Status Updates From Surprised by Hope

The two parables that appear to address this question directly are, we should remember, parables, not actual descriptions of the afterlife.

The most common New Testament word sometimes translated by hell is Gehenna. Gehenna was a place, not just an idea: it was the rubbish heap outside the southwest corner of the old city of Jerusalem.

Paul makes it clear here and elsewhere that it's the present life that is meant to function as a purgatory. The sufferings of the present time, not of some postmortem state, are the valley through which we have to pass in order to reach the glorious future.

we must say that all Christians, living and departed, are to be thought of as saints and that all Christians who have died are to be thought of, and treated, as such.

bodily death itself is the destruction of the sinful person.

Death itself gets rid of all that is still sinful; this isn't magic but good theology. There is nothing then left to purge.

In first Corinthians 15:58: the resurrection means that what you do in the present, and working hard for the gospel, is not wasted. It is not in Vain. It will be completed, will have it, fulfillment, and God’s future.

We sometimes speak of someone who's been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one-or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.

With Jesus, the future hope has come forward into the present. For those who die in faith, before that final reawaken-ing, the central promise is of being "with Jesus" at once. "My desire is to depart," wrote Paul, "and be with Christ, which is far better?"

Resurrection = life after life, after death

What does Jesus mean when he declares that there are "many dwelling places" in his father's house?

the word for “dwelling places" here, monai, is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run.

justification by faith is what happens in the present time, anticipating the verdict of the future day when God judges the world.

Justification by faith cannot be collapsed, as so many in the last two centuries tried to do, either into a generalized liberal view of a laissez-faire morality or into the romantic view that what we do outwardly doesn't matter at all since the only thing that matters is what we're like inwardly.

this picture of future judgment according to works is actually the basis of Paul's theology of justification by faith. The point of justification by faith isn't that God suddenly ceases to care about good behavior or morality.

Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.

The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and postliberal world. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God's coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over.

The picture of Jesus as the coming judge is the central feature of another absolutely vital and nonnegotiable Christian belief: that there will indeed be a judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all.

The promise is not that Jesus will simply reappear within the present world order, but that when heaven and earth are joined together in the new way God has promised, then he will appear to us-and we will appear to him, and to one another, in our own true
identity.

Colossians 3. Here we have in a nutshell Paul's theology of resurrection and ascension as applied to present Christian living and future Christian hope:

perhaps that is partly why such theology, with its dreams of Armageddon, has quietly supported the political status quo in a way that Paul would never have done.

Christian theology of resurrection, ascension, second com-ing, and hope. This theology was born out of confrontation with the political authorities, out of the conviction that Jesus was already the true Lord of the world who would one day be manifested as such. The rapture theology avoids this confrontation because it suggests that Christians will miraculously be removed from this wicked world.

The reality to which it refers is this: Jesus will be personally present, the dead will be raised, and the living Christians will be transformed.