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

Since the first century, some Christians have brought dead bodies back to life through prayer. While hardly ubiquitous, dead-raising is part of the supernatural landscape of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism. According to William Seymour, leader of the Azusa Street Revival, Jesus commanded it. This paper explores dead-raising around Bethel Church, a charismatic evangelical California megachurch with international influence. I argue that dead-raising offers scholars a rich, albeit unnerving opportunity to examine our frameworks for studying time, death, and religious bodies. When the dead rise, the forward march of time is reversed. Moreover, dead-raisers argue that the imperishable resurrection bodies of the distant future—the “eschaton”—become available now such that nobody has to die, full stop. To examine dead-raising is to pursue the breadth of Christian supernatural practice and Christians’ always shifting engagement with death. It is to resist burying the sources of our discomfort in the religious worlds we study.