On Christian Hope
Recently I posed the question, "What do you believe is the ultimate Christian hope?" I was very interested in the variety of responses (from the various communities where I posted, as well as my own blog), and now would like to share my own thoughts on the subject.
The reason this question is of current importance to me is because of what I believe to be a rather significant distortion of Christian teaching on hope and on life after death that is rather prevalent in all circles of Christian belief today. One of the most common responses to this question is some variation of, "That my soul will be in heaven with Jesus for all eternity." This certainly sounds like a nice enough answer, but unfortunately it has no basis in orthodox Christian teaching, and certainly is far removed from the hope promised us by Christ in the Scriptures. Whether consciously or not, this distorted vision of Christian hope is rooted in the infiltration of Platonic dualism into our religious belief. Plato looks at the soul as being the real thing of the person, the only thing that matters, and the body as but a prison from which the soul is mercifully released at death. Thus death is thought of as a final good, because of the fact that it allows the immortal soul to return to freedom. This understanding of the body/soul relationship has been Christianized so that death is seen as an evil for those who mourn the loss of their loved one, but for the one who dies, it is seen as allowing them to finally achieve their most blessed destiny, which is [they assert] the soul's eternal existence in the presence of God.
This is certainly not a biblical view, however, nor can it be presented as an authentic Christian view, regardless of how many Christians believe it. For Christianity to lose sight of the reality of the resurrection of the body as man's final eschatological destiny would mean for Christianity to cease to be altogether, and some new religion to take its place. The centrality of the Christian faith is and can only ever be the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and the promise that the very same awaits us as our ultimate eschatological hope.
This is a difficult thing for many Christians to accept, because we think so easily of heaven as being where we will finally be perfected, where our journey will finally be complete. To think of heaven as a state of incompletion seems scandalous to many, precisely because of the great abandonment of authentic Christian eschatology. Our life here on earth is perfect ontologically insofar as we exist as body and soul, as God intended. It is imperfect, however, in that our relationship with God and with creation is damaged, and often severely so. When we die, the soul is ripped from the body, as it were, highlighting the true violence of death (see, for example, the stark contrast between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus. Socrates embraced it as a final freedom and something to be embraced. Jesus grieved over it and experienced true terror at the thought of it, knowing as he did the ultimate violence it would force upon him).
At death all souls are judged. Some souls will be damned, some souls will not, and those not, either immediately or after an intermediate purification will enter into heaven, into the presence of God. This state of heaven, while certainly a joyous state, is also intermediate, and ultimately serves as a mirror image of the life on earth, insofar as in heaven the person enjoys a perfect relationship with God but is nonetheless ontologically incomplete. The soul does not have a body, and it is created for a body, and thus is incomplete in heaven. Certainly it is not a painful incompletion, for it is in heaven, it is with God, and that can only be joy. But the soul nonetheless maintains a continued hopeful expectation while in heaven, the hope of the resurrection, the hope of not only reunion with the body but with the body that is now perfected with incorruptibility and will live in the new earth that is equally incorruptible.
That our hope is rooted in the resurrection does not mean that we live only for the future. In his second encyclical, Spe Salvi, In Hope We are Saved, Pope Benedict XVI, commenting on the relationship between faith and hope, writes, "Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this reality constitutes for us a "proof" of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a "not yet." The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future." A Christian view of hope then is one where hope of future things, of things unseen, namely of the resurrection of the body and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, breaks into our present and has a profound impact on the praxis of here and now. It is for just this reason that a proper understanding of eschatological hope is so important. Understood properly it will lead the Christian to a building up of God's kingdom here on earth in anticipation of the kingdom being perfectly established at the resurrection; it will also lead towards a healthy understanding of the human body, one that recognizes that the whole person is healthier when the flesh is subjected to the spirit, in terms of a proper ordering of things, but also recognizes that the body is intrinsic to who we are as creations of God, that our ultimate hope is to live in a new earth in glorified bodies, and so even on this earth we treat the body (and all of creation!) with dignity and respect.
Because Christian hope is rooted in the resurrection and the ensuing perfect establishment of God's kingdom, this also says something important about the nature of salvation that is too often greatly misunderstood in some theological circles. Salvation is ultimately to be seen as the perfection of the Church, not the perfection of the individual. As such, salvation is always a corporate event, not an individual one. There is no such thing as "my personal salvation" because salvation is always to be seen as intrinsically connected to the perfection of the Church and the redemption of all of creation. Certainly we are called to have a personal relationship with God the Father through Jesus Christ, but just as a child has a personal relationship with his parents here on earth, that relationship is never isolated from the rest of the family, and the relationship is never in a vacuum that isolates him from his siblings. The family, while consisting of various personal relationships, is ultimately defined by its corporate relationship, and fate is seen not simply as related to an individual but to the family as a whole. So it is with the Church and salvation. We all have our roles and functions to play, and these roles are always geared towards the salvation of the Church, a salvation realized corporately in the general resurrection when the Church - militant, suffering, and triumphant - will together be raised in new glorified bodies and live in perfect fulfillment of God's kingdom in the new earth.
We are created to live on earth, in bodies, and in perfect relationships with both God and creation. Our faith informs us that this design will indeed exist for us in the future. This hope is not only informative but also performative, and so while living here and now we anticipate that future hope by making it a present reality as much as we possibly can. We strive to love God, to love our neighbor, to act with mercy, justice, compassion, holiness, and so forth here and now because we know that to do so is to experience something of the perfection to which we are called. We do not disdain this world or our bodies, but rather we anticipate their perfection, and live in hope that one day, that day when Christ returns, it will be so.