A body in heaven?

A question that arises from my last post is: where is this resurrected body now? If its physical, where is it in relation to the physical universe? According to the New Testament, Jesus Christ ascended to heaven and is now seated at the right hand of God. But isn’t heaven an immaterial, spiritual realm? After all, “God is spirit” (John 4:24). So how can a body go there? Indeed, some evangelicals deny that a material body can be in heaven. Murray Harris, for example, as best as I understand him, affirms that while the resurrected body of Jesus was physical, at the ascension Jesus’ body dematerialized and became “non-fleshly” (From Grave to Glory: Resurrection in the New Testament [Zondervan, 1990], 142-143). Among other problems, this seems difficult to square with Acts 1:9: “he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.” Its difficult to understand a cloud hiding Jesus’ body from visibility if he simply dematerialized. Further, the angels’ statement a moment later establishes continuity between the ascension and the second coming: “this Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Its therefore difficult to deny the bodily nature of the ascension without also calling into question the bodily nature of the second coming.

It seems better to me to re-examine our assumptions about the nature of heaven. Why should we assume that heaven cannot accommodate a physical body? We in no position to say what heaven can and cannot be. Heaven is not, as it were, at the outer edges of the universe, such that if only we had powerful enough telescopes we could see it! Its another realm, equally distant and near, the rules of which are totally different and unknown (contrary to Wayne Grudem, who posits heaven as an unseen place within the space-time universe (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Theology [Zondervan, 1995], p. 617). After all, the risen Christ can appear to Saul on the road to Damascus without leaving his heavenly throne to do so (or for that matter, without ceasing to hold the universe together [Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:18]). Heaven is so utterly beyond our mental capabilities to grasp that we shouldn’t be surprised that it destroys our rigid physical/spiritual dichotomies.

Furthermore, the ascension to heaven of Enoch in Genesis 5:24 and Elijah in II Kings 2:11 both seem to be bodily. Hebrews 11:5 tells us that Enoch “was taken up so that he should not see death,” and II Kings 2:11 says that “Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” Both texts explicitly point out there was no trace of them after they left (Hebrews 11:5, II Kings 2:12). If heaven cannot accommodate bodies, one has to provide an alternative explanation of where the bodies of Enoch and Elijah went.

While the idea bodily existence in heaven may seem strange to our limited minds, its not fundamentally any stranger than the incarnation. If one accepts that the Son of God left heaven to take on a body, it would be difficult insist that he cannot take that body back into heaven with him when he returns there. To put it even more simply, if you already believe God became like us, its not much harder to believe he remained like us.

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A new kind of reality

I just read through each of the gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and was very struck by how Jesus’ resurrected life is portrayed. One the one hand, the physicality of Jesus’ body and the continuity of his personhood is stressed in the strongest possible terms. In Luke 24, for example, when the disciples are wondering whether Jesus is a ghost, he reassures them, “see my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (v. 39; cf. John 20:27). And then, because seeing the holes in his hands and feet is not enough to convince them, he eats a fish in their presence (vv. 41-43). Against the gnostics, we must affirm with the early church the physicality of Jesus’ resurrection body.

And yet, there is something strange and supernatural about this physical body. After revealing himself to the disciples on the Emmaus road, he suddenly “vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:31). Similarly, he can appear out of nowhere, even through locked doors (John 20:26). And on three separate occasions people who know him intimately do not recognize him, even when they are talking directly with him (the two disciples on the Emmaus Road in Luke 24, Mary Magdalene in John 20, and the seven disciples in John 21). Its obvious there is something different about Jesus after Easter morning.

What I am seeing is that on Easter morning Jesus did not merely come back to life: he came back to a new kind of life – one never before seen in history, one that is immortal and glorious, one both material and eschatological, bodily and heavenly, physical and spiritual. It is a new kind of reality, a sort of spiritual-physical hybrid. The writer of Hebrews calls it “the power of an indestructible life” (Hebrews 7:16). Paul describes by saying, “the last Adam became a life-giving S/spirit” (I Corinthians 15:45). In other words, the resurrection is not mere revivification, but transformation. It is not the return to an old existence, but a passing into a new existence. Hebrews 2:9: “we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor.”

Others before Jesus were physically resurrected (Lazarus, for example, and those under Elisha’s ministry), but they came back to a normal earthly life, to die one day again. Easter is different. Easter is new. It the invasion of the future, the start of the second creation, the first fruits of the renewal God will give to believers (I Corinthians 15:20ff.) and indeed, all creation (Romans 8:20-21). At Easter, a new kind of reality emerges – one without precedent in history or eternity.

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Einstein

I have been reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein (Simon and Schuster, 2007). I picked the book up because I wanted to learn more about Einstein’s contribution to physics and what is really at stake with the special and general theories of relativity. I also wanted to learn about his life – what it was like to live in as a Jew in many antisemitic pockets of Europe in his earlier years, how he balanced his brilliance and his later academic fame with his personal life, what set him apart as a truly great thinker, and so on. Its a very well-written biography and has been worth the time spent on it. What I judge to be the book’s greatest strength is that Isaacson makes Einstein intelligible to non-scientists without watering him down.

My overall impression of Einstein from this book was the sense that what drove him and made him such a great scientist was his curiosity, his sense of wonder and reverence before the immensity of the universe, his imagination, his passion, his willingness to question both authority and the mundane, his intuition, his willingness to dream. How opposite to some rationalistic stereotypes of science! Einstein relied upon “thought experiments” to arrive at his most famous ideas, guided by an intuitive sense that the structure of reality must harmonious, beautiful, and simple. He claimed that his inspiration for science was the same as the poet’s inspiration – “a sudden illumination, almost a rapture” (549). Einstein shows that scientific inquiry is anything but detached, objective observation of the world: it has a non-linear, imaginative side to it.

Some great Einstein quotes to this effect:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world” (387).
“When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way” (551).
“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious” (548).

Other aspects of Einstein’s personality that will stay with me from this book include his extreme absentmindedness (which was truly hilarious at times!), his rebelliousness and loner mentality, his non-conformism, his sense of humor, his pacifism, his socialism, his Zionism, his determinism, his love of music, his social conscience, and his sheer gusto. He truly would have been fascinating to sit down and have a conversation with!

The most interesting part of the book for me was Isaacson’s description of Einstein’s religious views (to which he devotes a chapter, entitled “Einstein’s God”). Based on this chapter and the rest of the book, I would call Einstein a “mystical deist.” Deist because he believed in an impersonal “God” who structured the universe but does not intervene in it or take interest in humans. For example, he once said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God, who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind” (388-9). Mystical because he frequently relapses into personal language when talking of God, and because his sense of reverence before the immensity of “God” seems to often border on religious sentiment. For example:

“A spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble” (388).
“Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune intoned in the distance by an invisible player” (392).
“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable” (384).

You could perhaps call Einstein a deist flirting with theism (note: not a deist flirting with Christianity). What is very clear is that Einstein has nothing of the “science has disproved God” mentality that is so common among many contemporary scientists. On the contrary, the more he became acquainted with the laws of the universe, the more he suspected Something beyond the universe, animating these laws and breathing life into them. You could say that his passionate study of this world gave him the eerie feeling of another world behind it. While he certainly rejected the idea of a personal God as this ulterior force, he did not do so on scientific grounds.

In an interview with George Viereck just before Einstein’s 50th birthday, Einstein answered two important questions very directly:

Viereck: “you accept the historical existence of Jesus?”
Einstein: “Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”
Viereck: “do you believe in God?”
Einstein: “I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, its the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God” (386).

I think the metaphor Einstein gives about the child in the library is a very understandable position within the categories of common grace and general revelation. The proper Christian response to this is not to deny the complexity and vastness of the question of God in relation to human minds. The metaphor is indeed appropriate, given God’s immensity and our frailty. The Christian, however, believes that the metaphor does not end there, but ends with the Librarian showing up, walking over to the child, and explaining to him what the books mean. “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18).

Reading this book made me a better theologian. I think above all else it reminds me of how inescapable the Reality of God is. His beauty and glory are all over creation, and they press in on us from all sides, whispering at us of the world beyond this world. As Einstein himself put it: The child knows someone must have written those books.

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Quotes on Christ’s Resurrection (8)

“If the resurrection be fact, why not the incarnation? It is possible to isolate virtually all the other insignia of majesty in the synoptic tradition and pick them off one by one: the virgin birth, for example, the stilling of the tempest and the transfiguration. But if, in the last chapter of the story, we come across a fact such as the resurrection, then we have to roll back all our earlier skepticism and reinstate every pointer to the glory of this man, Jesus. The empty tomb is the Last Word (even though it has already been spoken); and what it says it says, in vindication of Jesus. It is the assertion of moral order; and the moral order it asserts is one which affirms the crucified blasphemer as the Messiah to whose claims God takes no exception.”

Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ (IVP, 1998), 238.

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Too much 24?

This morning Esther was about to head out the door to work, and I was still 2/3 asleep in bed, and the first thing that popped into my head to ask her was, “where did you get this secret assignment to protect yourself?”

Hmmm … I think we have been watching a bit too much 24 lately.

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Quotes on Christ’s Resurrection (7)

Bavinck calls the resurrection “the ‘Amen!’ of the Father to the ‘It is finished’ of the Son” (Volume 3 of Reformed Dogmatics, p. 442).

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Quotes on Christ’s Resurrection (6)

After showing how different bodily resurrection was from other first century ideas about life after death, N.T Wright addresses the charge that belief in the resurrection is out-dated and pre-modern:

“(It is) wrong to imply that the choice is between an ancient worldview and a modern (or even a postmodern) one. The ancient worldview of Homer, Plato, Cicero, and the rest had no room for resurrection either. What is at stake is the clash between a worldview that allows for a God of creation and justice and worldviews that don’t.”

N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008), 69.

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Quotes on Christ’s Resurrection (5)

This is a startling statement, the more you think about it, but seems to me justified on the basis of Acts 2:30-31 (King), Hebrews 7:16 (Priest), various verses in John, such as 8:28, 14:26, 16:7, 13 (Prophet):

“If (Christ) did not rise from dead and return to His Father, He is neither Priest, Prophet, nor King, in the full sense of any of these terms.”

William Milligan, The Resurrection of our Lord (MacMillan 1927), 152

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Stott versus Calvin on the Saving Efficacy of Christ’s Resurrection

I’m a huge fan of John Stott’s The Cross of Christ, but I think a weakness of the book is its relative neglect of Christ’s resurrection. Not only does Stott have very little treatment of the resurrection throughout the book, but when he does discuss it, he explicitly downplays its importance. Especially telling is the section on pages 232-234, where he interacts with Michael Green’s The Empty Cross of Jesus on the question of the relative roles of Christ’s resurrection and his death within his saving work. Stott argues here that the soteriological role of the resurrection is limited to confirming the power of the cross and vindicating Christ from death and shame. The resurrection was essential, but not as part of the saving work, only as proof of it. In his terms: Christ’s saving work “was finished on the cross,” and “victory over the devil, sin, death was won there.” The resurrection was simply God’s “public endorsement” of this victory (233).

I can understand why Stott wants to protect the exclusive centrality of the cross, because it is at the cross and nowhere else where Christ bears the Father’s wrath for our sins. I don’t want to take away one iota from the importance of Christ’s sin-bearing, wrath-absorbing crucifixion. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the New Testament conceives of Christ’s resurrection as more than mere confirmation of the cross, but as an integral part of Christ’s saving work together with the cross. Romans 4:25, for example: “Christ was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” Cf. Romans 6:4, 8:34, I Peter 1:3, 3:21. While the cross and the empty tomb can be distinguished, I do not think they can be finally separated: they together comprise Christ’s saving work for believers. Jesus saves us by rising as well as by dying.

I’ve been checking Stott against Calvin and found his treatment more balanced. The crucial insight that, in my judgment, makes Calvin’s treatment of this question superior to Stott’s is his understanding of significance of union with Christ. Before Richard Gaffin, Geerhardus Vos, or Herman Ridderbos, John Calvin understood that union with Christ in his death and resurrection is the central, unifying motif in (at least Paul’s understanding of) the believer’s salvation (see, e.g., Institutes 3.1.1). It is this understanding, my my judgment, that determines his more helpful treatment of the question phrased above:

“We divide the substance of our salvation between Christ’s death and resurrection as follows: through his death, sin was wiped out and death extinguished; through his resurrection, righteousness was restored and life raised up, so that – thanks to his resurrection – his death manifested its power and efficacy in us” (2.16.3).

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Quotes on Christ’s Resurrection (4)

I Corinthians 15:45: “Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being;’ the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”

Richard Gaffin unpacks the meaning of “life-giving S/spirit” here:

“Resurrection is here nothing less than the counterpart of creation. The resurrection of Christ is the beginning of the new and final world-order, an order described as spiritual and heavenly. It is the dawn of the new creation. It is the start of the eschatological age.”

“As birth is characteristic of the old aeon, the sarkic world, so resurrection marks the beginning of the new aeon, the eschatological, pneumatic world.”

Richard B. Gaffin, The Centrality of the Resurrection: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Baker House Book Company, 1978), 89-90, 111-112.

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