but hesitantly” (28:17). The later gospels go in both directions. In some stories, Jesus appears as a mysterious stranger, there and then not there, more apparition than physical presence (Luke 24:13-31, John 20:1-23), while in other stories, he appears fully fleshed, showing them his wounds and sitting down to enjoy a piece of fish (Luke 24:36-43, John 20:24-29, 21:4-14). 

Eventually, he is not there, not in the fully fleshed form the later Easter stories. It’s not resuscitation that the New Testament presents but resurrection, and resurrection means that Jesus is both present and not present. He is not present as he was before, walking about Galilee and Judea. That life is finished, bounded. He is, as the creed has it, “seated at the right hand of the Father,” which is coded language for physically not preset. Gone. But the resurrected truth is that he remains present to us, but in new ways: in the Spirit (Paul), in the Eucharist (Luke), in the body of gathered believers (Paul, Peter), in those who love him (John), in those who hear him knock (John of the Apocalypse), and more. 

And in these New Testament testimonies, the presence of Jesus is not just in the memory of the church. He is alive. He has agency. He knocks. At Easter we sing:

I serve a risen savior; he’s in the world today;
I know that he is living whatever men may say.

We could ask what exactly this means. Ask, for example, whether and in what sense the self-consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth lives in the risen and ascended Lord. And what does the agency—the lordship—of the risen Jesus mean? How does it work? These and other questions, but we would have no way to answer them. What is apparent in the New Testament witness is that the risen Jesus now transcends time and space. He does not live biologically like we live biologically. He does not have more days. He has not grown older. But in some fresh sense his days—his life entire—has come to have new power and significance. He lives.

PAUL’S THEOLOGY OF RESURRECTION

The one writer in the New Testament who raises questions about resurrection directly is Paul, especially in the 15^thchapter of 1 Corinthians. The contrast between the position I am laying out here and Wright’s position in God’s Homecoming and the big resurrection book can perhaps be clarified by a brief look at the second part of the chapter. A convenient place to begin is with verse 35, where Paul raises two questions that are relevant to our inquiry: “How are the dead raised?” and “With what kind of body do they come?” How and what.

Paul’s answer to those questions begins with a discussion of continuity and discontinuity. He uses the metaphor of the seed, also cited by Jesus in John 12:24: Unless the seed dies, the plant will not come up. There is continuity between the seed and the plant—wheat seeds bring up wheat, not oats—but also discontinuity—the seed dies (in 1^st century science). In verses 42-44, he works this out for resurrection, focusing on discontinuity.

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. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body.

So the NRSVue translation. How to translate the last pair is much mooted. In his big book on resurrection, Wright argues that the translation here, “physical body” and “spiritual body,” is misleading. It’s not a matter of two substances: material and spiritual. He suggests rather that what Paul is contrasting is what animates each kind of body. The first, Greek soma psychikon, alludes to Genesis 2:7 where Yhwh God brings the first human to life; the second, the soma pneumatikon, has in mind something like Romans 8:11 where the Spirit of God is said to bring life to our dead bodies. 

This seems correct, although a full accounting would require a good deal of amplification. Clearly, as the next verses indicate, Paul is playing on Genesis 2. He has in mind two births, as it were, two ways we are brought to life: one by the breath of the creator (see also Psalm 104) and the other by the breath of the Spirit. More can and should be made of this. But perhaps our focus should fall on the earlier contrasts, especially the first, in the NRSVue translated as “perishable” and “imperishable.” I much prefer, with Handel’s Messiah ringing in my ears, “corruptible” and “incorruptible.” The Greek word here, phthoros, has to do with natural decay. Think autumn, both as a season and a season of life. To be in space and time is to know phthoros, corruptibility. Flesh of every kind grows old and decays, returns to the earth.

What would it mean for flesh to be incorruptible? It would require, I suggest, a move to a dimension in which time and decay no longer apply. Such a life would be unchanging, complete, eternal, unmoving. Not more days, but eternity for our days. It’s something like this that Paul seems to have in mind. He fills out the picture in verses 50:

What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (NRSVue)

Whatever resurrection means for Paul, it’s clearly not a simple continuation of the earth-bound existence we presently occupy. It’s not “flesh and blood” life. It’s not “bodily” in the ordinary earth-sense of “bodily.” Paul wants to be quite clear about this: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”

But at this point Wright refuses to take Paul at his word. Wright insists that Paul does not mean by flesh and blood “’physical humanity’ in the normal modern sense,” (which, by the way, is also the ordinary ancient sense) but only sinful humanity, humanity post-fall. It’s not flesh and blood that cannot inherit the kingdom of God, but only sinful flesh and blood. One might wonder why, if that is what Paul means, he didn’t say so, but it’s not what he means. From the flow of the chapter as a whole it’s quite clear that Paul is not talking about sin but about biological life. The resurrected life cannot simply be an ad infinitim extension of this present life, biology forever; it must take on the lineaments of eternity.

Like the life of Jesus, as Paul says, “We will bear the image of the one of heaven” (15:49). What is raised up, given agency, comes alive, is not the next moment of my life or yours but the whole of our lives. Our whole history. This life, the life you have lived and the life that I have lived, is given by the resurrecting power of the Spirit new agency and presence for the age to come. Resurrection is not more days but eternity for the days we have been given.

STANDING AT THE EDGE

Something like that. Paul admits that what he speaks is mystery (15:51). Let me take you back to where we began, standing at the edge of the grave of someone you love. Not long ago I stood at the grave of my friend, Larry. What I longed for was not another day for Larry, an extension of his life. Or, at least, not just that. Much as I would have liked more days for Larry, what I prayed for was that his days would be taken up into eternity, given new life, so that forever the universe will not be without Larry. Or you. Or me.

So I hope. What I have to offer is my life, this life, this one corruptible and corrupted life. My hope that is God will take this life, my one life, and raise it up. And the same for your life. This life is the most precious thing we have. For now the question is, in the words of the immortal Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” But what I do with it is not the last word. The last word has yet to be spoken. 

Clay