Also on YouTube Live, President Rhapsody asks: "Do the saints in Heaven have a glorified
body?
I'm trying to reconcile the concept that they live in eternity, where there is no time as
we know it, and the resurrection of the body."
Right.
Great question.
The answer is no, they do not possess glorified bodies right now.
The only two that we know of that have their glorified bodies are Jesus and Mary, and of
course that's because of the Resurrection and the Assumption.
However, when it comes to that question of time, we have to be careful to make distinctions
here.
While it is true that once we die we enter into a realm that is alien to you and I, that
are on this side of the veil, or "under the sun," to use the language of Ecclesiastes,
right--it's not that there's no time in any sense in heaven.
There is, inasmuch as we are human and human souls are present there now, they are not
God.
So there is still a sense of movement or motion, motion from potency to act--which of course,
there is no motion in God.
God is what philosophers call "pure actuality," right, there's no lack in Him, there's no
motion from imperfection to perfection.
But when it comes to the souls in Heaven, there is.
And one very profound way that this is so is that they are without their bodies.
This is symbolized, by the way, in Revelation 6:9, for example, where we find the souls
of the martyrs in Heaven, and it says they're praying, "How long, O Lord?
How long until you avenge our blood?"
So there's a sense of longing, even though they're in Heaven.
Well, one very profound reason is because they don't have their bodies.
And remember, we are hylomorphic beings.
We are a body/soul composite.
So even though we say "the soul has substantial being--" that means it lives on after we die--we
say that the souls in Heaven now are incomplete substances, right?
Because they are lacking those bodies.
So there is that sense of motion, so in that sense, time.
But it's not time as we understand it.
Time is no more as we understand it.
They're not waking up in the morning, right, putting alarm clocks on and such; there's
no sleep; there's, you know, none of that sense of time that we understand, but there
is still that motion.
In fact, there's a great book, probably the best book, certainly, I've ever read on eschatology,
is a book called "Eschatology" by Cardinal Ratzinger.
And he talks about how he believes the Church needs to develop in this area in our understanding
of time, because God alone dwells in that realm of absolute Being, where there is no
motion whatsoever, but pure actuality.
Even the angels don't dwell there.
And there's been, in theology, a constant attempt to try and clarify things by creating
different terms.
We have, for example, in Latin, the "aeternitas" of God.
That's a term that's used in theology exclusively of God.
And then we have the "aeveternitas" of men.
But as Cardinal Ratzinger points out in his book, where do angels fit in there?
Because they're in a very, very different state than men, as pure spirits, and so the
idea of motion for them is different than for us.
So it's an area where we really do need to develop, according to Cardinal Ratzinger,
in precise theological terms.
But in general, understand, there can be and there is that motion from potency, the potential
for those souls that are disembodied--and by the way, Hebrews 12:24 talks about that,
how we have in Heaven an innumerable company of angels, Jesus, God, and such; but then
it also says "the spirits of just men made perfect," so there's spirits there without
bodies.
Well, they are longing for their bodies.
And in the end of time, at the end of time at the resurrection of the body, they will
be completed.
And when is that?
Is there a schedule on that?
No man knows.
"No man knows the hour," right?
Alright then.
I thought I'd maybe get it out of you, Tim, but you don't know.