Effects of dualism

Murphy makes this interesting comment, which she admits is an oversimplification: “the adoption of a dualist anthropology in the early centuries of the church was largely responsible for changing Christians’ conception of what Christianity is basically all about. I am suggesting that original Christianity is better understood in socio-political terms than in terms of what is currently thought of as religious or metaphysical. The adoption of a dualist anthrpology provided something different . . . with which Christians became primarily concerned,” namely, the state of their inner souls.

She also quotes the Jewish writer Neil Gillman, who insists on the importance of bodily resurrection is indispensable: “If my body inserts me into history and society, then the affirmation of bodily resurrection is also an affirmation of history and society . . . . To affirm that God has the power to reconstitute me in my bodily existence is to affirm that God also cares deeply about history and society.”