But is it really so shocking? All of these are familiar possibilities for a being that is an 'avatar' of a God - a spirit part of God that takes on human form and lives as a human, perhaps a super-powered human, maybe even breeds with humans etc.
(Jesus is not an avatar - but my point is that the general idea of a God taking on a human form is common enough.)
Neither is it all that shocking when the incarnated God comes back to life after being killed - since all societies seem to have believed in some kind of continuation of existence after biological death (so nothing really dies altogether), posited some kind of afterlife; and Gods in particular would be expected to be unkillable.
What is really shocking is that when the divine Jesus came back to life it was not as a spirit. Instead God became a Man again, in a Man's body, and for eternity. Jesus was resurrected.
I think that this is so shocking that - as far as I can tell - most Christians still don't believe it, and have never really believed it; but instead have always tried to claim that Jesus's resurrected body was 'not really' what it seemed, but some kind-of embodied spirit.
It is, apparently, very difficult for people to accept that a creator God could have a body like ours, eternally; and still be God.
To most intellectual Christians, at any rate, it seems intrinsically ridiculous that something solid and bounded might be superior to something unbounded of pure spirit; so they resort to various types of 'yes, but'... argument, that explain resurrection as retaining the appearance of an incarnate body while replacing its inner reality with spirit.
If this was so, the question is why?... Why did Jesus bother with resurrection, if the body was merely a kind of illusion? Why didn't he make eternal life explicitly a thing of pure spirit?
If this was so, the question is why?... Why did Jesus bother with resurrection, if the body was merely a kind of illusion? Why didn't he make eternal life explicitly a thing of pure spirit?
Why go to all the trouble of making it 'look like' Jesus had an absolutely humanish body, why the emphasis on how normal his body seemed?
(An emphasis, but not not exclusive; after all Jesus was hard to recognise, could apparently appear and disappear etc; but certainly the primary point being made is that this was in some essential way the same human body that Jesus had inhabited before he died, with the same appearance, wounds etc; and it was certainly solid to touch, and he ate food.)
If we take the Fourth Gospel as primary (and the other Gospels as partial confirmations) it is evident that the resurrection was into a 'normal', solid, material human body - and that was the main thing about it!
We should not allow secondary explanations to remove that major - and shocking - fact.
(An emphasis, but not not exclusive; after all Jesus was hard to recognise, could apparently appear and disappear etc; but certainly the primary point being made is that this was in some essential way the same human body that Jesus had inhabited before he died, with the same appearance, wounds etc; and it was certainly solid to touch, and he ate food.)
If we take the Fourth Gospel as primary (and the other Gospels as partial confirmations) it is evident that the resurrection was into a 'normal', solid, material human body - and that was the main thing about it!
We should not allow secondary explanations to remove that major - and shocking - fact.
The distinctive thing about Christianity is therefore not 'eternal life' in Heaven; but eternal life in some version of our actual solid human body.
There Must Be something very important about The Body, if it is to become eternal for us, in Heaven.
Note: On further reflection, the fact of resurrection has very wide-ranging implications for the nature of ultimate reality; including the nature of life in Heaven. In a nutshell, resurrection implies that the life eternal promised by Jesus to those who follow him is A Resurrected Life - a life certainly including resurrected entities, beings, things from this mortal life. Not, therefore, a life of pure spirit or thought; but a life of everlasting solid beings and objects of many kinds - thought consisting-of/ interacting-with solid things. Perhaps CS Lewis intuited this, in his fantasy of The Great Divorce?
There Must Be something very important about The Body, if it is to become eternal for us, in Heaven.
Note: On further reflection, the fact of resurrection has very wide-ranging implications for the nature of ultimate reality; including the nature of life in Heaven. In a nutshell, resurrection implies that the life eternal promised by Jesus to those who follow him is A Resurrected Life - a life certainly including resurrected entities, beings, things from this mortal life. Not, therefore, a life of pure spirit or thought; but a life of everlasting solid beings and objects of many kinds - thought consisting-of/ interacting-with solid things. Perhaps CS Lewis intuited this, in his fantasy of The Great Divorce?
Further Note added today: This is an edited repost of what strikes me as a significant insight (i.e. significant for me) which made near zero impact at the time of first publication seven years ago (except on WmJas Tychonievich) - and indeed, I did not properly grasp it myself. So here 'tis again.
2 comments:
Well, it had an impact on me even if I didn’t comment! It’s definitely one of those “not fully appreciated” as well as unique things about Christianity, although I would point to Ancient Egyptians as having the general idea. The fundamentalist/evangelical church we attended was very clear about the fact of bodily resurrection and from time to time people would speculate about our heavenly perfected bodies, but it didn’t really influence the theology. Ofc as fundamentalists they shun serious speculation and would put the resurrected body in the category of “things God doesn’t choose to reveal fully yet.”
One way the secretly atheist/materialist attitude manifests in Christians is a tendency to reject the good things in life that are temporary such as physical vigor, as though the wrapping up of mortal life and its end in death is what’s “really real” and a wise youth won’t enjoy his strength and beauty too much. As opposed to: God shows us these good things that are a preview of heaven and part of the point of their fading over time is to see if we really want them back or not, since that’s part of what heaven offers. Then the answer is neither to over-value/cling to these things within mortal life nor to inwardly/spiritually reject them, which drives us away from heaven, but rather to love them deeply enough to give up all sin at the end *and* to reject the false substitutes offered in mortal life.
@Mia - I tend to assume that following resurrection and at the beginning of Heavenly life, some people will choose to become children (of various degrees of maturity) - probably because that is when they felt at their best.
This would mean that in Heaven - at any time point - resurrected children would be present, even though some of these children would have died at various older ages and stages - although I don't have a much clearer picture than that.
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