Etymologically, eschatology means “study of the last things.” By now, however, readers will have discerned that eschatology is not simply a concluding topic but an indispensable lens through which we come to understand the whole system of Christian faith and practice. We have seen that eschatology comes even before soteriology, since the consummation (the Sabbath rest) was the goal of Adam’s trial. Graciously, God kept Adam from eating the fruit of the Tree of Life, which would have confirmed him and his posterity in everlasting death (Ge 3:22–24). Instead, God opened up a history of promise leading to the Last Adam, who won the right for all who are in him to eat the fruit of everlasting life (Rev 22:2).
In this section, then, we focus on eschatology more narrowly conceived: For what do we hope? What happens when we die, and what do we mean when we confess our faith in “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting"? In spite of the failures of Adam and Israel, “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his” (Heb 4:9).
It is the gospel itself that organizes our meditations concerning life, death, and the everlasting hope. From this perspective, the promise of being welcomed into God’s gracious presence immediately upon death is joyful news. And yet it is only the intermediate state. Going to heaven when we die is the way station, not the final hope announced in the gospel.
Eschatology and creation are interdependent themes. Are all things, visible and invisible, the good creation of a good God, as reported in Genesis 1:10, 18, 21, 25, 31 and throughout Scripture? Do we expect salvation of nature or from nature?
For centuries, Christians have borrowed the language of the immortality of the soul. However, as with many terms borrowed from ancient philosophy, the ancient writers of the church did not borrow uncritically.
There are two extreme positions in debates over the immortality of the soul. At one end is the Platonist view, most obviously expressed in Plato’s own Phaedo (esp. 64a–67b). According to this view, the soul or spirit is that higher (even divine) self that transcends bodily existence. Existing eternally in the invisible realm of the forms, the soul knows the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. However, its “fall” consists in its bodily incarceration. Cast mercilessly into time and space, the soul must strive to ascend beyond material, spatial, and temporal embodiment in order to remember the things that it has always known in the eternal realm. In this conception, “salvation” is the liberation of the soul from the body at death and final reunion with the One after a series of educative reincarnations. Philo of Alexandria translated the Old Testament into this Platonist scheme, while Origen of Alexandria accomplished the same distortion of Christianity a century-and-a-half after Philo’s death. Remarkably similar views are found in Eastern religions (especially in the doctrines of karma, samsara, and reincarnation) and in the popular mysticism of the West, from Gnosticism to the New Age movement.
We encounter this idea also today in process theology, and in various expressions of radical feminism and neopaganism. At death, according to Protestant theologian John Hick (drawing on the Tibetan Book of the Dead for support), the soul survives, and in the final state all self-identity merges into the One.1 He writes, “We cannot know how many worlds or series of worlds there are; and indeed the number and nature of the individual’s successive embodiments will presumably depend upon what is needed for him to reach the point at which he transcends ego-hood and attains the ultimate unitive state, or nirvana.”2 Grenz observes,
Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether articulated an even more obviously monistic vision. She saw death as “the final relinquishment of individuated ego into the great matrix of being.” For her, the Absolute is a “great collective personhood … in which our achievements and failures are gathered up, assimilated into the fabric of being, and carried forward into new possibilities.”3
Ontological monism destroys personal existence, but as Grenz notes, “In losing personhood, monism also destroys community.”4 When, as Eastern religions commonly teach, the self finally achieves its unity with all being, there is no personal consciousness of this ostensible benefit. The raindrop dissolves into an ocean of being. Lost in this paradigm of “overcoming estrangement” are both the reality of persons and community.
Even in the Christian West the lingering thrall of native paganism has kept alive the immortality of the soul. In pagan religious and philosophical worldviews, sin, evil, and death are considered part of the cycle of nature. They are simply “the way things are” because of finite embodiment. One is born, lives, and dies: each stage is as natural as the other. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, introduced the phrase “pass on” (and “pass away”) into the popular vocabulary, and argued that illness and death are illusions (what Eastern religions call maya).5 In this basically Gnostic worldview, the material world (including our bodies), evil, and suffering are erroneous beliefs that can be overcome by proper enlightenment in the eternal principles of universal harmony. The fall is not to be explained in historical terms—as the result of a representative act of covenant breaking in which we were included—but as essential to material creation as such. However, such ontic wounds, inasmuch as they pertain to the realm of matter, belong to mere appearances. We must transcend them, and death is the most decisive point at which this happy goal is finally attained.
However, in Scripture there is no assumption that the soul is immortal. Rather, like the body, it is a created substance with a beginning and an end. Immortality was the goal held out to Adam and Eve in the Tree of Life, and not merely for the soul but for the whole person. It is this immortality that was forfeited by Adam but has been promised to those who trust in Jesus Christ. Nor is human existence cyclical, through the endless rebirths of the soul. Rather, the soul comes into existence with the body and is oriented to a fulfillment in time and history that is identified in Christian eschatology as the consummation.
The pagan idea of the immortality of the soul and the Christian doctrine of the gift of everlasting life issue in radically different worldviews. It is interesting that whereas Jesus, when he was raised, immediately set about to find his companions for a meal, Descartes locked himself in a room by himself and contemplated his own existence, pretending that he was shorn of arms and legs, eyes and ears, left as a naked soul. It is no wonder that he concluded that the most indubitable reality in the universe was consciousness of his real self as pure mind.
If the real world is exclusively spiritual for the first view, the second reduces reality to matter; hence, it is typically called materialism. As old as pre-Socratic philosophy, atheistic materialism became especially popular in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche. There is no “beyond” and therefore no transcendent telos marked by a significant origin or destiny. Although Nietzsche adopted a cyclical view of temporal reality, he argued that we create our own meaning for ourselves, striving for “immortality” in the form of a heroic legacy. That thread of thinking that leads from Nietzsche to Derrida is, more than anything else, a sharp reaction against Platonism—which for these writers included Christianity.6 Right through to the end of our theology, then, we discern the outline of the contrasting worldviews: overcoming estrangement, the stranger we never meet, and the biblical paradigm of meeting a stranger.
Not all denials of the existence of the soul and its life after bodily death are atheistic. Often drawing on nineteenth-and twentieth-century Jewish scholarship, some biblical scholars and theologians have argued, with G. B. Caird, that “during most of the long period covered by the Old Testament the Hebrew people had no belief in an after-life.”7 Only when Jewish apocalypticism became tainted with Greek philosophy was the idea of a life after death introduced into Judaism, we are told. Accordingly, it is suggested that preexilic Jews hoped for a long life, not for survival beyond death in either a disembodied or an embodied form. Nevertheless, this thesis has been unraveling in recent Jewish interpretation. Among others, Jon Levenson has shown that the notion of a soul and its survival beyond death, prior to a final resurrection, has been essential to the Jewish hope well before the Second Temple period.8
Valiantly defending the reality of Christ’s resurrection and of the believer’s hope in bodily resurrection, some Christian theologians (such as Wolfhart Pannenberg and G. C. Berkouwer) nevertheless overreact against the Platonist heritage by questioning an intermediate state of disembodied existence.9 Some defenders refer to this position as “nonreductive physicalism,” because although it denies the existence of the soul distinct from the body, it does acknowledge a spiritual aspect of bodily existence.10
10.
A biblical anthropology navigates between these extremes, affirming the distinction between body and soul while understanding their separation at death as a curse rather than a blessing.11 In spite of this curse, believers enjoy God’s gracious presence upon their death, awaiting the day when they will be raised as a psychosomatic unity in his everlasting kingdom.
As I argued in considering human personhood in chapter 12, Christianity denies any confusion of the Creator and creature. No more than our bodies are our souls in any sense divine or intrinsically immortal. If the soul survives physical death, it is only because God grants this life as a gift in Christ. In its Christology, Christianity displays its clearest opposition to the Platonist/Gnostic scheme by its announcement that God himself became flesh to win our redemption by his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. Furthermore, by focusing all attention on Christ’s historical descent, ascent, and return in the flesh, the gospel is diametrically opposed to the myth of the exiled soul and its ostensible liberation from its bodily “prison house.” The gospel concentrates on the good news not that our soul survives death but that Christ welcomes us into the fellowship of the Trinity when we die, in which fellowship we await final salvation of our whole person in the bodily resurrection at the end of the age.12 In its ecclesiology, it speaks not of a fusion of essences, where personal identity is submerged in a cosmic unity, but of a communion of persons, gathered at the lavish feast to enjoy each other’s company forever with its gracious host.
Biblical eschatology moves forward, from promise to fulfillment, not in cycles. Already in Paradise creation is merely the anteroom for a fuller human purpose and destiny for creation. In this intervening time between the fall and the consummation, there have been various periods of God’s direct intervention in history and nature, as we have seen. However, during most of this history (including our own), nature is governed by God’s providence. Believers share in the common curse and in God’s common grace.
Furthermore, death is not “passing away,” and it is certainly not an illusion. For believers, it is “the last enemy” that must be destroyed (1Co 15:26). We share in Christ’s death and therefore also in his life (Ro 6:1–12; Php 3:10). Therefore, by looking to our head, we already know the outcome of this struggle, and so there is no reason for believers to fear death’s ultimate triumph (Ps 23:4; Heb 2:15; Ro 8:38–39; 1Co 15:55–57; Php 1:21–23; 2Co 5:8; Rev 14:13). For unbelievers, this death is merely the harbinger of “the second death": everlasting judgment (Rev 20:14).
Part of the curse is the separation of soul from body (Ge 2:17; 3:19, 22; 5:5; Ro 5:12; 8:10; 1Co 15:21). Death is an enemy, not a friend (1Co 15:26) and a terror (Heb 2:15), so horrible that even the one who would triumph over it was overcome with grief, fear, and anger at the tomb of his friend Lazarus (Jn 11:33–36). Jesus did not see death as a benign deliverer, the sunset that is as beautiful as the sunrise, or as a portal to “a better life.” Looking death in the eye, he saw it for what it was, and his disciples followed his example. After the deacon’s martyrdom, we read, “Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him” (Ac 8:2). The reason that believers do not mourn as those who have no hope (1Th 4:13) is not that they know that death is good, but that they know that God’s love and life are more powerful than the jaws of death. Although believers, too, feel its bite, Christ has removed the sting of death (Jn 14:2–3; Php 1:21; 1Co 15:54–57; 2Co 5:8). That is because “the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1Co 15:56–57). Downplaying the seriousness of the foe only trivializes the debt that was paid and the conquest that was achieved at the cross and the empty tomb.
In the intermediate state, believers are not simply in contemplative repose. Nor are they lost souls wandering throughout the realm of shadows or crossing back and forth over the river Styx ferried by Charon. Rather, they are made part of the company assembled at the true Zion, with “innumerable angels in festal gathering” and “the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb 12:22–24). Admittedly, we know very little from Scripture about the intermediate state. Nearly all of the passages cited concerning heaven refer to the everlasting rather than the intermediate state.
Several views have been put forward against the immediate, conscious existence of believers in the intermediate state.
(a) Soul sleep. Advocates of soul sleep, also known as psychopannychism, hold that upon one’s death the soul enjoys neither heaven nor hell during the intermediate state, but unconsciousness until the final judgment. A similar belief is thnetopsychism, which teaches that the soul also dies along with the body and both are raised together. Some who hold this position adopt an anthropological monism, denying the existence of a soul distinct from the body.
Although these views found few champions in church history, soul sleep of the first type seems to have enjoyed a revival at the time of the Reformation. In fact, Calvin wrote his first theological treatise against this view, defending the position most closely associated with early Jewish and Christian teaching: namely, that at “Abraham’s side,” the soul does survive the body at death, which is neither the new heavens and new earth of the consummation nor a place of suffering, but a place of intermediate joy in the presence of the Lord with his people. The Scriptures speak of the intermediate state as conscious existence, not soul sleep (Ps 16:10; 49:14–15; Ecc 12:7; Lk 16:22; 23:43; Php 1:23; 2Co 5:8; Rev 6:9–11; 14:13).
A variation of thnetopsychism is defended by Wolfhart Pannenberg as the restorationist theory.13 A similar perspective was suggested by G. C. Berkouwer.14 According to this view, Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus cannot be considered historical even if one adopts the traditional view, since the existence of the one in hell and the other in heaven presupposes that the final judgment has already taken place. Accordingly, as George Eldon Ladd concluded, the scope of this parable is not the intermediate state but “the hardness and obduracy” of the Pharisees who “refuse to accept the witness of Scripture to the person of Jesus.”15
In my judgment, Ladd’s exegesis is entirely sound. Jesus’ parables are never historical narratives or doctrinal descriptions, and they all concentrate on the kingdom as it is dawning in Christ’s person and work. Yet the fact still remains that even in Sheol, believers are “gathered to [their] fathers” and are conscious of being in the presence of God and the saints, even when their body lies in the grave. The contrast between the wicked and believers is that the latter will be brought out of the pit of death (Sheol) and see the light of life (Ps 49:7–15), “for you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures for-evermore” (Ps 16:10–11). Jesus told the believing criminal, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Lk 23:43), even though Jesus himself would not be raised until the third day, and when he died he called out, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (v. 46).
The body, apart from the soul, is dead (Jas 2:26), yet for believers, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2Co 5:8). Neither the everlasting consummation nor unconsciousness, this intermediate state is God’s preservation of the personal consciousness of believers in his presence awaiting the resurrection of the dead. In the book of Revelation, “the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne” cry out from before God’s throne, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?’” (Rev 6:9–10). Conscious of their blessedness, the souls of the martyrs are also conscious that their complete salvation has not yet been fully realized.
At the same time, it should not be surprising that the resurrection of the body was especially pushed to the forefront with “the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2Ti 1:10). Christianity therefore does not build on the pagan ruins of the immortality of the soul, but brings “immortality to light through the gospel.” It is an immortality that is bestowed as a gift in the resurrection, not a given of our nature as such. In other words, immortality finds its definition in eschatology and soteriology rather than anthropology.
Postmortem salvation. Another challenge to immediate, conscious existence in the Lord’s presence is the concept of postmortem salvation. Since the ancient church there have been those who have argued that the intermediate state offers the opportunity for condemned souls to repent and be saved. This view is increasingly attractive especially among Christians who want to affirm both the possibility of salvation for non-Christians and the necessity of hearing and responding to the gospel.16 However, this position is also contradicted by passages that teach explicitly the decisiveness of repentance and faith in this life, followed by judgment (Lk 16:26; Heb 9:27; Gal 6:7–8).
Purgatory. Also at odds with immediate, conscious presence of the soul with God is the Roman Catholic dogma of purgatory. According to this teaching, even if the guilt of sin is forgiven, the punishment for particular sins must be suffered before entrance into paradise. Purgatory is but an extension of the doctrine of penance, which denies the sufficiency of Christ’s active and passive obedience. If the guilt of our sins has been fully remitted, then punishment would be capricious and unjust. Besides contradicting central doctrines of the gospel, the idea that after people die they enter a state of purgation has no biblical support. Rather, the idea can be traced through Origen to the speculations of Plato and the Greco-Roman belief in three levels of existence in Hades: the lower region Tartarus (hell), a middle region for those who were neither good nor evil, and the Elysian Fields, often identified with the Isles of the Blessed.
The wide evidence of belief in a period of probation—of testing—before attaining everlasting glory in many religions may be considered a relic of the original covenant given to humanity in Adam. However, the Bible identifies this probation with the representative headship of Adam, recapitulated and fulfilled by the Last Adam. Non-Christian religions, however, place this trial in the hands of every person, to be fulfilled personally by works, if not in this life then in the next.17
By contrast, some in early Judaism taught that the soul at death goes to Gehenna, a holding place for final resurrection and judgment, and, as we have already seen above, Jesus taught that while unbelievers go to Gehenna at death, believers are with him in paradise. Roman Catholic theology bases the idea of purgatory on 2 Maccabees 12:42–45, which speaks of Judas Maccabeus having “made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin.” However, this act of Judas Maccabeus was a large sum of money that he sent to the temple “for a sin offering.” This is precisely the background of the temple worship that the writer to the Hebrews (among others, including Jesus) says has come to an end with Christ’s sacrifice of himself. By using this apocryphal (i.e., noncanonical) verse as a proof text for purgatory, Roman Catholic interpretation returns to the shadows of the law after the reality has come. Those who die in mortal sin go directly to hell, but with few exceptions all believers die with some venial sins that must be atoned for. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church,
All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. The Church formulated her doctrine of faith on Purgatory especially at the Councils of Florence and Trent The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead.18
As for those who die in mortal sin, “the teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, ‘eternal fire.’”19
The clear teaching of Scripture, however, is that every believer goes to be with the Lord upon death. Therefore, there is no point in praying for the dead, much less for purchasing indulgences, or otherwise expending effort on behalf of securing an earlier release of the departed from their punishments in purgatory. “Just as it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes the judgment …” (Heb 9:27). Furthermore, it is just as clearly and centrally taught in Scripture that believers do not “achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven,”20 but are clothed in the righteousness and holiness of Christ’s sufficient merit.
The concept of the essential immortality of the soul is not a subset of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body but its antithesis. Especially in contrast to contemporary assumptions—even among many Christians—it is significant that Christianity does not teach salvation by death. It is striking that the Apostles’ Creed insists upon our ultimate hope as “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” not “going to heaven when I die.” This is not to say that we do not go to heaven when we die, nor that this is not an obvious gain, especially since the Scriptures expressly teach otherwise.21 However, it is important to remind ourselves that as wonderful as it is to be in God’s presence, even separated from our flesh, it is the intermediate rather than the final state.
Our baptism presupposes the resurrection of the body, which is why it is a bodily sacrament and not merely a spiritual exercise of the mind. Every time we eat of the bread and drink of the wine in the Lord’s Supper we proclaim not only Christ’s death but his return in the flesh and even now feed on his body and blood for our salvation. Through these sacraments, our decaying bodies receive God’s pledge that they will be raised and receive immortality from his own risen and glorified flesh.
In the consummation, not only the earth but heaven itself will become new. As human bodies will be reunited in everlasting joy and integrity with their souls, so too earth and heaven will become one cosmic sanctuary of everlasting joy. Jesus spoke of it as a palingenesis (re-creation) in Matthew 19:28. For believers, at the resurrection the whole person—embodied soul and ensouled body—will be granted the gift of everlasting life (immortality). It is remarkable that Job longed to be in God’s presence even in the same flesh that was wasting with pain and disease: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!” (Job 19:25–27). Similarly, Paul observes that although we groan in body and spirit now, “we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved” (Ro 8:23–24).
A lodestar for the Christian hope is 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul not only treats the resurrection of believers as belonging to the same event (though in two stages) as that of their forerunner, Jesus Christ,22 but also considers the way in which the renewal of all things takes place. Even now, the resurrection of the dead in the age to come is being partly realized in the present by the renewal of the inner person (regeneration). Those who were “dead in the trespasses and sins” are already raised spiritually and are seated with Christ (cf. Eph 2:1–6; Ro 6). In 1 Corinthians 15:26, 51–55, Paul makes it clear that there is an order to this renewal: first spiritual resurrection, and then bodily resurrection, completing the total renewal of believers. As is also taught in 2 Corinthians 4:16–18, the “outer self” is wasting away while the “inner self” is being renewed day by day in the image of Christ (cf. Ro 8:9—30; 2Ti 1:10; Col 3:1–17). In 1 Corinthians 15:50 Paul says, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” Yet notice the comparison: “As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (v.v. 48—49).
Is Jesus raised bodily? Not only is that answered affirmatively in the Gospels, where Jesus eats with his disciples and even invites Thomas to inspect his wounds; it is answered affirmatively in this same chapter. In fact, Paul’s whole point in 1 Corinthians 15 is to challenge a sect that is teaching that the resurrection has already happened as a “spiritual” event. If Christ is not raised bodily, then we will not be raised bodily either. If this is Paul’s argument, it would not make any sense that he should turn the resurrection into a nonbodily event after all.
As with his flesh/Spirit contrast more generally, Paul is not thinking in terms of an ontological dualism (bodies/spirits) but an eschatological dualism (this age/the age to come). The powers and potentialities of this present age (such as modern medicine) may keep us from dying as soon as we might, but they cannot raise us to immortal glory. In its present condition, this body cannot withstand the glory of the heavenly city; it must be glorified, as Christ’s body was, in order to participate in the age (such as modern medicine) to come. Flesh and blood in its present, fallen condition cannot endure the joys of Zion. Nevertheless, our bodies will be changed (1Co 15:51), not replaced. “For … the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (v.v. 52–53, emphasis added). We cannot imagine the glory of our future existence, but we can look to Christ as our forerunner: “He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies …” (Ro 8:11), and Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Php 3:21). So the contrast is not between this body and another body but between this body in its lowly condition and this body changed into the glorious condition of Christ’s own body.
There is something to be noted about Paul’s analogy in 1 Corinthians 15:42—44 of the seed that is planted in the earth and rises as a plant. Whatever the apparent discontinuities between an apple seed and an apple tree, it is the same substance. Paul does not contrast embodiment with disembodiment; rather, he contrasts being with not being in the presence of Jesus Christ. The Platonist longs to be stripped not only of sin and death but of the body itself, while Paul longs to be “further clothed” (2Co 5:4). As Robert Reymond observes, “What Paul would most prefer would be that he might be alive at the return of the Lord and be clothed with the resurrection body without laying the mortal body down in death (vv. 2—4). But even the intermediate state is better by far than this present existence, beset as the present is with sin in which we have less direct communion with the Lord (v. 6).”23
Just as Jesus ate and drank after his resurrection, there will be eating and drinking in the new creation, although this time at the consummated marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9), with Jesus drinking wine with us (Lk 22:18), it is his eager expectation to feast with us when he returns (Mt 26:29–30). The prominent theme of eating and drinking in the presence of the Lord that one finds in the Old Testament historical books, recapitulated in the ministry of Jesus, is consummated in the new order. In the closing chapter of John’s Apocalypse, there is a river flowing (Rev 22:1), with the Tree of Life “yielding its fruit each month” (Rev 22:2). Although the consummation is expressed in this powerful apocalyptic imagery, the purchase of such imagery is lost if there is no physical creation. We are creatures of time and space, and we will not transcend our humanity but the bondage of our humanity to the conditions of sin and death. Wayne Grudem is exactly right when he argues, “Although a popular hymn speaks of the time ‘when the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more,’ Scripture does not give support to that idea.”24 Rather, all of our times will be gathered together in the fullness of God’s Sabbath rest: everlasting joy.
1. How does the historical economy of Christ’s descent, ascent, and return in the flesh reorient our hope, away from the pagan idea of the eternal state as disembodied existence?
2.On the question of the intermediate state (i.e., between death and the final resurrection), we may err in two directions. What are those extremes, and where would we go in Scripture to find the proper balance?
3.Is the Roman Catholic concept of purgatory capable of being harmonized with the gospel? Why or why not?
4.Is death “natural"?
5.What is the Christian’s ultimate hope for the future?
1. John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976): 399–424.
2. Ibid., 417.
3. Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1994), 760, from Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 258.
4. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 760.
5. Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures (Boston: Trustees Under the Will of Mary Baker Eddy, 1934), 186 (ll. 11–15).
6. Michael Horton, “Eschatology after Nietzsche,” in Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 20–45.
7. G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), 244.
8. Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006); cf. Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2008).
9. Wolfhart Pannenberg, What Is Man? (trans. Duane A. Priebe; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 46–47; Jesus—God and Man (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 87). I pointed out in chapter 12 the reticence of G. C. Berkouwer to affirm an intermediate state (see page 377, esp. fn. 10). It is not surprising that among more conservative and confessional Protestants, Reformed theologians are especially drawn to this view out of an understandable suspicion of a nature-grace (and correlatively, body-soul) dualism.
10. See especially Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006).
11. For an excellent treatment of this topic, which encompasses “last things,” see the excellent book by John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).
12. Although there are reasons to be wary of certain aspects of his construction, the contrast I am drawing here can be seen also in the title of Oscar Cullman’s Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead (London: Epworth, 1958).
13. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Constructive and Critical Functions of Christian Eschatology,” HTR 77 (1984): 130–31.
14. G. C. Berkouwer, Studies in Dogmatics: The Return of Christ (ed. Marlin J. Van Elderen; trans. James Van Oosterom; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 38–40, 59.
15. G. E. Ladd, The Last Things (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 34.
16. See for example Gabriel Fackre, “Divine Perseverance,” in G. Fackre, R. Nash, and J. Sanders, What about Those Who Have Never Heard? Three Views on the Destiny of the Unevangelized (ed. J. Sanders; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 71–95.
17. Interestingly, for example, Mary Baker Eddy even calls this “afterlife” a period of “probation.” There is no heaven or hell—no place for the soul to “go” at death—but only a higher state of consciousness for those who have done well. Those who have failed to do well encounter God’s “suffering love” until they are purified (Miscellaneous Writings, 1883–1896 [Boston: A. V. Stewart, 1896], 160). This is nearly identical to the views of Plato and Origen, with clear parallels in Eastern religions.
18. Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, Mo.: Liguori Publications, 1994), 268–69.
19. Ibid., 270.
20. Ibid.
21. See Robert Strimple, “Hyper-Preterism and the Resurrection of the Body,” in When Shall These Things Be? (ed. Keith Mathison; Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 2004), 287–352.
22. This is the thrust of Richard Gaffin’s richly insightful argument in Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 1987).
23. Robert Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville: Nelson, 1998), 1018.
24. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Bible Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 1162.