A fashionable wish to rest in peace and rise in glory
There is a way of talking about the recently dead that clergy use now that I can’t remember they did a generation ago: “May he (or she) rest in peace and rise in glory.”
I can’t object to the wish or prayer, but “May he rest in peace”, requiescat in pace, RIP, covered the ground traditionally. Certainly if you rest in peace you will rise in glory, since the Creed specifies “the resurrection of the body” as a doctrine.
Quite what happens in the meantime is not clear. In the course of nature, you’d have a thin time of it, since a soul without a body can’t see, hear or do much else. All the difference, though, would be made by seeing God in the so-called beatific vision, blissful in itself and also a way of knowing some of the things God knows.
The Church of England has trodden a narrow path of hope in the resurrection accompanied by rejection of prayers for the dead. So the Book of Common Prayer burial service prays for the living beside the body of the dead person “that, when we shall depart this life, we may rest in him [Jesus], as our hope is this our brother doth; and that, at the general Resurrection in the last day, we may be found acceptable in thy sight”.
It is a small step from telling God that you hope the departed rests in Jesus and asking him to grant that the departed does. People are not so shy of telling God what they want from him for a sick child or to rescue them from danger. Anyway, the Cofe service book called Common Worship includes a prayer “that all who with Christ have entered the shadow of death may rest in peace and rise in glory”.
Some suggest that the combined phrase was popularised by Robert Runcie when he was principal of Cuddesdon Anglican theological college (1960-70). Others have attributed it to Joe Fison as Bishop of Salisbury (1963-73). Since the Vatican Council, one option in the Roman
Catholic liturgy in England and Wales among prayers after death, asks that the departed “may enjoy eternal light and peace and be raised up in glory with all your saints”.
The parallel between rest or sleep and death is obvious. A Jewish prayer before sleep asks: “May it be your will, Lord my God and God of my ancestors, that I lie down in peace and that I arise in peace.”
For once, archaeology is helpful in the history of prayers for the dead. Inscriptions in Roman catacombs give short acclamatory prayers for the dead such as Pax tibi (“Peace be with you”), Spiritus tuus in bono quiescat (“May your spirit rest in peace”), Deus tibi refrigeret (“May God refresh you”). This last prayer is echoed in the Canon of the Roman Mass, still in use today, asking for the granting “to all who rest in Christ, a place of refreshment, of light, and of peace” (omnibus in Christo quiescentibus, locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis).
This refrigerium originated before Christian times as a meal consumed by the grave to commemorate the dead. But it came to signify a state of resting in Christ, awaiting his second coming, the resurrection of the dead and the general judgment. There was said to be a sect in Arabia in the third century called the Thnetopsychitae who taught that the soul died with the body. I’m not sure what that could mean, if the whole individual is to rise again; nothing would be left to provide continuity.
Luther is accused of believing in “soul sleep” – that souls remain unaware between death and the general resurrection – but I don’t know that he did. It has not “entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for those who love him”, St Paul declared. So it seems rash to insist on speculative details of how we rest in peace.