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.
Kim Burgess with Gary DeMar, The Resurrection of the Dead: The Mortal Swallowed Up by Life (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2026), 68. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. Quotations from it keep its NASB wording of Scripture.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1994), 14.6.2, 5 (2:395-96).
John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel according to John, trans. William Pringle, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), on John 3:13.
John Owen, Christologia, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, n.d.).
Westminster Confession of Faith 8.7, with the Assembly’s proof texts (1647).
That is not a hyper-preterist view, it is the orthodox view. The faithful before Christ went to Sheol , reference the story of the Rich Man and Abraham. Christ descended there after the crucifixion and the brought them all to heaven. They couldn't be justified without Christ.