(This post is an excerpt from An Unorthodox Faith: A New Reformation for a Postmodern World by Kurt Struckmeyer)

 

In spite of nearly universal Christian belief about a heavenly afterlife, Jesus never proclaimed a message about life after death. It was not as if it was a foreign concept to him; the belief was widespread in the Roman Empire of the first century. The Egyptians believed in a shadowy existence after death and had for thousands of years. Likewise, the Greeks believed that an immortal soul continued after earthly existence ended, as did the Zoroastrians in Persia. From the south, north, and east, these ideas prevailed among the peoples surrounding Palestine. But for Jesus, otherworldliness and a future life in heaven was not a central part of his ministry or mission. His proclamation of the kingdom of God was about a transformed life on this side of the grave. It was all about how we live today, not what happens after we die.

So why is there this widespread belief—shared by most clergy—that the message of Jesus was a message about a heavenly afterlife? Perhaps uncritical acceptance of a centuries-long tradition of doctrines created by ecclesial committees and a fundamental lack of interest in serious biblical scholarship is part of the answer. But being afraid to speak the truth to laity is the major issue. Letting people believe what they want to believe is the easier path to take. After all, clergy stand by their parishioners at the graveside when a loved one dies. Comfort, not challenge, is a requirement of their job. Still, at some point it becomes necessary to tell the truth about what is really in the Bible, if in fact the Bible is to be a foundation of Christian faith. And one thing is sure—a heavenly afterlife was not central to the message of Jesus in the gospel accounts.

One confusion about a heavenly afterlife is the concept of the resurrection of the dead. People often assume that the resurrection spoken of in the New Testament is an immediate transition from the moment of death into a glorious heavenly existence in the presence of God (or Jesus). But it’s not. Biblical resurrection is the idea that the dead will someday return to a renewed life here on earth, not to a heavenly dimension.

In the first century, the idea of the bodily resurrection was a fairly recent innovation in Jewish thought, espoused primarily by the Pharisees—including the Apostle Paul who claimed he was educated as a Pharisee. The Pharisees believed that those who had died as martyrs for their faith would be raised by God to experience new life in an earthly messianic kingdom and would be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their martyrdom in a renewed life as vindicated heroes. Resurrection was an issue of justice for the faithful but was clearly a concept based on wish-fulfillment.

Development of Jewish thought about resurrection

Throughout the Hebrew Bible there is little mention of life after death outside of the subterranean Sheol. Unlike the Greeks, the Jews did not separate the human being into two parts—the body and the soul—with an immortal soul that survived the death of the mortal body. For most of the history of the Hebrew people, they believed that when someone died, everything about that person died. Still, many believed that the dead somehow continued a shadowy existence in Sheol until their memory was forgotten. It is only during what is sometimes called the “inter-testamental period” when the books of the Maccabees (Maccabees 1, 2, and 3) were written, that the idea of a bodily resurrection entered Jewish thought.

When Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) died, his vast empire was divided among his top generals. One of them, Seleucus (SIH-loo-cos) (312–280 BCE), became the ruler of an area that included Syria and the land of Israel. One of the descendants of the Seleucid (SIH-loo-sid) dynasty, Antiochus Epiphanes IV (an-TEE-uk-us ep-if-an-ACE) (215–163 BCE) began a concerted effort to increase the influence of Greek culture, known today as Hellenism—including the Greek pantheon of gods—among his diverse subjects, including the Jews. The Greeks were generally tolerant of other religions, and regional gods—including the Hebrew god Yahweh—were allowed to be worshipped in addition to the Greek gods. Most other religions went along with this syncretistic approach, but not the Jews. They were monotheistic, which sometimes meant that they believed in the existence of only one God, and at other times meant that they believed that their God was superior to all the other gods. When the Jewish majority refused to acknowledge the Greek gods, Antiochus stepped up his campaign of forced cultural and religious integration. Antiochus—who took the egotistic surname “Epiphanes” (ep-if-an-ACE), which translates as a “manifestation [of God]”—precipitated a Jewish popular revolt in Jerusalem around the year 168 BCE by placing a statue of Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple and then sacrificing a pig at the altar. His action created a widespread uproar among the Jewish people. Antiochus then began an intense repression and persecution of resistant Jews in which many people were cruelly martyred in horrific ways. This in turn led to the successful Maccabean revolt (168–165 BCE) and the eventual independence of the Jewish people from Greek control for about a century, beginning in 164 BCE and lasting until the Roman conquest in 63 BCE. It was during this period of insurrection and martyrdom that some Jewish thinkers began to propose that if God was just, God would raise the faithful martyrs from the dead so they could experience the new age of freedom and independence after the Greek armies of Antiochus were defeated.

The idea of the resurrection of the dead, of course, had been a part of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia for centuries. Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) was an ancient Iranian prophet, philosopher, and religious poet who may have lived somewhere between 800 and 600 BCE. The teachings espoused by his followers sound very familiar. They believed that in the beginning, all of creation was perfectly good but was subsequently corrupted by evil. The conflict between the truth and order of creation and the falsehood and chaos that threatened it involved the entire universe. Zoroastrian followers had an active role to play in the conflict through good thoughts, words, and deeds that were necessary to keep the chaos at bay. At the end of the ages, there would be a great battle between the forces of good and evil, in which good would triumph. A future savior would bring about an earthly resurrection of the dead, followed by a last judgment. Ultimately, creation would be restored to its original perfection.

Jewish thinkers began to integrate the Persian concept of an earthly resurrection into their ongoing religious theological development. Initially, the unjust suffering of the martyrs and their reward and vindication through resurrection were closely linked ideas. By the time of Jesus, this novel theological proposition was part of an ongoing religious debate in the Jewish community. The conservative Sadducees refused to recognize the possibility of resurrection based on their orthodox reading of the Torah. It was simply not part of their traditional teachings and therefore not acceptable. The more liberal Pharisees, however, accepted, developed, and promoted the idea. The resurrection of the dead would be ushered in when a new messianic age began. The arrival of the future messiah was the key. By this point in history, some Jewish theologians had suggested that all faithful people—not just the martyrs—would be resurrected to a new life when the latest oppressors—this time, the Romans—were defeated and an independent nation was again established. Still others were intrigued by the idea that evil people might also be resurrected, so that they could be judged for their past deeds and endure a physical punishment in retribution, paying them back for the suffering they had caused in others. This created a satisfying package of ideas: the martyrs and other faithful people would be ultimately rewarded, and their persecutors would receive an ultimate punishment. The tables would be turned, and a final retributive justice would be meted out by God.

The apocalyptic book of Daniel, written during this period, describes the resurrection of the dead this way:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

That is one of only two passages in the Hebrew Bible that speaks clearly about life after death, other than an existence in Sheol. The other is in the book of Isaiah, in an apocalyptic psalm.

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.
O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew,
and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

The image to keep in mind from these texts is that the dead are “sleeping”—that they are unconscious and unaware of time. It is only when they awake—when their corpses rise from the dust—that they will experience renewed life.

Despite all of this inventive reasoning, the resurrection of the dead was never connected to an afterlife in heaven. According to the Jewish proponents of resurrection, when the general resurrection occurred, people would be restored to a physical life on earth. And this is the entire meaning of the resurrection in Paul’s writings. Paul anticipated that the reported resurrection of Jesus signaled the beginning of a general resurrection of the dead, which he believed was imminent. The old age was ending, and a new messianic age was beginning.

But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

For some first-century Jewish thinkers, it was assumed that after some period of time—perhaps after a lengthy new life on earth—the resurrected martyrs would once again perish, like Lazarus of Bethany who Jesus resurrected in John’s gospel, and who as far as we know is not still walking around. Even if the new existence was somehow envisioned as everlasting, it was always thought to be lived solidly on the earth—never in God’s dwelling place in heaven.

Jesus on resurrection

So, what did Jesus believe about the resurrection of the dead? We don’t have much evidence, because as we said it was not central to his mission and message. If it had been, we’d have a lot of teachings about the life of the living dead.

There is only one gospel episode we can point to in which the resurrection is discussed, and the issue was not brought up by Jesus. It is found in three parallel accounts in the synoptic gospels. We are told that while he was in Jerusalem a group of Sadducees questioned Jesus about the resurrection, even though they ridiculed the idea of a bodily resurrection themselves. If the gospel stories are accurate, Jesus was quite familiar with the Pharisaic position and accepted their concept of a physical resurrection. Several members of the Sadducean elite came to Jesus and posed a hypothetical situation based on a Jewish law in the book of Deuteronomy that was intended to provide for the support of a widow and to retain her dead husband’s property within her husband’s family unit. The text stated:

When brothers live together, and one of them dies without a son, the widow of the deceased shall not marry anyone outside the family; but her husband’s brother shall go to her and perform the duty of a brother-in-law by marrying her.

The Sadducees presented Jesus with this unlikely situation: a young woman marries seven brothers in turn, failing to give birth to children each time, and survives every brother until her own eventual death. The Sadducees then asked Jesus, “In the resurrection, whose wife of the seven will she be?” Here is the response Jesus gave according to Mark’s gospel:

Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they were astounded at his teaching.

Astounded? Probably bumfoozled is more like it. However, Jesus makes two points. The first seems to be that after the earthly resurrection the institution of marriage would no longer exist, and everyone would be chaste and celibate. This idea would have been a great disappointment to Mark Twain (1835–1910) who believed that most folks would be extremely bored with an everlasting existence of harps and wings and stated that if heaven was to be sought after and desired, it would consist of eternal orgasm.

Eugene Peterson paraphrases the idea expressed by Jesus in Mark’s gospel:

You’re way off base, and here’s why: One, you don’t know your Bibles; two, you don’t know how God works. After the dead are raised up, we’re past the marriage business. As it is with angels now, all our ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God.

It is difficult to know what to make out of this exchange about the end of marriage in the resurrection, about resurrected bodies being celibate or angelic in nature, and the reference to the living patriarchs. But if this is all that Jesus really had to say about the topic, I think we should move on and accept that it was not at the core of his message.

In spite of what Jesus thought or said, in the centuries after his death Christian theologians began to integrate classical Greek philosophy into Christian thinking and belief. The idea that the mortal human body is inhabited by an immortal soul was adopted by a church that was rapidly moving away from its Jewish roots. At death, some Hellenistic theologians now speculated, there is a separation between the body and the soul. In Greek thought, only the soul lived on. For Jews, however, death and resurrection were about a completely integrated body.

Paul’s understanding of resurrection

In letters to his newly established churches, the Apostle Paul was dealing with blended communities of Jews and gentiles. Thus, he tried to blend their concepts about the afterlife—a disembodied soul lasting forever and an integrated body/soul being resurrected. He speculated that in our resurrected state we will have “spiritual” bodies but never tries to define it or explain it.

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. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

As you read Paul’s developing theology, it seems as if he was working out radically new ideas as he wrote, trying to find a balance somehow between Jewish integrated physical realities and pagan separated spiritual realities in his resurrection schema. But remember, all of this theological speculation is purely Paul, not Jesus. As someone once said, it seems as if Paul was constantly tap-dancing, improvising a theology that would work in the empire’s diverse Hellenistic context, bringing Jews and gentiles together.

Paul’s religious concepts ignored the historical Jesus in favor of his newly minted apocalyptic Christ. As a result, the curious Christian ideas about the resurrection of dead bodies, the existence of a separate eternal soul, and an afterlife in a heavenly realm in the sky are a mixture of very different concepts that Paul and later Hellenistic Christian theologians managed to blend together in complete disregard to what Jesus taught. The idea of resurrected bodies being transported to a heavenly realm is simply not a sound biblical concept and was certainly never espoused by Jesus.

But once the idea of a resurrected afterlife was introduced to Christianity, the discussion of what happens to the soul at the point of death was open to even more speculation. Does the disembodied soul go immediately to heaven? When does the soul’s assignment to heaven or hell occur? Is there a preliminary judgment at death and a final judgment later? Does the soul go to a waiting place, like purgatory, for a period of time? Are the body and the soul reunited when Christ returns? Are they brought together for an earthly existence or a heavenly existence? What kind of bodies will we have in the resurrection? Will they be physical or will they be spiritual? Will our resurrected bodies be perfect? Will my need for orthodontia be resolved? Will I have a perfect Body Mass Index, or will I still be overweight? There is no general agreement on any of these questions about body and soul in the resurrection because there are simply no sound biblical bases to support any of this speculation other than Paul’s fertile imagination and our own wish fulfillment. In the end, our various understandings of what happens after death are simply human inventions to satisfy a natural human longing that life should not end at death. These understandings also fulfill a basic human need for justice—the need to believe that undeserved suffering on earth will be reversed in heaven, that the evil which flourishes here will be punished in an afterlife, and that faithfulness in the face of persecution will somehow be rewarded.

Asleep in the grave

The idea that the immortal soul has an immediate entry into heaven or hell after death derives primarily from Medieval Roman Catholic theology based on the writings of Greek philosophers. The concept was later refuted by Protestant reformers in the fifteenth century, yet today it is generally accepted as a common belief by many Christians regardless of denomination. According to centuries-old Catholic teachings, immediately after death a person undergoes a divine judgment in which the soul’s eternal destiny is determined. Some disembodied souls are united with God in heaven, while others are separated from God in hell, often envisioned as a place of never-ending torment. In addition, Catholicism envisions a third state. Those souls that are not sufficiently free from the consequences of sin must first be cleansed through an intermediate state of purgatory—a process of purification—before they can be united with God. Regardless, the dead soul is immediately conscious after death and finds itself in purgatory, heaven, or hell. Martin Luther objected to these teachings, especially the concept of purgatory. But he further refuted the idea that the soul is immediately conscious after death. And he believed that there is only one judgment—a final judgment at the end of time—that will determine the soul’s fate. Luther conceived the state of the dead as a deep, dreamless sleep, removed from time and space, without consciousness and without feeling until the general resurrection at Christ’s apocalyptic second coming.

For just as one who falls asleep and reaches morning unexpectedly when he awakes, without knowing what has happened to him, we shall suddenly rise on the last day without knowing how we have come into death and through death. We shall sleep until He comes and knocks on the little grave and says, ‘Doctor Martin, get up!’ Then I shall rise in a moment and be with him forever.

Anglican bishop N. T. (Tom) Wright (b. 1948) tries to balance these Catholic and Protestant ideas, suggesting that the sleeping soul is always conscious. He contends that the references to God’s many heavenly motel rooms and the immediate access to paradise are descriptions of a temporary dwelling place, a kind of interim way station where the soul survives until the bodily resurrection on earth. He summarizes his ideas in this way:

In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state . . . We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies.

But Wright clarifies that after the resurrection of the dead, the body and soul will not go to heaven to be with Jesus. Jesus will instead return to the earth.

And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, “Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven.” It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.

What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfill the plan, you won’t be going up there to him, he’ll be coming down here . . . Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.

In Tom Wright’s vision of how things will happen in the resurrection, a heavenly afterlife amidst the clouds is not a part of our future. It’s all about creating heaven on earth.

I think Wright understands the Apostle Paul correctly. This is essentially what Paul says in the letter we call First Thessalonians. It is the earliest Christian writing we have, dating from within twenty years of Jesus’ death. The community at Thessalonica was concerned that some among them had died and they wanted to know what would happen to these dead friends when Jesus returned. Paul describes the dead as having fallen asleep, presumably in an unconscious state in Sheol or Hades, but does not suggest that they are dwelling in heaven with God and Jesus. Quite the opposite.

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.

The process of resurrection that Paul describes works like this. With a great deal of fanfare, Jesus descends from heaven to initiate the general resurrection of the dead. As he is coming down, the dead will rise first from their graves and will join Jesus in the sky. Then, the living too will rise to greet him in the clouds. Together, they will all descend to earth to begin a new age of resurrected earthly life which will presumably last forever. Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan (b. 1934) once explained the schema something like this. Paul’s imagery is similar to that of an imperial visit to a city or town in the empire. As the emperor draws near, heralds sound trumpets to notify the citizens of his approach. The people then come out of the city to greet the emperor on the road. As he approaches, the first thing he passes are the tombs of the dead on the outskirts of the town. Then he encounters the elated townspeople who come out to greet him. Together, they enter the town in a celebratory procession. Now imagine turning this scene from a horizontal axis to a vertical one and you have the description in Thessalonians.

That’s the New Testament understanding of the resurrection of the dead in a nutshell. The Apostle Paul never says that a life in heaven awaits; only a renewed life here on earth. Prior to the resurrection, he never suggests that the dead are in heaven smiling down on us. He doesn’t picture them pursuing their favorite activities in the presence of God. They are asleep—presumably unconscious—buried under the ground. That’s the biblical picture. I’m sure if people really understood this creative scenario of Paul’s imagination, they would be deeply disappointed. This isn’t how most people imagine the afterlife. Heaven, halos, wings, and harps aren’t part of the story. But even if we understand Paul’s concept correctly, it still isn’t part of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus was focused almost entirely on the here and now on this side of the grave. Beyond that, in terms of what happens after death, Jesus was quite vague. Vagueness, ambiguity, mystery, and unknowing are probably all we can really understand about death.