Let's post something profitable for once.

This was illuminating. It answered some of the questions I had before and cleared up some confusions.


============================


"The word "resurrection," and all the other concepts that cluster around it, simply doesn't mean any of those things. It has to do with the blunt belief that someone who was physically dead is now physically alive...

[Omitted material]

Resurrection, then, means what it says: not survival, not the immortality of the soul, not eternal disembodied bliss, but bodily resurrection. Jesus seems - and the New Testament writers are as aware as we are that they are at the edges of language at this point -- Jesus seems to have gone through death and out the other side. His new life was not less than physical; but it seems to have had a new dimension to it as well, a kind of transphysicality, humanity with more dimensions added.


[Omitted material]

... Far too often today Christians slide back into thinking of the immortality of the soul, of mere survival in some shadowy existence, or of a disembodied heaven, as the ultimate destination of God's people. It's a measure of just how seriously the bodily resurrection has been taken within the tradition that Christians have asked the impossible question: do those who die go into a different time-sequence, so that they go straight to the ultimate destination at once? Or do they rest, and as it were 'sleep', while waiting, so that we all arrive at the end together?

Talking of 'going to heaven when you die', or of being 'in paradise', is in fact one way of answering that question: we go to rest and wait. 'The souls of the righteous are in God's hand, at peace.' But we wait for something more: for the new world, the marriage of heaven and earth and the renewal of both. Whatever you decide about the chronology of life after death, 'heaven' by itself is not the ultimate destination of the Christian. Heaven, or as some Jews called it, 'paradise', is a temporary resting place, in between bodily death and bodily resurrection.

[Omitted material]

... The ultimate destination of Jesus' followers is the renewed earth, which will be joined together with the renewed heaven to make a world with extra dimensions - just as Jesus' new body seems to have had extra dimensions. When we speak of life after death, therefore, as of course we must both in comfort and in hope, let us school ourselves to speak of it Christianly, and not slide back into the half-light of mere 'immortality'. This is my second point: God's future for his people is a newly embodied life on a renewed earth, married to a renewed heaven. This is the hope that followers of Jesus must keep before their eyes."

- NT Wright, Following Jesus, "XII. New Life - New World"