I am in the middle of writing an essay on prayer for the dead, an essay that has been bouncing around in my head for several years. The editor of Covenant, Fr Cal Lane, recently entered into some of this territory in his rich essay, Easter Hope and Funerals. And I was surprised to find myself in disagreement with him on a key point. Or at least I thought I was. But the more I think about it, the less certain I am about whether we disagree! Nonetheless, I suspect that some of where these fault lines lay center on the departure of some Reformation traditions from that of the traditional Western theological tradition. But we shall see.
For those who know me, they might be surprised that my disagreements have nothing to do with black vestments. Like Dr. Lane, I agree that any tension between mourning the loss of someone we love and the hope of the resurrection is both false and constructed.
N.T. Wright famously gave us the phrasing “life after death” and “life after life after death.” The first refers to the state between when the body dies and the general resurrection, which is limited. The second phrase refers to the state in which the soul is re-enfleshed with the body, an existence that moves us into the reality of God, by which I mean simply that it is a reality that has no end or terminus.
I’ve been reading through Paul Griffiths’ magisterial monograph, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Baylor, 2014) and this is not a review or summary of it; that would be nearly impossible. But it has been very helpful to me as I mull the complexity of these questions. One of the things Griffith does repeatedly is remind his readers of several features of Catholic teaching that are clear, in contrast with a great many matters that remain unclear and about which the Church has not spoken dogmatically.
What We Know
A human being or a human person is a soul-body. The human body is mortal and thus (with only the rarest exceptions) will die. Souls, on the other hand, have at least the capacity for an eternal existence (Griffiths speculates on the possibility that some souls could come to non-existence—annihilation—through the most profound separation from God, but that is not my concern here).
This human reality is different from other sorts of creatures. Animals, for example, have bodies but we have no reason to believe they have souls. Angels, on the other hand, have no materiality, though they have the capacity to take visible form. Angels, like the souls of human creatures, also have the capacity for an eternal existence.
Griffiths argues that the consistent teaching of the Church has been that when human beings die, they undergo a sort of judgment at death, such that, upon death, their souls begin to experience something of what their eternal existence will be. For those who die “in Christ,” what their souls know upon death is “in-Christness.” For those who have rejected God, what their soul knows upon death is separation from God. There is no sense in Scripture or in the Tradition that disembodied souls have the chance to choose Christ after their body dies. I suppose this could happen, but we are not given any reason in revelation to think this is the case.
One aspect of what is “happening” to the souls of those who die in Christ, upon the death of their body, has been debated hotly, as we know. A major strain of the Western tradition is the claim that there is some process by which the soul is brought to the state whereby the effects of sin have been done away such that the soul can have an unsullied vision of God. This goes by the name of Purgatory, and it was rejected by the main threads of the 16th-century reformations, including in the prayer book and formularies of the Church of England. Whether it is rejected in the current American prayer book is a different question for another time. But the following collect seems to assume this:
Into thy hands, O Lord, we commend thy servant N., our dear brother, as into the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Savior, beseeching thee that he may be precious in thy sight. Wash him, we pray thee, in the blood of that immaculate Lamb that was slain to take away the sins of the world; that, whatsoever defilements he may have contracted in the midst of this earthly life being purged and done away, he may be presented pure and without spot before thee; through the merits of Jesus Christ thine only Son our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 488).
In Cardinal Ratzinger’s volume Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, he is quite intentional to speak about Purgatory without any notional of temporality. Here is the passage:
Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought, some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where one is forced to undergo punishments in a more or less arbitrary fashion. Rather it is the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God, and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints. Simply to look at people with any degree of realism at all is to grasp the necessity of such a process. It does not replace grace by works, but allows the former to achieve its full victory precisely as grace. What actually saves is the full assent of faith. But in most of us, that basic option is buried under a great deal of wood, hay, and straw. Only with difficulty can it peer out from behind the latticework of an egoism we are powerless to pull down with our own hands. Man is the recipient of the divine mercy, yet this does not exonerate him from the need to be transformed. Encounter with the Lord is this transformation. It is the fire that burns away our dross and re-forms us to be vessels of eternal joy (Eschatology, 230-31).
It is not possible to probe the complexities of all of this here. But it is important, I think, to separate the question of purgatory and “life after death.” One can speak meaningfully about the latter without making any claims about the former.
What We Can Say
One of the most difficult theological challenges is to speak properly about the “life after death” phase. One of the things that Griffiths highlights is that while we tend to imagine the departed Christian living now in bodily reality, this is clearly not the case. When I was interviewing a Vatican official in the week after the death of Pope Francis, I was struck by the few times he mentioned the faithful who were coming to pay their respects when his body was lying in state in St. Peter’s Basilica. He was very careful to speak of the “remains of Pope Francis” or “the pope’s bodily remains.” Those remains are not Pope Francis. And (this is one of Griffiths’ more provocative moves), he says that it is improper to refer the soul of someone who has died as a human person. The death of the body means that a human person has ceased to exist. “Soul” is the generally agreed-upon term for that which does not die at the time of the death of the body. It is used regularly in the current American prayer book: “Depart, O Christian soul, out of the world.” An enfleshed soul is definitely a human person. If we cannot see what it is that we shall be after the resurrection, it is also difficult (maybe impossible!) to imagine what it means that something that is less than me will exist upon my death and before my body is raised to incorruption and rejoined to my soul.
Thus, whatever it means that, upon bodily death, the Christian soul is “with the Lord,” as St. Paul teaches, this must be distinguished carefully from what happens when every human person who has undergone bodily death is literally “re-incarnated” at the general resurrection (Griffiths argues that while Christians reject the various Hindu and gnostic versions of reincarnation, a basic definition of the term fits orthodox Christian belief: that at death, “the human creature who faced us when that flesh faced us is no longer there.” However, while the previous sentence is true, reincarnation simply claims that despite the presence of a corpse, this “does not mean that it is impossible to be faced with and embraced by that very same human creature again, sometime in the future” (p. 176) The proactive embrace of the term is worth pondering). Presumably Enoch and Elijah will not have this experience; and, in Roman Catholic teaching, neither will the Blessed Virgin Mary. Jesus is clear that it is not just the just, but also the unjust, who will be resurrected: Jesus says, “for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28-29). Thus, we can say that the “in-Christness” known by the soul upon the death of the body of Christians is simply the kind of knowing that is proper to souls.
When do we go to The Place?
The proper preface for the departed in the American prayer book (which is the same as in the current Roman Missal) with which Lane took exception is this:
Through Jesus Christ our Lord; who rose victorious from the dead, and comforts us with the blessed hope of everlasting life. For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.
My reading of this is that it refers to the two states I mentioned at the beginning, namely “life after death” and “life after life after death”:
- Life After Death: “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death…”
- Life After Life after Death: “when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.”
My interpretation is this:
- Human bodies die.
- When our mortal body dies, life does not end. Nonetheless, the character of that life is quite changed because it is non-material.
- At least two features of Christan hope are described here:
- That the death of the body does not mean the end of life, and
- That there is ever more reason to hope for life after life after death, namely, a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.
- Elsewhere in the Burial of the Dead, there is language of growth such that we can speak of a continuance of the journey begun on earth toward a transformation into the likeness of God and the ability to know God that will come to a glorious end in the return of the Incarnate Word in the flesh “with his angles in the glory of the Father” to “repay everyone for what he has done” wherewith he “will sit on his glorious throne” (Matt. 16:27; 5:31).
- The clear inference in the preface is that the dwelling for which we look is not known in the “life after death” phase but it is something for which we look in anticipation later, in “life after life after death.” In other words, we look for a re-enfleshed reality in which the soul-and-body unity is restored and the life that the soul had after bodily death is changed again into the most glorious sort of existence that a human person can have. For as the Epistle says, “we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
Where I thought I disagreed with Lane was when he made this claim: “our ‘place’ that Christ prepares for us is not ‘eternally’ in the heavens. Rather, that place he prepares (if we must linger on the subject) is only intermediate.” I read the preface to say the opposite.
But the more I think on this, the less certain I am. I went back to John 14, the scriptural source. As with what Jesus says in John 14, much of the language about heaven in Scripture is more opaque that many readers assume.
In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going (John 14:2-4).
What does it mean that Jesus is “preparing a place for us”? Growing up, I thought of some sort of building project, and this was reinforced in Bible studies and sermons. And the language about “many rooms.” But I am more inclined now to read this in a more poetic way, especially since God the Father does not live “in a place” and certainly does not need any rooms.
Regardless of how we read the “preparing a place” language, the sense of John 14 seems to be that the time when we will go to The Place is when “he comes again” and takes us “to himself,” i.e., at the Parousia when the dead are raised, and we are all again complete human persons. In “life after life after death.”
That said, Lane’s point is as much about the pastoral work of preaching and teaching.
Lane writes near the end, “People should leave our funerals—whether they are longtime mature disciples, or part of the “Christmas and Easter” club, or simply unbelievers who knew the departed and attended to pay their respects—with the distinct sense that Christians, when facing death, have a hope in the resurrection.” I couldn’t agree more.
But there are two reason we cannot ignore the intermediate state of Life After Death. First, because it exists. The Christian has two futures ahead: Life after Death, and then life after the resurrection of the body. Second, it doesn’t take a theological mind to begin to ask about this intermediate state. Third, right teaching about the intermediate state need not diminish nor undermine the proclamation of our Lord’s resurrection and the promise of our own.
Pastorally, there are things we can say and which the Burial of the Dead states also that in no way diminish the resurrection but speaks more fully:
- We are assured that those who have died in Christ are with the Lord. And “all that the Father gives” to the Son will come to him; “and those who come to me I will not cast out” (John 6:37).
- The life that the departed Christian lives before the resurrection as a disembodied soul is not yet what eternal life will be after the resurrection. That glory is impossible to fathom, for “it does not yet appear what we shall be. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
- Thus, the hope that we preach that rests in our Lord’s defeat of death by passing through its portals. When the incarnate Word passed through Death, death found itself undone by death.
Thus, there are two hopes about which we can preach. First, we preach that what the faithful departed know now is a better “knowing” of the Lord than can be known in our earthly existence. But second, like Abraham, we look forward to “the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb 11:10), which God has prepared for us and in which we will know the Lord “as he is.” For we will again be an ensouled human creature of flesh, but of a glory we cannot imagine: For “we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:20-21).
We need not gloss over the first promise that “life after death” for the Christian is “with Christ” when we preach about the second promise of “life after life after death,” when “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).
Christ is risen, and so shall we be. Alleluia!
The Rev. Matthew S.C. Olver, Ph.D., is the Executive Director and Publisher of the Living Church Foundation, Senior Lecturer in Liturgics at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, and a scholar of early Christian liturgy.
