Wonder and Joy in Prayer

One of the many gulfs that need to be closed between atheists and theists is the gulf that keeps atheists thinking that people are only theists because they want to be saved from death while being blind to the fact that so many theists feel instead the urgent desire to give thanks for being alive. Yes, there are many theists motivated by servile fear. But there are, I think far more motivated by wonder and delight. Indeed belief in a happy afterlife was a rather late development in Israelite religion and belief in that specific form of afterlife called the bodily resurrection of the dead was held only by Pharisaic Jews. And, until the stunning surprise of the Resurrection of Christ, nobody thought resurrection would happen until the Day of the Lord. The psalms are, for the most part, written by people with no clear idea of an afterlife as anything but Sheol. They praise God, not with the expectation of “heaven” as pop Christianity thinks of it, but out of delight in God in the present moment, because he and his creation are delightful and praise naturally breaks out of the psalmist in response.

As to the early Church, we have forgotten the strangeness of what it actually declares about the afterlife: namely, that it’s not that important. What matters is not “heaven”–a state of disembodied bliss somewhere in the void known as “life after death”. The apostles already believed in that before Jesus came along, just as much as anybody else. That’s why they took the risen Christ for a ghost. Everybody believed in ghosts and spirits and that kind of afterlife. What rocked their world was that Jesus was not a ghost, but somebody they could touch and handle and eat with. In short, the truly weird proclamation of the apostles is not “life after death” but life after life after death. A bodily resurrection right in the middle of history and not at the end of time was not at all what they were prepared for. But that’s what they got and it blew their minds as much as it continues to blow people’s minds today. People are ready for the “spiritual” to be disembodied. They are not ready for it to scarf down a piece of fish and promise that we too shall have glorified, divinized bodies in a completely transformed universe that includes not merely a New Heaven, but a New Earth as well. It really needs to be re-seen just how incredibly weird the claims of the gospel are.