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In many conservative circles, the word resurrection has come to denote the state upon which the Christian enters immediately after death. And my point is that throughout—from Paul as our earliest Christian writer right onto Origen at the end of the second century—that is simply not what the word resurrection meant to such people. Actually, if I walk around Westminster Abbey, most of the tombs earlier than the 19th century say, in effect, I am resting at the moment but I shall be raised in the future. That two-stage life after death is the classic Christian position.

When did we lose that sense of the two stages of life after death?

I think you can see it already in Dante, in the Middle Ages, where you get basically heaven, hell, and purgatory, as the three options. And though Dante still appears to believe in the resurrection, it's already clear that the Middle Ages bought into a Christian version of Platonism (or a platonic version of Christianity) in which these ultimate spiritual destinations were what mattered. And the word resurrection got brought on the heaven side of that.

But you see it as well in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. When Christian and his friends go across the river and all the trumpets sound, there is no sense that after their death they are now going into a period of waiting or resting, at the end of which, when Jesus returns to this world, all the dead will be raised. There's rather a sense that we're simply on a pilgrimage from this present world to the one that is to come, and that at death we enter into the one that is to come and there will be a celebration and a sigh of relief. And that's simply not the picture that the New Testament gives us.

The same sort of thing is reinforced in C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce.

Well it is, although Lewis combines that with a very robustly physical view of the new world that is much, much more solid and substantial and resurrectionish than most Christian pictures have been.

And it is Lewis, in his book Miracles, who actually explores what it means to have a risen body in ways that are close to some of the patristic discussions. He's quite close to Tertullian at one point. It was reading Miracles as a teenager that first made me realize that the ideas I'd grown up with about heaven were not bodily enough.

How does the doctrine of the resurrection affirm the goodness of creation?

That is absolutely central. In both the Jewish circles where resurrection was firmly believed, moving on towards the rabbis, and in early Christianity, both in the New Testament and in the second-century fathers, where you get resurrection, it goes very closely with two things—a doctrine of the goodness of creation and a doctrine of the justice and ultimate judgment of God. Judgment is not just negative, but also positive. Judgment is God's putting the world to rights.

If death is the dissolution of this body, never to be reassembled, then death has succeeded in saying present creation is bad and is going to be abandoned. But resurrection says, No. Present creation is good. It is corruptible and transient, not least because of sin, but God, having dealt with sin in the cross of Jesus Christ, will deal with corruption. And the result therefore must be the reaffirmation of the good creation, including the reaffirmation of human bodies.

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April (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47