As David Bentley Hart and I covered in our interview earlier this summer, early Christianity did not have a unified understanding of the parousia, or the eschatological resurrection of the dead, partly because there had been no such uniformity in Early Judaism around the topic of resurrection.1 The New Testament shares common faith in the factum of Jesus’ resurrection, but not in the qualitative nature of that resurrection: Paul openly describes resurrection as glorification to a pneumatic, celestial, and/or angelic form of existence (1 Cor 15); Mark does not expose the resurrected Jesus directly to our contemplation; Matthew’s risen Jesus is seen and worshiped, but the nature of his risen corpus is not discussed; Luke and John both seek to emphasize the sarkic character of the risen Jesus, such that he can eat fish, is not a pneuma (Lk 24:39), and can be palpitated by the doubting Thomas if he is brave enough (Jn 20:27). It is of course possible that in both Luke and John, Jesus’ sarkic resurrection is step one in a two-step process of postmortem glorification. The risen Jesus ascends in Luke-Acts and is thereafter present to the earthly church through the holy pneuma and in not-strictly-human-or-sarkic apparitions; the whole point of John’s narrative is that the Logos has become flesh in order to give the gift of the pneuma, that what is born of flesh may be born of pneuma (Jn 3:6). For Luke especially, the influence of the Maccabean martyr narratives, which stress resurrection as a terrestrial restitution for suffering and death, may well stand behind the depiction of Jesus’ sarkic resurrection: the point is that Jesus’ righteous suffering as a martyr on behalf of Israel has resulted in God’s vindication of his Passion through the gift of restored life (see 2 Macc 7). And for all the resurrection appearances, as Paul Griffiths points out in Christian Flesh,2 it is obvious that Jesus’ flesh is no longer “normal”: it is “unrecognizable as Jesus,” it “ordinarily doesn’t observe the spatiotemporal restrictions placed on human flesh,” and “it is not in fact fully available for fleshly interaction.” It is not until Jesus’ ascension that his flesh once more becomes available for embrace.3
So anyway, there may well be synthesis as well as debate already in the New Testament documents about the physics of Jesus’ resurrection, but the point is that the New Testament does not have a uniform narrative. For Paul, Jesus’ exaltation or glorification seems to be all that which is narrativized in the Gospels and Acts—resurrection, empty tomb, apparition, ascension, enthronement, gifting of the Spirit—as one event, and it seems to be the same in the Gospel of John. The apostolic experience is of the risen Jesus, glorified after and through his death with new, exalted life, which can be explained and narrativized in a variety of ways which are not wholly commensurate with one another.4 The important thing is to believe, in the words of the Nicene Symbol, that Jesus “rose on the third day according to the Scriptures”: we are not enjoined to a particular interpretation of what that means, though we are invited to speculative discourse on the subject.
And there is every reason to engage in that kind of discourse, not least since we are repeatedly promised in the New Testament that the resurrection of Jesus is the paradigm for our own eschatological glorification. What became of Jesus shall become of us: as Paul says at great length in 1 Cor 15, the resurrected body of the man from heaven, the Last Adam, shall be the body which we shall bear at his coming. The resurrection of Christ is the guarantee of our own resurrection in the future: so while what exactly happened in a historical sense may be unavailable to us, getting the apostolic kerygma about the risen Jesus itself right, learning how to parse the diversity and even the dissension of the earliest witnesses, matters for thinking about the life to come.
The Dormition of the Mother of God, celebrated in the Western Church as the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, both on August 15, bridges the gap between Jesus’ resurrection and our own. If in Jesus we see the paradigm of our own resurrection, then in the Dormition we see, so to speak, the icon of what it looks like for that paradigm to be realized in one of us.
Much like the resurrection and ascension of Christ, the Dormition and Assumption of Mary are not recoverable to us as facts of history. We have traditions about them but not certain, unassailable information. Even the transmission of the tradition of Mary’s Dormition and Assumption are complex.5 The Transitus Mariae texts were produced and circulated among orthodox and heterodox Christians, and constitute an example of popular and pious legendarium eventuating in liturgical festival—common enough, we might note, when it comes to events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary (such as those Feasts derived from the Protoevangelium of James). In some of these texts, Mary is resurrected and taken up to Paradise after a brief time of bodily death; in others, she falls into the slumber of death and her soul is collected by Christ, but her body is whisked away, like Arthur to Avalon, until the end of time.6 It remains the case in Orthodoxy that, broadly speaking, Mary is believed to be resurrected and ascended to heaven; the Orthodox have not dogmatized this truth as Roman Catholicism did in 1950, however, and so something ambiguous remains in the iconography and hymnography of the Dormition feast, where Christ’s collection of Mary’s soul and whisking of her off to Paradise remains essential to both—leaving Mary very much alive with Christ and therefore alive to us—but her resurrection is rarely, if at all, narrativized directly.
So whether historically or doctrinally, we are left more with questions than answers about what became of Mary at the end of her life, unless one is Roman Catholic and wishes simply to rest upon the definition promulgated in 1950 (though even there, Catholics often debate whether Mary died). In the Eastern festal cycle the Dormition serves to wrap up the Church year which begins with Mary’s Nativity and Presentation in the Temple, enfolding the life of Christ within the life of his Mother so as to personalize the life in Christ for us. Mary’s falling asleep in the Lord is meant to be our falling asleep in the Lord, and so the ambiguous character of her postmortem glorification—her soul only, awaiting bodily resurrection, or her body too, taken to Paradise?—is in that sense remarkably fitting, since historically Christians have not spoken with one mind on the timing and character of the resurrection. Origen, in De Principiis 2.9-11, openly states that the resurrection happens immediately postmortem, which is reconcilable with the notion that it happens at the end of time if one admits that at death our experience of time changes considerably; many contemporary theologians, including Dale Allison and John Polkinghorne, have emphasized the superfluity of an intermediate state for the discarnate soul in light of what we know to be true concerning time and space now that our forbears did not.7 The real question is of course whether the eschatological resurrection is to be an event in history, the sort that you could film and put on YouTube or see on the news, or if it is an event that transcends history, and therefore whose timing cannot necessarily be placed on a linear scale commensurate with, say, the Death of Charlemagne or the arrival of Buddhism in China. If the former, then an intermediate state is required; if the latter, there is no purpose for one, or at least there is no distinguishing intermediate hell, purgatory, or heaven from resurrection as a gradual process. Under neither rubric do we definitively answer whether Mary rose from the dead, but we are oriented for how to understand her resurrection if we believe in it: Mary’s assumption into glory on the model of an immanentist, historical parousia stands as the sign of our future resurrection, as it is still often catechized, while Mary’s assumption on the model of a vertical horizon of transcendence manifests to us a pathway we will begin to walk at death.
The ambiguity is deepened the more we reflect on the fact that the two possibilities are not, in the final analysis, mutually exclusive, particularly if experience shapes our sense of reality and perspective our sense of truth. It could well be that parousia and resurrection stand as events at the end of history, or very near the end of history, in alignment with the chiliast vision of some Early Jews and Christians; it could also simultaneously be that death is a portal that transports us from life in this world to life in the world to come, and that the path bridging one to the other is different for each of us. Traditional Christian Mariology, which I am happy to profess, is that the absolute sanctity of the Blessed Virgin Mary meant her assumption into heaven immediately, into the Garden of Paradise where, in the words of the Byzantine Memorial Service, “the choirs of the saints and the righteous will shine as the stars of heaven”; the direct suggestion, if Mary is meant to be our stand-in in heaven, is that this also awaits us at death.
Mary’s Assumption is also the condition of her crowning and enthronement at the right hand of her Son: it is her deification, and therefore the model for our own. The Dormition’s closure of the Byzantine liturgical year witnesses to the purpose of liturgical life in general: that our death may become the means of our following Christ in his Passion to celestial glory. In the face of this hope it is not so much that the specifics of eschatology become unimportant as that they cease to demand our focus. Whenever the end may come, and however—whatever form the parousia of Christ in the kosmos at large may take—Christ will come to me at the hour of my death, to receive my soul as he did Mary’s. And insofar as, by the logic of the Christian Tradition, the whole kosmos is contained in each human being, it is this coming which is indeed also the selfsame coming of the end for all things. This is after all the reading of 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 espoused by (St.) Origen of Alexandria and St. Gregory Nyssen: that the eschatological subjection of the Son to the Father is achieved in the subjection of all creation to the Father’s creative will that he might be “all in all,” such that it is precisely by universal creaturely participation in Christ’s trampling down of death by death that the parousia is realized. Mary’s Dormition witnesses to the truth that we are now Christ’s Body: that we both fill up his sufferings by our death, as well as that the glorification of Christ as messianic Son of Man now happens through our own deification. Such it is that, as St. Paul writes:
For I think that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy toward the coming glory to be unveiled to us. For the earnest expectation of the creation (κτίσις) awaits the unveiling of the sons of God; for to vanity the creation was subjected, not voluntarily but by the one having subjected, in hope that also the creation itself will be freed from the slavery of corruption for the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors together until now and not only, but also we ourselves having the first fruit of pneuma also ourselves groan in ourselves, expecting adoption, the redemption of our body. (Rom 8:18-23)8
By way of closing, it is worth pointing out that the “creation” here which awaits coming to be through the apocalypse of the deified sons of God, is not the ποίησις of God, nor the πλάσις of God, but the κτίσις: the true kosmos of God’s eternal creation, the world always already realized by God’s creative power, the incarnation of Christ in his cosmic body. The Mother of God, assumed into heaven, is in relation to us the face of that universal mother, laboring to bring God’s Son to birth (Rev 12:1-12).
See Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Levenson and Kevin J. Madigan, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Outi Lehtipuu, Debates Over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); C.D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism 200 BCE-200 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Paul J. Griffiths, Christian Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
Sadly, this Kindle book has no page numbers. Do better, Stanford.
I have not yet read it, but my suspicion is that Dale Allison’s new book is useful as a primer for thinking about resurrection in this way. See Dale Allison, The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: T&T Clark, 2021).
See Stephen J. Shoemaker, “Death and the Maiden: The Early History of the Dormition and Assumption Apocrypha,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 50 (2006): 59-97.
Shoemaker, “Death and the Maiden,” 68.
See John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Allison, Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 19-44. See also Gerhard Lohfink, Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017).
Λογίζομαι γὰρ ὅτι οὐκ ἄξια τὰ παθήματα τοῦ νῦν καιροῦ πρὸς τὴν μέλλουσαν δόξαν ἀποκαλυφθῆναι εἰς ἡμᾶς. ἡ γὰρ ἀποκαραδοκία τῆς κτίσεως τὴν ἀποκάλυψιν τῶν υἱῶν τοῦ θεοῦ ἀπεκδέχεται· τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη, οὐχ ἑκοῦσα ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸν ὑποτάξαντα, ἐφ’ ἑλπίδι ὅτι καὶ αὐτὴ ἡ κτίσις ἐλευθερωθήσεται ἀπὸ τῆς δουλείας τῆς φθορᾶς εἰς τὴν ε’λευθερίαν τῆς δόξης τῶν τἐκνων τοῦ θεοῦ. οἴδαμεν γὰρ ὅτι πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν· οὐ μόνον δέ, ἀλλὰ καὶ αὐτοὶ τὴν ἀπαρχὴν τοῦ πνεύματος ἔχοντες ἡμεῖς καὶ αὐτοὶ ἐν ἑαυτοῖς στενάζομεν, υἱοθεσίαν ἀπεκδεχόμενοι τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν τοῦ σώματος ἡμῶν.
This is great! I woke up this morning wondering what David Armstrong thought about the Dormition, and here it is!
Two questions-
You say
“The real question is of course whether the eschatological resurrection is to be an event in history, the sort that you could film and put on YouTube or see on the news, or if it is an event that transcends history, and therefore whose timing cannot necessarily be placed on a linear scale commensurate with, say, the Death of Charlemagne or the arrival of Buddhism in China.”
My understanding of the coming of Christ from the time I became a Christian was always that this was the intersection of time and eternity. That it was in a sense Eternity invading and lifting up time. So it’s not something that could be uploaded to YouTube, but that it’s also an event that happens on a time line, even if that moment also transcends itself. I never conceived of it as Jesus descending from the clouds in an especially shiny form in such a way that I could snap a photo. What about that? And I also wonder how Bulgakov saw it. I have read his speculations on the resurrection and Parousia but I can’t claim to have really understood it.
Next, I was really intrigued by your comments about the deified Moses guiding the writings of the Pentateuch in your interview with Jordan Wood. Would you be willing to say more about that? That would still presuppose that we see Moses as an historical figure that was then deified, no?