Jesus and the Demise of Death: Resurrection, Afterlife, and the Fate of the Christian

By Matthew Levering

What happens after death to Jesus and to those who follow him? Jesus and the Demise of Death offers a constructive theology that seeks to answer that very question, carefully considering both Jesus' descent into hell and eventual resurrection as integral parts of a robust vision of the Christian bodily resurrection. Taking on the claims of N.T. Wright and Richard B. Hays, Matthew Levering draws strongly upon the work of Thomas Aquinas to propose a radical reconstruction of Christian eschatological theology--one that takes seriously the profound ways in which Christianity and its beatific vision have been enriched by Platonic thought and emphasizes the role of the Church community in the passage from life to death. In so doing, Levering underscores the hope in eternal life for Jesus' followers and gives readers firm and fruitful soil upon which to base conversations about the Christian's future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781602586727

Matthew Levering

Matthew Levering is the James N. and Mary D. Perry, Jr. Chair of Theology at Mundelein Seminary. He is the author of four previous books with the University of Notre Dame Press, including Mary's Bodily Assumption (2014).

Book preview

Given the uncertainty of which we are so certain concerning eternity, perhaps only a post-postmodern turn can save us from being overwhelmed by our impending doom, our terminal temporality.

—Carlos Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity

Jesus and the Demise of Death

Resurrection, Afterlife,

and the Fate of the Christian

Matthew Levering

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS

© 2012 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798-7363

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible Catholic Edition, copyright 1965, published by Thomas Nelson Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover Design by Dean Bornstein

Cover Image: The Resurrection, c.1380 (tempera on panel) by Master of the Trebon Altarpiece (fl.1380). Narodni Galerie, Prague, Czech Republic/ Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levering, Matthew, 1971-

Jesus and the demise of death : resurrection, afterlife, and the fate of the Christian / Matthew Levering.

238 p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 193) and index.

ISBN 978-1-60258-447-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Eschatology. 2. Catholic Church--Doctrines. I. Title.

BT821.3.L48 2012

236--dc23

2011032295

To Ralph and Patty Levering

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I

THE PASSAGE OF JESUS CHRIST

1  Christ’s Descent into Hell

2  The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

3  Sitting at the Right Hand of the Father

PART II

THE PASSAGE OF CHRIST’S PEOPLE

4  A People in Passage: Faith, Eucharist, Almsgiving

5  Can We Merit Eternal Life?

6  Do We Have Spiritual Souls?

7  Bodily Resurrection and Beatific Vision

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

Like many people, I have often wondered what there is for me and my loved ones after death: what happens to us? Should even a theologian preserve a discreet silence? As Christians, however, we have much to hope for and much reason for hope. Holding fast the word of life (Phil 2:12), I wish to speak about this hope through Scripture and through the doctrinal and theological tradition of the Church, which benefited from Greek philosophical culture.

Many wonderful people helped me with this project. As will be clear in the pages that follow, I owe a special debt to N. T. Wright, without, however, ever having conversed with him. Although at times I disagree with him, I do so from a position of broad agreement with and strong admiration for what he has contributed to biblical studies. When the Dominicans of the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis invited me to deliver their Aquinas Lecture in January 2010, I presented an early draft of chapter 1. The Dominican community in St. Louis showed me gracious hospitality, and I owe particular thanks to Dominic Holtz, O.P. Michael Drever invited me to lecture on God and Greek philosophy at the Society of Biblical Literature, and the resulting conversations benefited me in preparing this book. Timothy Gray and Jared Staudt of the Augustine Institute invited me to speak at the first Nova et Vetera Conference in Denver, where I presented a draft of chapter 5, later published as Eternal Life: A Merited Free Gift? in Nova et Vetera 9 (2011): 149–62. I thank Tim and Jared for their wonderful hospitality, and I also gained from conversations at the conference with Ted Sri, Gary Anderson, Reinhard Hütter, Bruce Marshall, Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Romanus Cessario, O.P., Charles Morerod, O.P., and Jeremy Holmes.

Matthew Archer helped me assemble the secondary literature for this project, as did, at a later stage, Alan Mostrom, who also skillfully compiled the bibliography. The Index was generously prepared by Jason Heron. It has been a privilege to work with these three promising doctoral students. After I wrote a first draft of the chapters, Jörgen Vijgen persuaded me that the project was not hopeless. The long work of revision was enriched by the generosity of those who read and criticized the drafts: Reginald Lynch, O.P., Sean Fagan, Chad Raith, and Jared Staudt. I could not have proceeded without their help. Carey Newman of Baylor University Press deserves special thanks. With his wit, encouragement, guidance, and criticisms, he made the whole process far more enjoyable and fruitful than it otherwise would have been.

Let me gratefully acknowledge the friendship of Michael Vanderburgh: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35). For the welcome you gave me and my family in Dayton, may God reward you as Jesus has promised: Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world (Matt 25:34). While working on this book, I have had my family as a constant source of fun. My beautiful wife, Joy, is God’s blessing to me. I am amazed by watching my children get older, and I’m so glad to share in their lives. My parents and Joy’s parents helped us in a difficult financial situation when we were renting a house in Dayton. And it is to my beloved father and mother, Ralph and Patty Levering, with gratitude and love, that I dedicate this book.

Introduction

THE PLAN OF THE WORK

The eminent biblical scholar Richard B. Hays calls upon contemporary theologians to press forward to a robust recovery of apocalyptic teaching and preaching.¹ By apocalyptic, he has in view the Church’s traditional teaching about the ultimate glorification of Jesus Christ as Lord over all creation, the resurrection of the body, God’s final judgment of all humanity, and ‘the life of the world to come’ in true justice and peace.² When it comes to theological discussion of these themes, however, the past century has been a tumultuous one. The Church’s traditional eschatology has fallen out of favor.³ For many theologians and biblical scholars, significant portions of the Church’s traditional eschatology reflect an outdated worldview.⁴

Taking up Hays’ challenge, I seek to contribute to the robust recovery of apocalyptic teaching and preaching by setting forth a theology of resurrection and eternal life (Christ’s and ours). By means of a constructive retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’ theology of resurrection and eternal life, I argue that the Church’s traditional eschatology has a biblical perspicacity that has been missed by its critics.⁵ Since we learn about resurrection and eternal life from Scripture, I also examine in some detail the approaches of biblical scholars to these topics.⁶ This exegetical engagement provides the basis for appropriating Aquinas’ theological insights in a contemporary fashion. In this regard I agree with Joseph Ratzinger that theological insights must be capable of holding up in biblical terms, but it would be false to treat them as exegetical conclusions because the way we have decided in their favor is that appropriate to systematic thought.⁷ A Thomistic theology of resurrection and eternal life should accord with Scripture without claiming to derive exegetical conclusions in a strict sense.

In preparing this book, I was inspired by Alexander Schmemann’s remark that "it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage—a ‘passover,’ a ‘Pascha’—into the Kingdom of God."⁸ Since Jesus’ redemptive death has enabled our death to be a passage into the kingdom of God, the book has two sections, one on Jesus’ passage (his descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension), and one on the Church’s passage.⁹ It may seem unusual that I do not include a chapter on the cross, given that eschatological communion with the Trinity is attained in and through Christ’s cross.¹⁰ In this book, however, my fundamental concern is what happens after death to Jesus and to those who follow him,¹¹ a concern that is inseparable, of course, from how the Church participates in Jesus’ paschal mystery here and now.

The book’s first section, comprising three chapters, explores Jesus Christ as the one who discloses to us what ‘existence in transition’ means.¹² Chapter 1 asks whether, in accord with the Apostles’ Creed, contemporary Christians should affirm that Jesus descended into hell when he died, and if so, how to understand this affirmation. Agreeing with N. T. Wright that an intermediate state exists (after death but prior to resurrection), I argue that the dead Jesus joined the holy people who preceded him, and that his sojourning with them was a joyful one because he was present as the conqueror of sin. Chapter 2 treats Jesus’ glorious resurrection from the dead in accordance with the scriptures of Israel (1 Cor 15:4). In light of the historical reflection on resurrection faith (Jewish and Christian) provided by Jon Levenson, N. T. Wright, Dale Allison, and James Dunn, I inquire into whether theology has anything to add, particularly as regards the relationship of Jesus’ resurrection to Israel and the Church. Chapter 3 studies Jesus’ ascension in his flesh to the right hand of the Father, from whence he pours forth the Holy Spirit, who is love drawing us up to heavenly things.¹³ I seek to distinguish Jesus’ humanity and divinity in the glorification of Jesus and in the sending of the Spirit, and I inquire into the meaning of the Father’s right hand. These chapters emphasize that at every step of Jesus’ passage we are included: Jesus rejoices with the believing dead in the intermediate state; his glorious resurrection is in various ways the cause of ours; and his ascension to the right hand of the Father enables him to glorify us. As Douglas Farrow says, our destiny is bound up with that of Jesus.¹⁴

The second section, on our passage, occupies the final four chapters. Chapter 4 examines the eschatological community that even now participates in Christ’s resurrection and that awaits his return in glory and the consummation of history. Taking my bearings largely from the Book of Acts, I explore how faith, eucharistic worship, and charitable almsgiving relate us to Jesus. I ask whether Aquinas’ portrait of these realities obscures the eschatological orientation that they have in the New Testament. The fifth and sixth chapters address topics that are fundamental for conceiving of the world to come in relation to this world: whether God enables our actions to merit eternal life, and whether God has created us with a spiritual soul. Lastly, chapter 7 asks how the life of the world to come—beatific vision, bodily resurrection, the new creation—fulfills the passage on which the church is already embarked (as sketched in chapter 4). I agree here with Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart: Humans have been created to find our eternal fulfilment and joy in the vision of God. Creatures can have no completion or perfection in themselves alone, and human creatures will find their faculties of love, knowledge and enjoyment of beauty fully satisfied only in relation to God.¹⁵ As Bauckham and Hart point out, the vision of God does not compete with our knowledge and love for creatures, as it would if God were a reality alongside creatures rather than the transcendent Creator in whom all creatures have their being. The portrait of our eternal life in the Trinity that I offer in this final chapter requires, in Hays’ evocative phrase, the conversion of the imagination.¹⁶

SCRIPTURE, THE SOUL OF ESCHATOLOGY?

How can theologians claim to know so much about resurrection and eternal life? At the 2008 Synod of Bishops, devoted to the topic of Sacred Scripture, Pope Benedict XVI stated that where exegesis is not theology, Scripture cannot be the soul of theology, and conversely, where theology is not essentially the interpretation of the Church’s Scripture, such a theology no longer has a foundation.¹⁷ The status of Scripture as the soul of theology is affirmed by the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum (§24), and is also underscored by Benedict XVI’s recent Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini. Indeed, in Verbum Domini he urges, It is my hope that, in fidelity to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the study of sacred Scripture, read within the communion of the universal Church, will truly be the soul of theological studies.¹⁸

But has this been the case for traditional Christian eschatology? Consider, for example, the events that followed upon Jesus’ death. According to the Apostles’ Creed, Jesus Christ descended into hell.¹⁹ The Catechism of the Catholic Church interprets Jesus’ descent into hell in the following manner: In his human soul united to his divine person, the dead Christ went down to the realm of the dead. He opened heaven’s gates for the just who had gone before him (§637). How does the Catechism know this? In accord with its rightful emphasis on doctrinal continuity, the Catechism here cites the Roman Catechism published in the wake of the Council of Trent. But does Scripture, as the soul of theological studies, suggest any grounds for the interpretation of the Apostles’ Creed that is offered by the two Catechisms?²⁰ It might seem that a more biblically rooted theology would move away from the claim that the dead Christ opened heaven’s gates for the just who had gone before him.

Similarly, regarding Jesus’ resurrection, the Catechism affirms that the hypothesis that the Resurrection was produced by the apostles’ faith (or credulity) will not hold up. On the contrary, their faith in the Resurrection was born, under the action of divine grace, from their direct experience of the reality of the risen Jesus (§644). Here there is much more biblical evidence than in the case of Christ’s descent into hell. Nonetheless, it is notable that biblical scholars themselves debate whether the first Christians’ faith in Jesus’ resurrection was the result of the disciples’ wishful thinking or perhaps the result of apparitions of an exalted Jesus (similar to later Marian apparitions). The Catechism’s insistence that the hypothesis that the Resurrection was produced by the apostles’ faith (or credulity) will not hold up suggests that this hypothesis will not hold up precisely as a matter of biblical scholarship. Even if so, the question is what theologians can contribute to the discussion.

In accord with John 20:17 and especially Acts 1:9, the Apostles’ Creed confesses that after his resurrection Jesus ascended into heaven. Numerous biblical texts depict the ascended Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father. With regard to the meaning of Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of the Father, the Catechism quotes three texts from the Letter to the Hebrews, along with a passage from John Damascene. Damascene rules out the notion of a bodily God, but many biblical scholars today consider that Psalm 110:1—The Lord says to my lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool’—envisions a bodily God. Does the image make sense only within that framework? If the right hand of God is a strictly metaphorical description, then where is Jesus’ risen body and why is he there?

Questions such as this one may seem to miss the point of the ascension. The angels sternly correct the witnesses of the ascension, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven (Acts 1:11). Since Jesus will come again in eschatological glory, the community of believers cannot simply stand around wondering where he is. The community receives the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, so as to be found holy and blameless on the eschatological Day of the Lord. It might seem that theological questions about Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of God have not been helpful for sustaining the eschatological focus of the Christian community. Has Christian eschatology thereby been cut off at its roots?

Two further theological developments can appear to make this concern more plausible: the doctrine of merit and the doctrine of the spiritual soul. The Council of Trent is well known for its insistence that Christian believers, thanks to the indwelling Holy Spirit, do indeed merit the reward of eternal life. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, "Filial adoption, in making us partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true merit on us as a result of God’s gratuitous justice (§2009). Even though we cannot merit justifying grace, we do merit the graces needed for our sanctification, for the increase of grace and charity, and for the attainment of eternal life" (§2010). In its discussion of merit, the Catechism alludes once to Romans 8, without citing it, but otherwise the Catechism’s sources are the Roman Missal, Augustine, the Council of Trent, and Thérèse of Lisieux. Are there biblical grounds for understanding our meritorious actions as our participation through the Holy Spirit in Christ’s saving work, so that his passage from death to life remains always the source of ours?

The difficulty is equally acute for the doctrine of the spiritual soul. Here the Catechism does pause explicitly to reflect on the relationship of this doctrine to biblical revelation. In two highly compressed sentences, citing (in footnotes) three texts from Matthew, two from John, and one from Acts, the Catechism argues, "In Sacred Scripture the term ‘soul’ often refers to human life or the entire human person. But ‘soul’ also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: ‘soul’ signifies the spiritual principle in man" (§363). After a brief discussion of body-soul unity, drawing on the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul as the form of the body, the Catechism repeats the teachings of the fourteenth-century Council of Vienna and the sixteenth-century Fifth Lateran Council to the effect that God creates each soul immediately (the parents do not produce the soul) and that the soul is immortal. Neither of these teachings, however, is easily found in the New Testament. Nor is it clear how these teachings ensure the connection between our passage from death to life and Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. If we have an immortal soul, isn’t our passage automatic, arising from our own spiritual potencies?

Lastly, the doctrine of the spiritual soul undergirds the Catechism’s understanding of an eternal life as marked above all by beatific vision. But Jesus himself does not refer to the beatific vision, preferring instead to describe the world to come in terms of images of banqueting, the many rooms of his Father’s house, sitting on thrones judging and reigning, and the hundredfold replacement of goods that believers have sacrificed for Jesus’ sake in this life. Arguing that the mystery of blessed communion with God and all who are in Christ is beyond all understanding and description (§1027), the Catechism interprets these biblical images as metaphorical expressions of a transcendent reality. Without referring to Scripture, the Catechism states, Because of his transcendence, God cannot be seen as he is, unless he himself opens up his mystery to man’s immediate contemplation and gives him the capacity for it. The Church calls this contemplation of God in his heavenly glory ‘the beatific vision’ (§1028). But if Scripture is the soul of theological studies, as both the Second Vatican Council and Pope Benedict XVI say must be the case, then where does the Church get this understanding of the beatific vision?

One likely candidate, of course, is the philosophy of Plato. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is led by his teacher Diotima to ascend from contemplation of physical beauty to contemplation of the eternal spiritual form of beauty. Diotima asks Socrates whether if it were given to man to see the heavenly beauty face to face, would you call his … an unenviable life, whose eyes had been opened to the vision, and who had gazed upon it in true contemplation until it had become his own forever?²¹ If one finds Plato here at the pinnacle of the Church’s eschatology, it can easily come to seem that Plato is the driving force behind the whole of the Church’s eschatology. Thus the account of Christ’s descent into hell relies upon Christ’s separated soul and a community of conscious souls waiting for the resurrection of the body: where did all these active separated souls come from, if not from Platonic imaginations? Theological reflection on Jesus’ resurrection, too, draws upon philosophy and has in the past crowded out the study of Jesus’ resurrection by historians and biblical scholars. Similarly, in accounting for where Jesus is now, theological reflection on Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of the Father makes distinctions between spirit and matter that derive from Platonic philosophy. The Church too can seem less an eschatological community and more a community shaped by Platonic care of the soul through interactions with the souls of the saints. The notion of merit has roots in the virtue of justice that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle sought for themselves and their hierarchically ordered cities. Most troubling of all, the doctrine of the beatific vision can seem to relativize the biblical promises of bodily resurrection, last judgment, and new creation.

GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND THE FUTURE

OF CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY

Should the first task of implementing Pope Benedict’s vision therefore be to revise the Church’s eschatology along more biblical lines? One gets this impression from N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. He argues that for centuries Christians have mistakenly depended on Plato’s factory for their mental furniture.²² Beginning in the early patristic period, believers developed a Platonized Christianity (or was it Christianized Platonism?) that, in Wright’s view, distorted Christian eschatology in an otherworldly direction.²³ This position mirrors that of the mid-twentieth-century biblical scholar Oscar Cullmann, who contrasted the biblical doctrine of resurrection with the Greek doctrine of immortality and argued that the latter too often prevails among Christians.²⁴ The philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others, concurred: Soon after the end of the first centuries the eschatological problem was concealed. Afterward, the original meaning of Christian concepts was not recognized. In contemporary philosophy too, the Christian formations of concepts are concealed behind the Greek attitude.²⁵ We might also think of Tertullian’s trenchant remark against the Gnostic and Marcionite heretics: What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? … Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition!²⁶

Agreeing with Cullmann and Wright, contemporary theologians often criticize the use of Greek philosophy in Christian eschatology. Singling out Thomas Aquinas, but with the broad sweep of traditional Christian eschatology in view, Jürgen Moltmann articulates this standard criticism: "Thomas did not translate the biblical language into any other language or mode of thought, but basically liquidated it. His ‘theology of hope’ is in truth not the theology of a biblical ‘hope’ but the anthropology of the natural desire (appetitus naturalis) of the inner self-transcendence of human beings which finds its answer in the metaphysical theology of the supreme good (summum bonum)."²⁷ Despite his own criticisms of Moltmann’s eschatology as overly horizontal, Hans Urs von Balthasar expresses from quite a different perspective a broadly similar concern: Platonism clearly dominated Western, even Christian, thinking down to the threshold of modern times; we have only to think of the stress laid on the ‘immortality of the soul’, and how the resurrection was held to be an almost unnecessary ‘accidental blessedness’ superadded to the substantial blessedness already possessed.²⁸ The philosophical sources of Balthasar’s eschatology, like Moltmann’s, are generally not Greek but German, especially G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. Other major twentieth-century theologians, such as Sergius Bulgakov, Karl Barth, and Karl Rahner, also rely upon German idealism and its existentialist offshoots for philosophical underpinnings in eschatology.²⁹ R. R. Reno’s recent commentary on Genesis sums up the concern that the Platonic search for the sweet nectar of the eternal that will palliate our vulnerability to decay and death will lead us away from the divine Son who became incarnate, suffered, and died for us in order to give us a new future in the flesh, not a new metaphysical location.³⁰

As a young professor, Joseph Ratzinger sought in his own way to develop a ‘de-Platonized’ eschatology.³¹ Although his mature eschatology retains many points in common with his German contemporaries, he concludes that Scripture itself does not permit de-Platonization: the more I dealt with the questions and immersed myself in the sources, the more the antitheses I had set up fell to pieces in my hands and in their place I saw the inner logic of the Church’s tradition stand forth.³² In his Eschatology, he argues against portraits of Plato as an individualistic, dualistic thinker who negates what is earthly and advocates a flight into the beyond.³³ In his 2006 Regensburg Lecture as Pope Benedict XVI, he emphasizes that Greek philosophical thought is inscribed within Scripture itself, from the later wisdom literature through the New Testament: biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment.³⁴

Does this view of Scripture as related fruitfully to Greek philosophical thought find support from other scholars?³⁵ Treating what he terms the perennial issue of the Christian encounter with Hellenism in his Gifford Lectures on the Cappadocian Fathers’ natural theology, Jaroslav Pelikan observes that words such as logos (John 1:1) and hypostasis (Heb 1:3) came to the Septuagint and then to the Christian vocabulary from the language of Classical and Hellenistic philosophy and science.³⁶ Similarly, in his Judaism and Hellenism, Martin Hengel describes how the Wisdom of Solomon, which significantly influenced the New Testament texts, has affinities with Stoic philosophy.³⁷ Richard Bauckham notes the Stoic influence on a key text for traditional Christian eschatology, 2 Peter 1:4, he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.³⁸ Elsewhere Bauckham examines the use of Hellenistic true-god-language in the Letter to the Hebrews.³⁹ We might also point to Ben Witherington III, whose Jesus the Sage makes clear the Hellenistic influences in late Second-Temple Jewish and Christian texts.⁴⁰

Consider Paul’s claim that this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Cor 4:17-18). Paul’s emphasis on an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (or beyond all measure) calls to mind the transcending of this-worldly limitations that Plato is known for evoking. When Paul tells the Corinthians that by beholding the glory of the Lord they are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor 3:18), his expressions likewise resonate with Platonic and Stoic notions, without thereby ceasing to be uniquely Christian. Yet when N. T. Wright, whose opposition to Platonism we noted above, interprets 2 Corinthians 3–4, he finds that our glory means simply that we are not overcome by suffering, because we will be vindicated by God. In his view, the glory of God refers to the work of the Spirit in the hearts of believers. Christians are changed into Christ’s likeness from one degree of glory to another when Christians reflect God’s glory to one another and so enable an honest and open-faced ministry to take place.⁴¹ It will be clear that Wright makes very little of the eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison that Paul promises us. But if Paul is right that our glory is to be beyond all comparison, it