For All the Saints: Remembering the Christians Departed

by N.T. Wright

As I have worked on this theme over the last few years, from within the mainstream life of the Church of England, I have been increasingly aware of a mismatch between what the earliest Christians believed about life after death – and about resurrection as a newly embodied life after ‘life after death’ – and what many ordinary Christians seem to believe on the subject today.

what we do and say in church at this point is increasingly at odds with anything that can be justified from the Bible or the earliest Christian traditions.

What I am concerned with is thinking clearly and coherently (the traditional ‘liberal’ agenda), thinking biblically (the traditional ‘evangelical’ agenda), and thinking in dialogue with the great traditions of Christendom (the ‘catholic’ agenda). My fear is that we have been simply drifting into a muddle and a mess, putting together bits and pieces of traditions, ideas and practices in the hope that they will make sense. They don’t.

We Anglicans, like many other Christians, learn a fair amount of our theology through the hymns we sing,

Purgatory, in either its classic or its modern form, provides the rationale for All Souls’ Day. This Day, now kept on 2 November, was a tenth-century Benedictine innovation. It clearly assumes a sharp distinction between the ‘saints’, who have already made it to heaven, and the ‘souls’, who haven’t, and who are therefore still, at least in theory, less than completely happy and need our help to move on from there. (In some countries All Saints and All Souls form a combined ‘days of the dead’. In Mexico they keep ‘Dias de los Muertos’, though close to the United States border people grumble that the children are spoiling the solemnity of the season by importing Hallowe’en customs from their northern neighbour.) This is the commemoration which has become newly popular in many Anglican circles. And one of the main points of this little book is to question its rationale, indeed its very existence.

The bodily resurrection is still in the future for everyone except Jesus. Paul is quite clear in 1 Corinthians 15.23: Christ is raised as the first-fruits; then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ will be raised as he has been raised. The ‘coming’ of which Paul speaks has not yet happened; therefore, clearly, the dead in Christ have not yet been raised. This is actually the official view of all mainstream orthodox theologians, Catholic and Protestant, except for those who think that after death we pass at once into an eternity in which all moments are present – a quite popular view but one which contains many serious difficulties.

‘Going to heaven when you die’ is not held out in the New Testament as the main goal. The main goal is to be bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus Christ.

there is no reason in the foundation documents of Christianity to suppose that there are any category distinctions between Christians in this intermediate state. All are in the same condition; and all are ‘saints’.

In particular, we must take account of the well-known and striking saying of Jesus to the dying brigand beside him, recorded by Luke (23.43). ‘Today,’ he said, ‘you will be with me in paradise.’ ‘Paradise’ is not the final destination; it is a beautiful resting place on the way there. But notice. If there is anyone in the New Testament to whom we might have expected the classic doctrine of purgatory to apply, it would be this brigand. He had no time for amendment of life; no doubt he had all kinds of sinful thoughts and desires in what was left of his body. All the standard arguments in favour of purgatory apply to him. And yet Jesus assures him of his place in paradise, not in a few days or weeks, not if his friends say lots of prayers and masses for him, but ‘today’.

If we are to be true to our foundation charter, then, 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. I honour the sentiments of those who expend time and effort over canonization, beatification and the like. I know that they are trying to say something about how important holiness was and is. But I cannot help regarding their efforts as misguided.

twenty-second Article of Faith, which declares: ‘The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory . . . is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.’

there is one doctrine of purgatory, that taught by Rome, and Anglicans reject it.

I cannot stress sufficiently that if we raise the question of punishment for sin, this is something that has already been dealt with on the cross of Jesus.

The idea that Christians need to suffer punishment for their sins in a. post-mortem purgatory, or anywhere else, reveals a straightforward failure to grasp the very heart of what was achieved on the cross.

We have been fooled, not for the first time, by a view of death, and life beyond, in which the really important thing is the ‘soul’ – something which, to many people’s surprise, hardly features at all in the New Testament. We have allowed our view of the saving of souls to loom so large that we have failed to realize that the Bible is much more concerned about bodies – concerned to the point where it’s actually quite difficult to give a clear biblical account of the disembodied state in between bodily death and bodily resurrection. That’s not what the biblical writers are trying to get us to think about – even though it is of course what many Christians have thought about to the point of obsession, including many who have thought of themselves as ‘biblical’ in their theology. But what should not be in doubt is that, for the New Testament, bodily death itself actually puts sin to an end. There may well be all kinds of sins still lingering on within us, infecting us and dragging us down. But part of the biblical understanding of death, bodily death, is that it finishes all that off at a single go.

But the glorious news is that, although during the present life we struggle with sin, and may or may not make small and slight progress towards genuine holiness, our remaining propensity to sin is finished, cut off, done with all at once, in physical death.

When the prodigal son put the ring on his finger and the shoes on his feet, was he being arrogant when he allowed his father’s lavish generosity to take its course? Would it not have been far more arrogant, far more clinging to one’s own inverted dignity as a ‘very humble’ penitent, to insist that he should be allowed to wear sackcloth and ashes for a week or two until he’d had time to adjust to the father’s house? No: the complaint about the prodigal’s arrogance, I fear, comes not from the father, but from the older brother. We should beware lest that syndrome destroy our delight in the gospel of the free grace of God. We mustn’t let the upside-down arrogance of those who are too proud to receive free grace prevent us from hearing and receiving the best news in the world.

In fact, Paul makes it clear here and elsewhere that it’s the present life that is meant to function as a purgatory.

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life.

For all the saints I therefore arrive at this view: that all the Christian departed are in substantially the same state, that of restful happiness. This is not the final destiny for which they are bound, namely the bodily resurrection; it is a temporary resting place.

Since they and we are both in Christ, we do indeed share with them in the Communion of Saints. Once we erase the false trail of purgatory from our mental map of the post-mortem world, there is no reason why we shouldn’t pray for them and with them.

however important the saints may be, however much they may be surrounding us, it is still on Jesus himself that one fixes one’s eyes. What I do not find in the New Testament is any suggestion that those at present in heaven/paradise are actively engaged in praying for those of us in the present life.

there is every reason to suppose that they are at least, like the souls under the altar in Revelation, urging the Father to complete the work of justice and salvation in the world. If that is so, there is no reason in principle why they should not urge the Father similarly on our behalf. I just don’t see any signs in the early Christian writings to suggest that they actually do that, or that we should, so to speak, encourage them to do so by invoking them specifically. Likewise, there is certainly no reason in principle why we should not pray for them – not that they will get out of purgatory, of course, but that they will be refreshed, and filled with God’s joy and peace. Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love, before God?

The whole point of the letter to the Hebrews is that Jesus Christ himself is ‘our man at court’, ‘our man in heaven’. He, says Paul in Romans 8, is interceding for us; why should we need anyone else?

This, then, is my proposal. Instead of the three divisions of the medieval church (triumphant, expectant and militant) I believe that there are only two. The church in heaven/paradise is both triumphant and expectant. I do not expect everyone to agree with this conclusion, but I would urge an honest searching of the scriptures to see whether these things be so.

Romans 5 and Romans 8 speak of the great sweep of God’s mercy, reconciling and freeing the whole cosmos. This doesn’t sound like a small group of people snatched away to salvation while the great majority faces destruction.

even in the astonishing and moving vision of the New Jerusalem, the renewed heaven and earth (Revelation 21 and 22), there are some still ‘outside’: the dogs, sorcerers, fornicators, murders, idolaters and liars (22.15).

we should remind ourselves that from the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22 there flows the river of the water of life, on whose banks grow trees, the tree of life; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. There are mysteries here we should not reduce to simplistic formulae.

The central fact about humans in the Bible is that they bear the image of God (Genesis 1.26–8, etc.). I understand this as a vocation as much as an innate character. Humans are summoned to worship and love their creator, and to reflect his image into the world. When, however, instead of worshipping and loving him, they worship and love that which is not him – in other words, something within the order of creation, whether spiritual or material – they turn away from him. But they can only be maintained in his image, as genuine humans, by worshipping him; they depend on him for their life and character. The rest of creation, by contrast, is subject to decay and death. If we worship it, or some part of it, instead of the life-giving God, we are invoking death upon ourselves instead of life.

There is such a thing as a fundamentalist arrogance that declares that only its own type of Christian is the real thing, and that all others are a sham and heading for hell. But it is equally arrogant – almost equally fundamentalist, in its own way! – to insist that, because we must indeed be reticent at this point, we can cheerfully assume that everyone must be ‘in’ and that the warnings of scripture and tradition can be quietly set aside.

if God is indeed to put the world to rights, and if he has indeed given his human creatures the freedom we sense ourselves to have, including the freedom to reject his will and his way, the eventual judgment will involve the loss of those who have exercised that freedom to their own ultimate cost.

how then should we commemorate the faithful departed?

the commemoration of All Souls, especially the way it is now done, denies to ordinary Christians – and we’re all ordinary Christians – the solid, magnificent hope of the gospel: that all baptized believers, all those in Christ in the present, all those indwelt by the Spirit, are already ‘saints’.

The Christian hope, as articulated in the New Testament, is that if you die today you won’t be in a gloomy gathering in some dismal and perhaps painful waiting-room. You won’t simply be one more step further along a steep, hard road with no end in sight. You will be with Christ in paradise; and when you see him, you won’t shout, like poor Gerontius, ‘Take me away’. You will, like Paul, be ‘with Christ, which is far better’.

To make ‘the Kingdom’ a heavenly rather than an earthly reality is to miss one of the central points of the New Testament. What I wish we could do in our liturgical keeping of the church’s year is to make room, somewhere between Epiphany and Good Friday, for a thorough celebration of Jesus’ inauguration of this Kingdom here on earth, anticipating the final uniting and renewal of earth and heaven.

the Christian story isn’t about time going round and round in circles, but about time going forward into God’s new world.

None of this would matter much if Christian truth were just a ragbag of detachable doctrines and ideas that you could in principle rearrange in any order. But it isn’t. It’s a story, the story of God and the world, the story of God and Jesus, the story of God and you and me. How do we learn this story? How do we make it our own?

those who have died as part of God’s people are sustained in life by God. Couple that with Paul’s remark about ‘departing and being with Christ’, and that’s about as far as you can go in terms of what the New Testament teaches.

True prayer is an outflowing of love; if I love someone, I will want to pray for them, not necessarily because they are in difficulties, not necessarily because there is a particular need of which I’m aware, but simply because holding them up in God’s presence is the most natural and appropriate thing to do, and because I believe that God chooses to work through our prayers for other people’s benefit, whatever sort of benefit that may be. Now love doesn’t stop at death – or, if it does, it’s a pretty poor sort of love! In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and feeling the pain of that nothingness. But there is no reason at all why love should discontinue the practice of holding the beloved in prayer before God.

‘May the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace and rise in glory.’ Amen to that. Amen, too, to the peace, consolation and gradual assuaging of grief that comes from thus leaving those we love in the safe and sure mercies of the loving Creator and Redeemer.