Future Bodies Now: Dead-raising and Immortality in Modern Christianity

Sometimes when Christians die, they get back up. Last year, the evangelical magazine _Christianity Today_ ran the testimony of Cedric Kanana, an Anglican pastor from Rwanda who claims that he died and that God, working through prayer, brought him back to life. Kanana’s account is part of a long history of Christian dead-raising, one that historians have usually derided, brushed over, or completely ignored. Since the first century CE, some Christians have resisted the finality of death, pursuing instead a form of healing prayer intended to bring dead bodies back to life. When the dead rise, these events are considered miracles, dubbed “raisings,” “resurrections,” or, especially in modern medical settings, “resuscitations.” The Biblical lineup of dead-raisers is star-studded, consisting of the ancient Hebrew prophets Elijah and Elisha, Jesus, and the Apostles Peter and Paul. Near the end of the second century, Ireneaus identified the ability to raise the dead as one criterion for distinguishing genuine Christians from imposters (_Against Heresies_ 2.31.2). Resurrections were not uncommon in medieval hagiography and have appeared in Catholic and Protestant writings since the sixteenth century.

I argue that dead-raising offers scholars of religion a rich, albeit unnerving opportunity to consider the limits of our frameworks for studying life, death, time, and religious bodies. Resurrection miracles challenge linear trajectories from birth to death and decay in at least two ways. First, in the bodies of those who die and are brought back to life, the forward march of time is reversed. In a way, the past is resumed. Second, as I will elaborate below, resurrections occur when a metaphysically distinct future–the “eschaton”–collides with the present. For dead-raisers, the present coincides with The End and is thus brimming with supernatural power. For them, the resurrected body most Christians defer to the distant future is available today. What Christians say about time has dramatic implications for how they live, die, and live again.

In this paper, I examine dead-raising around Bethel Church in Redding, California, a megachurch that currently boasts 11,000 members. Led by Bill Johnson since 1996, Bethel gained a foothold in global charismatic evangelicalism beginning in the 2010s. The church is frequently noted (and attacked) for its influence on evangelical worship music and its emphasis on miracles, which is institutionalized in the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, launched in 1998 and which now enrolls over 2,000 students per year. According to sociologists Brad Christerson and Richard Flory (2017), Johnson has repeatedly stated that God is actively raising the dead. Johnson’s followers have walked the talk. Since 2016, for example, Tyler Johnson (no relation to Bill) and Michael C. King have started ministries based in the western United States explicitly devoted to dead-raising. Both have written theological and practical how-to manuals for dead-raising and have begun constructing international networks of Christians committed to praying for resurrection. Their work is the basis for my study.

The possibility of raising the dead now is rooted in a modification of long-standing Christian conceptions of the relationship between the body and time. Christian theology usually places humans squarely inside time, where time is part of God’s created order. But while “in” time, many Christians look forward to time’s eventual end (the eschaton), which will involve a massive resurrection event–dead people will return to life with mysterious spiritual and eternally imperishable bodies. But before the eschaton, mortality is inescapable. 

These traditional frameworks leak; they cannot contain the entire breadth of Christian practice relating to the body, death, or time. For example, a substantial portion of attempts to raise the dead entail rushing onto the scene of an emergency, laying hands on a dead or dying person, and praying that God will put the breath of life back into that person’s body. In his recent compendium _Miracles Today_ (2021), the New Testament scholar Craig Keener cataloged dozens of such cases, where the urgency of the circumstances precluded theological speculation and in which the dead returned to life. That said, especially in the twenty-first century, dead-raisers often consciously reject dominant Christian understandings of resurrection. According to Tyler Johnson and Michael King, resurrection is not deferred to some distant eschatological future. Coming back to life is an ontological possibility presently open to *all* humans. Further still, when dead-raisers collapse the line between the present and the eschaton, they often argue that *nobody ever has to die*. Human mortality is a ruse, a lie straight from Satan’s lips. To Tyler Johnson and Michael King, it is possible to infuse human flesh with God’s spirit, unlocking immortality here and now.

This approach to the body, in which the border between life and death is radically porous, is not confined to charismatics orbiting Bethel or to a single testimony in Christianity Today. The ongoing global spread of Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Christianity literally puts miracles on the map, resurrections included. In the May 1908 issue of the _Apostolic Faith_, William Seymour, leader of the Azusa Street Revival and leading expositor of Pentecostal theology in the first decade of the movement, wrestled with what it meant for humans to live with the presence of the Holy Ghost. To him, it meant power. Power to heal the sick, cleanse “lepers,” drive out demons, and raise the dead–that is, the supernatural ability to carry out the instructions Jesus gave his disciples according to Matthew 10:8 or to imitate Elijah, the dead-raising prophet. Within a year, Seymour was eagerly distributing news of resurrections in his newspaper (see Gastón Espinosa 2014). Dead-raising has been part of Pentecostalism since its inception and it continues to appear in evangelical Christianity the world over. To pay attention to dead-raising is to prop open analytical space in which scholars might grasp the full breadth of Christian supernatural practice in general and Christians’ always shifting engagement with death and dying in particular. It is to resist walling off the sources of our scholarly discomfort–whatever shape that discomfort takes–from the rest of the religious worlds we study.