What will we look like in heaven?
2024-05-21 00:29:56
Do you have questions about theology, the Bible, or the church that you’re too afraid to ask? Tired of pastors and scholars using unfamiliar language or overly complicated explanations? Curiously, Kaitlyn is a weekly podcast hosted by author and theologian Kaitlyn Schiess that tries to make theology accessible, meaningful, and fun. Each week, you’ll hear a kid ask a theology question–sometimes serious, sometimes silly–and Kaitlyn will interview a scholar to help answer it (without all the academic jargon). Together, Kaitlyn and her guest discover that this one simple question opens up big theological ideas that can impact our lives, shape our view of God, and understand Scripture in a new way. Whether you're reminiscing about your own childhood curiosities or simply seeking a refreshing take on faith, tune in and rediscover the joy of learning with "Curiously Kaitlyn.”
Welcome to Curiously, Caitlyn, a podcast where we try to make theology make sense. I'm Caitlyn Schess, and every week on this show you will hear a kid's question about God, theology, or the Bible, and then I'll talk with a scholar who will try to answer it.
I don't know.
That doesn't make any sense.
Dr.
Mark Cortes, thank you so much for joining me today.
I was so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
This is Dr. Mark Cortes. He's professor of theology at Wheaton College and the author of many books, including Theological Anthropology, a Guide for the Perplexed, which describes us in this episode.
Yeah.
All right. All right. Let's hear our kid question.
What will we look like in heaven, because I want my Nana to look like Nana, but she.
might want to look younger. A really good question, a very practical question, right? For kids to think about family members, especially family members who have died. And I love the honesty of, I want my Nana to look like the Nana I remember, but she might want to look a different way. So first, let's just start with your initial reaction to this question.
What will we look like in heaven?
Oh, that is a great question. I will say that I always answer questions about heaven with the answer of, I don't know. It's got to be our starting point. Good, good. Yeah, we just don't have that much detailed information in the Bible or even in tradition about what heaven's exactly going to look like.
So I want to plead ignorance to begin with and then see if I can go like just maybe a baby step beyond ignorance, if at all possible. So on what are we going to look like in heaven? If I'm going to unpack that just a little bit, I mean, one thing I absolutely want to say first is that we're going to have bodies. So we're going to be physical. in some sense.
I mean, the resurrection matters for how we think about what it's going to look like. So any kind of imaginative scenarios we've got about heaven that are somewhat disembodied or ephemeral, or we get turned into angels or something along those lines.
Strumming harps on clouds.
We'd take all of that and put it off to the side. You know, God made us to be human. He wants us to be human. Like that was, I think that was kind of part of the plan to begin with. Sure seems like part of being human is to have a body.
And so that's why the story, like we get created with bodies. Jesus comes in a body. The story ends with us being resurrected in bodies.
This is something we've talked about before, but it's really important. So we should say a bit more about what Dr. Cortes means here. He says that the story ends in resurrected bodies. Where does he get that?
Well, Jesus talked about the resurrection a few times, like in Matthew 22 and Luke 14.
. And there's other places in the New Testament, like 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4, that talk about how, when Christ returns, the dead will be raised. There are lots of places actually in the New Testament that talk about our resurrection in terms of our bodies. Like when Romans 8 talks about the redemption of our bodies, or the times that Jesus appears and his body is very real, with Thomas even touching the wounds in his body. Christians have always, for all of our history, affirmed that we are awaiting the resurrection of our bodies, not escape from our bodies.
So that's the one kind of confident piece that I've got to put on. the equation, is that we've got bodies. I'm assuming a question like this, though, wants a little bit more than just kind of the abstract, do we got bodies? What kind of body is going to be involved here? And so, from that point forward, I'm guessing, or kind of speculating on everything else.
One thing I do want to at least suggest is, I think our bodies will be at least somewhat like the bodies that we've got. To say that we have bodies, it has to mean something. And the one data point that we've got, as limited as it is, is the fact that Jesus died, was raised, and then we have some stories about what his life was like after the resurrection. And he was recognizably in a body form. It wasn't like.
people looked at him and said, oh, that's weird, I don't know what I'm looking at. Nope, that's a human, that's a human body. I know some of the stories are difficult to figure out exactly what's going on. And we want to keep in mind that after those stories, he ascends and goes up into heaven, and we don't really know what effect that had on his physical body. But I'm just going to stick with the little bit of information we've got, is that Jesus is walking around in something that sure looks recognizably like a human body.
So there's going to be some kind of continuity between this thing and whatever my resurrected body is like. The other thing that I want to say, though, is I don't want to lean into that too much. And if we're not careful, we kind of end up imagining life in heaven as being just kind of a slightly cooler version of what we've got now. And I think the Bible gives us enough to be a little bit more excited about what's coming in the future than just slightly cooler. It's going to be better than that.
And that means that this body, there's going to be something different about that. You can see that in those stories of Jesus, right? We've got some indications that it was recognizably a body, but something weird was going on there. Sometimes they didn't recognize him, or sometimes he's doing things that you don't expect bodied people to be able to do.
We talked about this with Krista McCurland in episode two, but Jesus appears in places like in the room with the disciples and disappears from places like on the road to Emmaus. That's what Dr. Cortes means when he says he's doing some weird things.
So you've got that continuity piece, but something's different. that kind of gives us the ability to look forward and hope that, whatever it is to have a body, to live, an embodied life is going to be not just slightly cooler, but lots of cooler moving forward. And I can kind of lean into that and be excited about that.
Yeah, that's great.
So one thing I want to say is sometimes, with this question, I feel like we try to develop a picture of what we're going to look like in heaven, where it's like the perfect thing that will never change. It's like kind of this ideal, and it's going to be that way for the rest of eternity, however long that is.
We should probably note that the very concept of eternity is a hard and a kind of weird concept. We'll need to come back to that in another episode.
And I'm not so sure that that's how we have to think about things. Everything else we know about what it means to be human is we're always changing. And we have stories and histories and we aren't the same as we were before. I'm not sure why we would think that would have to not be the case in heaven. So maybe there isn't a single answer to what am I going to look like in heaven.
Maybe I'll go through a variety of versions of me in heaven. I don't have anything to base that on, other than it sure seems consistent with what we see about everything else in what it means to be human.
Yeah, and I also hope that's true, because the alternative does sound kind of boring to just be the same all the time. I tell people all the time that I'm fully expecting an eternity to keep studying theology, because I have questions and I want to read books and I want to talk to people. And sometimes they act surprised as if what we are awaiting is just like static perfection. You won't have anything to learn. You'll know everything.
I'm not becoming God. I hope I'll still have questions to ask and things to explore. But that brings us back to the other part of this. I want to get to the last part of this girl's question in a second, which I think is really about relationship and imagining relationships and eternity. But even how she says it, what will we look like in heaven?
What does that mean in heaven? Or what is the state that you are imagining, as you're describing this, for us to be in eventually?
Yeah, so it's a great question. Those go together in my mind. The idea that we are resurrected into bodies so that we can live transformed human lives, but still recognizably human lives. Well, human bodies need places in which they kind of live and thrive and do the fun things that they were designed to do. So when I hear a question like this, and I hear the in heaven part of that, then I am going to want to kind of push us a little bit more toward the new earth language that we get, locally speaking, because it would be unfortunate if we succeeded in shaping our imaginations.
So I'm like, all right, after the resurrection, I've got a body, but it's just kind of floating around. Well, that's not really what it means to have. I'm supposed to do something with the body. And the body is to interact with an embodied environment. And the biblical pictures of what it looks like for these embodied humans is really earthy.
And they're running around and they're hanging out with animals, and there are cities. And it uses highly descriptive and sometimes confusing language, but it's all very earthy kind of language. There again, I want to say that there has to be some continuity where that language doesn't make sense, but there has to be some transformation, right? It's a better than, not just a repetition of our lives now. So yeah, so I want to say embodied humans living in a renewed earth, so that we are all being the kinds of humans that God designed us to be in the first place.
Yeah. So, thinking again now about the first part of this question, what will we look like? I think this kid might not be asking exactly this, but I think other kids have asked. I thought this, I'm sure, as a kid, and now. Not just what will we look like in terms of like, will our bodies look similarly like bodies?
So we've got that covered, but also there's some discontinuity too. Two, maybe three parts of this that I think people might also wonder about is the one the kid is wondering about, which is age. And I know theologians have thought about, is there like a perfect age will be? Is there like the correct age will be? Is there an age will be?
And these are all three big ones. I'm warning you in advance, so sorry. You can handle them however you would like. Age is one part. Gender is another part.
And maybe gender and race, are things that distinguish us physically or socially, culturally, do those still exist in eternity? And then lastly, and this brings me back to a few episodes we talked with Krista McCurland about, why do humans not have superpowers? Will we have greater ability in eternity? Will there be something about our human body's abilities that are different? Those are all three big ones, but take them, however you would like.
And we've got like three and a half hours.
Yeah, great. We're here all day.
A couple of things I'd want to say. to begin with. I mean, one, some of the questions like this can feel a little abstract and speculative, right? Because we don't know what we're talking about. So a response I often get from people with questions like this, well, who really cares?
If we can't know, then why waste your time on this? I think a question like this actually matters in a really tangible, vital sort of way, because what we imagine our heavenly body, our resurrected body, to look like, at least the way we typically do it, is we kind of create a picture in our mind of what we think an ideal human or an ideal version of me looks like. And anytime we start to think in terms of the ideal human or the ideal me, we need to recognize that we're operating in really powerful territory, because ideals shape our vision of which bodies matter, which bodies don't, which bodies are good, which bodies are bad, which versions of me are good, which versions of me are bad. So anytime we get into ideal language, that's always going to be something we want to handle really carefully and thoughtfully. With this one in particular, though, because we're talking about resurrected bodies that God gives us at the end, this isn't just my ideal, whether I intend to or not, when I start thinking about the resurrected body, I'm casting a picture of what I think God's ideal for human bodies is and for me.
And so now I've just, I've doubled down on why this is such an important topic to think through carefully. The other thing I always want to encourage people to be careful with here is I feel like we often wrestle with these questions in what I call kind of a choose-your-own-adventure approach to thinking about my body, right? And so I kind of, I grab the bits that I like, I ignore the bits that I don't like, and I kind of cast a vision of what the future will look like because of that. So I like my eyes, so clearly. those eyes have to be a part of the resurrected body.
I don't like my weight, so clearly I'll be skinnier. I've even heard people say, I've never been able to jump, you know? So in the resurrected life, I'll be able to jump like super high and slim basketball. finally, and whatnot. And they're kind of fun, you know, kind of ways of thinking.
But this kind of very self-centered.
and desire-driven way of thinking about the future doesn't strike me as the best way to think about what it means for us to really thrive and flourish as human persons. Really, the last thing I want to believe is that the success of my resurrection life is dependent on my ability to pick out the best parts of me. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster. Yes. So I'd much rather hope that God knows what he's doing and is going to put together a resurrection body that makes sense for all of us and will lead to our flourishing.
I just want to be careful with the pick and choose along the way. On the age question, and I was, of course, thinking about this because of the second half of the question, old or young, perfect age or whatnot. I'm hesitant. With a question like this, I'm always more fascinated with how people answer it and why they answer it that way. And the assumptions are usually on the younger end, at least, kind of the broader lifespan is.
you rarely see somebody saying, like, the ideal age is 70.
. It's usually, you know, we're picturing, like the 20-year-old, the 25-year-old and the prime of life, whatever that means. And because, of course, a young body, a healthy body, a strong body, a fast body, that must be the right, like the best kind of body. I think that says a lot about our assumptions of what ideal human life looks like. And it's the largely independent, able to do everything on its own kind of human life that we get pretty excited about.
And I also wonder if we need to have our imagination stretched a little bit more by what the beauty of an old body might actually mean. You know, so a body that is at least done well, a body that is shaped by a history of a life well-lived. A history of Christian faithfulness. Why isn't that like the most beautiful thing that we can think of, rather than a young body that has hardly had time to do anything in life? Now, obviously, we want to imagine bodies that aren't shaped by the pain and kind of the more destructive aspects of living in a fallen world that we wrestle with.
But I can get kind of excited about the idea that maybe it is the 70-year-old body that was an emblem of Christian faithfulness that should, I don't know, capture our imaginations more than it ought to.
Long version to a short version. Again, I don't know. I think there are a lot of different ones. And I'd like to challenge us to think more broadly about different kinds of ideal ages.
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Gender and race.
Yeah, so sorry. That's such a big question.
Well, and the tricky thing is, of course, and to some extent, age as well, but gender and race particularly raise questions of identity. Yeah. The way these always get shaped is what needs to be true about me in the resurrection in order for me to still be me? And so if you take away something like, or change something like, my gender, my race, there are certain conversations about disability that generate these same kinds of, like. if you take that away, then I am no longer me.
Dr. Cortez is referencing here a debate between theologians about how to think about disability and our resurrected bodies. Some theologians, including some disabled theologians, have said that resurrected bodies will still have the disabilities they had before the resurrection because it's so central to who those people are. Other theologians, including disabled theologians, have said that disabilities will be healed in eternity, that they are not central to who we really are. And some people fall somewhere in the middle.
As Dr. Cortez said earlier, this is not just an academic exercise. It's a way we think about what makes us, who we really are, what makes a good body, and how. we would know that. And it's hard.
And I'm really sympathetic to that, that we want to, it's kind of central to Christian faith that I am me in the resurrection. Otherwise, I don't really care what's happening to that person in the resurrection. It's gotta be me for this to really matter. But here as well, I want to be a little bit cautious about assuming that I already know what things are necessary in order for me to be me in the resurrection.
So I have a tendency to think that, I don't know, I've been 5'10 for a really, really, really long time. And it's kind of shaped my whole vision of who I am, that I'm neither tall, actually, sometimes I feel short, but I'm kind of in that medium range there. I'm pretty sure I could get away with being six feet tall in the resurrection, or 5'8, and I think it'd still be pretty good to go.
We tend to take certain things and view them as if they are so central to our identities that we couldn't be us without them. And I think I'd like to caution us about being confident that we can identify those identity-making things that well. But I'm also gonna back up to, I think the body matters. And so I have a hard time imagining.
the continuity piece that I think needs to be there in order for the body to be the good thing that God created up for us and wants us to dwell in. And then imagine that God's just gonna kind of randomly change all sorts of important things about our embodied existence. And so I am inclined to put things like gender and sexuality, at least aspects of race and ethnicity. We have talk about all nations, tribes, and tongues rejoicing and celebrating the resurrection. So it sure seems like there are pretty important elements of our embodied life now that carry forward.
And I do think, again, done well, that's important, because the body that I'm in now, this is the body that I'm trying to be faithful to Christ in. And so it makes sense to me theologically that this body then would get celebrated as it's being redeemed in the resurrection. And so there would be kind of marks of continuity that would say, no, it wasn't just any body that I tried to be faithful in, it was this one. Yeah, so.
That's really helpful. Part of what I hear you saying that is helpful for all of these other questions, like, if people wanna explore more of any of these aspects is that there's some element of continuity, there has to be some element of discontinuity, and you keep coming back to God made human bodies and called this good. And so that has to be central to how we talk about this. Let's talk about the last part of this question, because I think this child, who I know, who asked this, isn't just asking, she's a great training theologian, she's asking good questions, but she also is not just asking abstract theological questions. She's saying, I have a relationship with a human that I see with my eyes and I can touch and that's familiar to me.
And I don't want to anticipate a world where, yes, I see them again, but they aren't familiar to me. Like you were just saying, it's not some other person that just is in some way related to me. No, it's like, I want it to know that that's the same person that I know. So can you talk a little bit about, on that end of things, how you would answer, like, will we just be familiar to each other? Will there be relationships that we pick up again in the future.
that could help this girl who I think is just asking like, well, I know my Nana again, will we be in embodied relationship together again?
Generally speaking, I mean, the life that the Bible paints of the resurrection. is community life, right? It's the life of God's people gathered together in intimate relationship with God and with one another. So that the joy that is vital to that is a joy that comes absolutely from our relationship with God and being face-to-face with Him. But absolutely with doing that kind of alongside of the rest of God's people and celebrating this feast that is kind of laid out.
But like, it's a party, and it's a party that involves lots of people that are along there.
And I think the kind of celebration in community that the Bible is talking about really only makes sense in light, of, you know, kind of continuing and rejoicing in the relationships that we currently have. So I don't think there's a good way to understand what's going on there, where I kind of get dropped into this new earth state. I don't recognize anybody and I'm suddenly supposed to like, just be amazed and joyful and celebrating a party with them all.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, it certainly, I think, probably could go back to the continuity, discontinuity, but, like the relationships that we make now are vital to what God has created us for. So it just wouldn't make any sense of who we know God to be, that those would just disappear eschatologically, kind of end times, sorts of things.
Yeah.
So yes, the relationships are going to be there. I think they're going to be really important and we can celebrate in them.
Remember this word, eschatology? We've talked about it before. It's a big word that, as Dr. Cortez says, refers to the end times, the end of the story.
With a kind of a small child wrestling with these questions, I think probably two things I would want to lean into.
One, I mean, we probably can do this even in this earthly sorts of ways, right? So I could talk with a kid like this. I had a best friend when I was their age that we spent a ton of time with, played together all the time, knew each other inside and out. Haven't seen him now in probably 20 years. And I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that he probably looks a fair bit different than he did when I knew him long ago.
So it's not like I would see him on the street and just instantly know, oh, that's who that is. But give me maybe a minute and a half, maybe not even that long, of spending time together. And that familiarity, that relationship, it's there. And that's something that we can rejoice and celebrate and enjoy. Even though they're like, cause.
again, go back to what I said earlier, we're humans, we do change over time. So there can be change, but it's had to be changed. that threatens relationship or familiarity because of, I don't know, the life that goes on behind that. Well, if that's true for some kid that I knew 20 years ago and haven't seen since then, I mean, grandmas rank much higher than that. And so I'd want to kind of comfort someone like this, saying, I don't know how visibly familiar she'll be, but she'll still be grandma.
And you'll know that immediately and be able to enjoy that relationship in there. The other thing I tend to lean on here is just the, in Revelation, where it says that there will be no tears in heaven. And the confidence that gives me to know, even as I'm guessing and speculating and not being sure of what in the world I'm talking about, the piece that I can be sure of is that God is good and He knows us and He wants us to flourish. And I would probably ask, would I ask? I don't know, I might ask a kid like this, would it make you sad if you didn't know your grandma in heaven?
If the answer is yes, and I think that's a good yes, I think that ought to make somebody sad, then I just can't believe that. we can't hope that God can handle that. And then, yeah, you're going to rejoice in heaven because you get to be with grandma and you're both going to love it.
That's great. Well, you kind of already answered this, but if you want to say anything else, my last question was going to be, imagine you're with this kid, what exactly would you say?
I mean, I probably would just double down on. God is reliable.
God is, God wants the best for us.
So, whatever the answer is, it's going to be a good answer and lean on that and be confident in that.
And I probably would actually want to say, is grandma going to look the same? Say no, grandma's going to look better. I don't know what better means exactly, but if you can trust God, then she's going to look better in a way that God only understands. And then you'll get to be happy and you'll get to be really excited for how amazing grandma looks.
That is wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking this question really seriously with me.
I'm very much with you. I spent a lot of time hanging out with middle schoolers and I've always said, I get some of my best theological questions come from 12 year olds.
They are some great little theologians. Dr. Cortez didn't just answer this question about how we will look in heaven. He taught us something really important. That's even bigger than that question.
This life matters. This body matters. This earth matters. Our relationships here matter. Sometimes Christians have overemphasized our distance from the world.
Like it's holier or more faithful for us to almost hate our bodies, this earthly world, or even our closest relationships. Dorothy Sayers, a brilliant theologian, once joked that people think that the word sin just means that anything we like doing is wrong. And there's a grain of truth in all of this. Jesus talked about hating our families, hating our life in this world in order to gain eternal life. But all of those specific verses need to be understood in the context of the larger story of scripture.
A story that starts with creation made good and human bodies made good, and relationships and community as gifts from God, and ends with those good things restored and redeemed. We can be tempted to get captivated by the things of this world, loving them in the wrong way. But they are good gifts. Gifts that will be redeemed and perfected in eternity. We are not awaiting a heaven without bodies or relationships or anything to do.
We're awaiting an eternity in this redeemed creation, using these good bodies to live full lives in even better community with God and other humans made in his image.
Curiously, Caitlyn is a production of Holy Post Media, produced by Mike Strelow, editing by Seth Corvette, theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus cute kids, and never any butt news.
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