What Exactly Is the Beatific Vision?

If the beatific vision is the hope of the Christian life, it must be clearly understood. The idea that believers will one day “see God” can sound vague, as though Scripture were speaking in metaphor, but when the apostles speak of the appearing of Christ, the revelation of His glory, and the sight that transforms believers, they are describing a future event.

Completed Redemption

The word beatific (be·a·tif·ic) means happy.

The beatific vision, then, is the happy vision. It refers to the immediate and unmediated sight of God that believers will receive in their glorified state. It is the completion of redemption and the ultimate goal of our salvation. Scripture never treats redemption as being fulfilled merely by escaping judgment, growing morally, or even entering a renewed creation. These blessings matter, but they are secondary. The ultimate good of salvation is God Himself, seen and enjoyed in the face of Christ.

Parkinson emphasizes that this is the anticipation of Scripture fulfilled in Revelation 21, where God dwells with His people and they dwell with Him. He explains that this is not just a closeness to God, but a restored communion in which the creature is brought near without fear, without veiling, and without mediation.

Described by the Apostles

The New Testament repeatedly anchors Christian hope in the appearing of Christ and the promise of seeing Him. Paul tells Timothy to endure “until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ,” (1 Tim. 6:14) not because it is the end of history but because Christ Himself will be revealed. He calls Titus to wait for the “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13), which he defines as the appearing of the glory of Christ. The hope is not just an escape from the world but the unveiling of the One who made the worlds.

John makes this even more explicit when he writes that when Christ appears, “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). John does not speculate about all the mysteries of the glorified state as he openly admits, “it does not yet appear what we shall be,” but he is certain about one thing. We will be like Christ because we will see Christ. He places sight and transformation as belonging together.

Calvin comments that this future sight will be unlike anything the believer now possesses, for in this age we encounter God through Word and Sacrament, truly but mediately. We hear Him, we taste and see Him by faith, but we do not yet see Him as He is.

Paul echoes this when he speaks of seeing now “through a mirror, dimly,” but states that then we shall see Him “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). The dimness of our vision today does not imply deficiency in God’s revelation. As Calvin reminds us that the Word gives us a clear and sufficient revelation of God, but it remains a mediated revelation suited to our present capacity. The sight to come will not surpass the truth of our current vision, but the fullness of it. The difference is not from darkness to light, but the difference between the moments before the breaking of the dawn and noonday glory.

How can we see God?

If believers will truly see God, we must ask the question Scripture itself presses upon us, How is this possible?

Harrison Perkins points to the author of Hebrews, who insists that “without holiness no man shall see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14), but instead of treating holiness as a condition we must achieve, Perkins turns to the reformed doctrine of glorification to explain that what God requires, He supplies. The holiness necessary to see God is given by God. It is the final grace of redemption, not the outcome of our own merit.

Paul underscores this when he writes that those whom God calls, He also glorifies (Rom. 8:29). Glorification then is not the prize for the moral but the inheritance of all who are united to Christ. If Christ has secured your salvation, He has secured your glory. And if He has secured your glory, He has secured your sight of God.

The Transformation

Believers will behold God, and in beholding Him, they will be transfigured, healed, and brought fully into the likeness of Christ. The vision is the climax of redemption, the moment toward which every moment of sanctification is moving.

Even now, Paul says, we are being transformed by beholding Christ in the gospel. But then the beholding will be complete. The unveiled sight of the glory of God in the face of Christ will finish what grace has begun. What we glimpse through the mirror of the Word will be given to us directly, without veil or shadow. Faith will become sight. Hope will become joy. And the soul will finally reach its rest in the One it was made to see.

Understanding the beatific vision in this way helps explain why it cannot be marginalized. The entire shape of the Christian life bends toward it. Worship anticipates it, sanctification prepares for it, perseverance looks ahead to it, and the promises of Christ guarantee it.

In the next part of this essay, we turn to the objections that often arise when the doctrine is mentioned.

Is the beatific vision speculative? Is it mystical? Is it Catholic? Is it an escape from embodied life?

These questions matter, and the historic church (and more importantly, Scripture) offers clear answers.

Samuel G. Parkinson, To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), 140.

Ibid., 49.

John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, trans. John Owen (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1855), 206.

John Calvin, Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, trans. John Pringle, vo. 1, (Edinburgh, UK: The Calvin Translation Society, 1848), 431.

Harrison Perkins, “What Is Required to See God? The Beatific Vision and the Ordo Salutis,” Credo Magazine 14, no. 3 (2022).