CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 27
Paul and the Life to Come
1. Background of thought
The spiritual crisis which paul underwent 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”.1 It is probably impossible to draw such a sharp line between Paul’s attitude to life before this crisis and his attitude after it: if the judgment expressed in an earlier Chapter is maintained, that 2 Corinthians 10–13 (“Corinthians E”) followed and did not precede Chapters 1–9 (“Corinthians D”), then Paul was capable of quite sharp and ironical polemic after his “second conversion”.
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.2
It is plain that Paul inherited the belief in a coming resurrection of the body which was widespread among the Pharisees, but it should not be assumed too readily that the Pharisaic doctrine of resurrection at the beginning of the first century A.D. was uniform, or that it can be deduced without more ado from later rabbinical teaching. The belief in resurrection appears to have been one of the principal points of theological difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees:3 the narrative of Acts records how Paul, appearing before the Sanhedrin after his arrest in Jerusalem, threw the apple of discord among its members by declaring that as a Pharisee born and bred he stood on trial for “the hope of the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 23:6). Still more explicitly, he is said to have declared before Felix that he held the hope, shared by his accusers—by his Pharisaic accusers, of course—“that there is to be a resurrection of good and wicked alike” (Acts 24:15). It is curious—though it may be accidental—that in Paul’s letters there is no clear reference to the resurrection of the wicked.
The twofold resurrection is commonly believed to be first attested in Daniel 12:2—“many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will wake, some to everlasting life, and some to the reproach of eternal abhorrence”. But it is possible to render these words otherwise: “many who sleep in the dust of the earth will wake, and these are (destined) to everlasting life; but those (the others, who do not wake) are (destined) to the reproach of eternal abhorrence”4 (cf. Proverbs 10:7, “the memory of the righteous is for a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot”).
Josephus’s account of the Pharisees’ teaching is based on inside information, but it suffers from his eagerness to assimilate it to the Greek outlook, especially in Antiquities xviii. 14: “They believe that souls have power to survive death and that there are rewards and punishments under the earth for those who have led lives of virtue or vice: eternal imprisonment is the lot of evil souls, while the good souls receive an easy passage to a new life.” Nothing here would cause much offence to a Platonist. In his earlier work, his Jewish War, Josephus had spoken more explicitly of the Pharisees’ belief in resurrection: “They hold that every soul is incorruptible, but that the soul of the good alone passes into another body, while the souls of the wicked suffer eternal punishment”.5 Here it appears that the bodily resurrection of the righteous only is contemplated—although an uninitiated Greek or Roman reader might well have taken Josephus’s words to imply a belief in metempsychosis. Later in the Jewish War the Pharisaic belief finds fresh expression, where Josephus represents himself as trying to dissuade his comrades at Jotapata from committing suicide to avoid falling into the hands of the Romans: “those who depart this life in accordance with the law of nature [which would be violated by suicide] … win eternal renown;… their souls, remaining spotless and obedient, are allotted the most holy place in heaven whence, in the revolution of the ages, they return to find a new habitation in pure bodies”.6
The varieties of expectation among religious Jews in the last two centuries B.C. are well illustrated by the intertestamental literature. Ben Sira thinks that posterity’s remembrance of a good man’s virtues is the most desirable immortality:7 the author of Wisdom, influenced by Greek thought, thinks in terms of the survival of souls—especially of “the souls of the righteous” which “are in the hand of God”, so that no evil can befall them.8 The martyrs in 2 Maccabees—an epitome of the history of Jason of Cyrene—look forward to their resurrection in the same bodies as those in which they suffer, with their mutilated members restored;9 in 4 Maccabees—like Wisdom, a product of Alexandrian Jewry—the same martyrs use the language of Stoicism and exemplify the supremacy of Right Reason over physical pain and death.10
From the second century B.C., however, the idea of the Garden of Eden (Paradise) as a place of bliss for the righteous and of Gehinnom as a place of fiery punishment for the wicked after death took hold of popular imagination among the Jews—partly, no doubt, under the influence of Iranian belief, in which fire is a means of testing at the last judgment.11 In Pharisaism the fire of Gehinnom for the ungodly is not always purely penal; according to the school of Shammai those whose merits and demerits were evenly balanced had first to purge their sins in its flame and only so enter into Paradise.12 This implies the idea of some sort of personal survival between death and resurrection.
In a couple of Jewish apocalypses dating from the end of the first century A.D. the souls of the dead, or at least of the righteous dead, are kept in store-chambers or treasuries between death and resurrection.13
The Qumran texts speak plainly enough of eternal life for the righteous and annihilation for the wicked, but throw no clear light on the question of resurrection. Those who hold fast to God’s house “are destined for eternal life and all the glory of man (? the glory destined for man) is theirs”;14 the disobedient “have no remnant or survival”15 but suffer the doom of the antediluvian sinners who “perished and became as though they had never been”.16 The men of Qumran looked forward to the day of requital when God would “render to man his reward”.17 His elect would inherit the lot of the holy ones—indeed, in their community life they anticipated this inheritance, for God had “joined their assembly to the sons of heaven, to be a council of the community, a foundation of the building of holiness, an eternal plantation for all time to come”.18 They are “adorned with God’s splendour and will enjoy many delights with everlasting peace and length of days”.19 When the last battle between good and evil is fought, “there shall be eternal deliverance for those belonging to the lot of God and destruction for all the nations of wickedness”.20 But just how the godly pass from mortal life, or from a martyr-death, to their state of endless bliss is not so clear.
If we could be sure that the men of Qumran were Essenes, then we might associate the former’s expectation of eternal bliss with Josephus’s statement that the latter look for the soul, consisting of the finest ether, to be released from the bonds of the flesh and enjoy an elysian retreat.21 His description of this retreat is not unlike the oasis in which, according to one of the Qumran hymns, the godly man finds his abode—“beside a fountain of streams in an arid land, … beside a watered garden [in a wilderness]”.
No [one shall approach] the well-spring of life
or drink the waters of holiness
with the everlasting trees
or bear fruit with [the planting] of heaven
who seeing has not discerned
and considering has not believed
in the fountain of life.22
But Josephus’s tendency to conform Jewish beliefs and practices to those rendered respectable by Greek philosophy counsels caution once more in taking his information au pied de la lettre. Hippolytus, whose account of the Essenes in the ninth book of his Philosophoumena largely follows Josephus but seems to be indebted to a further source, says that in addition to the immortality of the soul they believed in the resurrection of the body: the soul, he says, is regarded by the Essenes as imperishable, resting after death in an airy and well-lighted place, until it is rejoined by the resurrected body on the day of judgment.23 Our ignorance of Hippolytus’s additional source prevents us from adequately evaluating his information where it contradicts that of Josephus, but a certain suspension of judgment is plainly the wise course to adopt.
2. New perspective
Whatever Paul’s earlier position on immortality may have been, it was decisively modified by his conversion to Christianity. This conversion resulted immediately and inevitably from his vision of the risen Lord, who called him to be his apostle. What he had previously refused to admit—that the crucified Jesus had been raised from the dead by the power of God, as the earlier apostles maintained—was now borne in upon him by testimony too compelling to be doubted. Jesus was therefore the Messiah, the Son of God, the highly exalted Lord—but, more especially for our present purpose, with Jesus’ rising from the dead the expected resurrection had begun to take place. What had been for Paul previously the resurrection hope was now, so far as Jesus was concerned, more than a hope; it was a fait accompli. Since God had raised Jesus from the dead, he would assuredly raise all his people in due course—more specifically, at Jesus’ parousia, his advent in glory.24 At least, he would raise those of them who had passed through death before the parousia—whether they belonged to the patriarchs and prophets of the old age or to believers of the new age. But many believers of the new age would not require to be raised from the dead, for they would still be alive at the parousia. Here and now believers of the new age continued to live in mortal bodies, but inwardly they already enjoyed a foretaste of the coming resurrection life—eternal life—because they were united by faith to the risen Christ, incorporated in him. This incorporation was effected by the Spirit of Christ whom they had received, and by his power the life of the risen Christ was already imparted to all his people. In baptism, indeed, they had died with Christ and been buried and raised with him; at his advent they would share his manifested glory, but by the indwelling Spirit they were able to anticipate the hope of glory and live in the good of it.25 It was no mere intimation of immortality that they thus received; it was an initial experience of immortality, though the full experience must await the parousia. Here and now they knew that “Christ, once raised from the dead, will never die again: death no longer has dominion over him” (Romans 6:9); and what was true of him must be true of his people who through him possessed as the gift of God the life of the age to come. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells within you”—so Paul’s argument runs—“then he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his indwelling Spirit” (Romans 8:11).
These last quotations from Paul’s writings express the full maturity of his understanding; but, while we can trace a progression in his thought and language on this subject, his central belief and teaching do not appear to have undergone any essential change throughout his Christian career.
The main body of Paul’s correspondence that has been preserved to us comes from a period lasting not more than from ten to twelve years. So short a period may see but little development in some men’s careers when they have reached this stage of life, but Paul’s life during these years was so full of intense activity and, latterly, a spell of enforced inactivity, coupled with an ever deepening awareness of what it meant to be Christ’s apostle among the Gentiles, that it would be surprising if his experiences had no influence at all on his outlook on the future.
3. The Thessalonians’ problem
At the beginning of this period Paul founded the church in Thessalonica. Circumstances beyond his control, however, forced him to leave the city before he had given his converts all the teaching he believed they required. He had at least taught them to wait expectantly for Jesus’ appearance from heaven to deliver them from the end-time outpouring of wrath on the ungodly;26 and such expectant waiting implied their survival to witness this great event. But in the weeks and months that followed Paul’s departure some of his converts died. The death of believers before the parousia was something that the Thessalonian church had not been prepared for, and a problem was thereby created in their minds on which they sought enlightenment. They seem, in fact, to have put two questions to Paul:
a. At Christ’s parousia, what will be the lot of those believers in him who have died before he comes?
b. When may the parousia be expected?
In answering the former question Paul assures them that those of their number who have died before the parousia will suffer no disadvantage when it take place; “we who are left alive until the Lord comes shall not forestall those who have fallen asleep”. On the contrary, when the Lord descends from heaven with the shout of command, the archangel’s voice and the trumpet blast, those who respond to his summons first will be the dead in Christ; when they rise at his call, brought to life with him who died and rose again, “then we who are left alive shall join them, caught up in clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:14–18). This assurance is conveyed to them “by the word of the Lord”—on the authority of an utterance of Jesus himself (whether given before his death or subsequently we need not now inquire). The language and imagery are those associated with Old Testament theophanies of redemption and judgment—we may think of the trumpet blast which calls home the dispersed of Israel in Isaiah 27:13 and the clouds of heaven on which one like a son of man is brought to the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7:13—but what is here communicated in these terms is new and distinctively Christian. Because Jesus died and rose again, those who die believing in him cannot fail to rise with him; and all his people must live forever with him.
As for the latter and more general question, when the parousia would take place, Paul does little more than repeat the words of Jesus, that it would come unexpectedly, “like a thief in the night”.27 The call to the people of Christ therefore is to “keep awake and sober”—“for God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:1–9).
4. The resurrection of the dead
Paul’s best-known contribution to the subject is his reply to those members of the church of Corinth who held, as he put it, that there was “no resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:12). In these people’s eyes the doctrine of the reanimation of corpses, as they took it to be, was perhaps an uncongenial Jewish superstition which was a handicap to the acceptance of the Christian message by thoughtful Gentiles. It was a pity, they thought, that Paul had not been able to disencumber himself of this as he had of so many other Jewish peculiarities. Happily, they themselves were more completely emancipated.
What these Corinthians positively believed about the life to come is more difficult to determine. They may simply have believed in the inherent immortality of the soul, or in some kind of assumption into glory at death or at the parousia; but there are hints elsewhere in Paul’s correspondence with them that they held what has been described as an “over-realized eschatology”. Earlier in this letter he tells the Corinthian Christians, ironically, that they have “arrived” ahead of time: “You have come into your fortune already. You have come into your kingdom—and left us out. How I wish you had indeed won your kingdom; then you might share it with us!” (1 Corinthians 4:8). Presumably they thought that with the gift of the Spirit they had received all that the religious man could desire. One suggestion is that they anticipated the outlook of Prodicus, a second-century Gnostic, whose followers claimed to be “by nature sons of the first God” and therefore “royal sons far above the rest of mankind”.28
If a gnostic link is sought, a more promising one may be provided by the Epistle to Rheginus, a short Valentinian treatise on resurrection, included in the “Jung papyrus” (one of the Nag Hammadi codices) and published for the first time in 1963.29 According to this document,
The Saviour swallowed up death.… For he laid aside the world that perishes. He changed himself into an incorruptible aeon and raised himself up, after he had swallowed up the visible by the invisible, and he gave us the way of our immortality. But at that time, as the apostle said, we suffered with him, and we rose with him, and we went to heaven with him. But if we are made manifest in this world wearing him, we are his beams and we are encompassed by him until our setting, which is our death in this life. We are drawn upward by him like beams by the sun, without being held back by anything. This is the spiritual resurrection which swallows up the “psychic” together with the fleshly.30
The first editors of this document interpreted its contents in terms of an over-realized eschatology such as that for which Hymenaeus and Philetus are reprobated in 2 Timothy 2:17 f.: “they have shot wide of the truth in saying that our resurrection has already taken place, and are upsetting people’s faith”. (Presumably the new life in Christ into which they had already entered was all they desired.) More recently Dr Malcolm Lee Peel has pointed out that there is an element of not-yet-realized eschatology in the document: bodily death must be undergone even by the elect, and it is followed by resurrection, albeit a spiritual resurrection.31 But when the transformation which follows death is described as a spiritual resurrection, the word “resurrection” is used in an extended sense, one which it does not bear in the New Testament. If the deniers of the resurrection at Corinth held some form of incipient Gnosticism (a possible, though not a necessary, view), they may have anticipated some such view as that expressed in the Epistle to Rheginus, for the “spiritual resurrection” envisaged in the Epistle might for Paul hardly have been a resurrection in the true sense of the word. In this “spiritual resurrection” it is the inward and invisible “members” that ascend, clothed in a new and spiritual “flesh”, for which the appearance of Moses and Elijah on the mount of transfiguration is cited as a precedent.
For Paul, the past resurrection of Christ involved a coming resurrection for his people, and it would be a bodily resurrection, as his was. True, the immortal resurrection body would be of a different order from the present mortal body; it would be a “spiritual” body whereas the present body was a “natural” body—sōma psychikon, a body animated by “soul”. This language is bound up with his distinction between life “in Adam”, who in Genesis 2:7 is described as “a living soul”, and life “in Christ”, who in resurrection has become “a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). But in this argument Paul goes beyond the assurance he had given to the Thessalonian Christians a few years earlier. Then, he declared that those who survived to the parousia would enjoy no advantage over the faithful departed; now he affirms, and that on the strength of a special revelation, a “mystery” newly disclosed,32 that those who survive will then undergo an instantaneous transformation, so that they too will be adapted to the conditions of the resurrection age. We may compare and contrast the expectation found later in the first century in the Apocalypse of Baruch where the bodies of the dead, raised without change of form in order to receive equitable judgment, are thereafter transformed in accordance with the verdict—those of the justified being clothed in angelic glory, while those of the condemned waste away in torment.33 According to Paul, the dead—that is to say, the dead in Christ, who alone of the dead come into his purview here—will rise in bodies which are not liable to corruption, while the living will exchange mortality for immortality.34 To much the same effect he tells his friends at Philippi that from heaven “we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body and make it like his body of glory” (Philippians 3:20 f.). Basic to his thinking throughout is the conviction that Christ and his people are so vitally and permanently united that his triumph over death must be shared with them, not only in sacramental anticipation but in bodily resurrection.
5. What happens at death?
But in all this nothing has been said about a question which, to our way of thinking, is of the essence of this topic of immortality: 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. 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 15:51 f.).
It is when we come to 2 Corinthians that we are conscious of a change of perspective on Paul’s part. 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.35 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. Whatever other changes this experience occasioned in his outlook, it modified his perspective on death and resurrection. 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. Be it noted, however, that while it affected his personal perspective, the “deferment of the parousia” caused no such fundamental change in his thought as it is sometimes held to have caused in the thought of the church as a whole.36 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); now in 2 Corinthians he tackles it. 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. Nonetheless he speaks with confidence: “we know”, he says (2 Corinthians 5:1). 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,37 so that physical death will mean no hiatus of disembodiment but the immediate enjoyment of being “at home with the Lord”.38
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: “we do not want to have the old body stripped off. Rather our desire is to have the new body put on over it, so that our mortal part may be absorbed into life immortal. God himself has shaped us for this very end; and as a pledge of it he has given us the Spirit” (5:4 f.).
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. Attempts have indeed been made to explain the heavenly body as a corporate entity, the body of Christ39; but believers have already “put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27), and the Pauline concept of the body of Christ and believers’ membership in it is related to the present mortal existence rather than to the life to come. If, however, the new body referred to here is the spiritual body of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul no longer thinks of waiting until the parousia before he receives it. Nor is it a merely temporary integument that he hopes to receive at death, pending his investiture with the resurrection body at the parousia; it is the eternal “housing” 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 no interval of conscious “nakedness” between the one and the other.40 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 the new body will be immediately available at death. 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”,41 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 Corinthians 5:6, 9). Appearance before the tribunal of Christ, to give account of deeds done in mortal body, is still a future certainty; so also is the participation of the people of Christ in their Lord’s glory when he is manifested—that “revelation of the sons of God” for which, according to Romans 8:19, “the created universe waits with eager expectation”. 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. Paul’s last word on the immortality of men and women of faith is the logical outworking of his teaching on their union with the living Christ.