Resurrection and Judgment

The Old Testament arrives at the resurrection slowly, as lesson 1 set out, and then says it without hedging. Daniel 12:2: 'And many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, but others to shame and everlasting contempt.' Isaiah 26:19: 'Your dead will live; their bodies will rise.' A caution about Ezekiel 37, which every congregation hears as a resurrection text: the valley of dry bones is explicitly interpreted inside the chapter, at verses 11 to 14, as the restoration of the house of Israel from exile. It is a picture of national resurrection, and the fact that it works as a picture tells you the idea of bodily resurrection was available to be used as one, which is a real piece of evidence. It is not a prediction of the last day, and telling a congregation that it is will cost you their trust when one of them notices verse 11.

Jesus takes the Pharisaic side of a live first-century argument and pushes it further than either party had. In Mark 12:18-27 the Sadducees bring him a puzzle about seven brothers and one widow, designed to make resurrection look absurd. His answer has two halves that are both worth having. First, they are wrong about the nature of the risen life: those who rise neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven, which is a statement about marriage rather than about bodies. Second, and this is the part that repays study, he argues for the resurrection from the Torah, the only part of the canon his opponents would grant him, and specifically from Exodus 3:6, where God calls himself the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob long after all three are dead. He is not God of the dead but of the living. The argument is that covenant relationship with the living God is not the kind of thing death can terminate.

1 Corinthians 15 is the sustained treatment and its logic should be learned as logic, because Paul builds the whole thing as an argument rather than an assertion. Some in Corinth say there is no resurrection of the dead. Paul's reply, in verses 12 to 19, is that if there is no resurrection of the dead then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, the preaching is in vain and so is their faith; the apostles are found to be misrepresenting God; they are still in their sins; those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished; and 'If our hope in Christ is for this life alone, we are to be pitied more than all men.' Then verse 20 turns: 'But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.' Firstfruits is a harvest word, and the point of firstfruits is that the rest of the crop is the same crop. What happened to Jesus on the third day is the pattern and the guarantee of what happens to his people.

The raising is universal, not restricted to believers. John 5:28-29 says an hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. Acts 24:15 has Paul stating a hope that there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked. Daniel 12:2 has both destinies in one verse. Whatever a reader concludes in the next lesson about the fate of the lost, the New Testament does not hold that only the saved are raised.

The creeds put the doctrine in the most physical words available, and the choice of words was deliberate. The Apostles' Creed, in its Latin form, confesses carnis resurrectionem, the resurrection of the flesh, which is why English versions say resurrection of the body rather than of the dead. The Nicene Creed confesses the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Those phrases were not written in a vacuum. They were written where the alternative on offer was the immortality of the soul and the shedding of the body as a deliverance, and the church chose the harder and less respectable word on purpose.

Paul's answer to the question of what kind of body is an analogy, and the analogy is doing exact work. You sow just a seed; God gives it a body as He has designed; what you sow is not the body that will be. Hold both halves. The plant is not a second, unrelated thing that replaced the seed, and it is also not the seed with improvements. There is one story with one subject running through it, and the form at the end is not derivable from the form at the start. That is what the four contrasts then spell out: sown perishable and raised imperishable, sown in dishonour and raised in glory, sown in weakness and raised in power, sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body.

Take the last pair carefully, because it is the one most often misread. Pneumatikos does not mean immaterial. Paul uses the same adjective of people in 1 Corinthians 2:15 and of food and drink in 10:3-4, and in none of those places does it describe a substance. It describes what a thing belongs to or is animated by. A soma pneumatikon is a body constituted and driven by the Spirit of God, as the present body is a soma psychikon, a body animated by natural life. When 15:50 says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, the phrase 'flesh and blood' is a Semitic idiom for mortal humanity as such, used that way at Matthew 16:17 and Galatians 1:16, rather than a statement that the risen body has no matter in it.

The resurrection appearances are the data, and they are stubbornly two-sided. He is touched. He shows his hands and his side; Thomas is told to put his finger there. Luke 24:39 has him say, 'Look at My hands and My feet. It is I Myself. Touch Me and see - for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.' He eats a piece of broiled fish in front of them. And at the same time he is not recognised on the Emmaus road and in the garden, he appears inside a locked room, and he vanishes from the table. Any account that keeps only one half of that has stopped reading. Whatever the risen body is, the witnesses describe something continuous with the body that was buried and not confined in the way that body was.

Now the scandal, which has been constant. At Athens the mockery begins exactly when the resurrection is mentioned. In the second century Celsus called the hope disgusting and impossible, and Origen answered him at length in Contra Celsum book 5; the objection was not that a soul could not survive, which every educated pagan granted, but that anybody would want a corpse back. Gnostic teachers offered the respectable alternative, a salvation that was escape from matter, and 2 Timothy 2:18 already names two men who were saying the resurrection had already happened. The fathers dug in on the physical word: Irenaeus argues it through book 5 of Against Heresies, and Tertullian wrote a whole treatise, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, whose title is its argument. The church has repeatedly been offered a more dignified hope and has repeatedly refused it.

Understand why the refusal matters doctrinally, because it connects to everything in this module. A bodily resurrection says that matter is good, which is a claim about creation and which lesson 5 will take up. It says that salvation is the redemption of what God made rather than an escape from it. It says that the person who suffered in a body is the person who is vindicated, which is why the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6 are given robes rather than congratulations. And it says that history is going somewhere rather than being left behind. One honest open question should be flagged: what exactly constitutes the identity of the raised body. The medieval schoolmen worried hard about material continuity, and Caroline Walker Bynum's The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, published in 1995, traces how seriously and how strangely they worried. Nobody now thinks identity requires the same atoms, since the atoms of a living body are replaced many times over already. What identity does require has never been settled, and it is better to say so than to invent a mechanism.

The texts are many and they agree on the main lines. Hebrews 9:27 appoints judgement after death. Acts 17:31 says God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the Man he has appointed, and has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead. Romans 2:16 speaks of the day when God will judge men's secrets through Christ Jesus. 2 Corinthians 5:10 has all of us appearing before the judgment seat of Christ. Matthew 25:31-46 has the Son of Man on his glorious throne with all the nations gathered before him. And Revelation 20:11-15 has the great white throne, the books, and the book of life. The judgement in the New Testament is not a metaphor for the natural consequences of a life. It has a judge, a day, a criterion and an outcome.

Who judges is stated with unusual precision. John 5:22 says the Father judges no one but has assigned all judgment to the Son, and 5:27 adds that he has given him authority to execute judgement because he is the Son of Man. Acts 17:31 says the judge is a man whom God has appointed. 2 Corinthians 5:10 calls the tribunal the judgment seat of Christ and Romans 14:10 calls it God's judgment seat, which is a small detail with a large Christology inside it. So the one who will judge every human being is the one who was judged by a Roman governor, and that is not a devotional flourish; it is the reason Revelation can describe the throne of God and of the Lamb as a single throne.

Then the saints judging, which is genuinely puzzling and should not be smoothed over. 1 Corinthians 6:2-3: 'Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels?' Matthew 19:28 has the Twelve sitting on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Daniel 7:22 has judgement given for the saints of the Most High. Revelation 20:4 has thrones with authority to judge committed to those seated on them. The main proposals are these. That judging here carries the Old Testament sense it has in the book of Judges, where to judge is to rule and to deliver rather than to preside at a trial, so what is promised is a share in Christ's reign. That the saints judge by participation, their presence with the Judge constituting the verdict rather than their pronouncing it. That the language is a fortiori and rhetorical, since Paul's actual aim in 1 Corinthians 6 is to shame a congregation into settling its own quarrels. What no text does is describe the mechanism, and a teacher who supplies one has gone past his evidence.

The books are two kinds of thing and the distinction is the point. Revelation 20:12: 'And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne. And books were opened, and one of them was the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to their deeds, as recorded in the books.' Here the BSB's English counts the Book of Life as one of the books. The Greek says literally and another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the King James keeps that: 'and another book was opened, which is the book of life'. The lesson's distinction rests on the Greek and the King James wording, and a reader who prefers the BSB's rendering can still see two functions in the one scene, because the deeds are recorded in the books and the decisive clause in 20:15 is about the Book of Life. One set records deeds. The other records names. The book of life is not a New Testament invention: Moses offers to be blotted out of God's book at Exodus 32:32, Psalm 69:28 asks that the wicked be blotted out of the Book of Life, Daniel 12:1 has everyone whose name is found written in the book delivered, Malachi 3:16 has a scroll of remembrance, and Paul speaks of his fellow workers whose names are in the book of life at Philippians 4:3. In Revelation 20:15 the decisive clause is about the second book: 'And if anyone was found whose name was not written in the Book of Life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.'

Two further features of the New Testament's account belong here because every tradition affirms them. First, the judgement reaches what is hidden. Romans 2:16 has God judging the secrets of men; 1 Corinthians 4:5 says the Lord will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and expose the motives of men's hearts; the verb in 2 Corinthians 5:10 is to be made manifest. Second, it admits of degrees. Luke 12:47-48 distinguishes the servant who knew his master's will from the one who did not, and gives them different beatings. Matthew 11:21-24 says it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon than for Chorazin. And 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 has a believer's work tested by fire, with loss suffered and the man himself saved. Whatever else is disputed in the next lesson, the New Testament does not present the outcome as a single undifferentiated verdict on either side.

State the problem at full strength before anybody solves it. Romans 2:6: God 'will repay each one according to his deeds.' Romans 2:13: 'For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but it is the doers of the law who will be declared righteous.' 2 Corinthians 5:10, written to Christians: each one will receive his due for the things done in the body, whether good or bad. Revelation 20:12 and 20:13 say twice that the dead were judged according to their deeds. And the same apostle writes Romans 3:28, that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law, and Ephesians 2:9, that salvation is not by works, so that no one can boast, and Titus 3:5, that he saved us not by the righteous deeds we had done. Two things about the BSB's English are worth knowing. The word it prints as deeds in Romans 2:6 and Revelation 20:12 is the same Greek word, erga, that it prints as works in Romans 3:28 and Ephesians 2:9, so the apparent clash of vocabulary is partly the translators' variety. And at Romans 2:13 the BSB renders the verb as 'declared righteous' where Romans 3:28 has 'justified'; the Greek verb is the same, and a reader of the English alone will not see that the two verses use one word. The BSB's choice leans toward the forensic reading of the verb, which most Protestant accounts below welcome and the Catholic account below reads differently, as a making righteous. Hermeneutics module 4 worked the James and Paul version of this question; here the question is sharper, because both columns are Paul's and one of them is about the last day. Five accounts follow, each as its own defenders give it, each with what it costs.

Works as evidence rather than ground. This is the classical Reformed answer and much of evangelicalism follows it. The verdict at the last day is the public declaration of a verdict already given in justification, whose ground is the righteousness of Christ received by faith; works are brought forward as the evidence that the faith was real, in the way a tree's fruit demonstrates what kind of tree it is. Matthew 7:16-20 supplies the image, James 2:18 the challenge to show faith by works, and 1 John 3:14 the test of love for the brothers. John 15:1-8 supplies the mechanism, since the branch bears fruit by abiding rather than by effort, and Ephesians 2:10 puts even the works on the grace side of the ledger, as good works which God prepared in advance as our way of life. Westminster Confession 16 treats good works as the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith. What it costs: Romans 2:6 and 2:13 use stronger language than evidence, and the tradition has produced two different explanations of that passage without settling between them. One holds that Romans 2 states the standard of the law that nobody in fact meets, so that its function is to silence every mouth before 3:19. The other holds that it describes real Christians whose obedience the Spirit produces. Both are argued by serious Reformed exegetes, which tells you the text is not simply yielding what the doctrine needs. The position's own best defenders add that evidence is not a weak word in a courtroom, since evidence is what a verdict is publicly given upon, and that the distinction it is protecting is between what a verdict rests on and what it answers to.

Merit within grace. The Catholic account begins further back: justification on the Catholic reading is a real renewal of the person and not only a declaration about him, so the works that follow are the works of a person actually made righteous by grace. The sixth session of Trent teaches in its sixteenth chapter that eternal life is to be held out both as a grace mercifully promised and as a reward faithfully rendered, and its thirty-second canon condemns the claim that a justified person does not truly merit an increase of grace and eternal life by good works performed through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ. The council's own order matters here and is routinely reversed by critics. Trent teaches first that nothing preceding justification merits it, neither faith nor works, and only then that a person already justified, and living as a member of Christ, merits an increase of what he has been given. Remove the first half and the second becomes the caricature. The crucial qualification is in the same documents and is usually omitted: merit is itself a gift. The Catechism treats merit at 2006 to 2011 and quotes the line, from Augustine by way of the liturgy, that when God crowns our merits he is crowning his own gifts. What it costs: the account has to explain how a reward can be genuinely merited and genuinely given, and Protestant readers have pressed for five centuries that the final verdict is thereby made to rest partly on the believer. Catholic theologians answer that it rests on grace operating in the believer, which is a different sentence, and that a grace which changes nobody is not the grace the New Testament describes.

Necessary fruit without causal weight. The Lutheran account refuses to make works a cause of salvation in any sense while refusing equally to make them optional. The fourth article of the Formula of Concord, in 1577, gives two images: the Epitome has good works following a living faith as the fruits of a good tree, and the Solid Declaration has it that works can no more be separated from faith than heat and light from fire. The same article rejects the proposition that good works are necessary to salvation, as standing against justification by grace and Christ's merit alone and as taking the gospel's comfort from troubled consciences, and rejects in the same breath, as a flat statement, that good works are injurious to salvation. The final judgement therefore reveals faith rather than establishing a verdict, and the works named at Matthew 25 are produced as public testimony to a righteousness that was never the doer's own. What it costs: the distinction between a necessity of consequence and a necessity of cause is precise, it is easy to state and hard to preach, and it has been misheard in both directions inside Lutheranism itself, which is why it needed a confession to settle it. Lutherans regard that difficulty as the price of refusing both of the easier options, and they point out that the article exists because someone had already collapsed the distinction in each direction and the congregations had suffered for it. The account's positive strength is pastoral: it allows a dying believer to be told that the verdict is already spoken and that nothing in his record is being weighed against it, which is the use Luther himself made of the doctrine.

Judgement as revelation of a healed or unhealed person. The Eastern account reframes the question rather than answering it in Western terms, and a student should notice the reframing rather than translating it back. Salvation in the East is healing and transformation, union with God worked out over a whole life, so what the last day discloses is what a person has become. Judgement is then described as the encounter with the uncreated glory of God, experienced as light by those made able to receive it and as fire by those who are not, which is why some Eastern writers say that the same divine love is heaven to one and torment to another. Matthew 25 is read as straightforwardly as it sounds, and the Orthodox liturgical year sets it on the Sunday before Lent begins. Its texts are the ones the Western accounts tend to handle last: Matthew 25:31-46, where faith is not mentioned at all and the criterion is bread and water and a visit; 2 Corinthians 3:18, where believers are being transformed into the Lord's image with intensifying glory; and 1 John 3:2-3, where seeing him as he is and being purified stand in the same breath. What it costs: pressed hard, the account can look as though Paul's forensic vocabulary has been set aside rather than integrated, and the East's own theologians have had to insist that the language of acquittal is not being denied but located inside a larger account of what God is doing to a human being. What the account has going for it is that it makes sense of a feature of the New Testament that the Western options handle awkwardly, namely how often the criterion named in the judgement scenes is mercy shown to particular hungry and imprisoned people.

Present verdict and final verdict. A fifth proposal, most fully argued by N. T. Wright in his 2009 book Justification and anticipated in various forms in Wesleyan and Anglican writing, distinguishes the present justification of the believer, which is by faith alone, from the final verdict, which is issued in accordance with the whole life lived by the Spirit. On this account Romans 2:6-16 is Paul's own doctrine rather than a hypothetical, and the last day publicly confirms the verdict already announced. Its other load-bearing texts are 2 Corinthians 5:10, addressed to Christians and speaking of what is due for the things done in the body, and Galatians 5:5, where by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the hope of righteousness, a righteousness the account takes to be a verdict still to be pronounced. What it costs: it is contested from more than one side. Reformed critics argue that whatever the preposition, the account makes the believer's works part of what the final verdict answers to, which is precisely the question the Reformation turned on; other critics argue that Romans 2 is performing a different function in Paul's argument altogether. Wright's reply is that the distinction between a verdict issued on the basis of works and a verdict issued in accordance with them is the whole point, and that a reading which cannot let Romans 2 say anything has not solved the problem but silenced it. It is worth noting that the proposal is not confined to one camp: something close to it is standard in Wesleyan theology, where final salvation is held to depend on a faith that continues and works by love, and the argument between it and the first account in this list is older than the twentieth-century form of it.

What all five agree on is worth naming, because a student who only hears the disputes will think nothing is fixed. All five hold that no one is saved by a balance of good deeds over bad. All five hold that a faith which produces nothing is not the faith the New Testament means. All five hold that the judge is Christ and that the standard is his and not the culture's. And all five have to carry both columns of texts, which is the test to apply when you next hear somebody expound one column as though the other were not there.

The question is not a seminar puzzle. Most human beings who have ever lived died without having heard the gospel in any form they could have understood, and a great many of them were devout by the lights they had. The student in the inquiry has a grandmother, and any answer that cannot be said out loud in front of her is not an answer. Three positions are on the table, and the traditions have judged them differently, so this section does two jobs: it states each one as its own defenders state it, and it says plainly which have been held inside Christian orthodoxy and which have been judged to fall outside it, with the reason.

Exclusivism, also called particularism or restrictivism, holds that salvation is through Christ alone and is received through explicit faith in him in this life, so that those who never hear are lost. Its texts are direct. Acts 4:12: 'Salvation exists in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.' John 14:6: 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.' Romans 10:14-17 asks how they can believe in the One of whom they have not heard, and how they can hear without someone to preach, and concludes that faith comes by hearing. 1 Timothy 2:5 names one mediator. Its account of justice is Romans 1:18-21: God's invisible qualities have been clearly seen in what has been made, so that men are without excuse, and on this reading nobody is condemned for failing to hear a message that never came but for what he did with the light he had. Its defenders include Ronald Nash in Is Jesus the Only Savior? in 1994 and D. A. Carson in The Gagging of God in 1996, and it is the reading behind a great deal of Protestant missionary history. Its named weakness is that almost all of its own defenders make an exception for infants who die and for the severely mentally disabled, on grounds of God's mercy rather than of explicit faith, which concedes that explicit faith is not an absolute condition and then requires them to explain why the concession stops there. Their answer is that an infant is incapable of the means rather than merely deprived of them, which is a distinction they take to be principled, and critics take to be the same mercy applied selectively. Its second difficulty is that Romans 10:14 is a question about the ordinary means of salvation and does not by itself state that God never acts otherwise. What should be said for the position, whatever one concludes, is that it has driven more people onto ships and into hard places than any other view in this section, and its defenders regard that as a consequence of taking Romans 10 seriously rather than an accident.

Inclusivism holds that Christ is the only Saviour and that his salvation is not always applied through explicit knowledge of him, so that a person may be saved by Christ without having heard of Christ. Its texts are equally direct. Acts 10:34-35 has Peter saying that God does not show favoritism, but welcomes those from every nation who fear Him and do what is right. Acts 17:23-30 has Paul telling the Athenians that what they worship as something unknown he proclaims to them, and that God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times. Romans 2:14-16 has Gentiles who do not have the law doing by nature what the law requires, with the work of the law written on their hearts. John 1:9 calls Christ the true Light, who gives light to everyone. 1 Timothy 2:4 says God wants everyone to be saved. The Old Testament supplies figures who stand outside the covenant and are commended within the text: Melchizedek, Jethro, Job, Naaman, the sailors and the Ninevites in Jonah. Its Protestant defenders include Clark Pinnock in A Wideness in God's Mercy in 1992 and John Sanders in No Other Name in the same year, and C. S. Lewis dramatised a version of it. In Catholic teaching it is not a minority opinion but the conciliar position: Lumen Gentium 16 says that those who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience, can attain to salvation, and the same paragraph ends by insisting on the missions. Karl Rahner's phrase anonymous Christians is a theological proposal about the same ground and is not itself conciliar language. Its named weakness is that Romans 1 and 3 are read by many as denying that anyone in fact responds rightly to general revelation, since Romans 3:11 says there is no one who seeks God; and it has difficulty specifying what the minimum content of a saving response is without either emptying faith of content or smuggling the content back in.

Pluralism holds that the religions are different culturally conditioned responses to the same ultimate reality, that Christ is normative for Christians without being the unique and universal saviour, and that salvation, or what the traditions variously call liberation, is genuinely available within each. Its best-known defender is John Hick, who argued in God and the Universe of Faiths in 1973 for what he called a Copernican revolution in theology, moving God rather than Christianity to the centre, and developed the case philosophically in An Interpretation of Religion in 1989; Paul Knitter argued a version of it from a Catholic background. Its arguments are less exegetical and more of three other kinds: that the moral and spiritual fruits of the other great traditions are real and observable and require explaining; that the accident of birthplace determines religious allegiance to an extent that makes exclusive claims look arbitrary; and that texts such as Acts 17:23 and John 1:9 point to a light not confined to the church. Its named weakness, pressed by critics and conceded in substance by Hick himself, is that it cannot be held together with the classical doctrine of the incarnation, which is why Hick edited and contributed to The Myth of God Incarnate in 1977 and argued that the incarnation should be understood as metaphor. That is an honest position and it is a revision of the creed rather than an interpretation of it. Its defenders answer that the classical doctrine was itself a development worked out over four centuries, that the title Son of God functioned in its first Jewish setting as a designation of office and vocation, and that 1 Timothy 2:4, which says God wants everyone to be saved, is more easily held on their account than on any other. A second criticism comes from a direction that surprises students, because it is not made by conservatives: Gavin D'Costa and S. Mark Heim have argued that pluralism flattens the religions by assuming in advance that they are all aiming at the same thing, when the traditions themselves describe different ends and would mostly decline the compliment.

So the boundary, stated as the traditions have stated it. Exclusivism and inclusivism are both held within Christian orthodoxy and have been for centuries; a student will find both among people who confess the Nicene Creed without reservation, and the disagreement between them is about the reach of Christ's work and not about whether it is unique. Pluralism has been judged to fall outside, and the reason is specific rather than temperamental. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's declaration Dominus Iesus in 2000 rejected the view that Christ is one saviour among others and that the revelation in him is complementary to others. The Reformation confessions, the Orthodox tradition and the ecumenical creeds all confess one mediator and one incarnate Lord. The judgement is not that pluralists are insincere or that they have no arguments; it is that the claim they deny is the claim the creeds make. Two further proposals sit at the edge and should be named rather than hidden: postmortem evangelisation, argued from 1 Peter 3:19 and 4:6 by Gabriel Fackre and others, which most traditions have not adopted and whose exegesis is disputed; and universalism, which belongs to the next lesson and is not the same thing as inclusivism, though the two are constantly confused.

What is settled and what is not. Settled: there is a judgement; the judge is Christ; the criterion includes what people have actually done; salvation is by Christ alone; the church is commanded to preach to everyone, and none of the three positions above weakens that command, since Lumen Gentium 16 ends with the missions and so does Romans 10. Not settled: how God deals with those the message never reached. Hold that open honestly rather than closing it for comfort in either direction, because the two ways of closing it are equally available and equally cheap. One says confidently that they are lost, which goes beyond what any text states about a particular person. The other says confidently that they are fine, which quietly removes the urgency that put the apostles on the roads. What you can say to the student, and defend, is that her grandmother is in the hands of a judge who became a man, who knows exactly what she was given and what she did with it, and who has already been through everything she went through. That is not an evasion. It is the only thing the New Testament actually tells you about a particular soul you did not meet.