Will we know our loved ones in heaven? This question emerges from the deepest places of human longing and loss, touching anyone who has ever said goodbye to someone they cherish. In this profound episode of Enter the Bible, hosts Katie Langston and Kathryn Schifferdecker welcome back Rev. Dr. Mary Hinkle Shore, former Luther Seminary professor and current Aging Life Care Management specialist, to explore what Scripture reveals about eternal relationships. Through careful examination of Jesus's resurrection appearances, Paul's teachings in 1 Thessalonians 4, and the great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11-12, the conversation navigates both the mystery and the hope that surrounds our understanding of heavenly relationships.

Rather than offering simplistic answers, this thoughtful discussion acknowledges the complexity of biblical texts while affirming the central Christian hope that love—not separation—defines eternity. The panel explores challenging questions about marriage in heaven, the nature of resurrected bodies, and what it means that "nothing good is ever lost" in God's care. Drawing from pastoral experience alongside scholarly insight, this episode provides comfort and biblical grounding for anyone wrestling with questions about reunion with loved ones, offering hope rooted in Scripture's promise that we will indeed recognize and be with those we love in the new heaven and new earth.

Welcome to another episode of the Enter the Bible podcast where you can get answers or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Katie Langston.

And I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker and today we have as our special returning guest, Reverend Dr. Mary Hinkle Shore. She's a former professor at Luther Seminary ⁓ and current small business owner for Aging Life Care Management. Her website, if you're interested, is the aginglife.com. Thank you so much, Mary, for joining us for this Enter the Bible episode.

It's great to be here, Kathryn. Thank you.

We love having you on. ⁓

We do.

And we thought about you when we got this question, and as usual listeners or viewers, can submit your own questions about the Bible ⁓ at enterthebible.org. This is a particularly kind of poignant question. So one of our listeners wrote, will I know my loved ones in heaven?

Yeah.

And we thought of you because you are ⁓ not only a New Testament professor, but also a pastor. And this seems to us something that a pastor ⁓ or a pastoral concern. I might just tell a short anecdote from my own experience as a pastor. So in the ELCA in the Lutheran Church, you do a pastoral internship while you're in seminary. And so I did my internship.

in this wonderful small town, wonderful church, Zion Lutheran Church in Gowrie, Iowa, small town Iowa. And I remember the first time that I visited someone who was dying, or at least who knew they were dying, right, was an older man ⁓ who had ⁓ a terminal ⁓ diagnosis of cancer and did end up dying a month or two after I visited him. But it was such a...

it was like standing on holy ground to be with this man because everything else fell away, right? Small talk, talk about the weather, know, whatever fell away. And he really wanted to know, he asked some really deep questions. And one of them was this, though for him it was specifically,

will I know my wife in heaven? So his wife had passed away a few years before that. And another pastor had said to, when he asked this other pastor, would he know his wife in heaven, that pastor said, no, going back to the passage in the gospels where Jesus says there's no marriage or, know, no being given in marriage, no marriage in heaven. so that pastor said, no, you know, you won't know your wife. I, you know, I,

I thought that was a terrible answer. I thought that was a terrible, terrible answer. is a terrible And I said, of course you will know your wife in heaven because the love that we know now is just a foretaste of what we will know in heaven. So I think this is a question that obviously, you know, that's been decades ago. it's something that I think people continue to wonder. So Mary.

as a biblical scholar and a pastor, how would you begin to answer that question?

Well, I have to say I agree that I don't think the right answer is we won't know people in heaven. That just seems like how could that be heaven if we were not recognizable or recognizing of our loved ones? So I also want to say though that there's a fair amount of mystery here. mean, we're making educated guesses.

Part of the guess is maybe that, or part of the way I'm thinking about it, is to think of those scenes where the risen Jesus isn't recognized right away, but he is, of course, in every case recognized. It takes a little something. that tells us either his loved ones just can't quite imagine that they get to see him again,

Or, he's different and it takes a minute, but it ends in recognition. So an example would be when Mary is in the garden and she thinks the fellow talking is the gardener and just wants to know where's the body. And it turns out that the body's alive and talking to her and she recognizes Jesus. Or the folks on the road to Emmaus look back over that experience and think, we must have known something. Our hearts were burning within us.

recognize them until that breaking of So maybe it's yes and yes, we will know our loved ones and there may be some things about them that we can't anticipate at this point. That's the beginning of an answer. don't know. I'd be interested in what you two think about that.

Yeah, I I agree with that. think we don't know exactly what our resurrected bodies will be like, and we don't know exactly what the new heaven and the new earth will be like. But I do think it matters that tomb was empty, so it is Jesus, right? It will be us in some sort of very real way. But what precisely

shape that that takes. don't think we know and we probably won't know until we get there. I do want to just briefly on the will we be like married in heaven thing. This is something coming out of a Mormon background that's pretty pertinent because for at least as a question that I've thought about because because for Mormons like one of the whole you know points of life is to get married

what they call get sealed in one of the temples so that you can be with your spouse forever. And one of the things, my own kind of conversion to Christianity, I had to really wrestle with that question. I was sealed to my husband, my parents were sealed, right? So there was this sort of like, am I gonna be with them in the next life? Is that still a promise I can hold onto? And I think,

where what I came to was, think, kind of like, you guys were saying, you know, will we be married in the married sense? Like, probably not. It's probably our relationships will probably look and be different, but not in a bad

you know, in a way don't know each other, we don't care for each other, we don't love each other, or we're not present with each other, but, you know, probably the social structure of the new heaven and the new earth is different from what we experience now in ways that it's probably difficult to even imagine. But I do think we are, you know, I do think

We're ourselves and the people we love are themselves in a profound way and we will know each other. I do believe that.

Katie, I'm sorry, I didn't know about you. But I know that it is a thing. want to tell just a brief anecdote. My dad, when he was dying, asked my mother if she would be married to him in heaven. Would she consent? Because their vow had gone as far as till death part us. And mom was really troubled. I mean, she didn't want him to worry, but she was also like, what?

Right,

Bye bye.

And my father was a devout Christian and had, as my mother would say, read his Bible. And so we talked about this passage where Jesus says, you know, the question is meant to be a trick question, right? The Sadducees come up and they say, you know, this woman is married and her husband dies, and then she marries again and her husband dies, and then she marries again. And it's just this sort of hyperbole of, you know, whose wife will she be?

because they don't believe in the resurrection at all, and they're just trying to run into a question in past time. And ⁓ so we talked about that and kind of came out, Katie, where you come out, which is, there are relationships in heaven. The whole point of Jesus making us one with God is to draw us into the relationship that the Father and Son have in the Spirit and also in then closer relationship with each other.

marriage, think, certainly as we know it on earth, is a really dim representation of the fullness of love, right? We all do it in such a broken and yet beautiful way. And I'm not disparaging the institution, but just saying, I think it's going to be better than that, actually.

Right.

I mean, if you think about marriage as sort of one of the more intimate in many, many ways kind of relationships that we have on earth in terms of our ideally commitment to one another, ⁓ in terms of the vulnerability and the sharing.

do not misinterpret what I'm about to say, but it's almost like if that is a dim, dim representation of what our relationships are like, maybe there's a sense in which we experience that sort of depth of love and commitment and openness and relationship with more than just our spouse and the new heaven and the new earth, right? That that's the sort of, at least a good marriage, because there's really crappy marriages out there, but at least a good marriage, right? There's that kind of...

comfort and commitment and care that you could imagine might characterize what relationships look like with everyone, right?

The only thing I would say is that probably friendship could also be used as a category. I've spent lot of my life and yet I would say that I have some of the truest friends that they've been an extraordinary gift in this life.

I agree with that.

I agree.

Amen. Amen to that. When I think about, I want to go back to some of the passages you were talking about, Mary, and there is mystery, right? There's no kind of one final, this is what heaven will be. Like 1 Corinthians 15 gets somewhat close, Paul's chapter on resurrection, and yet even he acknowledges there's mystery to it as well, right? We don't

quite understand what the resurrected body will be, but we will understand. Or I think about Jesus saying to the thief on the cross, today you will be with me in paradise. But the one that I always come back to in terms of just imagining heaven might be is Hebrews chapter 12. Well, Hebrews chapter 11 and 12, right? So chapter 11 is the

The long list of people who live by faith that begins now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And then the writer of Hebrews goes through this long list of biblical people that have lived by faith. And then chapter 12 says, therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely and let us run with perseverance. The race that is set before us.

looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of So that great cloud of witnesses, right? I imagine this huge Olympic stadium, like track stadium filled with the people that are mentioned in chapter 11, these heroes of the faith, but also my grandma Esther and my grandpa Urban and my father Jim and

you know, and all the loved ones, the saints that have gone before us, cheering us on. And so that at least says to me that yes, we will know, they will still be Grandma Esther and Grandpa Urban, you know, and Abraham and Isaac, right, that we will still know them. I don't know if that speaks to you guys.

Yes.

Totally,

I love this Hebrews passage and I didn't think of it myself. I have another...

one to add in before we're finished with the But I think about the way that we have echoed Hebrews 11 and 12 in our hymnody when we talk about, the circle be unbroken? And the idea is no, it will not be unbroken. And even our church architecture has a a semicircle communion rail, often with these, especially I think of the little rural churches I served in North Dakota.

cemetery behind the church so that the circle is drawn there and enacted on Sunday morning when we commune. Yeah, this is, I love the idea of those who have gone before us offering us an example, and then hanging around, if you will, being in the stands to cheer us on.

That's a beautiful image. And it connects with this question because it's not just, when am going to be married in heaven or well, I know my most intimate friends in heaven, but how will we be connected to all of those who've gone before us? And the answer is, you know, in the power of the Spirit and in love.

Yeah, I do. have one more. It's 1 Thessalonians. We've talked about 1 Corinthians 15. It's worth reading if you're interested more in the question. Hebrews 11 and 12. And I think 1 Thessalonians 4, if I remember correctly. And I bring it up because we think it's Paul's first letter. So it's written in mid-50s maybe. So just 20 years, 20 plus years after the resurrection.

And people are starting to wonder like, Jesus hasn't returned and is my loved one who has died lost to me? And to the eschaton, right? And to the way it's gonna be at the end because they've already died and Christ hasn't returned. And Paul says, no, they are not lost to you. In fact, they'll be raised first and then all of us together meet.

Christ and this image is like the conquering hero coming, you know, running back into town and people run out of town to meet him and then he arrives in the city from which he came and is given a hero's welcome. So that's the image of Jesus coming back. It's not like we all float away with him. We just go up sort of to heaven to meet him and he comes then to earth to be with us.

And it's very early material in the New Testament. I think it speaks to this question as an age-old question. It was asked very early by the believers and answered pretty early too.

Yeah.

It is a beautiful passage. I'm just going to quote, read it a bit. you're right, 1 Thessalonians 4, starting at verse 13, but we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord.

will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command with the archangels call, and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive who are left will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever." Yeah, that's a beautiful passage as well. there's, again, I think an assumption there that those who have died, those we love.

are with the Lord now and we will be with them and with the Lord when we die or when the last day comes, whichever comes first.

Yeah, that is lovely. it does, this is not the question that the person asks, we'll have to maybe, maybe I'll submit it myself, but it does leave that question, right? Because it's like, the image here is of Christ coming, right? So that sort of the idea is heaven and earth meet. That's, we're not whisked away to some, you know, disembodied nothingness, right? We're not vapor.

or cotton or however we've seen it in Hollywood, which is fine. I mean, you've got to imagine it some way, but that's not actually...

That's

not actually it. So it is kind of lovely to think, okay, so even before the resurrection, right, of all people or what have you, that they are with the Lord still in some way. So that's kind of like now, right, while we await the fulfillment of all things. That's interesting to think about. Where are they now? But that's not this question.

Yeah. yeah, I think about, so for one of the classes I teach with our friend Alan Paget, God Evil and Suffering, we read a book by John Polkinghorn, who actually recently died just a few years ago. He was a ⁓ physicist and then an Anglican priest. He wrote this lovely little book called Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, and he talks about heaven.

And he says something along the lines of, you know, if God, he's quoting from the gospels again where Jesus in the argument with the Sadducees says, you know, God is God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is God of the living, not of the dead. And says to the Sadducees, you are completely wrong. There is a resurrection. And Pokinghoin takes that passage and he says, well, if God is, if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still

alive with God, then we have hope that we will be too and our loved ones as well. And then he says something like, and in God, nothing good is ever lost. Isn't that beautiful? Nothing good is ever lost. I cling to that, right? Especially for when you encounter lives that have been cut short by cancer or accident or you know,

Yeah

lives that should, in our estimation, should have lasted a much longer time. That even there, there's still goodness there and that nothing good is ever lost. That they too exist with God, that they live with God and in God's care and in God's love. And I don't know, I find that comforting. That God keeps and preserves and

loved ones who now feel lost to us, but who we have hope that we will see again.

Yeah, amen. Beautiful.

Well, thank you so much. mean, these are just, you know, tastes. This is a beautiful and important question. And we've only been able to reflect just a little bit on it. But I do think kind of we can say with some certainty or with some hope, guess, that, you will know your loved ones in the new heaven and the new earth, even if we're not entirely sure what that'll look like.

And Mary, just want to thank you so much for being here wisdom, and pastorally. Just really appreciate that. And thank you to those of you who have been either listening or watching on YouTube for being with us today. We really appreciate that. If you would like more awesome content like this, ⁓ conversations, reflections, questions, commentaries, all kinds of stuff.

like to invite you to go to enterthebible.org. There's just a whole bunch of wonderful resources there. We have a new newsletter as well that you can sign up for. It's just right there on the homepage, so I'd invite you to do that. We promise not to spam you. It's just once a month and we kind of send out what's the latest on the site so you can stay informed. And ⁓ if you have enjoyed this podcast, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast app or like and subscribe on YouTube.

And of course, the very best compliment you can pay us is to share the podcast with a friend. Until next time.