This was published in the 12 April issue of the Canadian periodical Christian Courier:
In our society it is not difficult for people to believe in the immortality of the human soul. Even where Christian faith is not necessarily robust, public opinion polls persistently show a majority of North Americans in some fashion to believe in God and in life after death. Following a death in the family people will often claim to believe that their departed loved one is “somewhere else” and possibly looking down on them from on high. But it’s all quite vague and amorphous.
It takes no great effort to believe this. Plato famously believed in reincarnation, as does Hinduism and the varieties of post-modern spiritual experience grouped under the New Age label. Moreover, it seems to take little work on God’s part for a soul to drift off into the ether after the demise of the body.
Even some Christians believe that our ultimate destiny is in an incorporeal state with God in heaven. I recall a funeral in my youth in which the presiding minister conspicuously omitted any reference to resurrection, focussing solely on soul survival at the expense of the clear teachings of Scripture (e.g., I Corinthians 15).
Why the reluctance to put the resurrection in the spotlight? Because it is quite simply more difficult for people to accept. The Athenians laughed at Paul when he mentioned it (Acts 17:32). Many scientists today scoff at the notion that dead cells can be revivified. If our ultimate hope is in God intervening actively at some point in the indefinite future, raising every human being who has ever lived, and inaugurating the new heaven and earth, this requires more of us than a belief in immortality, which leaves the present world, including human remains, untouched.
During the Easter season we celebrate the resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ, “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (I Cor. 15:20). Not everyone can accept this, even among those who name Christ’s name. Theologian Rudolf Bultmann famously argued that the crucifixion and the resurrection were one event, the latter consisting of the rising of faith in the early church and not literally of a dead person.
Yet Paul himself had anticipated this argument: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. . . . And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost” (I Cor. 15:13-14, 17-18).
But, no, we are not lost. We have God’s promise that, as surely as Jesus was raised from the dead, so shall we be raised in his good time to eternal life. It may happen tomorrow. It may happen a thousand years from now. But it will happen. Thanks be to God, who has saved us through his risen Son!
April 14th, 2010 | 2:20 pm | #1
This is very true. People have a vague ‘next room’ theology about death; but that is very different from the resurrection hope.
April 15th, 2010 | 6:46 am | #2
“Even some Christians believe that our ultimate destiny is in an incorporeal state with God in heaven.”
I think the words of Justin Martyr are wise here:
“For if you have fallen in with some who are called Christians, but who do not admit this [truth], and venture to blaspheme the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; who say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven; do not imagine that they are Christians…”
Strong words, but so needed today. Bodily resurrection might not be denied, or even avoided, but so often it is ignored and under-emphasised by the church. We’ve paraded a left behind, float off with Jesus theology of the end times (I know dispensationalism has a millenial reign on earth and then new heavens and earth, but so much of the focus of many is the rapture), and culture has pushed neo-gnosticism and there’s a vicious circle going on.
April 15th, 2010 | 7:46 am | #3
Thank you, Si, for the passage from Justin Martyr. I had not come across this before, but it’s very helpful indeed. It deserves to be better known amongst Christians of all traditions.
Interestingly, it looks from the larger context of the passage that Justin was a premillennialist:
April 16th, 2010 | 12:17 am | #4
I find it baffling that any Christians would believe that a disembodied heaven somehow makes more sense than the new creation, with resurrected bodies. First of all, there’s the fact that the Risen Lord is very much embodied. Then there’s the question of creation itself. God made the world and called it “very good.” Why would He make a good thing only to throw it away? Why would He give us bodies if the only thing that He values is the soul? I think it’s dualism creeping in again: matter is bad, spirit is good.
When I was in the process of conversion to Christianity, and I discovered that Christians believe that we will have bodies in the resurrection, I was astonished and intrigued.
It made so much sense… in fact, it made sense of my own experience in the world. I had (and have) an intuitive sense of the value of my own physical body, a joy that I take in physicality (I am an athlete, so I think that gives me a keener appreciation of the joy of movement, for instance). However, outside the Christian faith, there is no real explanation for why I felt so strongly that my physical self and my intellectual self, though quite different, are both important — nor any explanation for the joy of the “flow state” in which body and mind are completely at one.
Christianity’s doctrine of the Resurrection puts all the pieces together. God gave me a body because He meant me to have one — and He made the world and will redeem it, not throw it away. And it brings it all into focus to know that my body is, right now, a temple of the Holy Spirit. It means I can worship God with my whole being — not just with words or emotions, but with my body — and I can offer to Him all that I do, so that when I fence (knowing that this is a gift from Him) my fencing is, itself, a mute prayer — sharing with Him the joy in the gift He has given me.
April 16th, 2010 | 5:24 am | #5
Beautiful, Holly! I couldn’t have said it better.
April 16th, 2010 | 2:21 pm | #6
Holly is exactly right. Nothing, and I mean nothing, about Christianity makes any sense without this understanding of the Resurrection.
I might add that the ultimate resurrection of the body and the creation of a “new heaven and new Earth” is a bedrock of Orthodox Christianity. I recently heard an Orthodox priest explain that Thomas’s demand to see and touch the risen Christ is mis-characterized as a statement of doubt. What Thomas is demanding is a risen Christ that makes sense, that is, one who is embodied again. He won’t accept the other disciples’ claim to have “seen the Lord” if all they are talking about is “his ghost” or “spirit.”
I don’t know how this Platonic, or gnostic, understanding came to dominate the thinking of modern, Western Christians, but I look forward to the Orthodox view gaining more currency among all Christians.
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