Kim Burgess and Gary DeMar believe that no Old Testament saint went to heaven at death. All of them, Burgess says, “went to Sheol and had to wait there for Christ to come,” and the Westminster Confession commits “a flagrant and inexcusable violation of Scripture” when it teaches otherwise. His clinching text is John 3:13: “No one has ascended into heaven, but He who has descended from heaven, even the Son of Man.” Then comes the verdict: “How in the world, then, did Westminster miss this ...? Could it have been stated any more clearly by Scripture? How crippling self-imposed theological blindness is!”1 Earlier in the book he reads the same verse as “implying that the doors to heaven were not open at that time in His public ministry” (20).

This view is common among hyper-preterists, and the reason is easy to see. If the resurrection is not the raising of the body that was buried, and if it happened in AD 70, what exactly was raised? For Burgess and DeMar, the answer is the Old Testament saints, released from Sheol into heaven. They treat Sheol not as the grave but as “the realm of the dead” (66), an underworld where the Old Testament dead were kept in what DeMar calls a “waiting/holding pattern” (231). Burgess says that “their resurrection was to occur at the parousia of Christ in AD 70” (231), so none of them could have entered heaven at death. The doctrine does not come from John 3:13. It comes from a system that forces every resurrection text into AD 70 because of its mishandling of the “time texts,” and John 3:13 is then forced to support it.

The same method shows in how Burgess handles the resurrection itself. Working through 2 Corinthians 5, he grants that Paul’s language about being “further clothed” “may seem to be an argument, more or less, in favor of the traditional creedal view,” then answers the creeds with a question, “What are you going to do with the time texts?!” and calls the result “a ‘Catch-22’ situation” (166). A few pages later he is plainer still: “Is there a problem with preterism? Exegetically, I would say that there is” (177). When the text points one way on the resurrection, the time texts decide the question for him. Clearly, then, Burgess allows his interpretation of the so-called time texts to control his interpretation of the resurrection passages, even when those passages present serious exegetical difficulties for his system. Those texts do not imply, as he claims, that all prophecy was fulfilled by AD 70. Unless those texts actually prove that the resurrection had to take place by AD 70, Burgess has no warrant for forcing the resurrection passages into that frame.

As for his charge against Westminster, Burgess has the matter backwards. The Assembly knew this verse well, as we will see. Burgess and DeMar are the ones who have missed what it is about.

What the Text Says

Start with the conversation Jesus is having. Nicodemus has stumbled over the new birth, and Jesus rebukes him for it: “Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” (John 3:11-12).2 The subject is knowledge and testimony: who knows the things of heaven, and who can make them known. Verse 13 continues that argument by naming the Son of Man’s unique qualification to speak of heavenly things.

The Old Testament had already used this language for access to divine knowledge. Agur asks, “Who has ascended to heaven and come down?” in a passage about knowing God and His name (Prov. 30:4). Moses tells Israel that the commandment “is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’” (Deut. 30:12), and Paul applies the same words to Christ (Rom. 10:6). John himself returns to the theme later in the chapter: “He who comes from heaven is above all. He bears witness to what he has seen and heard” (John 3:31-32). The structure of 3:13 matches the prologue: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (1:18). In both places “no one” is followed by an exception, and the exception is the Son, who alone knows the Father and reveals Him.

On Burgess’s reading, Jesus is telling Nicodemus that the Old Testament saints had not entered heaven: not Abraham, not Moses, not David. So ask the obvious question. How does excluding them fit the argument Jesus is making? He has just said, “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” He is rebuking Nicodemus for refusing His testimony. Whether Abraham’s soul was in heaven or in Sheol has nothing to do with that rebuke. It does not explain Christ’s authority to reveal heavenly things, and it gives Nicodemus no reason to receive what He says. The context concerns knowledge, not the location of departed souls. As in Proverbs 30:4, “ascending into heaven” is a way of speaking about access to the counsels of God, which no mere man has. Christ has that knowledge, not by a journey but as the Son who is at the Father’s side and came from Him (1:18; 3:31-32). That is why Nicodemus should believe Him.

The wording of the verse creates another difficulty for his local reading. The verb is perfect: “No one has ascended” (anabebēken). If these are Christ’s words to Nicodemus and the ascent is a bodily one, the verse has a chronological problem, because Jesus had not yet ascended in that sense. He says so Himself after the resurrection: “I have not yet ascended to the Father” (20:17). If the exception itself describes a completed bodily ascent, it would require some earlier, unrecorded ascent during His ministry, which is exactly the Socinian fiction that Turretin answers below. Some interpreters instead take verse 13 as John’s own comment, written after the ascension, which removes the chronological difficulty. But neither reading establishes Burgess’s conclusion about the souls of the dead.

Nor can the descent describe the local movement of Christ’s human nature from heaven to earth. “He who descended from heaven” is “the Son of Man.” But the Son’s human nature did not exist before the incarnation and did not come down from anywhere. It was conceived by the Holy Spirit in Mary’s womb (Luke 1:35) and born on earth, “born of woman” (Gal. 4:4). The Son of God came down by taking flesh, not by moving His body from one place to another. Scripture speaks of the person by the name of His human nature (”the Son of Man”) while it describes what belongs to His divine nature (coming from heaven). John uses the same pattern when he speaks of “the Son of Man ascending to where he was before” (6:62). Since the descent describes the incarnation and not the movement of a human body from heaven to earth, Burgess cannot simply assume that the ascent in the same sentence describes a man carried bodily into heaven. The context, which concerns knowledge of heavenly things, tells us what it means.

The textual variant points the same way. After “the Son of Man,” many manuscripts add “who is in heaven” (ho ōn en tō ouranō). The clause is found in Codex Alexandrinus, in the great majority of later Greek manuscripts, and in the Latin and Syriac versions. It is missing from the earliest papyri (P66 and P75) and from Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, so modern critical editions and the ESV leave it out and give it in a footnote. The KJV and the older Reformed writers read it. The argument does not depend on the longer reading. But if it is original, it makes the spatial reading still harder: the Son of Man was standing on earth talking to Nicodemus and was at that moment “in heaven.” Either way, the verse describes who Jesus is, not a journey His body had made.

And even if Burgess is granted a spatial reading, his inference does not follow. “No one has ascended into heaven” is not the same statement as “no departed soul has been received into heaven.” To reach that conclusion, Burgess must first show that the ascent Christ speaks of includes the reception of departed souls into heaven, and nothing in the passage makes that its subject. Scripture elsewhere speaks of the spirit returning “to God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7), and the Confession uses the same language (WCF 32.1). Burgess has supplied the extra premise himself. He has not derived it from John 3:13, which says nothing about the dead, nothing about Sheol, and nothing about whether heaven’s doors were open. He has taken a sentence about revelation and used it to settle a question about the intermediate state that no one in the conversation raised.

What the Reformed Church Has Said

None of this is new. Francis Turretin took up John 3:13 against the Socinians, who taught that Jesus, being a mere man, was carried up into heaven after His baptism to be taught the gospel before He began to preach. Turretin answers that the orthodox “recognize no other descent from heaven in the days of his flesh than the metaphorical one made by his incarnation.” He then distinguishes two kinds of ascent:

It is one thing for Christ to have ascended to heaven properly and locally in respect of his humanity; another to have ascended metaphorically and mystically by a sublime knowledge of heavenly mysteries. Christ is not said to have ascended in the former sense (”No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven,” Jn. 3:13) because the same one who ascended is said to have descended (thus he could not be said to be still in heaven), but concerning the mystical ascent.... Thus the sense will be, No one knows heavenly things and is acquainted with the divine counsel except himself. The connection teaches that this must be the meaning because in the preceding verse he had treated of the revelation of mysteries.3

On the clause “who is in heaven,” Turretin adds that it “must be understood of the person in the concrete, not of the human nature in the abstract.”

John Calvin reads the verse the same way: “For to ascend to heaven means here, ‘to have a pure knowledge of the mysteries of God, and the light of spiritual understanding.’” Christ “excludes the whole world from heaven” so that we will stop trusting our own understanding, and then “what was denied to all others is granted to the Son of God.” He explains “who is in heaven” by the unity of Christ’s person: “on account of the unity of the Person of Christ, that what properly belongs to one nature is applied to another, we ought not to seek any other solution.”4

John Owen is the most direct. The subject of the verse, he says, “is the revelation of heavenly things,” and the ascent that Christ denies to all men “is an entrance into all the divine, heavenly counsels of God.” As for the descent, Christ, “being always in heaven in the glory and essence of his divine nature, came down from heaven, not locally, by a mutation of his residence, but by dispensation in the assumption of our nature into personal union with himself.” Owen calls the alternative, a bodily trip into heaven during Christ’s earthly life, “the most fond and wicked imagination of the Socinians, invented to countenance their disbelief and hatred of his divine person.”5

Then there is the Westminster Confession itself. Chapter 8, section 7 teaches that “by reason of the unity of the person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes in Scripture attributed to the person denominated by the other nature.” The Assembly’s proof texts for that clause are Acts 20:28, 1 John 3:16, and John 3:13.6 Westminster did not miss John 3:13. The Assembly cited it in support of the unity of Christ’s person, the same Christological teaching Calvin, Turretin, and Owen found in the passage: the Son of Man came down from heaven by taking our nature and remained in heaven in His divine nature while He spoke with Nicodemus. The doctrine Burgess actually attacks is in chapter 32, which teaches that at death “the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens,” and adds, “Besides these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none” (WCF 32.1). Burgess attacks chapter 32 with a verse the Assembly had already cited in chapter 8 for a different doctrine.

John 3:13 is not a statement about the intermediate state. It does not tell Nicodemus where Abraham went when he died, or when the souls of the faithful would leave Sheol. Those questions are not under discussion. The Confession’s doctrine rests on other texts (Luke 23:43; 2 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23; Heb. 12:23), and Burgess’s case against it must rest on other texts too. John 3:13 supplies no proof of it.

The verse teaches that Jesus alone can reveal the things of heaven because He alone came from there. Burgess has turned that claim about Christ’s person into a claim about the intermediate state, against the context and the plain fact that the Son of Man’s flesh was born on earth. The church has read the verse this way for centuries, and the charge of “self-imposed theological blindness” fits Burgess’s reading, not Westminster’s.

Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians to a young church he had been forced to leave. Luke records that he reasoned in the synagogue at Thessalonica on three Sabbaths, and that opposition later drove him out of the city (Acts 17:1-10). He taught the new believers to “wait for his Son from heaven” (1 Thess. 1:10),1 and he left them facing persecution (2:14; 3:3-4). Unable to return, he sent Timothy, who came back with good news of their faith and love (3:6). But between Paul’s departure and this letter, some members of the church had died. The letter itself shows what troubled the survivors. They were waiting for Christ to return, and they feared that those who died before He came would miss His coming or be at a disadvantage when it happened (4:15). So Paul writes, “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (4:13), and he ends, “Therefore encourage one another with these words” (4:18). That is why ministers still read these verses at burials.

Kim Burgess and Gary DeMar devote chapter 9 of The Resurrection of the Dead: The Mortal Swallowed Up by Life (“Caught Up with the Lord”) to this passage. In that chapter DeMar twice asks Burgess the obvious question: who are “the dead” in 1 Thessalonians 4? Burgess gives two different answers, seventeen pages apart, and then admits, “Wires can surely start to get crossed here.”2

What the Book Says

The question gives Burgess trouble because of what he believes happens at death. He holds that Christ’s death and resurrection opened heaven, so that from then on a Christian who dies goes straight to the Lord and receives his resurrection body at once. “At the moment of physical death they would have a body that is made fit for the eternal and imperishable/incorruptible Kingdom of God” (18). Again: “immediately upon this event of physical death, we will have an eternal and glorious existence ... that will be a newly-embodied existence and life with God in the heavens” (181). He means resurrection in the full sense: “Those saints who have died and have been resurrected (yes, resurrected!) are ‘sons of God, being sons of the resurrection’” (192). Old Testament saints were different. They waited in Sheol, and “their resurrection was to occur at the parousia of Christ in AD 70” (231).

He then places 1 Thessalonians 4 in AD 70: “It was then that ALL of the saints ... would be, and were, brought, per the historically-objective, covenantal accomplishment of redemption, into the eternal Kingdom of God.... This is the subject matter of 1 Thessalonians 4” (81). He does not take the catching up physically: “for the living, it is not to be a case of them being bodily jerked up and removed from point A to point B” (215). The saints are “raised up ... Spiritually, not physically, not geographically” to reign in the heavenly places (227), and meeting the Lord is “but a fancy metaphor for full covenantal reconciliation with God” (221).

With that in view, here is DeMar’s question the first time he asks it:

GARY: Let’s make this clear. The “dead ones” here are who exactly?

KIM: If I look at it from the perspective of Paul’s subject matter in 1 Corinthians 15, I think “the dead” there is a specific reference to the Old Covenant saints who had lived and died long before Christ’s coming, but clearly here in 1 Thessalonians 4, it is not limited to them, but includes the loved ones of the Thessalonians saints who had also died somewhat recently. (213)

Sixteen pages later DeMar asks again, this time about Christians who died after Christ’s resurrection and ascension:

GARY: The question I have now relates to “the dead.” What happened to the Christians who died after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ? “We shall not precede those who have fallen asleep.” Paul is talking about those first-century Thessalonians. If they did not precede those who had fallen asleep, when did those who did fall asleep? When did this transition occur for them between Jesus’ death and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70? (229)

Burgess points to Stephen, 2 Corinthians 5:8, Philippians 1:21-23 and Hebrews 10:19-20 to show that these Christians went straight to the Lord. Then he concludes:

It was only the deceased Old Covenant saints that were waiting, and they were the ones that the yet-living saints on Earth were not to precede. Paul says nothing here about the saints who died after AD 30 and went directly to be with the Lord. I believe Paul is making this distinction in 1 Corinthians 15 between (1) those he refers to as the “dead ones/dead persons” (15:12-17: the Old Covenant dead) and (2) those he speaks of, like Stephen, as having “fallen asleep” in Christ (15:6, 18, 20), though I hate to press this distinction too far, for it does not always hold (cf. Acts 13:36 with regard to King David). (230)

Put simply, Burgess now says that when Paul wrote, the Thessalonians’ own dead already had their resurrection bodies in heaven. So Paul’s promise that the living “will not precede those who have fallen asleep” cannot be about them. It has to be about Abraham, David and the prophets, who were still waiting in Sheol. Burgess sees the difficulty right away:

Wires can surely start to get crossed here because it seems like the living are being said to precede the dead, but this is not the case with these deceased post-AD 30 saints like Stephen. They were no longer living at that point and so they are not bound by the restriction in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. (231)

Later on the same page he ends the discussion: “This is the best I can do” (231).

Where the Book Contradicts Itself

The chapter leaves three questions unanswered, and each one comes from the order of Paul’s own argument: who the dead are, when they are raised, and what happens to the living.

The first question is who the dead are, and Paul answers it himself. He writes about “those who are asleep” (4:13). He promises that God will bring with Jesus “those who have fallen asleep” (4:14). He assures the living that they “will not precede those who have fallen asleep” (4:15). Then he says that “the dead in Christ will rise first” (4:16). Nothing in these verses signals a change of subject. The people who have fallen asleep in verses 13-15 are the dead in Christ in verse 16, and they are the Thessalonians’ own dead, the people the church was grieving.

Burgess first agreed. On page 213 he said that “the dead” in this passage are “not limited to” Old Testament saints “but includes the loved ones of the Thessalonians saints who had also died somewhat recently.” That concession matters, because the identification does not rest on the traditional reading alone. Burgess saw the same thing in the text. But on page 230 he takes it back: “Paul says nothing here about the saints who died after AD 30.” He gives no reason from the passage for the change, and nothing in verses 13-16 marks a point where the Thessalonians’ dead drop out and Old Testament saints take their place. Ironically, DeMar opened the chapter with a rule from Fee and Stuart that forbids that move: “A text cannot mean what it could never have meant for its original readers/hearers” (211). Grieving Thessalonians could not have heard “those who are asleep” as a reference to Abraham.

Burgess’s terms do not hold either. In 1 Corinthians 15 he made “the dead” the term for Old Testament saints and “fallen asleep” the term for Christians who died after Christ came: “‘The dead’ were those OT dead.... Those who had ‘fallen asleep’ or were presently ‘falling asleep’ in Christ were/are, in contrast, those who, like the martyr Stephen, died after Christ had come” (20). In 1 Thessalonians 4 Paul uses both terms for one group within three verses, and on page 230 Burgess has to concede that his distinction “does not always hold.” He also claims that “Scripture never seems to want to speak about Christians as having ‘died’ per se” (213). His reason is that Christians cannot “die” in the sense of “perish forever” (213), and that much is true. But his claim is about Scripture’s wording, and the wording is against him. The passage in front of him speaks of “the dead in Christ” (4:16), and he himself builds repeatedly on “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord” (Rev. 14:13; 46, 81).

The second question is when the dead are raised. Paul says that “the dead in Christ will rise” when “the Lord himself will descend from heaven” (4:16). Burgess believes that a Christian receives his resurrection body when he dies (18, 181, 192), and that 1 Thessalonians 4 was fulfilled in AD 70 (81). Once the dead in verse 16 are shown to be the Thessalonians’ own dead, Burgess has two options. He can say those believers were raised twice, once when they died and again in AD 70, which he does not believe. Or he can say that Paul changed the subject between verses 15 and 16, which the text does not allow. On page 230 Burgess takes the second option. But if he is right, Paul’s words of comfort end up saying nothing about the very people the Thessalonians were mourning.

The third question is what happens to the living. Paul says they will be “caught up together with them” (4:17), that is, together with the dead, at the Lord’s coming. Burgess agrees that Paul’s “we” means “the ones then living, the ones then remaining alive until the parousia of the Lord in their day” (112). But he adds that “they all would be ‘changed’ eventually, because this bodily or ‘image’ (15:49) change comes via the process of death” (112). On that view, no one alive in AD 70 was changed or caught up together with the dead. Each of them joined the dead later, one at a time, by dying. Burgess does say something happened to the living in AD 70: a corporate, covenantal transition in which they were “raised up ... Spiritually ... to sit with Christ in those heavenly places” (227). Yet he calls that same seating, from Ephesians 2:6, “the ‘already’ reality” (224). On his reading, then, the living received at the Lord’s coming the union with Christ they already had, not the change Paul promised.

After a full chapter on 1 Thessalonians 4, the book still cannot say who “the dead” are, when they rise, or how the living join them. It gives two answers to the first question and closes with “This is the best I can do” (231). Paul answered all three in six verses, and the church has never had trouble reading him.

What Paul Promised

Paul writes “about those who are asleep” (peri tōn koimōmenōn, 4:13). The present participle describes people in the condition of sleep, and the occasion of the letter shows who they are: members of this church who had died. His concern is their grief, “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” The Thessalonians were not mourning the patriarchs. They had “turned to God from idols ... to wait for his Son from heaven” (1:9-10), and some of them had died before He came. As verse 15 suggests, their fear was that these believers would miss His coming. That fear only makes sense about their own dead.

Paul answers that fear first from the resurrection of Jesus: “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (4:14). He uses the plain word “died” (apethanen) for Jesus and keeps “sleep” for believers, and the words “even so” tie their outcome to His. Then comes the promise: God “will bring with him” (axei syn autō) those who have fallen asleep. Interpreters differ over whether Paul means that the departed come with Jesus at His descent, or that God, having raised them, brings them with Jesus into His presence (compare 2 Cor. 4:14). Either way, Paul ties their future to Jesus’ own resurrection. That they are with the Lord in the meantime is taught more plainly elsewhere, in texts Burgess himself cites: “to depart and be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23), “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8).

Next Paul gives the order of events: “For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first” (4:15-16). Paul uses the strongest form of negation in Greek (ou mē phthasōmen): the living will by no means go ahead of the dead. “The Lord himself” (autos ho kyrios) comes in person. And “the dead in Christ will rise” (anastēsontai), with the same verb Paul used of Jesus two verses earlier, when he said Jesus “died and rose” (anestē). What God did for the body of Jesus on the third day, He will do for theirs when Christ comes down from heaven. Their rising is future, and it is tied to the Lord’s coming, not to the day each of them died. Paul makes the same argument in 1 Corinthians 15:20-23: Christ is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,” and then “at his coming those who belong to Christ.” In both places the risen Christ is the pattern, and His coming is the occasion.

This is where Burgess’s reading breaks down. He agrees that Christians who died after the cross “went directly to be with the Lord” (230), and Paul says that these same believers “will rise” when the Lord comes (4:16). Burgess can account for only one of those statements at a time. If the Thessalonians’ dead already have their resurrection bodies, nothing is left for them to rise from. If they are not the ones who rise, the passage is about someone else. Only the church’s historic interpretation fits both: the believer’s soul is with Christ while his body sleeps, and at Christ’s coming the body is raised. It’s that simple.

Burgess’s own definition of sleep points the same way: “The language of ‘sleep’ is used, for that’s what the bodily appearance is to us of a deceased person” (213). But if sleep describes the body, then waking describes the body too. On the next page he cites Daniel 12:2: “many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake” (214). What sleeps in the dust is what wakes from it.

Verse 17 describes the meeting: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” Two phrases matter most. “Together with them” (hama syn autois) puts the living and the dead in the same moment. “To meet” (eis apantēsin) was often used of people going out to meet an arriving visitor, sometimes in a city’s formal reception of a dignitary.3 Luke uses it when the brothers from Rome “came as far as the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns to meet us” (Acts 28:15). Paul pictures the whole church, the living and the raised, going out together to receive its King. He teaches the same hope elsewhere: “he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence” (2 Cor. 4:14), and “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment” (1 Cor. 15:51-52).

Paul ends by telling the church to encourage one another “with these words” (4:18), and the words are about these dead. A promise about Abraham would not have comforted the Thessalonians about their own dead, and a metaphor for covenant standing would not have answered their question. Paul’s answer was direct: your dead are with Jesus, they will rise when He comes, and you will be with them and with Him forever. Again, it’s that simple.

At the Graveside

The Westminster Standards follow this passage closely. At death “the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens ... waiting for the full redemption of their bodies” (WCF 32.1).4 Their bodies “even in death continue united to Christ, and rest in their graves as in their beds, till at the last day they be again united to their souls” (LC 86). Then “at the last day, such as are found alive shall not die, but be changed: and all the dead shall be raised up, with the selfsame bodies, and none other” (WCF 32.2), and “the righteous, being caught up to Christ in the clouds, shall be set on his right hand” (LC 90). Each part of 1 Thessalonians 4:14-17 is there: the soul with Christ, the body asleep, the Lord’s descent, the rising of the dead, the change of the living, and the catching up together.

The trouble in Burgess’s chapter does not come from Paul. It comes from wrongly dating the return of Christ to AD 70, and mishandling the resurrection texts that use mellō, such as Acts 24:15, by insisting that the word has only one meaning, “about to” (see my series on mellō). Once that date is fixed, every Christian who died before it must either be risen already or be waiting somewhere Paul never mentions, and the passage has to be bent to fit. Without that assumption the passage reads plainly. The Thessalonians’ dead, the martyrs of the first century, and every Christian who has died since are in the same condition: with the Lord, waiting for the day when God brings them with Jesus and raises their bodies from the dust.

That is why a minister can read 1 Thessalonians 4 at a Christian’s burial and mean it about the person being buried. On Burgess’s reading he cannot. Either that believer has already risen, in which case “will rise” is not true of him, or the verse is about someone else. Paul wrote it about believers like the one being buried, and he told the church what to do with it:

“Therefore encourage one another with these words.”