We have got our story of salvation upside down. Ever since the early Middle Ages at least, most Christians have supposed that the point of the Christian gospel was to enable saved human ‘souls’ to go up to ‘heaven’.1 We’ve read Romans, not least Romans 8, in that way: when Paul says, at the climax of the chapter (verse 30), ‘those he justified, them he also glorified’, we have assumed that this means ‘Justified sinners will go to heaven’. But that isn’t what ‘glorified’ meant for Paul. He never once mentions ‘going to heaven’, here or elsewhere.
