We look for the resurrection of the dead

The Text

The creed turns to the future and changes its verb a third and final time. We believe governed the confession of God; we acknowledge governed baptism; now we look for (προσδοκῶμεν, expecto) governs the last two clauses. The grammar is the grammar of hope. The creed does not end with a present possession or a settled fact but with a forward-leaning expectation — the church’s final posture is not we have but we await. The whole structure of Christian existence is encoded in that verb: the church lives between the times, holding the resurrection of Christ (clause 13) as accomplished and the resurrection of the dead (clause 22) as awaited, and the space between them is the space of hope.

The clause confesses the bodily resurrection of the dead — the raising of the dead themselves, in their psychosomatic wholeness, at the last day. It is the direct corollary of clause 13 (on the third day he rose again): the verbal root is identical (ἀνάστασις / resurrectio), and the dogmatic link is causal, not merely illustrative. Christ is not the example of a resurrection we might hope independently to attain; he is the first-fruits (1 Cor. 15:20–23), the cause and pledge of ours. Because the one of one Being with the Father entered death and rose bodily, the dead in him will rise bodily. The clause is the eschatological extension of the gospel’s central fact.

The clause is, with the resurrection of Christ, the point at which the catholic faith is most directly opposed to every form of philosophical and modern reductionism. It is not the immortality of the soul (a Greek-philosophical doctrine the church received only as subordinate and reinterpreted); it is not the survival of influence, memory, or “spirit”; it is not a metaphor for renewal in this life. It is the raising of the dead — the dead persons, body and soul, transformed and glorified — at the coming of Christ. The catholic tradition has held this against Greek dualism, against gnostic spiritualism, against modern liberal demythologization, and against the sentimental folk-religion that has effectively replaced it in much contemporary practice with “the soul going to heaven.”

Translation Notes

Prosdokōmen / expecto — we look for. The verb of eschatological expectation, and the third deliberate verb-shift in the creed. Prosdokáō / expecto is not the cool assent that a future event is probable; it is the active leaning-forward of hope toward a promised future — the posture of the watchman, the awaited dawn, the Maranatha. The creed’s last movement is grammatically a posture of waiting. The pastoral weight of this is large: the church’s final word about itself is not an achievement but an expectation; Christian existence is constitutively forward-leaning. The older and modern English agree on look for / look forward to; the substance is the leaning of hope.

Anastasin / resurrectionem — resurrection. The same root as Christ’s rising in clause 13. The verbal echo is the doctrine: ours is his resurrection extended to his members. Resurrection (ana-stasis, a standing-up-again; re-surgo, a rising-again) is not resuscitation (a return to mortal life, like Lazarus, who died again) and not immortality (the continuance of an undying part); it is the raising of the whole person into a transformed, glorified, deathless mode of bodily existence — what Paul calls the spiritual body (σῶμα πνευματικόν, 1 Cor. 15:44), meaning not a body made of spirit but a body animated and ruled by the Spirit, incorruptible, glorious, powerful (1 Cor. 15:42–44).

Nekrōn / mortuorum — of the dead. It is the dead — dead persons — who are raised, not souls who never died. The Nicene idiom resurrection of the dead and the Apostles’ Creed idiom resurrection of the flesh (σαρκὸς ἀνάστασιν / carnis resurrectionem) confess one faith with different polemical edges: of the flesh presses hardest against the spiritualizers (it is this, the flesh, that is raised); of the dead presses the personal-existential point (it is the dead, the persons who really died, who are really raised). The catholic faith refuses the reduction of resurrection to the immortality of a separated soul: the soul’s survival of death (which the tradition also affirms, the intermediate state) is not yet the resurrection; resurrection is the reuniting and transforming of the whole person at the last day. The hope is not escape from the body but the redemption of the body (Rom. 8:23).

Historical Context

The clause is the conciliar form of the most distinctive and most contested article of apostolic eschatology. The resurrection of the dead was, from the beginning, the point at which the gospel collided most directly with the surrounding philosophical world. At Athens, Paul’s hearers followed him until he reached the resurrection of the dead, and then some scoffed (Acts 17:32); the Corinthian denial that there is no resurrection of the dead drew Paul’s longest sustained argument (1 Cor. 15); the Sadducees denied it (Mark 12:18–27); the Greek philosophical tradition, which prized the immortality of the soul and regarded the body as the soul’s prison, found resurrection of the body not merely incredible but undesirable.

The early church’s articulation was therefore necessarily polemical and emphatically bodily. The second-century gnostics spiritualized the resurrection into a present, inward, esoteric awakening (the Treatise on the Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip from Nag Hammadi; the position Paul already confronts in 2 Tim. 2:18, who have swerved from the truth by claiming that the resurrection has already taken place). Against them, the catholic Fathers — Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian (On the Resurrection of the Flesh), Athenagoras (On the Resurrection of the Dead), Methodius — insisted on the future, bodily, public raising of the dead. The Apostles’ Creed’s resurrection of the flesh is the baptismal church’s deliberately anti-gnostic formulation; the Nicene-Constantinopolitan resurrection of the dead confesses the same faith in the apostolic-Pauline idiom.

The early church also had to relate the resurrection to the intermediate state — what happens between death and the last day. The settled catholic teaching: the soul does not sleep into non-existence nor pass immediately into its final condition; the dead in Christ are with the Lord (Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:8; Luke 23:43) in a real but provisional blessedness, awaiting the resurrection that completes their salvation. The intermediate state is real but penultimate; the resurrection is the goal. The medieval West elaborated this with the doctrine of purgatory (a purifying intermediate condition for the imperfectly sanctified) — received by Rome, rejected by the Reformation, not held by the East in the Western juridical form. But the structural point — the dead are not yet raised; they await — is catholic and is exactly what the creed’s we look for confesses: even the blessed dead are, with the church on earth, in the posture of expectation.

The modern period brought the sharpest assault and a significant recovery. Enlightenment rationalism and 19th–20th-century liberal Protestantism tended to replace the resurrection of the body with the immortality of the soul (a return, in effect, to the Greek position the church had subordinated) or to demythologize it into a symbol of authentic existence (Bultmann) or of social-historical hope. The 20th-century recovery — Oscar Cullmann’s landmark essay Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (1956), the biblical-theology movement, Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope (1964), N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) and Surprised by Hope (2008) — recovered the apostolic-creedal doctrine: the Christian hope is not the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the dead and the renewal of all creation. This recovery is one of the major theological developments of the modern period and has substantially reshaped preaching, hymnody, and pastoral practice across the traditions.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Justin Martyr, On the Resurrection; Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead; Irenaeus, Against Heresies V; Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh; Methodius, On the Resurrection; Origen (the contested spiritualizing tendency); Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection; Augustine, City of God XXII; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures XVIII

The patristic settlement is emphatically and polemically bodily. Irenaeus’s Against Heresies V is the great anti-gnostic resurrection text: the same God who made the body will raise it; the flesh that is nourished by the eucharist (the body and blood of Christ) is capable of incorruption and is destined for it; salvation is the redemption, not the discarding, of the flesh. Tertullian’s On the Resurrection of the Flesh presses the realism to its sharpest: the flesh is the hinge of salvation (caro salutis est cardo) — what is not raised is not saved, and God’s power and justice both require the raising of the very body that lived, suffered, and served.

Athenagoras’s On the Resurrection of the Dead gives the early philosophical defense (God’s power can reassemble; God’s justice requires that the body which shared the soul’s deeds share its recompense; the human being is by nature a body-soul unity whose final state must therefore be embodied). Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Soul and the Resurrection (the dialogue with his dying sister Macrina) gives the mature Cappadocian articulation, holding the bodily resurrection while addressing the philosophical difficulties (personal identity across death, the transformation of the body) with unusual subtlety.

The contested figure is Origen, whose articulation (the resurrection body as a transformed, “spherical,” ethereal vehicle, the material substrate radically changed) was read by some as compromising the realism; the Origenist controversies (and the 553 condemnations) policed the boundary. Augustine’s City of God XXII is the magisterial Latin synthesis: the same body, numerically identical, raised and transformed — all defects healed, the martyrs’ scars retained as honors, the body perfectly subject to the spirit, incorruptible and glorious; the resurrection is the consummation toward which the whole City of God moves.

Strengths

• The patristic insistence on bodily realism is the permanent catholic bulwark against every spiritualizing reduction
• Tertullian’s the flesh is the hinge of salvation and Irenaeus’s eucharist-resurrection link are permanently valuable
• Gregory of Nyssa’s careful handling of identity-across-death anticipates the perennial philosophical questions
• Augustine’s City of God XXII is the magisterial synthesis

Weaknesses

• The polemical anti-gnostic context produced, in some Fathers, an over-literal “reassembly” imagery (the same particles regathered) that the Pauline transformation does not require and that creates needless difficulties
• The Origenist over-spiritualizing and the reactive over-materializing both show the difficulty of holding identity and transformation together — a tension the tradition manages but does not dissolve

Scholastic

Tradition: Peter Lombard, Sentences IV; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Supplement 75–86; Bonaventure, Sentences IV; the doctrine of the dotes (gifts) of the glorified body; Dante, Paradiso

The scholastic tradition systematized the doctrine with characteristic precision. Aquinas (in the Supplement assembled from his Sentences commentary) treats the resurrection under: its necessity (the soul is naturally the form of the body; a permanently disembodied soul is an unnatural, incomplete state; the soul’s beatitude is therefore not complete until reunited with its body — a striking scholastic argument that the resurrection is required for the completion of even the blessed); the identity of the risen body (numerically the same body, by the soul’s reunion with matter it informs, transformation notwithstanding); and the qualities or dotes of the glorified body, drawn from 1 Cor. 15:42–44 and Phil. 3:21 — impassibility (no longer subject to suffering or death), subtlety (perfectly subject to the spirit), agility (freedom of movement, no longer weighed down), and clarity (radiance, the glory that shone in the Transfiguration and will be shared by the glorified — Matt. 13:43).

Aquinas’s deepest contribution is the argument from the soul as form of the body: precisely because the human person is, on the Aristotelian-Thomist anthropology, not a soul using a body but a body-soul unity, the separated soul in the intermediate state is incomplete, and the resurrection is not an optional appendix to salvation but its required completion. This makes the bodily resurrection structurally necessary, not merely promised — a powerful answer to every reduction of Christian hope to the soul’s survival.

Strengths

• The soul as form of the body argument makes bodily resurrection the structural completion of salvation, not an appendix — a permanently powerful argument against soul-immortality reductionism
• The dotes (impassibility, subtlety, agility, clarity) give a disciplined, biblically-rooted account of the glorified body
• The treatment of identity-across-transformation is careful and durable

Weaknesses

• Some scholastic speculation on the dotes and on the precise conditions of the risen body (age, stature, the fate of bodily matter) outran the biblical witness
• The Aristotelian hylomorphic framework, while powerful, requires translation and is not the only viable Christian anthropology
• The integration with the contested doctrine of purgatory is not received by the Reformation traditions

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Sermons on 1 Corinthians 15; the Augsburg Confession XVII; the Lutheran funeral chorales; the doctrine of the sleep of the dead (in some Lutheran articulation); modern: Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?

The Lutheran tradition holds the clause in catholic form, with characteristic integration with justification and a notable accent on resurrection over immortality. The Augsburg Confession XVII confesses that Christ will return… and will raise up all the dead, giving eternal life and everlasting joys to the godly and elect, but condemning the ungodly to endless torment. Luther’s 1 Corinthians 15 sermons make the resurrection the dogmatic ground of all Christian comfort: the believer dies in the certainty of rising, because the Head has risen and the members follow.

Luther sometimes spoke of the intermediate state as a sleep (a deep, unconscious rest in Christ from which the dead are wakened at the resurrection — we shall sleep until he comes and knocks on the grave and says, “Dr. Martin, get up!”), an image that emphasizes the resurrection as the true and only awakening and refuses any independent glory of the soul apart from the body’s raising. Later Lutheran scholasticism qualified the “soul sleep” language toward the mainstream conscious-intermediate-state view; the abiding Lutheran accent is that the Christian hope is resurrection, not the immortality of the soul. The 20th-century landmark Oscar Cullmann’s Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (1956) — though Cullmann was Reformed, the argument is broadly received across Lutheran and Reformed theology — gave the modern classic statement of exactly this Reformation accent: the New Testament hope is the resurrection of the dead, sharply distinct from the Greek immortality of the soul.

Strengths

• The Reformation accent — resurrection, not soul-immortality — recovers the apostolic priority and is one of the great modern correctives
• The integration with justification gives the resurrection its pastoral-evangelical force (the believer rises acquitted)
• The funeral chorale tradition carries the doctrine in the church’s sung consolation

Weaknesses

• The “soul sleep” language, pressed strongly, sits uneasily with the catholic mainstream’s conscious intermediate state (Phil. 1:23; Luke 23:43) and remains an intra-Lutheran and ecumenical question
• The strong resurrection-over-immortality accent, popularly received, can underplay the real (if penultimate) blessedness of the dead in Christ

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.25 (On the Final Resurrection); the Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 57–58; the Westminster Confession Ch. 32; the Westminster Larger Catechism QQ. 86–90; Oscar Cullmann; Karl Barth; T. F. Torrance

The Reformed tradition gives the clause one of its fullest confessional treatments. Calvin’s Institutes III.25 is a sustained meditation on the final resurrection as the goal and crown of the believer’s hope; Calvin holds the conscious intermediate state (the souls of the faithful, at death, rest and behold God’s glory while awaiting the resurrection — against both soul-sleep and any notion that the intermediate state is the final state) and insists, against speculation, on the certainty of the bodily resurrection grounded in Christ’s.

The Heidelberg Catechism Q. 57 gives the pastoral form: What comfort does the resurrection of the body afford thee? That not only my soul after this life shall be immediately taken up to Christ its head, but also that this my body, raised by the power of Christ, shall be reunited with my soul, and made like unto the glorious body of Christ. The catechism holds together the intermediate state (the soul to Christ immediately) and the resurrection (this body raised and glorified) with exemplary clarity. The Westminster Confession Ch. 32 and Larger Catechism QQ. 86–90 give the fully elaborated Reformed scholastic treatment: the self-same bodies, reunited with the souls, the just raised to honor, the unjust to dishonor.

The major modern Reformed contributions — Cullmann’s resurrection-not-immortality thesis, Barth’s treatment of the resurrection as God’s eternal “Yes” embracing the whole creaturely person, T. F. Torrance’s integration of the resurrection with the doctrine of creation and new creation — have substantially shaped the ecumenical recovery.

Strengths

• The Reformed confessions hold the intermediate state and the resurrection together with exemplary clarity (the Heidelberg Q. 57 is a model)
• The Reformed grounding of our resurrection in Christ’s (Calvin’s Institutes III.25) is patristic in substance and pastorally strong
• The modern Reformed contributions (Cullmann, Barth, Torrance) are central to the ecumenical recovery

Weaknesses

• The fully elaborated Reformed scholastic treatment can drift toward speculative precision on the conditions of the raised body
• The decretal frame (the just and the unjust raised to fixed, predetermined ends) presses the doctrine in directions the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition does not follow

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: the patristic tradition (esp. Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus); John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith IV; the Paschal liturgy; the Anastasis icon; the doctrine of the resurrection as cosmic and as theōsis consummated

The Eastern tradition holds the clause within its integrated Paschal and theotic vision. The resurrection of the dead is not an isolated future event but the cosmic consummation of the resurrection of Christ already celebrated as the center of the whole Christian life. The Paschal proclamation — Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life — is itself the confession of clause 22: Christ’s resurrection is the bestowing of life on those in the tombs; the general resurrection is the universal extension of what the Anastasis icon depicts (the risen Christ drawing Adam and Eve, and in them all the dead, up out of the graves).

The Eastern accent: the resurrection is the completion of theōsis — the whole person, body and soul, glorified by participation in the divine life, the body itself made radiant (the Taboric light of the Transfiguration as the anticipation of the glorified body). The Eastern tradition has been less juridically elaborate than the West on the intermediate state (it holds the conscious expectation of the dead, prays for the departed, but has resisted the Western purgatory in its juridical form) and more cosmically expansive on the resurrection: with the raising of the dead comes the transfiguration of the whole creation (Rom. 8:19–23), the cosmos itself drawn into incorruption.

Strengths

• The Paschal integration makes the resurrection of the dead the living center of the church’s worship, not a remote future appendix
• The theōsis frame gives the glorified body its proper rationale (participation in the divine life, the Taboric light)
• The cosmic scope (the whole creation transfigured with the raised dead) is biblically rich and ecumenically fertile

Weaknesses

• The varied Eastern practice and relatively undeveloped doctrine of the intermediate state can leave pastoral questions less precisely answered
• The cosmic-theotic idiom requires translation for traditions unfamiliar with it

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (1956); Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (1964), The Coming of God (1995); Karl Rahner; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), Surprised by Hope (2008); the recovery of holistic anthropology

The modern ecumenical recovery of this clause is one of the major theological achievements of the period, and it is largely a recovery — the recapturing of the apostolic-creedal doctrine from the Greek-immortality reduction that had largely displaced it in popular and liberal Protestantism. Cullmann’s 1956 essay was the lightning rod: it argued, with great force and some controversy, that the New Testament hope is categorically distinct from the Greek immortality of the soul — the Christian does not look for the natural indestructibility of an undying part but for the gracious raising of the whole dead person by the power of God. The thesis was sharpened in debate (the catholic tradition also affirms the soul’s survival in the intermediate state; the question is one of priority and ground, not simple either/or), but its central recovery has been broadly received.

N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) provided the major historical-exegetical undergirding (the early Christian resurrection hope is unintelligible except as the response to an actual bodily resurrection of Jesus), and Surprised by Hope (2008) carried the recovery into popular pastoral practice with its sharp slogan that the Christian hope is not “going to heaven when you die” but resurrection and new creation — “life after life after death.” Moltmann’s Theology of Hope and The Coming of God set the resurrection within the comprehensive eschatological transformation of all things. The convergence across Catholic (Rahner, the post-conciliar recovery of holistic anthropology), Orthodox, and Protestant theology on the bodily, future, holistic character of the hope is one of the genuine ecumenical convergences and has reshaped funeral liturgies, hymnody, and preaching across the traditions.

Strengths

• The recovery of resurrection-over-immortality is one of the great modern theological correctives, broadly ecumenically received
• Wright’s historical-exegetical work re-grounded the hope in the resurrection of Christ and reconnected clauses 13 and 22
• The recovery has concretely reshaped funeral practice, hymnody, and pastoral care toward the apostolic hope

Weaknesses

• The sharpest forms of the Cullmann thesis can underplay the catholic affirmation of the conscious intermediate state, producing a new imprecision in pastoral care of the bereaved
• Popular reception sometimes swings from one reduction (soul-to-heaven) to a polemical over-correction that embarrasses the legitimate language of being “with Christ” at death

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of the resurrection of the dead is unambiguous, catholic, and characteristically integrated with sanctification, assurance, and the universal scope of grace. The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784), Article III — Of the Resurrection of Christ — grounds our resurrection explicitly in Christ’s: he rose, took again his body with all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all men at the last day — the last day being precisely the day of clause 22. Wesley’s Explanatory Notes on 1 Corinthians 15 expound the apostolic argument in full: Christ the first-fruits; the resurrection body sown in corruption and raised in incorruption, sown in dishonor and raised in glory, sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body; death swallowed up in victory.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the integration of the resurrection hope with the whole way of salvation. Justification and the new birth begin a real renewal now; sanctification and Christian perfection carry it forward; the resurrection completes it. The believer’s progressive transformation in love is not a different work from the resurrection but its inauguration — what the Spirit begins in regeneration and advances in sanctification, the Spirit consummates in the resurrection of the body (Rom. 8:11, the verse that, for Wesley, binds present sanctification and future resurrection into one work of one Spirit: he who raised Christ… will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you). The same Spirit who witnesses to the believer’s adoption (the assurance of Sermons 10–11) is the pledge (ἀρραβών, 2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5; Eph. 1:14) of the resurrection — the present assurance is the down-payment on the future raising. Wesleyan assurance is therefore not merely about present forgiveness but about the certainty of the resurrection: the Spirit who assures is the Spirit who will raise.

The Wesleyan accent also presses the universal scope. Because Christ died for all and the resurrection of the dead is universal (all the dead are raised — John 5:28–29; Acts 24:15, a resurrection of the just and the unjust), the doctrine is held within the frame of universal grace and the genuine, awful seriousness of the judgment that the resurrection inaugurates (clause 15; Sermon 15, “The Great Assize”). The resurrection is not, for Wesley, only consolation; it is the universal raising of all to stand before the Judge — and therefore both the believer’s blessed hope and the ground of the gospel’s urgency.

Charles Wesley’s hymnody is saturated with the resurrection hope. Rejoice, the Lord is King! — Rejoice in glorious hope: / our Lord, the Judge, shall come / and take his servants up / to their eternal home: / We soon shall hear th’archangel’s voice; / the trump of God shall sound, rejoice! And the funeral and “rejoicing in hope” hymns: Come, let us join our friends above / that have obtained the prize, / and on the eagle wings of love / to joys celestial rise — and its great stanza on the one church militant and triumphant divided only by the unraised state: One family we dwell in him, / one church above, beneath, / though now divided by the stream, / the narrow stream of death. The stream is narrow precisely because the resurrection will close it.

The pastoral Wesleyan posture: confess the bodily resurrection of the dead, grounded in Christ’s, without modification; refuse the popular reduction to “the soul going to heaven” and teach the parish the fuller apostolic hope; integrate the resurrection with the whole way of salvation — what grace begins in the new birth and advances in sanctification it completes in the raising of the body, by the one Spirit; preach the Spirit’s present witness as the pledge of the future resurrection (assurance and hope are one); hold the universal scope and the seriousness of the judgment the resurrection inaugurates; and let the church grieve at the grave in hope — the stream of death is narrow, and it will be crossed.

Hymnody

The hymnody on this clause is the great Easter, funeral, and “blessed hope” repertoire — the church’s sung defiance of death.

“Christ the Lord is risen today” (Charles Wesley, 1739) confesses the ground of our resurrection in his: Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia! / Following our exalted Head, Alleluia! / Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia! / Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

“Jesus lives! thy terrors now” (Christian Gellert, 1757; trans. Frances Cox, 1841) is the great hymn of resurrection defiance: Jesus lives! thy terrors now / can, O death, no more appall us.

“Abide with me” (Henry Francis Lyte, 1847) ends in the resurrection hope: Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes; / shine through the gloom and point me to the skies: / heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee; / in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

“For all the saints” (William Walsham How, 1864) moves through the communion of saints to the resurrection’s consummation: But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day; / the saints triumphant rise in bright array; / the King of glory passes on his way. / Alleluia!

“The strife is o’er, the battle done” and “Thine is the glory” (Edmond Budry, 1884) confess the risen Christ as the pledge of our rising: No more we doubt thee, glorious Prince of life; / life is naught without thee: aid us in our strife; / make us more than conquerors, through thy deathless love.

“Come, let us join our friends above” (Charles Wesley, 1759) is the great Wesleyan hymn of the one church divided only by the narrow stream of death.

“Lo! he comes with clouds descending” (Charles Wesley, 1758) confesses the resurrection at the parousia: those who set at naught and sold him… / shall the true Messiah see.

“Sing with all the saints in glory” (William J. Irons, 1873, paraphrasing 1 Cor. 15) is the great hymnic setting of the resurrection chapter: Sing with all the saints in glory, / sing the resurrection song! / Death and sorrow, earth’s dark story, / to the former days belong.

“I know that my Redeemer lives” (Samuel Medley, 1775; and the Job 19 / Handel Messiah setting) confesses the personal resurrection hope: I know that my Redeemer lives… / and on the latter day shall stand upon the earth… in my flesh shall I see God.

“Now the green blade riseth” (J. M. C. Crum, 1928) sets the resurrection in the paschal-agricultural image: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

For the liturgical year: this clause is performed at every funeral and burial (its primary pastoral home), at Easter and the whole Easter season, at All Saints (the resurrection in its communal-eschatological breadth), and at the Easter Vigil. The Christian funeral is, properly understood, a confession of clause 22: the church commits the body to the ground in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Three pastoral tasks attach to this clause, and they are among the most consequential in the whole creed for the actual lived faith of the parish.

The first is correcting the folk-religion that has replaced this clause. The single most widespread doctrinal substitution in contemporary Western Christianity is the replacement of the resurrection of the dead with the immortal soul going to heaven when you die. It is what most parishioners actually believe, what most funeral eulogies actually proclaim, and what most popular consolation actually offers — and it is not the creed. The pastor’s task is patient, repeated, gentle re-catechesis: the Christian hope is not the natural survival of an undying part of you; it is the gracious raising of you, the dead person, body and soul, transformed and glorious, at the coming of Christ, into a renewed creation. This is not pedantry. The folk-substitution quietly concedes the body, the creation, and the future to death and offers only an escape; the creed refuses the concession and confesses that death will be defeated, not merely survived. The pastor who recovers this clause gives the parish a far greater hope than the one the culture has sold them.

The second is teaching the right place of the intermediate state. Having recovered the resurrection, the pastor must not overcorrect into denying the real (if penultimate) blessedness of the dead in Christ. The catholic both-and: the dead in Christ are, at death, with the Lord (Phil. 1:23; Luke 23:43) — a real, conscious, blessed rest — and this is not yet the resurrection; even the blessed dead are, with the whole church, in the posture of we look for. The pastoral language at the deathbed and the graveside should hold both: “she is with the Lord” is true and consoling; “and we look for the resurrection of the dead” is the larger and final hope that completes it. Teaching this protects the bereaved both from the thin culture-religion and from a polemical over-correction that would deny them the comfort of “with Christ.”

The third is letting the funeral confess the creed. The Christian funeral is the single most important liturgical performance of this clause, and it is the moment the surrounding culture most aggressively replaces with the rival gospel (the eulogy that makes the deceased’s memory their only immortality; the “celebration of life” that cannot look at the grave; the soul-to-heaven sentimentality). The pastor’s task is to ensure the Christian funeral actually confesses we look for the resurrection of the dead — in its Scripture, its hymnody, its committal (“in sure and certain hope of the resurrection”), and its honest naming of death as a real enemy that has been, in Christ, defeated. A congregation that buries its dead in the creed’s hope is being catechized in this clause more powerfully than by any sermon.

For the preacher: this clause is the proper subject of preaching at every funeral, throughout the Easter season, at All Saints, and whenever the lectionary reaches 1 Corinthians 15, Romans 8, or John 11. The recurring homiletical task is the recovery articulated above: name and gently dismantle the soul-to-heaven substitution, and preach the larger apostolic hope — bodily resurrection, defeated death, renewed creation, the redemption (not the discarding) of the body. The tone is not polemical correction but the offer of a greater hope than the one the hearers have settled for.

For the liturgist: the committal in the burial rite (“earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life”), the Easter Vigil’s movement from tomb to resurrection, the All Saints commemoration, and the careful choice of funeral hymnody and Scripture are the concrete means by which the parish is formed in this clause. The liturgist’s discipline is to resist, at the funeral above all, the cultural pressure to replace the creed’s hope with the culture’s consolation.

Further Reading

• Genesis 3:19 — you are dust, and to dust you shall return
• Job 19:25–27 — I know that my Redeemer lives… in my flesh I shall see God
• Psalm 16:9–11 — you do not give me up to Sheol
• Psalm 49:15; 73:24–26 — God will redeem my life from the power of the grave
• Isaiah 25:6–9 — he will swallow up death forever
• Isaiah 26:19 — your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise
• Ezekiel 37:1–14 — the valley of dry bones
• Daniel 12:1–3 — many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake
• Hosea 13:14 — shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol?
• 2 Maccabees 7 — the martyrs’ confession of the resurrection
• Matthew 22:23–33 — Jesus and the Sadducees on the resurrection
• Mark 12:18–27; Luke 20:27–40 — the God of the living
• John 5:24–29 — all who are in their graves will hear his voice
• John 6:39–40, 54 — I will raise them up on the last day
• John 11:1–44 — I am the resurrection and the life
• Acts 17:30–32; 23:6; 24:15, 21; 26:6–8 — the apostolic preaching of the resurrection
• Romans 6:5; 8:11, 18–25 — the redemption of our bodies
• 1 Corinthians 15 — the great resurrection chapter (read whole)
• 2 Corinthians 4:14; 5:1–10 — an eternal weight of glory; the heavenly dwelling
• Philippians 1:21–24; 3:10–11, 20–21 — he will transform our humble bodies
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 — the dead in Christ will rise first
• 2 Timothy 2:8–13, 18 — against those who say the resurrection is past
• Revelation 20:11–15; 21:1–22:5 — the resurrection, the judgment, the new creation
• Justin Martyr, On the Resurrection
• Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies V
• Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh
• Methodius of Olympus, On the Resurrection
• Origen, On First Principles II.10 (the contested treatment)
• Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection
• Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures XVIII
• Augustine, City of God XXII; Enchiridion 84–93
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith IV.27
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Supplement 75–86; Summa Contra Gentiles IV.79–89
• Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.25
• Luther, Sermons on 1 Corinthians 15
• Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 57–58
• Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter 32; Larger Catechism QQ. 86–90
• Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article III
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on 1 Corinthians 15, John 11, Romans 8
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 15 (“The Great Assize”)
• Charles Wesley, “Come, let us join our friends above,” “Rejoice, the Lord is King”
• Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (Epworth, 1958)
• Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Harper & Row, 1967); The Coming of God (Fortress, 1996)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47
• N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003); Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008)
• Anthony Thiselton, Life After Death (Eerdmans, 2012)
• Murray Harris, Raised Immortal (Eerdmans, 1983)