The Resurrection of the Body

One of the abiding confusions in contemporary Christian theology is over the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. The vast majority of Christians affirm this, at least when they say the creeds, but there have been notable exceptions by theologians who decide that this claim isn't credible given a modern scientific worldview. 

It seems to me that too often both affirmation and denial are based on naive acceptance or rejection of an Enlightenment worldview that is already fading from a Western understanding of the nature of reality and the knowledge of reality.

The gospels tell us that Jesus died, was placed in a tomb, and that on the third day the tomb was found by his followers to be empty. The gospels also tell us that the people involved had two immediate explanations; either it was grave robbers, or perhaps the disciples themselves stole the body. 

Then Jesus himself appears to his disciples in such a way that they know he is risen from the dead. And his interactions with them make clear that he has neither been merely resuscitated nor is he merely a ghost or apparition. He has a body you can touch. But he is also capable of appearing and disappearing and coming through locked doors. 

This is something unique, and the apostles  come to see this as the fulfillment of prophecy related to Jesus as Messiah, and as a revelation of the meaning of his death on the cross for us a humans. Their reinterpretation of the Jewish scriptures in light of Jesus life, death, and resurrection creates a radically new framework of interpretation of those scriptures, overthrowing traditional rabbinic forms of analysis (and thus never accepted by the rabbis.) The Jewish scripture becomes the original witness that Jesus as the Christ. So we call it the Old Testament.

In the sermons recorded in Acts the meaning of the resurrection unfolds in apostolic preaching: Jesus is Lord. Jesus’ resurrection is the promise of Israel’s restoration. And finally it is the sign and guarantor that all humanity will be raised from the dead at the final judgment and those who follow Christ will be received into God’s reign. 

We can let Paul take it from there. His critical insight is that the bodily resurrection of Christ shows that there is an essential and eternal integrity to the life we live in our bodies. We are not disembodied spirits. It is our embodied selves that are destined to live in God’s reign. 

Neither the Jewish culture of his day, nor the Greek culture of his day had the concepts necessary to articulate this truth. The apostles had already undertaken a dramatically new interpretation of portions of the Jewish scripture in light of Jesus. Now Paul create a new language; distinguishing between a natural body and a spiritual body, in order to articulate the meaning of the resurrection. (I Corinthians 15:44. "σπείρεται σῶμα ψυχικόν, ἐγείρεται σῶμα πνευματικόν. Εἰ ἔστιν σῶμα ψυχικόν, ἔστιν καὶ πνευματικόν." Note that  ψυχικόν is sometimes translated "physical," but the word "natural" better conveys the Greek in our cultural context.)

Paul also understands that when you try to speak about something that does not fit into the conceptual framework given by a particular worldview or worldviews than it is by definition a mystery. It is something that cannot be explained within any available, conceptual framework.

Mystery is not something our enlightenment culture bears with easily.

It is characteristic of modernity that for something to be true it has to be explicable. To be explicable there must to be clear conceptual framework within which it can be explained.  And the only three frameworks that modern culture readily accepts are: 1. the scientific understanding of relationships in the the material/physical world, 2. the psychological understanding of things that happen in the mind and, 3. a philosophical understanding of abstract logical relationships between ideas.

And this sets up the contemporary conflict between those who say that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was physical (meaning it must be located in the world explained by science), and those who say it was psychological (explicable as an event in the minds of believers.)

This conflict comes about because the Enlightenment does not offer us a the conceptual tools with which to understand the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  

Whatever the nature of the resurrected body of Christ, it was not merely physical in the scientific sense. For a body to be physical in the scientific sense it must occupy a single space at a single time and be subject to normal physical laws. Physicists may talk about waves and wave functions at a sub-atomic level, but when we use the word physical we know it means something that has a specific location in space and time.The resurrected body of Christ does not fit the contemporary definition of something physical. 

Yet neither is the resurrection presented to us as something that took place entirely within the minds of the apostles. The risen body of Christ is presented as something outside the apostles, subject to public observation and witness. Moreover the risen Christ is presented as participating in the same natural environment that others participated in. He wasn't merely a psychological phenomenon in the modern understanding of psychological. 

As a result for the apostles, as well as Paul and the early Christians, Jesus' resurrection from the dead created a new logical framework within which to both understand Jewish Scripture (which thus becomes the Old Testament) and their own lives. It wasn't logical in the normal sense of the word. It created the logic within which their world finally made sense.

What about today? We too easily forget that it isn't the how of the resurrection that matters in the scripture, it is the why. The how is a mystery. The why is clear. Jesus is presented as the first fruit, the pioneer, the one who has gone where we will go. What he experienced after his death will be our experience after death. His resurrection is the source of our hope that death doesn't have the final say in our lives, and in particular doesn't have the final say in our lives as embodied creatures of God.

This is good news. There is continuity between the body we have now that is suitable for this natural world, and the body we will have suitable to the transcendent reign of God. Jesus has already shown us this; that we will follow in his path from a natural body to a spiritual body. How this will happen is a mystery, and it neither made sense in the time of Jesus nor does it make no sense within Enlightenment conceptual frameworks. Yet the why is clear; so that our embodied lives have eternal meaning.  

Where we go wrong in contemporary theology, both classically liberal and classically evangelical, is adopting the modernist belief that credibility is tied to explicability in one of the Enlightenment conceptual frameworks; that a credible gospel must be either scientific, or psychological, or logical. Some liberal theology denies the physical resurrection because it is incoherent with science. Thus it asserts a purely psychological resurrection. Evangelical theology asserts the physical resurrection and denies a psychological resurrection because it is equally in thrall to science as an explanatory framework. 

Where both go wrong is believing that credibility comes from coherence with modernist understandings of the nature of reality. 

Science, including psychology, is useful in explaining both material objects and mental phenomena. However, our human relationship with ourselves, the natural world, and God, which is really what soma (body) means in scripture. And that is far more complex than the physical sciences or psychology can explain. Relative to the framework they provide, the soma of Christ as understood in the New Testament is a mystery. Relative to the framework they provide our participation in the soma of Christ is a mystery. And thus relative to the framework they provide our own soma are a mystery.

What mystery demands isn't reductionism, but embrace and exploration.

The credibility of a claim that Jesus is bodily risen from the dead is challenged by incoherence with day to day experience of the reality of death. Yet it is credible and coherent with our experience, manifest throughout the history of humanity, that there is a continuity of human personhood that extends beyond the limits of the physical body in both space and time. It is credible and coherent with our sense that there is a connection between our immanence and Transcendence: that we are made in the image of God and participate in the body of the Son and are draw life from the Spirit. 

What we need is the imagination and creativity, the openness to God's Spirit, to allow the resurrection of Christ, experienced by faith, to reform the logic by which we understand and relate to the world. Then we can witness to Christ rather than attacking each other's always-deficient frameworks for analysis.