Life After Death As Reality and Mystery

Religious booksellers offer books whose authors claim to know a great deal about life after death. Such authors base what they assert to be true on Bible verses.

That these verses indicate their ancient authors expected life to continue beyond the grave cannot be credibly disputed. But the nature of the afterlife remains largely a mystery. Those who talk or write as if they know in more than a general way what heaven will be like are overreaching.

Near the end of the last book in the New Testament, its author records what he sees as a new heaven and new earth. The old heaven and earth are gone, and in its place is a new Jerusalem. God now dwells with mortals, whose tears God wipes away. There will be no more crying, mourning, or death, because the prior order has been replaced by a transformed one (Revelation [or Apocalypse] 21:1-4).

Even the most clunky translation renders this is wonderful language, whose words and imagery are magnificent. Most reputable biblical scholars take this passage to be poetic, but they may be reluctant to dismiss it as mere poetry. It must have a deeper meaning and significance, they suggest, but if so, what is it?

In John 11:25-26, Jesus proclaims himself to be the resurrection and the life, promising that those who put their trust in him, even if they die, will live. But in what mode or form?

Perhaps the most quoted verse in the Bible appears earlier in that Gospel (John 3:16): God loved the world so much that God surrendered his only son, so that those who place their faith in him will not perish but have eternal life. In John 5:25, Jesus says “in truth I tell you, those who respond to [my] voice will live.” But again, does this mean here on earth? Or in heaven, and if so, what and where exactly is that?

The Apostle Paul, in his first letter to the church at Corinth, declares that although our physical bodies are subject to decay, our natural bodies will become spiritual bodies—sown in weakness and dishonor, raised in power and glory (I Corinthians 15:42-45). Later in that same chapter, Paul writes that the perishable will be clothed with the imperishable, the mortal with the immortal, and the awful sting of death will be no more. In his letter to the believers in Rome, Paul expresses his confidence that absolutely nothing could ever separate him and his fellow Christians from God’s love revealed in Christ Jesus, his Lord (Romans 8:38-39).

These passages suggest we will have bodies and we will have consciousness, but is that the same thing as continued personal identity? Will we recognize each other? And, will my mind we at the peak of whatever mental power I had on earth? Will we all have the same cortical power?

There are many other parts of the Old Testament, and more explicitly in the New, that indicate their authors looked forward to life after death, and that this life would be in the presence of God.

Although there is no physical evidence to prove this, it seems unfathomable that the universe would have instantaneously come into being fourteen billion years ago, which is no longer disputed, and yet be without purpose. Or, more to the point, without an intentional super-being having caused it to exist. The Christians name for this Super Being is, of course, God.

If there is a God who can relate to us as a person—that’s the best we can do to make sense of God—and who therefore possesses something akin to consciousness, might this God have intended all along to give human beings everlasting life?

Whether God invites everyone or just some into the Kingdom of Heaven is an issue we’ll leave to the theologians. So is whether people are able to resist God’s call and so have the choice of whether or not to respond to it, how good deeds play into all this, and whether once people have sincerely responded to God they have the capacity to turn their hearts away from or even against God. None of these questions are our immediate concern. Nor is the question on the table the precise contours of the afterlife.

The issue here has to do with whether there even is one. Christians live in the hopeful expectation that there is, and that the end goal of our existence is to enjoy the life God will grant us upon our resurrection. Christians look forward to living as brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus, the Christ, eternally.