Confessions x: Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.

Just for Easter, number x in my series, Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind.

1. I am not the "you" of the Bible. 
2. Try reading the verse before your favorite verse.
3. Then I read the verses before the prophecies
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Confession #n: Resurrection isn't going to heaven when you die.
1. I grew up with two beliefs that I never really tried to fit together. The first was that, when you die, you go to heaven or hell. The second was that the dead would rise from their graves when Jesus came back to earth.

Later on, I tried to make them fit. When you die, you are in some sort of intermediate state. Perhaps your soul is in "Abraham's Bosom" (Luke 16) or Paradise (Luke 23:43). On the other hand, you may find yourself in torment (Luke 16 again).

Then when Christ returns, your soul is reunited with your body, like Iron Man calling his suit from afar. The soul of the Christian is reunited with an upgraded body. And, on the Day of Judgment, the damned are also reunited with their bodies before going to eternal torment.

2. There are many Christians who, perhaps without even realizing it, simply do away with the resurrection part. A few years ago, when an ossuary with the name James on it was discovered, there was speculation about what would happen if the bones of Jesus were found. A colleague of mine -- teaching at a Christian college, no less -- didn't think it would make any difference if they found the bones of Jesus. Apparently, he thought the afterlife was purely spiritual. Our physical bodies didn't matter, as far as he was concerned.

Some of us were stunned. Admittedly, the person didn't teach in the religion department. They taught in a completely different field and really didn't know any better. They didn't realize that resurrection in the Bible is an embodied resurrection. Jesus' tomb is empty -- and that matters.

When I was growing up, I didn't realize how important our bodies are in the Bible for eternity. But 1 Corinthians 15 makes it very clear. When Paul talks about resurrection, he isn’t imagining a disembodied existence. He can’t even conceive of an afterlife without a body (cf. 1 Cor. 15:35). For Paul, salvation isn’t escape from the body. It’s the transformation of it. 

For Paul, the alternative to resurrection isn’t “your soul goes to heaven.” It's no future at all.

3. Come to find out, our popular notions of the immortality of the soul are more Greek than biblical. It's not that we can't make them fit. There are several hints of something similar. "Into your hands, I put forth my spirit" (Luke 23:46). There are martyred "souls" under the altar in Revelation 6:9.

But Jesus' resurrection is a bodily resurrection. Luke and John make a big deal of this fact. In Luke, the risen Jesus asks for fish to show he is not a ghost (Luke 24:39-43). In John, he offers the marks in his hands, feet, and side for Thomas to touch to know it is him (John 20:27).

And I've already mentioned the apostle Paul, who apparently can't understand what the Corinthians are thinking about resurrection. He doesn't understand how they can believe Jesus is alive and yet not believe in resurrection. As a former Pharisee, resurrection for him obviously means that our corpses rise from the dead. [1] "Someone will say, 'How will the corpses be raised?' and 'With what sort of body are they coming?' (15:35). 

He just assumes everyone knows that resurrection involves our bodies. It doesn't even occur to him there might be another view like, "You die your soul is freed." In this part of his ministry, he even talks about the time between death and resurrection as "sleep" (1 Thess. 4:13; 1 Cor. 15:51).

Resurrection of the dead is the rising of dead corpses. The Greek story said, "Your soul escapes your body." The biblical story says, "God raises your body."

4. But the biggest shift came when I realized that this embodied eternity in the New Testament is almost certainly on earth. The kingdom of God in the Bible is God's kingdom come to earth.

This seemed heretical to me as a young man studying for ministry. And I know I wasn't the only one. I know a church leader who was shocked to hear a professor at my seminary point out that this is exactly what Revelation 21 describes. Somehow, while we took all the rest of Revelation literally -- the parts that probably weren't meant to be taken literally -- we took this part figuratively. We took the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem as a poetic expression of the future rather than something that might literally happen.

Yet, when I became a professor, my theology colleagues would assure me that historic Christianity has always believed that eternity is on a new earth, the redeemed earth of Romans 8:18-23. That was news to me. "Orthodoxy" in my low church background meant an eternity in heaven.

But it's all there in the New Testament. I just mentioned Romans 8 and Revelation 21. But Jesus too talks of people coming from north, south, east, and west to feast with him in the kingdom of God (Luke 13:29). I had just always ignored the clear implication that this was on earth somehow. But it's strange verses like that one that lead to paradigm shifts.

I still believe we are conscious between death and resurrection, somewhere, in some form. The details are above my pay grade. I believe in spending eternity with Jesus.

But I now believe it will be in a glorified body. And I believe the kingdom of God will be right here, on a new earth. Christianity isn’t about leaving earth for heaven. It’s about heaven coming to earth.

[1] N.T. Wright emphasized this fact in his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).