Resurrection of the Body?

This Easter has got me thinking, again, about what exactly our 'hope' in Christ is and what we expect to happen when we die. This came to a bit of a mini-crisis while I was studying at Regent College. One of my classmates spoke boldly in one morning tutorial session to say that "Christianity does not promise the immortality of the soul! That is platonism. Christianity promises something completely different - the Resurrection of the Body!"

Now, I was born and raised in the Church, and thought myself fairly astute when it came to basic understandings of the Bible and Christian theology. Yet this took me aback. I went searching for memory verses. (Soul... Soul... Soul... Immortality... hmm...) After some discussion I left even more unsettled. Well, what is the soul after all? I mean whatever it is Jesus must have it. Yet still, the risen Jesus - the Gospels emphatically make clear - was not a disembodied soul but an EMBODIED person. Hmm...

And whatever promise we may claim in terms of 'everlasting life' (which seems to be the Biblical name for 'immortality' - perhaps platonism is tempting after all) this promise is ultimately based in the Risen Christ. That same man Jesus, mistaken for the gardener and found frying fish on the beach, was three days previous carrying a cross through the streets of Jerusalem. The resurrection body bore the scars of the crucifixion body. And he, according the New Testament, is the 'foretaste' and 'archetype' of the New Creation. Whatever shall ultimately happen to us after death is going to happen according to the model set by Jesus! The 'seed' that was 'sown' in death gets a new body fit for eternal life, at least this seems to be the metaphor chosen in 1 Corinthians 15. The 'physical body' gets a new 'spiritual body' - but that 'spiritual body' goes on being a 'physical body' too! And the hope really is that what God did in and for Jesus he will one day do for the whole creation. That 'all things' (see Colossians 1:15-20) as created by God 'will be' and in fact 'already are' redeemed by God and brought into the Kingdom of God which is the New Creation. This is a hope I can hope in!

This is most beautifully and provocatively laid forth in a poem by John Updike called 'Seven Stanzas at Easter.' I first read this years ago and stumbled upon it again recently. May it move us all closer to the mystery of Christ whose Body was raised, and the hope of the New Creation.

'Seven Stanzas at Easter'

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

Save the World? Part One.

This begins a short series on 'saving the world'. There is lots to explore here and I welcome feedback and interaction with these ideas along the way!


In taking a few days off and catching up on some reading I came across this quote from E.B. White:

"If the world were merely seductive," he noted, "that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

These are insightful words. And I believe they point out two acute dangers for us and our generation. What I want to do is explore these dangers and ask what a theological account of 'saving' and 'savoring' the world might do to reorient these desires. In this post I will explore the desire to 'save' the world as i have encountered it and begin to sketch a theological response.

First, the desire to improve (or save) the world. Lazybones notwithstanding, I see this being drilled into my generation in a myriad of ways. In my work with A Rocha, most encounters with younger students (ages 16-25 say) make clear that there is little patience among these folk for sustained argument or theological depth. They know the earth is in trouble - and they want to FIX it. Show me how to SOLVE the PROBLEM! The Biblical stuff is nice, important, yes. But I want to jump ahead - how to apply this in my life and how to scale that up so that the whole world can be saved.

As I said, I wrestle with whether this is a good thing. I believe the desire to improve the world is a Holy Desire. Yet the framework for said improvement is often utilitarian - and thus consequentialist - and divorced from the sort of tempered life experience that is so needed. Consequentialism (for those who have been spared the joys of an ethics course) judges what is 'right' in terms of the consequence it produces. So if my desired outcome or consequence is to change the world, actions are right which contribute to that change and are wrong when they fail to contribute towards that end.

The problem, of course, is that we simply cannot ever know what the outcome of our actions will be. This is extremely evident when applied to environmental problems. Will legislation for increased biofuels reduce our carbon footprint? Well, Yes, it might reduce our consumption of fossil fuel. But, No, because it leads to rapid deforestation to make way for biofuel plantations. (And as my dad has pointed out, the carburetor business has skyrocketed - turns out 10% ethanol destroys the carburetors of most small engines.) The point is we never know the result of our actions, so predicating the 'rightness' of these actions on forecasted consequences is dangerous business.

Of course, as Alasdair MacIntyre so aptly pointed out, "I can only answer the question, 'what am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'of what story or stories to I find myself a part.'" For people of faith, the outcome of our action may well look like a cross. And so it should. But the cross is hardly the sort of outcome a consequentialist wants. Success? Achievement? Improving the world? Or hanging dead as a political dissident. How do we make that choice?

So how to proceed? Is there another option? Well I believe we must continually anchor our desires to Save the world in the Story of God's own desire to Save and to Savor the world. We must learn to see our work and action on behalf of the world as wholly subsidiary to God's work in Christ. We will not 'save' the world! But the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated in Christ and the world will ultimately be saved! Knowing this, we work to 'save' and to 'preserve' the life of Creation - with its diverse creatures and peoples - in ways that are in keeping with this Kingdom. The weight of the world, rather than driving us to a brash consequentialist ethic, moves us towards God in worship and dependence, and to offer ourselves to the work of God in the world.

In offering this short account of how the Resurrection shapes our desires to 'save' the world I have carefully sidestepped a few issues. What does Salvation mean? Is the whole world going to be saved? Or just human souls? And isn't it dangerous to believe we can 'participate' in anything like 'salvation'? This will be the subject of the next post.


*After reading this I went to look for the source. Turns out it has been misquoted and reprinted thousands of times. After lots of sifting, it traces back to a New York Times interview with White, click this link to see the actual interview with White.