Bodily Resurrection Quotes

The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence.

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn't a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture is totally different. Take it away, and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring the problems of the material world. Take it away, and Sigmund Freud was probably right to say that Christianity is a wish-fulfillment religion. Take it away, and Friedrich Nietzsche was probably right to say that Christianity was a religion for wimps. Put it back, and you have a faith that can take on the postmodern world that looks to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as its prophets, and you can beat them at their own game with the Easter news that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time originated about two centuries before the life of Jesus, and by his day it had become a common feature of Jewish thought. Later, at the hands of Christians, it came to be transformed into a teaching of postmortem rewards and punishments, the ideas of heaven and hell.

It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus’s “divine” status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

They are teachers who point to their teaching or show some particular way. In all of these, there emerges an instruction, a way of living. It is not Zoroaster to whom you turn. It is Zoroaster to whom you listen. It is not Buddha who delivers you; it is his Noble Truths that instruct you. It is not Mohammed who transforms you; it is the beauty of the Koran that woos you. By contrast, Jesus did not only teach or expound His message. He was identical with His message. “In Him,” say the Scriptures, “dwelt the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” He did not just proclaim the truth. He said, “I am the truth.” He did not just show a way. He said, “I am the Way.” He did not just open up vistas. He said, “I am the door.” “I am the Good Shepherd.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” “I am the I AM.” In Him is not just an offer of life’s bread. He is the bread. That is why being a Christian is not just a way of feeding and living. Following Christ begins with a way of relating and being.

Resurrection means bodily resurrection or it means nothing at all.

The belief in the bodily resurrection has no religious foundation, and the doctrine of immortality refers to the after-existence of the soul only.

It is not about "life after death" as such. Rather, it's a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: "life after 'life after death.

Both the Church and the Eucharist have their source and receive their present vitality from the events celebrated in Holy Week: the Last Supper of Jesus with his apostles, his atoning passion and death on Good Friday and his bodily resurrection on Easter Sunday

The Ascent to Christ is a struggle thro’ one heresy after another, River-wise up-country into a proliferation of Sects and Sects branching from Sects, unto Deism, faithless pretending to be holy, and beyond,— ever away from the Sea, from the Harbor, from all that was serene and certain, into an Interior unmapp’d, a Realm of Doubt. The Nights. The Storms and Beasts. The Falls, the Rapids, . . . the America of the Soul. Doubt is of the essence of Christ. Of the twelve Apostles, most true to him was ever Thomas,— indeed, in the Acta Thomæ they are said to be Twins. The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty. He is become the central subjunctive fact of a Faith, that risks ev’rything upon one bodily Resurrection. . . . Wouldn’t something less doubtable have done? a prophetic dream, a communication with a dead person? Some few tatters of evidence to wrap our poor naked spirits against the coldness of a World where Mortality and its Agents may bully their way, wherever they wish to go. . . . — The Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, Undeliver’d Sermons

Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.' I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass. But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.

Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection.

The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time originated about two centuries before the life of Jesus, and by his day it had become a common feature of Jewish thought. Later, at the hands of Christians, it came to be transformed into a teaching of post-mortem rewards and punishments, the ideas of heaven and hell.

the only prospect which is really desirable or delightful, is that from the window of the breakfast-room [...] where we meet the first light of the dewy day, the first breath of the morning air, the first glance of gentle eyes; to which we descend in the very spring and elasticity of mental renovation and bodily energy, in the gathering up of our spirit for the new day, in the flush of our awakening from the darkness and the mystery of faint and inactive dreaming, in the resurrection from our daily grave, in the first tremulous sensation of the beauty of our being, in the most glorious perception of the lightning of our life; there, indeed, our expatiation of spirit, when it meets the pulse of outward sound and joy, the voice of bird and breeze and billow, does demand some power of liberty, some space for its going forth into the morning, some freedom of intercourse with the lovely and limitless energy of creature and creation.

The resurrection of the body - what do we really mean by this? ...Did not the mystics and sages of all times teach us that the positive meaning of death is precisely that it liberates us from the prison of the body, as they say, from this perennial dependency on the material, physical, and bodily life - finally rendering our souls light, weightless, free, spiritual? We [must] consider more profoundly the meaning of the body... We must consider the role of the body in our, in my, life. On the one hand, of course it is entirely clear that all of our bodies are transitory and impermanent. Biologists have calculated that all the cells that compose our bodies are replaced every seven years. Thus, physiologically, every seven years we have a new body. Therefore, at the end of my life the body that is laid in the grave or consumed by fire is no longer the same body as all the preceding ones, and in the final analysis each of our bodies is nothing other than our individual [being] in the world, as the form of my dependence on the world, on the one hand, and of my life and of my activity on the other. In essence, my body is my relationship to the world, to others; it is my life as communion and as mutual relationship. Without exception, everything in the body, in the human organism, is created for this relationship, for this communion, for this coming out of oneself. It is not an accident, of course, that love, the highest form of communion, finds its incarnation in the body; the body is that which sees, hears, feels, and thereby leads me out of the isolation of my *I*. But then, perhaps, we can say in response: the body is not the darkness of the soul, but rather the body is its freedom, for the body is the soul as love, the soul as communion, the soul as life, the soul as movement. And this is why, when the soul loses the body, when it is separated from the body, it loses life.

We sometimes speak of someone who’s been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one—or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.

Even if millions have seen Bonhoeffer’s death as tragic and as a prematurely ended life, we can be certain that he did not see it that way at all. In a sermon he preached while a pastor in London, he said: No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence. Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up—that is for young and old alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death? . . . Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace. How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

It is ironic that none of those who took issue with Schweitzer’s theology and cursed his writings gave up fame and fortune or membership in the highest stratum of German society to live among the poorest of the poor. They prepared their critiques in the comfort of the pastor’s study or the university library, while Schweitzer nailed patches of tin on the roof of his free medical clinic at Lambarene by the banks of the Ogoove River. Theologians who sat in endowed chairs took his Christology to task, while he scraped infectious lesions off blue-black natives in the steaming misery of equatorial Africa. Albert Schweitzer deserves to be remembered as the greatest Christian of the twentieth century, yet he did not believe in literal miracles— the blood atonement, the bodily resurrection, or the second coming, just to name a few. All he did was walk away from everything the world calls good to follow Jesus.

According to the gospels, Christ healed diseases, cast out devils, rebuked the sea, cured the blind, fed multitudes with five loaves and two fishes, walked on the sea, cursed a fig tree, turned water into wine and raised the dead. How is it possible to substantiate these miracles? The Jews, among whom they were said to have been performed, did not believe them. The diseased, the palsied, the leprous, the blind who were cured, did not become followers of Christ. Those that were raised from the dead were never heard of again. Can we believe that Christ raised the dead? A widow living in Nain is following the body of her son to the tomb. Christ halts the funeral procession and raises the young man from the dead and gives him back to the arms of his mother. This young man disappears. He is never heard of again. No one takes the slightest interest in the man who returned from the realm of death. Luke is the only one who tells the story. Maybe Matthew, Mark and John never heard of it, or did not believe it and so failed to record it. John says that Lazarus was raised from the dead. It was more wonderful than the raising of the widow’s son. He had not been laid in the tomb for days. He was only on his way to the grave, but Lazarus was actually dead. He had begun to decay. Lazarus did not excite the least interest. No one asked him about the other world. No one inquired of him about their dead friends. When he died the second time no one said: “He is not afraid. He has traveled that road twice and knows just where he is going.” We do not believe in the miracles of Mohammed, and yet they are as well attested as this. We have no confidence in the miracles performed by Joseph Smith, and yet the evidence is far greater, far better. If a man should go about now pretending to raise the dead, pretending to cast out devils, we would regard him as insane. What, then, can we say of Christ? If we wish to save his reputation we are compelled to say that he never pretended to raise the dead; that he never claimed to have cast out devils. We must take the ground that these ignorant and impossible things were invented by zealous disciples, who sought to deify their leader. In those ignorant days these falsehoods added to the fame of Christ. But now they put his character in peril and belittle the authors of the gospels. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Why did he not again enter the temple and end the old dispute with demonstration? Why did he not confront the Roman soldiers who had taken money to falsely swear that his body had been stolen by his friends? Why did he not make another triumphal entry into Jerusalem? Why did he not say to the multitude: “Here are the wounds in my feet, and in my hands, and in my side. I am the one you endeavored to kill, but death is my slave”? Simply because the resurrection is a myth. The miracle of the resurrection I do not and cannot believe. We know nothing certainly of Jesus Christ. We know nothing of his infancy, nothing of his youth, and we are not sure that such a person ever existed. There was in all probability such a man as Jesus Christ. He may have lived in Jerusalem. He may have been crucified; but that he was the Son of God, or that he was raised from the dead, and ascended bodily to heaven, has never been, and, in the nature of things, can never be, substantiated.

We read of feeding on flesh and drinking blood; of body parts and flesh-unions; of vines, branches, and living water; of dying in another’s death and living in another’s life; and of the indwelling Spirit and God becoming flesh. Perhaps it is because this language and these images mystify and puzzle us that we fail to reckon properly with them. We feel a bit like many of Jesus’s contemporaries, confused and even troubled by what he says. But we must reckon with these words, because embedded in them are the most astounding of promises—eternal life, the hope of glory, forgiveness, holiness, redemption, resurrection, bodily transformation, and, most astonishing of all, the Son of God dwelling in us. This is the language of salvation and the logic of the gospel,

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral -- a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus -- that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since." "Do you believe in God or not?" Hiro says. First things first. "Definitely." "Do you believe in Jesus?" "Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus." "How can you be a Christian without believing in that?" "I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God’s new creation within the present world order.

Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess. RESURRECTION:

the Christian doctrine of incarnation means that bodily life is good, something to be embraced and enjoyed. Our hope in Christ is not that we can finally escape the limitations of bodiliness for the freedom of a purely mental or “spiritual” existence. It is rather that we might be freed from death and sin for a resurrected bodily life that enjoys God forever. If we look at the full trajectory of human life from birth through death to “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” incarnation can be seen as describing the full process of Jesus’ life, and especially his final resurrection fullness, rather than merely a claim that from the beginning this man is God with us.

Gnostic Christianity depreciates our bodiliness, demeans creation and materiality; it sees salvation as release from embodiment. Identified and refuted as a heresy by the same theologian, Irenaeus, gnosticism has nonetheless continued to dog Christianity throughout its existence, continually insinuating that being embodied is some kind of cosmic mistake. The cure for that kind of thinking can certainly be found in the biblical accounts of God’s good creation and of Jesus’s birth, healing ministry, crucifixion, and bodily resurrection, and in the church’s embodied practices of worshiping God and serving neighbor.

How can you say that? You’re a religious person yourself.” “Don’t lump all religion together.” “Sorry.” “All people have religions. It’s like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we’ll latch onto anything that’ll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That’s the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that’s the way it’s headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus—that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we’re in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since.” “Do you believe in God or not?” Hiro says. First things first. “Definitely.” “Do you believe in Jesus?” “Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Resurrection is not just another way of talking about Sheol, or about what happens, as in Psalm 73, ‘afterwards’, that is, after the event of bodily death. It speaks of something that will happen, if it does, after that again. Resurrection means bodily life after ‘life after death’, or, if you prefer, bodily life after the state of ‘death’. That is why it is very misleading—and foreign to all the relevant texts—to speak, as does one recent writer, of ‘resurrection to heaven’.106 Resurrection is what did not happen to Enoch or Elijah. According to the texts, it is what will happen to people who are at present dead, not what has already happened to them.

He was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (3:18). It is difficult to decide whether “spirit” should be capitalized (AV) or not (RSV), depending on whether the spirit is Christ’s spirit in contrast to his body, or whether it is the Holy Spirit. If it is the former, we may have the idea of an altogether “spiritual resurrection” in contrast to the resurrection of the body. This, however, is contrary to primitive Christian belief, which always thought of the resurrection of the body, although of a body transformed by the Holy Spirit. It is better, therefore, to take flesh and spirit not as two parts of Christ, but two different ways of viewing the whole Christ. Flesh is the human sphere of existence; Spirit is Christ in his heavenly sphere of existence.21 This can include his bodily resurrection, but the body glorified by the Holy Spirit. Our problem is with the words that follow: “in which [i.e., in the Spirit] he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark” (3:19-20). We can do little more than outline the three major interpretations.22 The older patristic interpretation is that in the intermediate state, Christ in the Spirit went and preached the gospel to the spirits of dead people imprisoned in Hades, who either lived in the days of Noah or in the time before Christ.23 This view soon lost favor, for it opened the door to the possibility of salvation after death. A second view, held by Augustine and many Reformers, holds that Christ in his pre-existent state of being preached the gospel through Noah to Noah’s living contemporaries. The third view, most widely accepted today, is that in the intermediate state Christ proclaimed the victory of the gospel to fallen angels imprisoned in Hades.24 The “preaching” involved may not mean an offer of salvation, but the triumphant announcement that through his death and resurrection, Christ had broken the power of the spirit world.25

For Irenaeus, salvation came by having faith in the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus; according to the Gnostics, salvation came by learning the secret truths that Christ taught concerning how to escape this world of the body. I should stress that these truths were not available to just anybody. Only those who had the spark of the divine within could receive them. Others—those without the spark—belonged to the god of this world, the creator who made matter and all the misery and suffering connected with it. These others could not know the truth because they were not from above. This made it exceedingly difficult to argue with Gnostics. If you claimed they were wrong, they could simply point out that you didn’t “know.” If you interpreted a passage of Scripture to counter their claims, they could smugly assure you that you misunderstood the passage. If you claimed that their interpretation violated that natural meaning of the text, they could say that the real meaning lies beneath the surface, there only for those with eyes to see.

Jesus did not only teach or expound His message. He was identical with His message. “In Him,” say the Scriptures, “dwelt the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” He did not just proclaim the truth. He said, “I am the truth.” He did not just show a way. He said, “I am the Way.” He did not just open up vistas. He said, “I am the door.” “I am the Good Shepherd.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” “I am the I AM.” In

Through his preaching and healing, through the pattern of discipleship he called people to follow, through his bodily resurrection from the dead, the Lord Jesus literally embodies for us a new way of life, which conforms to the will and reign of God.

What other things have given men such certain faith in immortality as have the cross of Christ and the resurrection of His body? The Greeks told all sorts of false tales, but they could never pretend that their idols rose again from death: indeed it never entered their heads that a body could exist again after death at all. And one would be particularly ready to listen to them on this point, because by these opinions they have exposed the weakness of their own idolatry, at the same time yielding to Christ the possibility of bodily resurrection, so that by that means He might be recognized by all as Son of God.

Augustine in City of God pictures a resurrection in which the bodily systems we no longer need to protect ourselves can use energy to praise God.

God, through the perfect life, atoning death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, rescues all his people from the wrath of God into peace with God, with a promise of the full restoration of his created order forever—all to the praise of the glory of his grace.

Either we believe in a God who can do anything, or we must accept a Christian faith that’s non-miraculous; and that does away with the inspiration of the Bible, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Although Christian thinking on the body is formed by the account in Genesis, of equal if not greater importance is belief in the resurrection of the body. In the form of the "Nicene" creed adopted at the Council of Constantinople, the final clauses read, "We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Christian thinking about human beings oscillates between the beginning and the end, origin and goal. The hope of resurrection led inevitably to the question of whether the body was part of the definition of the self. The bodily resurrection of Jesus was, of course, a matter of biblical history, but it took time for Christian thinkers to draw out the full implications of the Resurrection for Christian anthropology.

Never broken by sin, saved by being preserved from sin, Mary is the first to benefit from Christ’s conquest of sin, the first after Christ to experience bodily resurrection.

God’s people are not looking for deliverance from Earth, but deliverance on Earth. That’s exactly what we will find after our bodily resurrection.

The things which certain stupid men invent, who indulge their fancy, and give bodily form to the punishment of sinners and the reward of the just and righteous, and say that there is at the resurrection a reckoning and a pair of scales, the Church does not receive; but each one of us carries his light and his fire within him, and his heaviness and his lightness is found in his own nature. Just as stone and iron naturally possess the property of falling to the earth, and as the air naturally ascends upward on account of its rarity and its lightness; so also in the resurrection, he that is heavy and lying in sins, his sins will bring him down; and he that is free from the rust of sin, his purity will make him rise in the scale.34

I was able to confess the Apostles' Creed, but only with deep ambiguity. But I stumbled over "he arose from the dead." I had to demythologize it and could say it only symbolically. I could not inwardly confess the resurrection as a factual historical event. I was assigned the task of teaching theology, but when I came to the resurrection, I honestly had to say at that stage that is was not about an actual event of a bodily resurrection but a community memory of an unexplained event. I could talk about the writings of the people who were remembering and proclaiming it as the saving event, but I could not explain to myself or to others how Christianity could be built on an event that never happened...That was my credo in my early thirties. It was new birth without bodily resurrections and forgiveness without atonement. Resurrection and atonement were words i choked on . That mean that the gospel was not about an event of divine salvation but about a human psychological experience of trust and freedom from anxiety, guilt and boredom

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence. Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up–that is for young and old alike to think about. What are we so afraid when we think about death? Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle, it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace. How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God’s new creation within the present world order. And with that failure many other things have been lost as well.

Hellenistic religion aimed to provide just such aids to liberation from the bodily existence of this world, together with the promise that at death one’s soul would finally be released from the body to find its perfect happiness - its ‘salvation’ - in that eternal world.

April 13 MORNING “A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me.” — Song of Solomon 1:13 MYRRH may well be chosen as the type of Jesus on account of its preciousness, its perfume, its pleasantness, its healing, preserving, disinfecting qualities, and its connection with sacrifice. But why is He compared to “a bundle of myrrh”? First, for plenty. He is not a drop of it, He is a casket full. He is not a sprig or flower of it, but a whole bundle. There is enough in Christ for all my necessities; let me not be slow to avail myself of Him. Our well-beloved is compared to a “bundle” again, for variety: for there is in Christ not only the one thing needful, but in “Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” everything needful is in Him. Take Jesus in His different characters, and you will see a marvellous variety — Prophet, Priest, King, Husband, Friend, Shepherd. Consider Him in His life, death, resurrection, ascension, second advent; view Him in His virtue, gentleness, courage, self-denial, love, faithfulness, truth, righteousness — everywhere He is a bundle of preciousness. He is a “bundle of myrrh” for preservation — not loose myrrh tied up, myrrh to be stored in a casket. We must value Him as our best treasure; we must prize His words and His ordinances; and we must keep our thoughts of Him and knowledge of Him as under lock and key, lest the devil should steal anything from us. Moreover, Jesus is a “bundle of myrrh” for speciality. The emblem suggests the idea of distinguishing, discriminating grace. From before the foundation of the world, He was set apart for His people; and He gives forth His perfume only to those who understand how to enter into communion with Him, to have close dealings with Him. Oh! blessed people whom the Lord hath admitted into His secrets, and for whom He sets Himself apart. Oh! choice and happy who are thus made to say, “A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me.

preterism Full preterists are a relatively small minority. “The true preterist view is that the second coming of Christ was to finally judge and remove the last vestiges of the Old Covenant system and fully establish the kingdom and the New Covenant system by 70 A.D.”393 They also view the resurrection as spiritual not bodily, and that the resurrection, the day of the Lord, and the judgment all occurred in AD 70.394 Most Christians hold that full preterism is heretical because it denies the bodily resurrection of believers and the future second coming of Christ. Partial preterism Partial preterism, particularly in its mild variety, has a well-established history. Mild partial preterism “holds that the Tribulation was fulfilled within the first three hundred years of Christianity as God judged two enemies: the Jews in A.D. 70 and Rome by A.D. 313.”395 Moderate partial preterism, such as that advanced by R. C. Sproul, “sees the Tribulation and the bulk of Bible prophecy as fulfilled in the events surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in A.D. 70; but they still hold to a future second coming, a physical resurrection of the dead, an end to temporal history, and the establishment of the consummate new heaven and new earth.”396 Moderate partial preterists believe that “in the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 there was a parousia or coming of Christ [but] it was not the parousia.”397

Historic Premillennialism. Historic premillennialists believe that any doctrine of the millennium must be based on the NT and be consistent with Christ’s present reign. They believe that there will be two bodily resurrections separated by the “thousand years”: the resurrection of the righteous when Christ comes again and then the resurrection of the unrighteous after the thousand years. After that, the eternal state will be instituted.10 (2) Dispensational Premillennialism. Dispensational premillennialists hold that there is a radical distinction between Israel and the church and that all prophecies must be interpreted “literally”: prophetic promises to OT Israel must literally be fulfilled in the physical nation of Israel, not in the church. They view the millennium as the climax of God’s dealings with Israel. They hold that Christ will actually have two “second comings”: the first one, which they call the “pretribulational rapture,” is only “for” his church (i.e., the church will leave the earth and meet Christ in the air and then go back with him to heaven). Later, after the “great tribulation,” Christ will physically come with his church to the earth and set up a thousand-year kingdom in which Israel is dominant.11 They also believe that there will be three resurrections: the first for the righteous dead at the rapture; the second at the end of the tribulation for those saints who have died during the tribulation; and the third at the end of the millennium for the unbelievers.12 After that there will be a great rebellion which Christ will overcome. He will then institute the eternal state.

Though my approach throughout the book will be positive and expository, it is worth noting from the outset that I intend to challenge this dominant paradigm in each of its main constituent parts. In general terms, this view holds the following: (1) that the Jewish context provides only a fuzzy setting, in which ‘resurrection’ could mean a variety of different things; (2) that the earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection, but held a ‘more spiritual’ view; (3) that the earliest Christians believed, not in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/ascension/glorification, in his ‘going to heaven’ in some kind of special capacity, and that they came to use ‘resurrection’ language initially to denote that belief and only subsequently to speak of an empty tomb or of ‘seeing’ the risen Jesus; (4) that the resurrection stories in the gospels are late inventions designed to bolster up this second-stage belief; (5) that such ‘seeings’ of Jesus as may have taken place are best understood in terms of Paul’s conversion experience, which itself is to be explained as a ‘religious’ experience, internal to the subject rather than involving the seeing of any external reality, and that the early Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or hallucination; (6) that whatever happened to Jesus’ body (opinions differ as to whether it was even buried in the first place), it was not ‘resuscitated’, and was certainly not ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that the gospel stories, read at face value, seem to require.11 Of course, different elements in this package are stressed differently by different scholars; but the picture will be familiar to anyone who has even dabbled in the subject, or who has listened to a few mainstream Easter sermons, or indeed funeral sermons, in recent decades.

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence. Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up—that is for young and old alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death? . . . Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace. How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

To summarize, the “outer man” of the believer does not yet experience the saving benefits of union with Christ, either transformative or forensic. So far as I am “outer man,” I am not yet justified (openly), any more than I am resurrected (bodily). And that is so, without diminishing either the reality that I am already and irreversibly justified or the future certainty of my being justified in the resurrection of the body at the final judgment. Here again, in terms of the principle of 2 Corinthians 5:7, I am justified “by faith,” but not (yet) “by sight.

Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble postmortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death.

Patiently, hopefully, actively we are waiting for Jesus. And yet here is the astonishing twist: As we wait for our Lord and the bodily resurrection yet to come for the departed, the world waits for us. As we long for God, the world is longing for God in us.

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence . . . Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

Passover enables us to pause and observe His death in preparation for Easter Sunday. Good Friday and Easter – or Resurrection Sunday – is the crux of our Christian faith and heritage. However, over time this season has been downgraded in our culture to a “Happy Spring,” “Easter Bunny,” and candy-egg sort of event. While the church still emphasizes Easter (hopefully), Americans in general have lost sight of its true meaning. While these other practices may be harmless, they distract from the very reason for the Easter celebration, which is the bodily resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is time to recapture the wonder and rich tradition of this season, beginning with Passover, a purposeful meal around the dinner table.

January 27 MORNING “And of his fulness have all we received.” — John 1:16 THESE words tell us that there is a fulness in Christ. There is a fulness of essential Deity, for “in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead.” There is a fulness of perfect manhood, for in Him, bodily, that Godhead was revealed. There is a fulness of atoning efficacy in His blood, for “the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.” There is a fulness of justifying righteousness in His life, for “there is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” There is a fulness of divine prevalence in His plea, for “He is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by Him; seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.” There is a fulness of victory in His death, for through death He destroyed him that had the power of death, that is the devil. There is a fulness of efficacy in His resurrection from the dead, for by it “we are begotten again unto a lively hope.” There is a fulness of triumph in His ascension, for “when He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and received gifts for men.” There is a fulness of blessings of every sort and shape; a fulness of grace to pardon, of grace to regenerate, of grace to sanctify, of grace to preserve, and of grace to perfect. There is a fulness at all times; a fulness of comfort in affliction; a fulness of guidance in prosperity. A fulness of every divine attribute, of wisdom, of power, of love; a fulness which it were impossible to survey, much less to explore. “It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell.” Oh, what a fulness must this be of which all receive! Fulness, indeed, must there be when the stream is always flowing, and yet the well springs up as free, as rich, as full as ever. Come, believer, and get all thy need supplied; ask largely, and thou shalt receive largely, for this “fulness” is inexhaustible, and is treasured up where all the needy may reach it, even in Jesus, Immanuel — God with us.

The gospel was summarized in the verses above. It is the incarnation, sinless life, substitutionary death, burial, bodily resurrection, ascension, and eternal reign of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

The new king of the Protestant Establishment, featured on the cover of Time, was Reinhold Niebuhr, a New Yorker and bona-fide intellectual comfortable with nuance and ambiguity who didn’t believe in the biblical miracles, including Jesus’s bodily resurrection, or even in individual heavenly eternal life.

Belief in bodily resurrection was one of the two central things that the pagan doctor Galen noted about the Christians (the other being their remarkable sexual restraint).

The New Testament is full of the promise of a world to come in which death itself will be abolished, in which the living God will wipe away all tears from all eyes. The personal hope for resurrection is located within the larger hope for the renewal of all creation, for God’s new heavens and new earth. Take away the bodily resurrection, however, and what are you left with? The development of private spirituality, leading to a disembodied life after death: the denial of the goodness of creation, your own body included. If Jesus’ resurrection involved the abandoning of his body, it would make exactly the wrong metaphorical point.

How can you be a Christian without believing in that?” “I would say,” Juanita says, “how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It’s so National Enquirer-esque, don’t you think?

soul but the physical body (Rom. 8:17, 30). Saint Paul never questions but always affirms the physical, bodily resurrection. The transfiguring Presence of God Himself, however, transforms the human body from an earthen one to a celestial one as the angels possess. But

the pouring out of the Holy Spirit is the glorification of humanity, and this includes not only the soul but the physical body (Rom. 8:17, 30). Saint Paul never questions but always affirms the physical, bodily resurrection. The transfiguring Presence of God Himself, however, transforms the human body from an earthen one to a celestial one as the angels possess. But

So, "God" in the NT is emphatically known as the deity who raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him to glory, which justifies and even demands now that Jesus be proclaimed as "Lord" (e.g., Phil 2:9-11). But God's resurrection of Jesus also serves to signal incomparably this God's great power and purpose, which are to eventuate in a personal/bodily glorification of believers that is patterned after that given to Jesus. Also this resurrection-power is available now to transform believers into true children of "God" (e.g., Eph 1:15–2:10). In short, the conviction that God had raised Jesus seems to have generated remarkably quickly a rich body of theological thought in which God as life giver was central.

This is my body. Broken. This is my blood. Drained. Eat. Drink. Do this in remembrance of me. It is queer and beautiful that some of us belong to a God who tells us to consume his body and blood in remembrance. What do the body and blood have to do with memory? How do they connect us to the story of liberation? It means something that the Euacharist, this lasting ritual of the presence and memory of God, is a physical nourishment as much as it is spiritual. I once went to a church that gave everyone a whole slice of bread and they actually buttered it. It felt wrong, but they had something so right. I love that we don't just bow to the bread, we eat it—the body of God entering our bodies. And I think God's supposed to taste good. That we have managed to regurgitate a Christian spirituality that is anything less than bodily glory, agony, healing, and restoration is our tragedy. I don't think it an accident that we are made to remember God through an act that nourishes us in our own bodies. I've heard much of bodily sacrifice, of taking up a cross, of dying and dying again. But I need to hear of resurrection—of the bodily love of receiving the Eucharist. You want to tell me to love God? Ask me when I've last eaten. Come now, you want me to tell you a prayer? You'll find it in the blood beating from heart to head to toe and home again. Don't ask me of salvation, Listen to the hum of my chest as I now fall asleep. I cannot see the face of God by rejecting my own.

Just like in our bodily resurrection in the end, what we offer the ground as a seed is our dead body, not the gloriously resurrected one. Take note: what we offer Christ is not a transformed life, but simple our life.

The contradictions (antilogia) found in Scripture are apparent, not real; they are to be understood only with respect to us who cannot comprehend and perceive the agreement everywhere, but not in the thing itself. And if the laws of legitimate contradiction are attended to (that opposites should agree with the same thing [tō autō], in the same respect [kata to auto], with reference to the same thing [pros to auto] and in the same time [tō autō chronō]), these various apparent contradictions in Scripture might be easily reconciled. For the discourse does not concern the same thing, as when James ascribes justification to works, which Paul denies to them. For the former speaks of declarative justification of the effect a posteriori, but the latter of justification of the cause, a priori. Thus Luke enjoins mercy, 'Be ye merciful' (Lk. 6:36) which Deuteronomy forbids, 'Thou shalt not pity' (Dt. 19:13). The former refers to private persons, the latter to magistrates. Or they are not said in the same respect, as when Matthew denies the presence of Christ in the world, 'Me ye have not always' (Mt. 26:11*); and yet it is promised, 'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world' (Mt. 28:20). The former is said with regard to his human nature and bodily presence, but the latter with regard to his divine nature and spiritual presence. Or the statements are not made with reference to the same thing, as when something is said absolutely and another comparatively. 'Honor thy father' (Ex. 20:12); 'if any man hate not his father' (Lk. 14:26). The former must be understood absolutely, the latter comparatively for loving less and esteeming less than Christ. Or not in the same time, hence the expression 'distinguish times and you will reconcile Scripture.' Thus at one time circumcision is extolled as a great privilege of the Jews (Rom. 3:1*); at another it is spoken of as a worthless thing (Gal. 5:3). But the former refers to the Old Testament dispensation when it was an ordinary sacrament and a seal of the righteousness of faith, but the latter concerns the time of the gospel after the abrogation of the ceremonial law. At one time the apostles are sent to the Jews alone by a special mission before the passion of Christ and prohibited from going to the Gentiles ('Go not into the way of the Gentiles,' Mt. 10:5); at another they are sent to all nations by a general mission after the resurrection (Mk. 16:15).

The contradictions (antilogia) found in Scripture are apparent, not real; they are to be understood only with respect to us who cannot comprehend and perceive the agreement everywhere, but not in the thing itself. And if the laws of legitimate contradiction are attended to (that opposites should agree with the same thing [tō autō], in the same respect [kata to auto], with reference to the same thing [pros to auto] and in the same time [tō autō chronō]), these various apparent contradictions (enantiophanē) in Scripture might be easily reconciled. For the discourse does not concern the same thing, as when James ascribes justification to works, which Paul denies to them. For the former speaks of declarative justification of the effect a posteriori, but the latter of justification of the cause, a priori. Thus Luke enjoins mercy, 'Be ye merciful' (Lk. 6:36) which Deuteronomy forbids, 'Thou shalt not pity' (Dt. 19:13). The former refers to private persons, the latter to magistrates. Or they are not said in the same respect, as when Matthew denies the presence of Christ in the world, 'Me ye have not always' (Mt. 26:11*); and yet it is promised, 'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world' (Mt. 28:20). The former is said with regard to his human nature and bodily presence, but the latter with regard to his divine nature and spiritual presence. Or the statements are not made with reference to the same thing, as when something is said absolutely and another comparatively. 'Honor thy father' (Ex. 20:12); 'if any man hate not his father' (Lk. 14:26). The former must be understood absolutely, the latter comparatively for loving less and esteeming less than Christ. Or not in the same time, hence the expression 'distinguish times and you will reconcile Scripture.' Thus at one time circumcision is extolled as a great privilege of the Jews (Rom. 3:1*); at another it is spoken of as a worthless thing (Gal. 5:3). But the former refers to the Old Testament dispensation when it was an ordinary sacrament and a seal of the righteousness of faith, but the latter concerns the time of the gospel after the abrogation of the ceremonial law. At one time the apostles are sent to the Jews alone by a special mission before the passion of Christ and prohibited from going to the Gentiles ('Go not into the way of the Gentiles,' Mt. 10:5); at another they are sent to all nations by a general mission after the resurrection (Mk. 16:15).

The contradictions (antilogia) found in Scripture are apparent, not real; they are to be understood only with respect to us who cannot comprehend and perceive the agreement everywhere, but not in the thing itself. And if the laws of legitimate contradiction are attended to (that opposites should agree with the same thing [tō autō], in the same respect [kata to auto], with reference to the same thing [pros to auto] and in the same time [tō autō chronō]), these various apparent contradictions in Scripture might be easily reconciled. For the discourse does not concern the same thing, as when James ascribes justification to works, which Paul denies to them. For the former speaks of declarative justification of the effect a posteriori, but the latter of justification of the cause, a priori. Thus Luke enjoins mercy, 'Be ye merciful' (Lk. 6:36) which Deuteronomy forbids, 'Thou shalt not pity' (Dt. 19:13). The former refers to private persons, the latter to magistrates. Or they are not said in the same respect, as when Matthew denies the presence of Christ in the world, 'Me ye have not always' (Mt. 26:11*); and yet it is promised, 'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world' (Mt. 28:20). The former is said with regard to his human nature and bodily presence, but the latter with regard to his divine nature and spiritual presence. Or the statements are not made with reference to the same thing, as when something is said absolutely and another comparatively. 'Honor thy father' (Ex. 20:12); 'if any man hate not his father' (Lk. 14:26). The former must be understood absolutely, the latter comparatively for loving less and esteeming less than Christ. Or not in the same time, hence the expression 'distinguish times and you will reconcile Scripture.' Thus at one time circumcision is extolled as a great privilege of the Jews (Rom. 3:1*); at another it is spoken of as a worthless thing (Gal. 5:3). But the former refers to the Old Testament dispensation when it was an ordinary sacrament and a seal of the righteousness of faith, but the latter concerns the time of the gospel after the abrogation of the ceremonial law. At one time the apostles are sent to the Jews alone by a special mission before the passion of Christ and prohibited from going to the Gentiles ('Go not into the way of the Gentiles,' Mt. 10:5); at another they are sent to all nations by a general mission after the resurrection (Mk. 16:15).

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul grounds the bodily death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus in the reality of the history of Genesis. It was a real man, Adam, who brought about physical death and corruption into God’s very good world (Genesis 1:31). This is the reason Paul says Jesus came to earth as a real man in order to undo the work of the first man.

This is my body. Broken. This is my blood. Drained. Eat. Drink. Do this in remembrance of me. It is queer and beautiful that some of us belong to a God who tells us to consume his body and blood in remembrance. What do the body and blood have to do with memory? How do they connect us to the story of liberation? It means something that the Euacharist, this lasting ritual of the presence and memory of God, is a physical nourishment as much as it is spiritual. I once went to a church that gave everyone a whole slice of bread and they actually buttered it. It felt wrong, but they had something so right. I love that we don't just bow to the bread, we eat it—the body of God entering our bodies. And I think God's supposed to taste good. That we have managed to regurgitate a Christian spirituality that is anything less than bodily glory, agony, healing, and restoration is our tragedy. I don't think it an accident that we are made to remember God through an act that nourishes us in our own bodies. I've heard much of bodily sacrifice, of taking up a cross, of dying and dying again. But I need to hear of resurrection—of the bodily love of receiving the Eucharist. You want to tell me to love God? Ask me when I've last eaten. Come now, you want me to tell you a prayer? You'll find it in the blood beating from heart to head to toe and home again. Don't ask me of salvation, Listen to the hum of my chest as I now fall asleep. I cannot see the face of God by rejecting my own.

This is to affirm that since the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, he is present bodily in the world through his people.

That’s why it’s so important to pay our respects to deceased friends and relatives at the cemetery. Sometimes you hear people say that they don’t think that’s necessary because the person’s “not really there,” that he or she is “with God,” or that the best thing to do is “say a prayer” for the person’s soul. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it’s only half true. As we’ve said, after someone dies, only part of the person is with God. The other part—the person’s body—is still here with us on Earth. When we visit someone at the cemetery, we are showing that we understand and believe this truth: that the person we loved is not just a spirit, that he or she is going to be a whole person once again. Justin Martyr, writing a little more than one hundred years after Christ’s own bodily resurrection, summed it up perfectly: “If God has called humans to life and resurrection, he has called not a part, but a whole—and that is the soul and the body.

So, then, since the person you are and the world God has made will be gloriously reaffirmed in God’s eventual future, you must be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord’s work, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.” Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess.

THE COMPANY INSPECTOR SAID, “You’ve been high-grading, Webb.” “Who don’t walk out of here with rocks in their dinner pail?” “Maybe over in Telluride, but not in this mine.” Webb looked at the “evidence” and said, “You know this was planted onto me. One of your finks over here. Maybe even you, Cap’n—” “Watch what you say.” “—no damned inspector yet ain’t taken a nugget when he thought he could.” Teeth bared, almost smiling. “Oh? seen a lot of that in your time?” “Everybody has. What’re we bullshittin’ about, here, really?” The first blow came out of the dark, filling Webb’s attention with light and pain. IT WAS TO BE a trail of pain, Deuce trying to draw it out, Sloat, closer to the realities of pain, trying to move it along. “Thought we ‘s just gonna shoot him simple and leave him where he fell.” “No, this one’s a special job, Sloat. Special handling. You might say we’re in the big time now.” “Looks like just some of the usual ten-day trash to me, Deuce.” “Well that’s where you’d be wrong. It turns out Brother Traverse here is a major figure in the world of criminal Anarchism.” “Of what’s that again?” “Apologies for my associate, the bigger words tend to throw him. You better get a handle on ‘Anarchism’ there, Sloat, because it’s the coming thing in our field. Piles of money to be made.” Webb just kept quiet. It didn’t look like these two were fixing to ask him any questions, because neither had spared him any pain that he could tell, pain and information usually being convertible, like gold and dollars, practically at a fixed rate. He didn’t know how long he’d hold out in any case if they really wanted to start in. But along with the pain, worse, he guessed, was how stupid he felt, what a hopeless damn fool, at just how deadly wrong he’d been about this kid. Before, Webb had only recognized it as politics, what Veikko called “procedure”—accepting that it might be necessary to lay down his life, that he was committed as if by signed contract to die for his brothers and sisters in the struggle. But now that the moment was upon him . . . Since teaming up, the partners had fallen into a division of labor, Sloat tending to bodies, Deuce specializing more in harming the spirit, and thrilled now that Webb was so demoralized that he couldn’t even look at them. Sloat had a railroad coupling pin he’d taken from the D.&R.G. once, figuring it would come in handy. It weighed a little over seven pounds, and Sloat at the moment was rolling it in a week-old copy of the Denver Post. “We done both your feet, how about let’s see your hands there, old-timer.” When he struck, he made a point of not looking his victim in the face but stayed professionally focused on what it was he was aiming to damage. Webb found himself crying out the names of his sons. From inside the pain, he was distantly surprised at a note of reproach in his voice, though not sure if it had been out loud or inside his thoughts. He watched the light over the ranges slowly draining away. After a while he couldn’t talk much. He was spitting blood. He wanted it over with. He sought Sloat’s eyes with his one undamaged one, looking for a deal. Sloat looked over at Deuce. “Where we headed for, li’l podner?” “Jeshimon.” With a malignant smile, meant to wither what spirit remained to Webb, for Jeshimon was a town whose main business was death, and the red adobe towers of Jeshimon were known and feared as the places you ended up on top of when nobody wanted you found. “You’re going over into Utah, Webb. We happen to run across some Mormon apostles in time, why you can even get baptized, get a bunch of them proxy wives what they call sealed on to you, so’s you’ll enjoy some respect among the Saints, how’s that, while you’re all waiting for that good bodily resurrection stuff.” Webb kept gazing at Sloat, blinking, waiting for some reaction, and when none came, he finally looked away.

In the 1220s, Solomon of Basra responded wearily to the painful literalism with which many lesser thinkers read biblical metaphors: The things which certain stupid men invent, who indulge their fancy, and give bodily form to the punishment of sinners and the reward of the just and righteous, and say that there is at the resurrection a reckoning and a pair of scales, the Church does not receive; but each one of us carries his light and his fire within him, and his heaviness and his lightness is found in his own nature. Just as stone and iron naturally possess the property of falling to the earth, and as the air naturally ascends upward on account of its rarity and its lightness; so also in the resurrection, he that is heavy and lying in sins, his sins will bring him down; and he that is free from the rust of sin, his purity will make him rise in the scale.

In his more recent writings, Ehrman (2014, p. 149) has conceded, ‘it is in theory possible even to say that Jesus was crucified, and buried, and then he was seen alive, bodily, afterward.’ However, he insists, What is not a plausible historical conclusion is that God raised Jesus into an immortal body and took him up to heaven where he sits on a throne at his right hand. That conclusion is rooted in all sorts of theological views that are not widely shared among historians, and so is a matter of faith, not historical knowledge.

Conversely, in Judeo-Christian faith, the human body is not an ill-designed “meat sack,” as transhumans so often deride. We were made in God’s image to be temples of His Holy Spirit. The incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ and His bodily resurrection are the centerpieces of the gospel and attest to this magnificent fact. While in our fallen condition human suffering is reality,

that devil who of old wickedly exulted in death, now that the pains of death are loosed, he alone it is who remains truly dead. There is proof of this too; for men who, before they believe in Christ, think death horrible and are afraid of it, once they are converted despise it so completely that they go eagerly to meet it, and themselves become witnesses of the Savior’s resurrection from it. Even children hasten thus to die, and not men only, but women train themselves by bodily discipline to meet it. So weak has death become that even women, who used to be taken in by it, mock at it now as a dead thing robbed of all its strength. Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot the passers-by sneer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king who has conquered him. So has death been conquered and branded for what it is by the Savior on the cross. It is bound hand and foot, all who are in Christ trample it as they pass and as witnesses to Him deride it, scoffing and saying, “O Death, where is thy victory? O Grave, where is thy sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). (28) Is this a slender proof of the impotence of death, do you think? Or is it a slight indication of the Savior’s victory over it, when boys and young girls who are in Christ look beyond this present life and train themselves to die?

Expressive association In the United States, expressive associations are groups that engage in activities protected by the First Amendment – speech, assembly, press, petitioning government for a redress of grievances, and the free exercise of religion. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees, the U.S. Supreme Court held that associations may not exclude people for reasons unrelated to the group's expression. However, in the subsequent decisions of Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, the Court ruled that a group may exclude people from membership if their presence would affect the group's ability to advocate a particular point of view. The government cannot, through the use of anti-discrimination laws, force groups to include a message that they do not wish to convey. However, this concept does not now apply in the University setting due to the Supreme Court's ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which upheld Hastings College of Law policy that the school's conditions on recognizing student groups were viewpoint neutral and reasonable. The policy requires student organizations to allow "any student to participate, become a member, or seek leadership positions, regardless of their status or beliefs" and so, can be used to deny the group recognition as an official student organization because it had required its members to attest in writing that "I believe in: The Bible as the inspired word of God; The Deity of our Lord, Jesus Christ, God's son; The vicarious death of Jesus Christ for our sins; His bodily resurrection and His personal return; The presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the work of regeneration; [and] Jesus Christ, God's son, is Lord of my life." The Court reasoned that because this constitutional inquiry occurs in the education context the same considerations that have led the Court to apply a less restrictive level of scrutiny to speech in limited public forums applies. Thus, the college's all-comers policy is a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access to the student organization forum.

The very implausibility of the restoration of pared down fingernails and amputated limbs at the end of time underlines, for me, the despicableness of human beings who, in fact, torture and mutilate their fellow human beings. Yet, the implausible, even risible doctrine of the resurrection of the body asserts that—if there is such a thing as redemption—it must redeem our experience of enduring and even inflicting such acts. If there is meaning to the history we tell and the corruption (both moral and physical) we suffer, surely it is in (as well as in spite of) fragmentation. Bodily resurrection at the end of time is, in a technical sense, a comic—that is, a contrived and brave—happy ending.

The Christian solution therefore is not the destruction of the material world, but its redemption, so that it is restored to its created goodness. We see the firstfruits of this restoration in the healing miracles that Jesus performed, in Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead, and in the giving of his Spirit to dwell within the bodies of those who trust in him. We will see its fulfilment when Jesus comes again and the dead are raised to live in a renewed heaven and earth.

The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead is not an old-fashioned thing. It tells us that God loves the whole man and the whole man is important. The biblical teaching, therefore, opposes the Platonic, which makes the soul (the “upper”) very important and leaves the body (the “lower”) with little importance at all. The biblical view also opposes the humanist position where the body and autonomous mind of man become important and grace becomes very unimportant.

Since the initial bestowal of the forgiveness of sins coincides with the fallen creature's passage from spiritual death to eternal life, both it and its renewal in absolution and Holy communion are inseparable from God's consequent action to preserve the life restored in Christ. And because bodily death stems from the sin whose seat is in the soul, apprehending the forgiveness of sins necessarily flowers in the resurrection of the body which suffers death for the soul's offense.

Hakim records on the authority of Jabir that the Prophet (sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) said that Jibril said, “A servant worshipped Allah on the top of a mountain, in the middle of an ocean, for five hundred years. Then he asked his Lord to let him die in the state of prostration. We used to pass by him each time we would descend and ascend and we would find written in the (pre-eternal knowledge) that he would be resurrected on the Day of Judgment and would stand before Allah, Mighty and Magnificent. The Lord would say, ‘Enter My servant into Paradise by virtue of My mercy.’ The servant will say, ‘My Lord, rather by virtue of my deeds!’ This will happen three times, then Allah will say to His angels, ‘Weigh my favours against his deeds,’ and they will find that the blessing of sight alone takes up all the deeds he did during his five hundred years of worship, with the other bodily blessings still remaining. He will say, ‘Enter My servant into the Fire!’ He will be dragged towards the Fire and will cry out, ‘Enter me into Paradise by virtue of Your mercy! Enter me into Paradise by virtue of Your mercy!’ Thereupon he shall enter Paradise.” Jibril went on to say, “Muhammad, things only happen by the mercy of Allah.” [Hakim #7637]

Another group of gnostics, called Sethians because they identified themselves as sons of Seth, the third child of Adam and Eve, say that the disciples, deluded by “a very great error,” imagined that Christ had risen from the dead in bodily form. But the risen Christ appeared to “a few of these disciples, who he recognized were capable of understanding such great mysteries,”86 and taught them to understand his resurrection in spiritual, not physical, terms.

Ladd understands ezesan in verses 4 and 5 as meaning bodily resurrection in both instances. In support of this interpretation he points to two other passages in the book of Revelation whereezesan has this meaning: 2:8 and 13:14.

The fact of Christ's resurrection is the basis of our faith; the promise of our own resurrection is the basis of our hope. A merciful God wants to share his very life with us; and his Son shapes that life to conform to his own, even in his bodily reality.

As we discussed earlier, the gospel is “folly to Gentiles” (1Co 1:23) not only because of its message (namely, a crucified Messiah crowned King of kings in his bodily resurrection as the beginning of the new creation) but because of its very form.

When God’s Son took on flesh, he truly and bodily took on, out of pure grace, our being, our nature, ourselves. This was the eternal counsel of the triune God. Now we are in him. Where he is, there we are too, in the incarnation, on the cross, and in his resurrection. We belong to him because we are in him. That is why the Scriptures call us the Body of Christ.5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Paul concludes his description of the Lord’s Supper with the words “for whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). The meal that believers regularly celebrated was not just a celebration of Jesus’s death and resurrection; it also looked forward to his glorious return. Though Jesus is spiritually present at the meal, he is physically absent from the church. The church thus waits for the bodily return of Jesus to raise believers to life, to bring judgment, and to establish an everlasting kingdom.