Surprised By Hope

A couple of months ago, I was chatting to my friend Neil on the way home from church, and in that conversation, I confessed to him that I had no idea what happens to people after they die.

This might come as a surprise to some people who know me. Lots of people have solid ideas about what happens to people after they die. For different people, those ideas are very different. Here in Scotland, many people believe that death is a final end. Many more believe that death marks a physical, and perhaps also a spiritual, reunion with the rest of the universe, as the matter of your body begins to be slowly digested and recycled: hence why ever more people are opting to be cremated rather than buried in one piece. Other minorities believe in an immortal soul that goes to some other place - be it heaven, hell, purgatory, nirvana or reincarnation. I belong to the Christian community, which is supposed to have clear answers on these questions passed down from ancient times, and people who know me know that I think hard about doctrines. So it may be a surprise that amongst all the convictions which people have all around me, and amongst all my own convictions on other topics, I hadn’t the faintest clue what happens to people after they die.

If you are surprised, let me surprise you some more: I am of no fixed opinion on a whole range of really important philosophical and theological topics, from the existence of the soul to the purpose of sex, from the nature of the sacraments to the metaphysics of the mind. But late last year, I set myself some New Year’s resolutions to address some of these questions. Not, by any means, to decide once and for all the end of the matter: just to form a well-informed opinion. Sometimes staying quiet isn’t good enough: I’m aiming to rectify my silence on these topics, because I think these topics are too important to ignore.

And one of the issues I picked out was this very issue: what happens to people after they die? To that end, Neil recommended me a book by the conservative Anglican theologian, Tom Wright, called Surprised By Hope, published in 2007, at which point I was just learning to spell.

As a result of this book, I feel I understand what the Christian orthodoxy is, and feel able to treat that view as my working assumption.

Wright defends traditional Christian orthodoxy. He claims that his view is orthodox, and I’m roundly convinced that it is. When I wrote down in bullet points what his view amounted to, I found that I had more or less re-written half the Nicene Creed.

• Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
• On the third day, he rose from the dead.
• He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
• He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
• His kingdom will have no end.
• We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Amen. That’s pretty much it. All that I need to stress, to avoid under-stating Wright’s view, is that he specifically thinks that physical creation, including our bodies, will be transformed into a new kind of physicality, including new kinds of physical bodies for you and me, and that the ‘world to come’ means that heaven and earth - which he regards as God’s physical space and our physical space - will be united.

He contrasts this orthodox view with several views common today amongst Christians, some of which have even been muddled up with the traditional orthodoxy:

• ‘Jesus was raised to new life, spiritually, like a ghost.’
• ‘Jesus literally ascended into the sky, as if he had an invisible jetpack: and that’s where he is now.’
• ‘The Christian hope is that we will go to be united with God in heaven after we die.’
• ‘The Christian hope is that we will be snatched up to heaven at the rapture and taken to a resurrection life there.’
• ‘The Christian hope is that we will experience God’s eternal life temporarily before we die.’
• ‘Jesus won’t really judge anyone, because he loves everyone, and because he’s meek and lowly, not judgy.’
• ‘The world will be redeemed through the work of the Church.’
• ‘Only God can ever make a difference to the sinful state of the world, so the only works we should care about now are “saving souls”.’

I am happy to admit that I have often been guilty of most of these heresies. The only ones I’ve never been tempted by are the ‘rapture’ view, and the thing about the invisible jetpack.

Wright has not definitively put any of these ideas to rest for me. Surprised By Hope is just not that kind of book. It’s not a treatise. It’s actually quite light on substantial argument in favour of Wright’s position. Wright’s main achievement for me, isn’t to convince me that he’s right, but that his position is a good starting point, a good place from which I should need to be convinced.

He does this chiefly by showing that his view is the consensus view of the New Testament. (He claims to be showing it is the consensus view of ‘the early Church’, but he never presents much evidence outside the New Testament, so I’m being charitable by restricting his claim to the New Testament authors.) Say what you like about Scriptural authority; if Mark, Matthew, Luke, John and Paul all were convinced something was apostolic teaching, you’d better well take it seriously.

If you want convincing, take a look for yourself. Some of the key New Testament texts are John 5; Acts 17:30-32, 24:14-16; 1 Cor 15, 16:22; 2 Cor 4-5; Rom 6, 8; Col 3:1-4; Eph 1:10; 1 Thess 4:14-18 and of course Rev 21-22.

You can also try convincing yourself that this is coherent with the Old Testament hope, by looking at Isa 11, Dan 7, Ps 2, and having another look at the assumptions behind Paul’s behaviour in Acts 24:14-16.

The only significant problem texts I’ve found for Wright’s view are 2 Cor 4-5 and Rev 21-22. In 2 Cor 4-5, Paul seems to plainly assert that we will have to leave the body in order to face the judgement seat of Christ, and which makes no apology for the assertion that, even though Christ has reconciled us to God, we will still have to face judgement for our deeds - which seems to justify the infamously un-Biblical doctrine of purgatory. If you assume that Paul’s writings express a completely consistent view, however, you will have routes out; in particular, you could look at the language of Rom 6 and 8. Large chunks of Paul’s letter to the Romans also suggest, if taken out of context, that we will have to leave our bodies behind, and that even those reconciled through Christ will face judgement for their deeds - except that key verses contradict both of those views. Clearly, that’s not what Paul meant in Romans; so, you might argue, it’s not what he meant in 2 Cor either: provided you assume that Paul’s writings present a consistent view. (If Paul changed his mind, no explanation is necessary why Rom and 2 Cor seem to be inconsistent: they could actually be inconsistent in that case.)

Meanwhile, in Rev 21-22, John has a vision of a ‘new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away’. This directly contradicts Wright’s emphatic insistence that God’s new creation will be continuous with the first. For Wright, this isn’t an academic detail, it’s needed in order to give us a motive to care for the world we’ve currently got. Without continuity, he fears we’d be right to join those who are content with trashing the natural environment because the whole thing’s going to end up in fire and brimstone anyway. Yet this piece of Revelation seems to permit exactly that.

If you were to defend Wright against Revelation, you might point out that Revelation is a literal description of a vision John had, and is therefore not in every detail an accurate picture of the future, but a metaphor, an image of the future. (Fine, but if the wholesale replacement of heaven and earth is a metaphor, what is it a metaphor for? If the literal future is continuity, why not describe a vision of continuity?) And you may also assume that the entire Bible is consistent on the matter of God’s ultimate future, and on that assumption, bring your analysis of the rest of the New Testament to bear.

Whatever you do with the problem texts, it seems clear to me that the overwhelming weight of Biblical evidence favours the traditional orthodox position over any of the alternatives. Given that, I’m happy to take it as a starting point as I continue to think about what happens to people after they die.

So, I may go back to Neil now, and say - maybe not quite yet ‘I have an opinion’ - but at least ‘I know what my working assumptions are.’ I know what is the orthodox Christian view: that is, the consensus view of the relevant experts. The consensus view of relevant experts is generally a good place to start.

I still have plenty of concerns, though. Here are my top three quandaries on this topic now.

Firstly, it would be rather unsettling if the orthodox Christian vision for God’s ultimate future popped entirely into existence after the Ascension. The apostles say that their teaching was given to them by the Holy Spirit - but are we going to trust our entire doctrine on the future to what a small number of men claim was told to them by an invisible being behind closed doors? If the view of the New Testament authors is trustworthy, then it at the very least needs to cohere very well with the Old Testament. The New Testament hope should be woven deep into the Old Testament promises. I find Genesis, Daniel, Isaiah and the Psalms promising, but I’ve only gotten skin-deep into comparing these texts to the New Testament: I’d like to go both deeper into these texts, and broader across the Old Testament.

Secondly, I want to hear the opposition in their own words. Wright very openly admits that his view is currently a minority opinion even within Christianity, despite being Christian orthodoxy. Given that is the case, it’s reasonable to expect the opposition to have some good arguments on their side. Wright has not presented any strong arguments from opposing views, which makes me suspect not that there are no good arguments, but that he has omitted to cover them in his short and accessible book. And if there really are no strong arguments against the traditional view, then we should expect powerful explanations as to why so few people accept what apparently they should.

Thirdly, I have residual concerns from the metaphysics of mind. I recall from my undergraduate days that continuity is a major concern amongst the relevant experts. I think a minority of them even claim that the person who goes to sleep and the person who wakes up again are completely distinct people who just so happen to time-share the same body. If continuity is a major problem, then it is a major problem for resurrection doctrine, too, which even in the New Testament is compared to a kind of sleep, admitting that there is some kind of discontinuity between the old body and the resurrection body. Add to this the easily observable fact that many Christian bodies have rotted and are no longer suitable for re-animation: their new bodies will have to be physically discontinuous as well as mentally discontinuous with their old bodies. If I will be given a new body, is it metaphysically plausible that the person who inhabits that body will be the same ‘me’ that inhabits this body, now?

Much love all. As always, answers on a postcard please.