The Teaching Corner

Lutherans believe the same thing about death and the afterlife as all other orthodox Christians.  That is we believe that because of Christ, death does not have to be our final ending, but that we have hope of new life after death with Christ.  Where things get muddled is in details, and this is because we do not have many of these details and, as a result, many myths surrounding death and the afterlife have arisen in our culture that masquerade as “Christian” concepts but are not particularly Christian.  Perhaps we might be best severed this month by examining a few of these myths.

Myth #1—Good people go to heaven when they die, bad people go to hell.

    If this truly were the case, we would either have no need for Jesus, or heaven would be a very empty place.  Our Christian faith is based on the very true fact that none of us deserve to get into heaven.  Even the most pious do-gooder saint is not good enough to merit heaven.  We can only enter into God’s kingdom by the grace of God, made available to us through Christ.  That grace we receive is not based on the works we do, for that would nullify the importance of grace, but rather it is a free gift.  As a result of this we cannot claim to go to heaven because we have been relatively “good,” nor can we say who is going to hell.  We can only instead proclaim the promise we have through Christ and leave the rest up to God.

Myth #2—The human soul is inherently immortal.

    While this is a commonly held belief in our society, it is not Christian, for nothing is inherently immortal except God.  In fact the only way humans can have life beyond this one—whether in heaven or hell—is by the power and grace of God.  Belief in a soul that is somehow eternal and separate from the body is not a Christian belief, but an aspect of certain philosophy that has infiltrated Christianity over the millennia.  The Christian church therefore has no official doctrine regarding the existence or non-existence of an immortal soul, save to say that if a soul becomes immortal it is only so because it has been made so by God, not because it is so by its nature.

Myth #3—The ultimate goal for Christians is eternal life for the soul in a spiritual heaven.

    A popular concept today is that when individuals die they go to heaven and eventually when Christ returns the earth will be destroyed and all people will live eternally in a sort of spiritual heaven.  This ignores what we confess as Christians every Sunday and what we read in scripture.  We believe in the resurrection of the body, not the immortality of the soul.  The ultimate goal for Christians is not an escape from this earth into a celestial paradise, but for the kingdom of God to arrive in its fullness on earth.  God means to redeem all his creation, the physical as well as the spiritual—for God made it and it was good.  Notice at the end of Revelation that the new Jerusalem, the dwelling place of God, comes down to earth from heaven; the people of earth aren’t zapped up to heaven.  An eternal ethereal existence is not part of the Christian vision.  Our hope is grounded in physical as well as spiritual salvation.