Life after life after death
The standard view of life after death has long focused on a disembodied soul that, immediately pursuant to the expiration of the body, goes either to heaven or to hell. I remember the sermon preached at my father’s funeral some years ago. It was classic Platonism—Dad’s soul had now escaped the entrapping shell of his cancer-ravaged body and was free in the beautiful communion of heaven.
Christian scholars have long questioned this easy dualism of body and soul. Karl Barth, for instance, insisted that the more biblical view calls us to see ourselves as both “ensouled bodies” and “embodied souls.” But the standard view has remained strong, especially in everyday church circles. That may be changing, as a passel of recent books indicate.
Premier among them is N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. Rob Bell’s bestseller Love Wins follows Wright in putting the post-mortem emphasis on resurrected bodies in the context of a new heaven and a new earth. More recently Howard Snyder and Joel Scandrett, in Salvation Means Creation Healed, make an extended argument that salvation focuses not just on souls and not just on people, but presents the hope of a transformed and new earth. Meanwhile, biblical scholar Richard Middleton is at work on a book that will closely examine the major biblical texts and argue for the eschatological hope of a new heaven and a new earth.
