Friday, March 13, 2009

Accessible Eschatology: life after the afterlife

And now that life is a little less day-to-day, back to our "accessible eschatology" series. Today I didn't even remember what I had already talked about, so I went back and read everything I've already said starting back in January. If you're new to the series, I encourage you to do the same, or else this will just float out there with no context for you.

We turn our attention now to personal eschatology, the study of the question, "what happens when a person dies?" Under the umbrella of eschatology, this is the arena that is most often talked about, because death happens. Sure, it's possible to ignore death or not think about it, especially in our culture where death is the realm of select health care professionals, but since "there are only two certainties in life - death and taxes," death is way more real to most people than the coming return of Jesus. ("What coming return?" Exactly.)

So, what does happen when a person dies? If I had to guess, I bet the three most common answers to that question in our culture would be as follows, in order:
1. "I don't know."
2. "You go to heaven."
3. "Nothing. You decompose."
Let's work with #2 - "You go to heaven." What do people mean by "heaven"? Well, it's rather common and even cool these days to use your imagination to craft a compelling vision of heaven (like in Mitch Albom's book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven). A lot of that is very meaningful to the person doing the imagining, whatever else other people (myself included) think of it. Some "you go to heaven" folks would alter that just a bit:
"Good people go to heaven, and bad people go to hell."
Many evangelical Christians would tweak this to say:
"People who trusted in Jesus as their personal Savior in this life go to heaven, and those who never trusted in Jesus go to hell." (Sidebar - we could have a nuanced biblical conversation about who gets the "thumbs up" and who gets the "thumbs down," but that is another conversation for another day. In the meantime, if you're more curious about that than you are about the topic of this post, by all means close your browser and go read a good book like this one.)
Asked to describe heaven, the average Christian might say something like this: "There will be streets of gold, and we will worship God for eternity."

For a picture of the afterlife, this has some quality slices of the truth incorporated. However, there's something important missing, something that is rarely taught about in a great number of churches: The ultimate biblical hope for the future is not for the afterlife. It's for life after the afterlife.

What does this mean? Human beings were created as bodily creatures. We were meant to live a physical existence. Ever since the Hebrew prophets, the hope of the people of God has been for our resurrection from the dead. Among other things, the resurrection of Jesus was God's way of declaring his faithfulness to the promise of our resurrection. We will all be raised from the dead in bodily form; Jesus gives us evidence of this as the "firstfruits" of the resurrection (see I Corinthians 15; the firstfruits metaphor is drawn from agriculture).

The Bible teaches that paradise (what we commonly think of as "heaven"), our home in the afterlife, will be a splendid place. We will no longer struggle with sin there, and we will experience fellowship with Jesus. On the other hand, paradise is a holding tank where we will await the even more glorious resurrection from the dead. That... is our real hope. We will possess incorruptible bodies, engage in meaningful relationships, and pursue physical tasks - all without the frustration and futility that faces us today. It will be paradise-plus. The ideals of the kingdom of God will be lived out in a physical kingdom, not just a place where our souls float around. It will be more wonderful than paradise; it will be more wonderful than the garden of Eden; it will certainly be more wonderful than any utopia that can be imagined by the human mind.

We'll talk more about this place in coming posts. In the meantime, I probably have a good number of skeptics in the audience. Allow me to provide a few readings from the Bible for your consideration:
Isaiah 26:19
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Daniel 12
I Corinthians 15
I Thessalonians 4:13-18
Revelation 19-22
And if you don't believe me yet, consider what Anglican Bishop Tom Wright has to say - he has a whole book on the issue: Surprised by Hope. I don't agree with Wright on every count, but he knows the Bible very well, and he gets a lot right in this book. *UPDATE* (Saturday, March 14): I wrote this post yesterday, the same day a much more prominent blogger - evangelical Methodist scholar Ben Witherington III - posted this interview with Bishop Wright. Check it out.

Next post: THE END OF THE WORLD!!!...?