Theopedia

Glorification

“And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

— Romans 8:30 (ESV)

Definition

Glorification is the final stage of the ordo salutis: the completion of a believer’s salvation, in which the soul is made perfect in holiness at death and the body is raised, transformed, and reunited with the soul in immortal glory, conformed to the risen Christ (Rom. 8:29-30; 1 John 3:2).1 It begins already in this life through the Spirit’s witness and the believer’s sanctification, but is not completed until the resurrection of the body at Christ’s return (1 Cor. 15:42-43).2

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter titled “glorification,” but its chapters on the state of man after death and the last judgment state the doctrine’s substance. On the intermediate state, it teaches that the souls of the righteous are “made perfect in holiness” and received into paradise “waiting for the full redemption of their bodies.”3 On the resurrection itself:

“At the last day, such of the saints as are found alive, shall not sleep, but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies, and none other; although with different qualities, which shall be united again to their souls forever. The bodies of the unjust shall, by the power of Christ, be raised to dishonour; the bodies of the just, by his Spirit, unto honour, and be made conformable to his own glorious body.”4

The Westminster Confession states the resurrection of the just in nearly identical wording, closing with the same phrase: “made conformable to his own glorious body.”5 The two confessions, alongside the Westminster Larger Catechism’s fuller statement that the just “shall be raised up by the power of Christ” and “made like to his glorious body,”6 agree that glorification is not the soul’s blessedness alone but the resurrection and transformation of the body as well, following Christ’s own resurrection as its pattern.

Biblical Basis

Paul places glorification as the last link in an unbroken chain: “those whom he justified he also glorified” (Rom. 8:30). The verb is already past tense, though the believer’s own bodily glorification still lies ahead, because the outcome is as certain as the calling and justification that precede it.1 Paul ties the goal to Christ himself: believers are predestined “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29), and at his appearing “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

Paul’s fullest treatment of the resurrection body is in 1 Corinthians 15. The body “is sown in dishonor” and “raised in glory,” “sown a natural body” and “raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:42-44), yet it is the same body, not a different one, “for this perishable body must put on the imperishable” (1 Cor. 15:53). Christ’s own resurrection secures this: he is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20), and “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:21). Paul’s other extended discussion, in 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:10, describes the present body as an “earthly tent” awaiting “a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5:1), while Colossians ties the believer’s present hidden life in Christ to a future public unveiling: “when Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:4).

Historical Development

Patristic period: the resurrection of the flesh against the gnostics

The nature of the resurrection body became, in Ronald Heine’s account, “a storm center in the second century” between orthodox Christians and gnostic teachers.7 Gnostic writers, who regarded the material world as the flawed product of a lesser being rather than the true God’s creation, read Paul’s language of a “spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44) as excluding the flesh altogether; the Gospel of Philip argued that only “that which belongs to Jesus and his blood,” not “flesh and blood,” would inherit anything at all.8 Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in the late second century, and Tertullian, writing in Carthage in the late second and early third centuries, answered that the same flesh that dies is raised, though changed in its qualities; Heine notes both men “recognize that the nature of the body of flesh will be altered in significant ways” without ceasing to be a resurrection of that same body.9 Origen, writing in Alexandria and Caesarea in the first half of the third century, took a mediating position: the resurrected body preserves an underlying “form” continuous with the body that died, changed for the better, rather than either an untouched physical body or a wholly different one.10 The church received the position of Irenaeus and Tertullian as orthodox and treated the other two as departures from it.9

Reformed orthodoxy: glorification begun and completed

Puritan and Reformed orthodox theologians distinguished glorification’s present, partial stage from its future completion. William Ames (1642) defined glorification as “a reall transmutation of a man, from misery or the punishment of sinne, unto happinesse eternall,” beginning already in “the apprehension and sence of the love of God shining forth in Christ” and the believer’s assurance of salvation, ahead of its full possession.2 Benedict Pictet, professor at Geneva, organized his Christian Theology (1696; English translation 1845) around this same order, treating “Of Glorification” as his final book: glorification “commences even in this life, by a sense of God’s love in Christ; by peace, joy, the communication of spiritual gifts, and also by sanctification,” but “what takes place very imperfectly in this world, will be brought to perfection” only at the resurrection of the body.1

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic. Roman Catholic theology likewise holds a bodily resurrection and a final beatific vision of God, but frames the believer’s arrival there through a scholastic apparatus the Reformed tradition rejects. Thomas Aquinas taught that the beatific vision is man’s supernatural end, beyond what human nature can reach on its own, so that Adam was given a donum superadditum, a gift of grace “superadded” to his created nature to fit him for that end.11 On the Reformed account, by contrast, “the beatitude of the beatific vision is enjoyed on account of merit, but only the merit of Christ,” received through faith and imputed righteousness rather than through the believer’s own infused, cooperating grace.12

Objections and Responses

If believers are already “made perfect in holiness” at death, why does the body need to be raised at all? Pictet answers that the perfection granted the soul at death is not the whole of what Christ purchased: the body itself was created good, indwelt by the Spirit, and “chosen to be his temple” (1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19), so that its continued absence from glory would leave God’s own dwelling place “remain[ing] always in the dust.”13 The justice of God likewise requires that the same body which served or sinned share in the soul’s judgment, “for what sort of a body would that be, the head of which was alive, while the members were dead?”13

A resurrected body must be a different, newly created body, not the one that died and decayed. Pictet answers that a resurrection, by definition, is “the second state of a thing that has fallen or decayed,” so that a body newly formed by God “would not be a resurrection, but a creation.”14 The same body is “sown in corruption, and dishonour” and “raised in incorruption” and glory (1 Cor. 15:42-43), unchanged in substance though changed in quality, on the pattern of Christ’s own resurrection, in which he did not assume a different body but showed the disciples the same hands and feet they had known (Luke 24:39).14

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 348. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity: Drawne out of the Holy Scriptures, and the Interpreters Thereof, and Brought into Method (London: Edward Griffin for Henry Overton, 1642), 146. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. ↩

  4. 2LBCF (1677/1689), chap. 31, paras. 2-3. ↩

  5. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 32, “Of the State of Men after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 3. ↩

  6. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 87, “Of the Resurrection.” ↩

  7. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 14, “The Christian Eschatological Hope,” 158. ↩

  8. Gospel of Philip, cols. 56-57, quoted in Heine, 159. ↩

  9. Heine, 163-164. ↩ ↩2

  10. Heine, 163. ↩

  11. Samuel G. Parkison, To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), chap. 5, “Retrieval for Reformed Evangelicals,” 161. ↩

  12. Parkison, 161. ↩

  13. Pictet, 352. ↩ ↩2

  14. Pictet, 353. ↩ ↩2