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On Disembodied Resurrected Persons: A Study in the Logic of Christian Eschatology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

P. W. Gooch
Affiliation:
Chairman of Humanities and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Scarborough College, University of Toronto

Extract

I believe in…the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. (The Apostles' Creed)

The ancient Christian affirmation of a bodily resurrection still echoes today, and admittedly makes this paper's title sound odd. Resurrected persons are supposedly people with bodies, at least within Christian eschatology. How then can they be disembodied?

The counter-question is whether the notion of bodily-resurrected persons can satisfy certain problems raised by that same Christian eschatology, and this paper is an exploration of these issues. The first part draws attention to the importance of resurrection in contemporary philosophical discussion, in particular for John Hick's notion of eschatological verification. Part II examines critically the adequacy of this view of resurrection. In Part III we turn to a thesis about St Paul's concept of the resurrection body which avoids some of the problems raised in Part n. But the thesis raises its own difficulties, and the paper concludes with a sketch of further complexities in the logic of Christian eschatology.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

page 200 note 1 For references for these views, see the following: Flew's article, Can A Man Witness his Own Funeral?’, Hibbert Journal (1956)Google Scholar, for his well-known claim that it is logically impossible to survive death; Phillips, D. Z., Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Penelhum, T., Survival and Disembodied Existence (New York: Humanities Press, 1970)Google Scholar; and chapter 2 ‘Immortality’, in Geach's God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).Google Scholar

page 200 note 2 I draw this account from Hick's, Faith and Knowledge (second edition) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), ch. 8.Google Scholar

page 200 note 3 There have been many discussions of the philosophical issues involved in eschatological verification, and Hick has been careful to reply to his critics. See in addition to the second edition of Faith and Knowledge his recent essay, Eschatological Verification Reconsidered’, in Religious Studies xiii (1977), 189202.Google Scholar

page 201 note 1 Both quotations are from Faith and Knowledge p. 180.

page 201 note 2 This is drawn from Faith and Knowledge pp. 183–5.Google Scholar In a more recent discussion (Resurrection Worlds and Bodies’, Mind lxxxii (1973), 409–12)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Hick has reiterated some of these characteristics in such phrases as ‘physically alike in every particular, psychologically alike in every particular’, and ‘a psycho-physical being exactly like the being that I was before death’ (p. 411).

page 201 note 3 Faith and Knowledge, pp. 181–4.

page 201 note 4 Faith and Knowledge, p. 184.

page 202 note 1 It was after this paragraph was first written that Hick's ‘Eschatological Verification Reconsidered’ appeared. He now acknowledges that in principle such verification could occur in this world, though he maintains that this would not satisfy traditional theism (Religious Studies XIII 201).

page 203 note 1 Aquinas was interested in questions about hair and nails for the resurrection body: Summa Theologica supp. q. 80.

page 203 note 2 Something like this trust seems to be Geach's solution: ‘The traditional faith of Christianity, inherited from Judaism, is that at the end of this age Messiah will come and men rise from their graves to die no more. That faith is not going to be shaken by inquiries about bodies burned to ashes or eaten by beasts; those who might well suffer just such death in martyrdom were those who were most confident of a glorious reward in the resurrection’ (God and the Soul p. 29).

page 203 note 3 This and the previous quotation are from Faith and Knowledge p. 190.

page 204 note 1 Faith and Knowledge, p. 184. Geach, on the other hand, tries to capitalize on this point as teaching material continuity, although not material identity, between this by and the resurrection by (God and the Soul p. 28). I comment on problems in material continuity near the end of Part III below.

page 204 note 2 See Penelhum's chs. 2 and 3 for the possibility of perception and agency in disembodied beings (Survival and Disembodied Existence).

page 206 note 1 Moule, C. F. D., ‘St. Paul and Dualism: The Pauline Conception of Resurrection’, New Test. Stud. xii (19651966), 107.Google Scholar He goes on to describe some views, including notions of transfigured bodies and the resurrected as like angels.

page 206 note 2 Jeremias sees in this the new thing that Paul has had revealed: at the Parousia, for both living and dead, the change will be immediate (Jeremias, J., ‘“Flesh and Blood Cannot Inherit the Kingdom of God” (I Cor. xv. 50)’, New Test Stud. ii (19551956), 158–9.Google Scholar

page 207 note 1 Robinson, J. A. T., The Body (London: SCM Press, 1952), p. 31.Google Scholar

page 207 note 2 The Body p. 32, note.Google Scholar

page 207 note 3 There are many exegetical questions raised by the passage which I cannot consider here. My reading takes the phrase ho de theos didôsin autô (i) sôma kathôs êthelêsen (v. 38) to mean not merely that God gives to each kernel body as he has wished, but also to each particular thing of whatever kind. Paul goes on to say this is true of each seed but I see no reason why he would not extend it further. There is a linguistic difficulty here, of course: one doesn't speak of animals, fish, stars and the like as changing into something, so to say that God gives ‘it’ a (new) body is inappropriate; ‘it’ already is a body. As for sarx: when Paul says that there is one kind of flesh for man, another for animals, another for…he need not be taken as making biological or taxonomic claims. Dahl, M. E. (The Resurrection of the Body London, SCM, 1962, p. 32)Google Scholar thinks differently, that Paul is somehow separating the ‘flesh’ of men from that of other species. But sarx as one general kind of sôma is separate only from seeds and stars and the like; within the category Paul is merely pointing to diversity, not making claims about ‘substantial’ or ‘qualitative’ differences (contra Sider, , ‘The Pauline Conception of the Resurrection Body in I Corinthians xv. 35–54’, New Test. Stud. xxi (19741975), 430).Google Scholar He is saying, then, that men are not birds or cows or fish, that each sôma as sarx is different.

page 208 note 1 Dahl, , p. 8; p. 94.Google Scholar

page 208 note 2 Dahl, , p. 27.Google Scholar See also p. 33 n. 1.

page 208 note 3 Sider, , pp. 431, 432.Google Scholar Actually, I have trouble knowing what Dahl could mean by ‘organic identity’ other than some kind of spatio-temporal continuity. Presumably the ‘organic’ functions to warn us that the identity is not static, but on the other hand it is not qualitative. So it must be numerical identity, that there is one and only one thing which has undergone change. That, however, is what we mean by the ‘continuity’ of the same thing.

page 209 note 1 Sider, , p. 434.Google Scholar Dahl would agree: ‘a body-spiritual, a personality competely controlled and informed by the creative spirit of God and therefore beyond corruption. Man is that kind of flesh, with that kind of destiny’ (p. 81).

page 209 note 2 Dahl, , p. 90.Google Scholar

page 209 note 3 See Jeremias, J. (p 206 n. 2 above).Google Scholar

page 209 note 4 See Earle Ellis, E., ‘II Corinthians v. 1–10 in Pauline Eschatology’, New Test. Stud. vi (19591960), 211–24Google Scholar, for an attempt to read many of the terms in this passage as ‘corporate’ concepts, and ‘nakedness’ as a moral rather than metaphysical condition.

page 209 note 5 Granted that this is not the primary function of these terms, they may still carry this implication. See for instance Dahl, , p. 113, where he discusses ouranos as ‘the sphere of God himself’. And additional matters for exegetical attention might include such phrases as ta mê blepomena in II Cor. 4. 18. These belong to the eternal, the sphere of resurrection: but does the word mean ‘things incapable of being seen’, that is, non-extended realities, or simply ‘things not (yet) seen’?Google Scholar

page 210 note 1 Dahl, , p. 94.Google Scholar ‘It is vital to insist on the word identity as describing this relationship, because the whole idea has no meaning unless it is the same personality that is to be raised that exists now’ (p. 94).

page 211 note 1 Sider, , p. 435.Google Scholar Sider quotes approvingly Héring's rejection of the “Cartesian prejudice” which would assume that the term “spiritual body” must connote something which lacks substance and extension’ (p. 435, n. 2) – a sorry misreading of Descartes' most elementary point, that substance can be either spiritual or extended; in fact, that extended substance (body) is ultimately dependent upon spiritual substance (God).

page 211 note 2 Dahl, , p. 91.Google Scholar

page 211 note 3 Some may object that this reading of St Paul ignores the parallel he draws between Jesus' resurrection and our resurrection. In case it should be thought necessary to my view that Jesus' resurrection be as a disembodied person (for the sake of this parallelism), let me say that I think this need not follow. This assertion requires argument for which there is no space here, but it might be noted that (i) the resurrection accounts are of a physical, empirical body raised from death; and (ii) Jesus' case may be unique in that a bodily resurrection is required as concession to our epistemological limitations, though this concession is of the same order as the incarnation itself.

page 212 note 1 ‘When this chapter (I Cor. 15) is set in its proper context of the whole Pauline theology, it becomes quite impossible to think of the resurrection hope in terms of the individual unit’ (Robinson, p. 81).

page 212 note 2 See Penelhum, , p. 108.Google Scholar

page 213 note 1 Perhaps the most vigorous defender of the possibility of disembodied persons who survive death is H. D. Lewis: see, most recently, The Self and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1973)Google Scholar; and Persons and Life After Death (London: Macmillan, 1978).Google Scholar Cf. two papers by Purtill, Richard L.: ‘Disembodied Survival’, Sophia 13. 1 (1973), pp. 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Intelligibility of Disembodied Survival’, Christian Scholar's Review v, 1 (1975), 322.Google Scholar

page 213 note 2 Versions of this paper were presented at a seminar at the American Academy of Religion 1976 meeting in St Louis, and the founding meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers in Cincinnati, April 1978.