Do Not Imagine They Are Christians?! (Justin Must Be Trippin!)

This past Sunday (Easter Sunday) we looked at a rather harsh assertion by second century Christian apologist, Justin Martyr. Writing with what seems like a huge chip on his shoulder, Justin takes aim at those “who say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven.” About such people he says, “Do not imagine that they are Christians.” They are in his eyes, “godless, impious heretics.”

What is so jarring about this claim is that what Justin calls heretical is precisely what we take today to be orthodox Christian belief. He is calling into question the very core of what we take the Christian faith to be all about. After all, isn’t this why we believe in Jesus in the first place? So that our souls will go to heaven when we die?

While we might not be inclined to raise the heresy threat level to code red, it is still worth exploring why this belief about our souls going to heaven is in the very least problematic.

On the charitable side, what we can say about the idea that our souls go to heaven when we die is that it isn’t wrong. It isn’t wrong, but it isn’t exactly right. Here, it is helpful to borrow a phrase coined by New Testament scholar N.T. Wright. He talks about life after life after death. That’s not a type-o.

Life after life after death.

What Wright means to say is that resurrection names the life that comes after what we commonly think of as life after death. What we commonly think of as life after death is the popular notion that our souls go to heaven after we die. Put this way, resurrection names the ultimate end for which we hope. That our souls go to heaven is only a passing moment. To imagine it as the whole of what we hope for is like mistaking the bathroom break we take before reaching our destination for the destination itself.

This helps us to realize that the Christian hope is not a disembodied hope. It is material. It is physical. It is resurrection. What happened to Jesus on a Sunday morning more than two thousands years ago is a preview of coming attractions. The biblical term is “firstfruits” (1 Cor. 15:20). As we often say, what we see God do for Jesus in raising his dead body from the grave is what God will one day do for all of creation (us included, God willing!).

This seems to be a more fitting end to the five-act story of (1) Creation/Fall, (2) Israel, (3) Jesus, (4) Church (5) The End. In this case, another title we could give to the fifth and final act is New Creation. The story is not about God abandoning creation, which is what we naturally come to believe when we assume that the ultimate hope of the biblical narrative is for our bodiless souls to end up in an ethereal heaven. But this, as we have been saying, is not the end for which we hope.

Resurrection is.

Resurrection preserves and honors God’s unrelenting and unfailing faithfulness to the good, good world created in and through the over-abundant love shared between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In this way, the end becomes the fulfillment, not the negation, of the beginning. This after all is what we find in the pages of Scripture – that the completion of the good work begun in Genesis is consummated by the time we reach the end of Revelation.

But we know that people die and that their bodies are buried. We bury the dead and the dead stay buried. Resurrection is something that does not occur in the natural course of things. Indeed, it is something we must wait for; an event that will come to us at the fulfillment of time. So then the question remains, “What happens to us when we die in the mean time?”

We’ll pick this up in a subsequent blog post.