Life after life after death

Time carries an article in which noted New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright tries to set the record straight on heaven. He says,

Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves." That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God's presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ's kingdom.

The full article is here: Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop.

Divine Reality

John Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest who is a former professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University. He has written widely on religion and science. He has this to say on the subject,

I do not believe that I shift gear in some strange intellectual way when I move from science to religion. In particular, I do not claim that religious belief springs from some mysteriously endorsed and unquestionable source of knowledge that is not open to rational assessment and, if necessary, to reassessment. Theology has long known that our images of God are inadequate to the infinite richness of his nature; that human concepts of God are ultimately idols to be broken in the face of the greater reality.

In search for truth, science and religion are intellectual cousins under the skin. In the nineteenth century, A.D. White wrote a celebrated book called "The Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom" (Appleton, 1896), but its thesis of conflict was a costly and ill-judged mistake. I have sought, instead, to present an account of the friendship between science and theology, which I believe to be the truer assessment.

Religion is our encounter with divine reality, just as science is our encounter with physical reality.
—from Polkinghorne's book, "Quarks, Chaos & Christianity: Questions to Science and Religion"

In the archives, there is a Tribune & Georgian religion column It doesn't have to be science vs. religion.