Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Dr.
F. F. Bruce:
- The Apostle
Paul's
- View of the
AfterLife
-
The following excerpts are from Paul: Apostle of The Heart Set
Free by F.F. Bruce. British professor, Dr. Bruce,
is generally regarded as one of the greatest theologians of the
twentieth century.
The
Editor’s summary comments are also offered along with Dr. Bruce’s
words, which are set within quotation marks.
One of the difficulties of the Apostle Paul’s teaching regarding
death and resurrection is that he seems to offer us somewhat conflicting testimony.
In 1 Cor. 15 Paul appears to be telling us that when one “in Christ” dies
he will find himself without a body; that is, he will “sleep” until the grand
Second Coming of Christ, at which event Christians will be changed “in a twinkling of
an eye,” forever then to be with the Lord.
- 1 Corinthians 15:50-53
- 50 Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood
cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption. 51Behold,
I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed-- 52in
a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and
the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 53For this
corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
However, in 2 Corinthians 4 and 5, written, scholars
believe, about a year after the first letter, St. Paul quite apparently is of a different
mind-set regarding the afterlife.
- 2 Cor. 4:14-18
- 14knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus will
also raise us up with Jesus, and will present us with you. 15For all things are
for your sakes, that grace, having spread through the many, may cause thanksgiving to
abound to the glory of God. 16Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our
outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. 17For
our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding
and eternal weight of glory, 18while we do not look at the things which are
seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary,
but the things which are not seen are eternal.
- 2 Cor. 5:1-8
- For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we
have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2For
in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from
heaven, 3if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. 4For
we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but
further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. 5Now He who has
prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. 6So
we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from
the Lord. 7For we walk by faith, not by sight. 8We are confident,
yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.
9 Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to
Him.
Dr. Bruce notes that the life-and-death trials of the
good apostle during that interim year may have been so severe, so traumatic, that they
caused Paul to think more deeply on the matter of death and resurrection than he had
previously done.
“The spiritual crisis which Paul under went
towards the end of his Ephesian ministry as a result of his almost miraculous escape from
what seemed imminent death has been described by one of the greatest New Testament
students of the twentieth century ‘as a sort of second conversion’. It is
pointed out in defence of this view that in the letters which can be dated after this
crisis there is ‘a change of temper’: controversies are conducted in a more
tolerant spirit, there is a readier acceptance of his apostolic hardships, a greater
appreciation of the values of family life and ‘a sustained emphasis on the idea of
reconciliation’.
"It is probably impossible to draw such a sharp
line between Paul's attitude to life before this crisis and his attitude after it…
Nevertheless, on a broad view of Paul's spiritual development, the thesis can, in general,
be sustained; and there is one area of his thinking in which the effect of the crisis can
be discerned with special clarity -- his thinking about the life to come.
“Paul's detailed views of the life to come before
his conversion cannot be established with complete certainty. There was a wide variety of
opinions in this field current in the Judaism of his time -- much wider than has been
commonly supposed. In Jewish literature of the period between 200 B.C. and A.D. 100, it
has been pointed out: ‘…statements on an immortality of the soul which excludes
the resurrection of the body are almost as common as those which explicitly state the
resurrection of the body, and the same proportions can be asserted for statements on the
soul's life after death without exclusion of the body and texts which state the
resurrection without explicit reference to the body' …"
Dr. Bruce presents a large body of evidence indicating
the wide-ranging beliefs regarding the afterlife extant at the time of Jesus and before.
This is relevant in that Paul, a leading former Pharisee, would have known of these views
and would have been, at least in part, influenced by them.
"What happens at death? Not until 2 Corinthians
does Paul approach this question, so far as his extant correspondence is concerned. This
may have been due in part to his expectation that he would survive until the parousia [the
Second Coming]. In the nature of the case he could not know that he would survive until
then, but in his earliest references to the subject he associates himself with those who
will survive: ‘we who are left alive until the Lord comes shall not forestall
those who have died’ (1 Thessalonians 4: 15) – ‘those who have died’
are mentioned in the third person but the survivors are mentioned in the inclusive first
person plural.
“In 1 Corinthians 6:14 the first person plural is
used of those who will experience resurrection: 'God not only raised our Lord from the
dead; he will also raise us by his power' -- but here no distinction is drawn
between those who have died and those who will still be alive, for Paul is emphasizing
that the body comes within the scope of God's redemptive purpose and that present bodily
actions have therefore a serious relevance for the future state of Christians; by us
he means ‘us Christians’ in the most general sense.
"No significant shift of perspective is involved
in 1 Corinthians: ‘we shall not all die, but we shall all be
changed’, for at the parousia ‘the dead will rise immortal and we (the
living also) shall be changed’ (1 Corinthians 15:51f.).
"Probably not more than a year separated the
writing of the two letters, but the experiences of that year affected Paul profoundly. In
addition to the ‘fightings without and fears within’ to which he refers in 2
Corinthians 7: 5, there was one specially serious danger which overtook him in proconsular
Asia, one from which he could see no way out but death.
“Confrontation with death was no new thing for
Paul: ‘I die daily’, he could say some months before this trouble befell him (1
Corinthians 15:31). But on this occasion he felt like a man who had received the
death-sentence. On earlier occasions the way of escape had presented itself along with the
danger, but no such way could be discerned this time, so that when at last, beyond all
expectation, escape did come, Paul welcomed it as little short of resurrection from death.
“Paul had frequently experienced the risk of
death before, but never before had he faced for a period what he believed to be certain
death.
“For one thing, he henceforth treats the prospect
of his dying before the parousia as more probable than otherwise. This change would no
doubt have come about in any case with the passage of time, but it was precipitated by his
affliction in Asia...
“Now it is as a personal
confession of faith that he says: ‘we know that he who raised the Lord Jesus
to life will with Jesus raise us too, and bring us to his presence, and you [who
are still alive] with us’ (2 Corinthians 4:14).
“But, if death before the parousia was now the
more probable prospect for Paul, what would be his state of existence (if any) between
death and the parousia? As we have seen, this question did not exercise him before (so far
as can be judged from his extant writings);
"But in tackling this question he could appeal to
no ‘word of the Lord’ as he had done when clearing up the Thessalonians'
difficulty, nor had he any special revelation to guide him as when he unfolded to the
Corinthians the ‘mystery’ that the parousia would witness the transformation of
living believers as well as the resurrection of those who had fallen asleep.
“But what do ‘we know’?
“Not simply that for the believer to depart is to
be ‘with Christ’, which is ‘better by far’, as he puts it in
Philippians 1:23, but that, for this to be so, some kind of new embodiment is necessary at
death and his assurance is that such embodiment is available.
“Paul evidently could not contemplate immortality
apart from resurrection; for him a body of some kind was essential to personality. Our
traditional thinking about the ‘never-dying soul’, which owes so much to our
Graeco- Roman heritage, makes it difficult for us to appreciate Paul's point of view.
(Except when immortality is ascribed to God himself in the New Testament, it is always of
the resurrection body that it is predicated, never of the soul.)
"It is, no doubt, an over-simplification to say
that while for the Greeks man was an embodied soul, for the Hebrews he was an animated
body; yet there is sufficient substance in the statement for us to say that in this as in
other ways Paul was a Hebrew born and bred.
“For some, including several of his Corinthian
converts, disengagement from the shackle of the body was a consummation devoutly to be
wished; but if Paul longed to be delivered from the mortality of this present earthly
‘dwelling’, it was with a view to exchanging it for one that was immortal; to be
without a body of any kind would be a form of spiritual nakedness or isolation from which
his mind shrank.
"But he sees the resurrection principle to be
already at work in the people of Christ by the power of the Spirit who indwells them; in
some sense the spiritual body of the coming age is already being formed:
"while the ‘outward
man’ wastes away under the attrition of mortal life and the hardships of apostolic
service, the inward man experiences daily renewal’ (2 Cor. 4:16), so that physical
death will mean no hiatus of disembodiment but the immediate enjoyment of being ‘at
home with the Lord’ (2 Cor. 5:8).
“It is in 2 Corinthians 5: 1-10 that Paul makes
his most personal contribution to the subject of immortality. The number of articles and
monographs devoted to the interpretation of this passage is beyond counting, and shows no
sign of abating.
"Without waiting for the parousia, Paul
begins by stating his assurance that ‘if the earthly frame that houses us today
should be demolished, we have a building from God, a house not made by human hands,
eternal, and in heaven’ (2 Corinthians 5: 1).
“What is in these words called a
‘building’ is afterwards described in terms of a garment: ‘we yearn to have
our heavenly habitation put on over this one’ -- since, of course, ‘being thus
clothed, we shall not find ourselves naked’ (5: 2 f.).
"But whether building or garment is spoken of, it
is a body -- the new, immortal body -- that is meant:
“It is difficult to distinguish the new body to
which Paul here looks forward from the spiritual body to be received when the last trumpet
sounds, according to the teaching of 1 Corinthians 15 …
"Nor is it a merely temporary integument that he
hopes to receive at death, pending his investiture with the resurrection body at the
parousia;
which God has prepared for him and his
fellow-believers, and of which the present gift of the Spirit is an anticipatory
guarantee.
“So instantaneous is the change-over from the old
body to the new which Paul here envisages that there will be
"The change-over takes place, as he says in 1
Corinthians 15: 52, ‘in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye’ -- only there the
split-second transformation takes place at the parousia, whereas here Paul seems to imply
that for those who do not survive until the parousia
"If he does not say so quite explicitly, this may
be because he has received no clear revelation to this effect.
“Perhaps Paul's pre-Christian conception of the
life to come had little to say about the state of affairs between death and resurrection.
The dead were dead, and that was that, but they would be brought back to life by the power
of God on the resurrection day.
“But, for Paul the Christian, the resurrection of
Christ made a vital difference to this pattern. For Christ, having died, had already been
brought back to new life by the power of God, and by faith-union with him his people were
already enabled to share the power of his resurrection and walk in newness of life.
"Was it conceivable that those
who were united, right now in mortal life, with the risen and ever-living Christ, should
have this union interrupted, even temporarily, by bodily death?
“We have it on Dr. Samuel Johnson's authority
that a man's expectation of imminent execution ‘concentrates his mind
wonderfully’, and it may have been precisely such expectation that concentrated
Paul's mind on this question in the months preceding the writing of 2 Corinthians, to the
point where he reached the conclusion set forth in this fifth chapter. It was not the
nature of the resurrection body that caused him chief concern, although he could not
conceive of conscious existence and communication with his environment in a disembodied
state.
"What he craved, and received,
was the assurance that absence from this earthly body would mean being ‘at home’
with the Lord, without any waiting interval.
“The immediate investiture with the new body is
valued only as a means of realizing and enjoying a closer nearness and a fuller communion
with the Lord than had been possible in mortal life. Therefore, says he, ‘we never
cease to be confident’ and meanwhile we ‘make it our ambition, wherever we are,
at home or away, to be acceptable to him’ (2 Cor. 5: 6, 9) ... The coming
consummation is in no way diminished, but those eschatological features which are realized
in life on earth at present do not cease to be realized in the interval between death and
the final consummation; they continue indeed to be more intensely realized than is
possible during life on earth.
Editor's note: Notice how Paul's thoughts on
the afterlife conform closely to the near-death experience (NDE) reports:
1) Paul's "inner man," spoken of just before
-- and therefore linked to - his "building" and "garment" analogies,
is another way of describing what the NDEers refer to as the "astral" or
"etheric" body.
2) Notice how the "inner man" and its
strengthening is linked to our suffering in this life. So many NDE reports center on the
need to return to this life because of the weakened condition of the spiritual body due to
selfishness prior to the NDE. Howard Storm's report is a prime example.
3) We receive our glorified, light-composed body
immediately upon dying. In fact, it has been with us all the time, within, the "inner
man."
4) Notice that the new body realized at death is not
an interim body until the resurrection -- it is "eternal," that is, we are given
our permanent body immediately upon dying.
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