Glorification

Glorification is, in Christian theology, the final stage of salvation: the state of the redeemed in the age to come, when mortality and the effects of sin are removed and the person is conformed fully to Christ, body included. In the Protestant ordering of salvation it is the last term of a sequence, calling, justification, sanctification, glorification, and it differs from the others in being wholly future and wholly God's act, with nothing progressive or cooperative about it.

Its pivotal text is Romans 8:29-30, where the chain runs from foreknowledge through predestination, calling and justification to glorification, with the final verb in the past tense. That grammatical feature has been much commented on and is taken by Reformed interpreters as expressing the certainty of the outcome, what is still future is spoken of as already done. Paul's fuller treatment is 1 Corinthians 15, where the resurrection body is "sown in dishonour, raised in glory", and a contrast is drawn between the body as it now is and a "spiritual body", with the transformation extended to those still alive at the end. Philippians 3:21 speaks of the body of humiliation being conformed to the body of Christ's glory.

What the doctrine chiefly commits its holders to is that the final state is embodied. Christianity inherited the resurrection of the dead from Second Temple Judaism and has consistently affirmed it against accounts, Platonist and later, in which the soul's release from the body is itself the goal. What a "spiritual body" is has never been settled: Aquinas discussed the properties of the glorified body at length, and modern theology has generally been more reticent, but the claim that there is one is credal rather than speculative.

Neighbouring doctrines qualify the picture. Eastern Christianity's theosis, and its reading of the Transfiguration light, treat glorification as beginning now rather than only at the end. Catholic teaching holds that the blessed enjoy the beatific vision before the general resurrection and are glorified in body afterwards. And in ordinary usage "glorification" also names the act of giving glory to God, a second sense the tradition connects to the first by insisting that the creature's fulfilment and God's glory are not in competition, a point made most memorably in the opening of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Article one sets out glorification's place in the Protestant order of salvation and its grounding in Paul. A significant strand of recent theology has argued that ordinary Christian piety lost hold of what the doctrine actually claims, replacing it with a picture the New Testament does not teach.

N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope (2007) argued at length that much popular Western Christianity has substituted "going to heaven when you die," understood as a disembodied, non-physical destination, for the New Testament's own claim, which is bodily resurrection into a renewed physical creation. On Wright's reading, the language of glorification and of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15 describes a transformed but genuinely material future, not an escape from materiality, and he treats the popular substitution as a serious and consequential distortion rather than a harmless simplification, since it changes what Christians expect is finally to be redeemed, the body and the world along with the soul, or only the soul.

The argument has proved influential well beyond Wright's own tradition and has fed directly into contemporary debate about Christian environmental responsibility: if the created world itself is to be renewed and glorified rather than discarded once souls are extracted from it, as several theologians working in Wright's wake have argued, the case for present ecological care follows from eschatology rather than sitting alongside it as a separate ethical add-on. Critics of the emphasis reply that it risks losing sight of the intermediate state, what happens to a person between death and the general resurrection, a question Wright addresses but which not all readers of his popular work have absorbed with the same care he gives it.