Souls after Death ..............................................................................

Lecture 18

The Christian hope was not the hope of going to heaven with Jesus,

but the hope of Christ coming from heaven to earth to establish the

Kingdom of God on earth and restore all things and redeem the world

and raise everyone from the dead. The hope was resurrection of the

dead. That meant an undoing of death so that people who are corpses

become living human beings again.

T

he theological concept of souls going to heaven developed to explain
what happens in the interval between death and resurrection. The
Christian hope of bodily resurrection leaves a gap or interim between
when we die and when we are raised from the dead. In the New Testament,
the dead are said to be “asleep,” as if resurrection is something like waking
up. Believers who die are “with the Lord,” which must mean somehow with
the exalted Lord Jesus at God’s right hand.

Four interconnected philosophical concepts about the soul came to be used
as a framework for explaining the state of the dead before the resurrection.
One is the concept that a human being consists of body and soul; another is
the concept that death is the separation of soul and body. Furthermore, there
is the concept that the soul is by nature immortal, and there is the concept
that good souls ultimately go to heaven.

The crucial question was whether souls could be fully blessed before the
resurrection. The one time the New Testament pictures souls in heaven, they
are waiting for judgment day—they are not quite happy. Augustine hesitates
to say disembodied souls are blessed by the full vision of God, because that
would seem to make resurrection of the body superÀ uous. The issue was not
fully settled in the West until 1336, when Pope Benedict XII declared that
holy souls enjoy the beati¿ c vision before the resurrection.

Jesus’s own interim between death and resurrection was elaborated in
the doctrine of the harrowing of hell. There is a distinctively Christian
understanding of what it means to say God died—not the Father or the Holy