Around Easter, I was in another discussion about the necessity of the resurrection for the hope proclaimed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There is a perpetual tension I find between people who believe two different kinds of things about the hope that the Gospel, or "Good News of Jesus", offers us for the end of physical life. The first cluster of ideas is that a general faith in personal existence after death is sufficient for the Gospel, and all we need to affirm is that "we go to heaven when we die". The second cluster of ideas is that the Gospel entails a much more particular hope that in Christ we will be resurrected and re-embodied in a New Creation at the end of all things. I trend strongly toward the second cluster of ideas for both Biblical reasons and the philosophical implications of resurrection for full human flourishing.
The Biblical rationale is fairly easy to find and understand. The overall message of the New Testament is that we look forward to resurrection in Christ, not merely a postmortem existence in "heaven". Perhaps the most important passage that illustrates this is also the oldest narrative of the resurrection in the New Testament, from the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians in the late 50's CE:
1Corinthians 15.3–7, 12–15, 20–28: [3] For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, [4] and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, [5] and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. [6] Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. [7] Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles...
[12] Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? [13] If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; [14] and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. [15] We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised…
[20] But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. [21] For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; [22] for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. [23] But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. [24] Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. [25] For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. [26] The last enemy to be destroyed is death... [28] So that God may be all in all.
Thus, this passage, along with a smattering of other New Testament passages, strongly affirms that the Christian Hope after death is not merely spiritual existence in heaven (whatever that may mean), but an embodied existence with and in Christ. But what is more interesting to me here is WHY this hope is the way it is. What is it about resurrection that not only fits better with Scripture, but also fits better with the nature of being human, and the needs that humans have? Biblical scholar and Anglican bishop NT Wright has made a whole career of this argument. And since I’ve been reading Wright for around 2 decades, I’ve thought a lot about this. And here's some of the reasons I've come to, both Biblically and philosophically:
On one hand I think Heaven language is vague and bland and fairly meaningless. The two key weaknesses of Heaven language are: 1. That it paints the next life as less substantial and less real than this life, rather than more substantial and more real than this life. Heaven is a kind of bright shadow of this world, rather than the fulfillment and culmination of it. 2. This is primarily because Heaven language envisions us as disembodied spiritual “angels”, rather than re-embodied resurrected humans.
On the other hand, correcting Heaven language can often come off as scolding and superior and, well, not very humble. It can easily sound like a theological version of the mansplaining “well actually” guy. And that’s not a good look. Especially since 99.9999% of us have never actually experienced what it is like to be resurrected.
Sure, we can say that being resurrected is a form of re-embodiment, and it is more substantial and more real than our experience of embodied life now. We can say it is analogous to Jesus’ resurrected body, which according to the Gospels was both substantial (touchable, able to eat and cook and touch others, etc.) while also being able to transcend our normal three dimensional space (appearing in locked rooms, ascending to the right hand of God, etc.). And we can say that the New Creation is something analogous to this, except for all of creation and not just our individual bodies.
But beyond this, what else can we really say?
Even the great Saint Paul gets flummoxed and tongue tied when trying to describe what the resurrection body is like in places like 1Corinthians 15 which I quoted in part above. In the part I did not quote he tries to explain what the resurrection body is like. Paul lumps metaphor upon metaphor, but never clearly defines the resurrection body in a clearly delineated way. He just says it is “like” several things, but in a kind of analogous or even apophatic way. In 1Corinthians 15.35–50 Paul attempts to do this using a series of binary comparisons:
But all of these terms and metaphors have been the subject of endless debate and dissection and digression. Yes, we can say that resurrection is some kind of embodiment analogous to the Risen Jesus of the Gospels. But beyond this, it is hard to specify. And getting to this level of non-specificity takes a great deal of reading, analyzing, and intellectual subtlety. Most people don’t have the time or the intellectual firepower to engage in a debate that doesn’t yield too much fruit (other than resurrection is super-substantial re-embodiment). So, when they speak of Heaven it usually is just a mental shortcut for (a) the life after this life; and (b) where God lives.
The take home for me? I used to despise Heaven language and I would do the “well actually” treatment in introducing the resurrection. I didn’t find a lot of fruit from this. I found it did not work well to use “No/Instead” kinds of arguments where I say “No Heaven is a bad concept, instead think only in terms of resurrection”. Primarily this is because Heaven is used around 600 times in English Bibles and it’s confusing to simply negate this language. It is hard to get most people to believe Heaven is a pipe dream when it is mentioned regularly in the text itself. Rather, I’ve moved to “Yes-And” kinds of arguments. YES, Heaven is used in Scripture to speak of God’s abode and sometimes to refer to the life after this life. AND scripture goes on to further specify that the final destination of the next life is resurrection, where all creation is re-embodied in a super-substantial way in God’s New Creation.
Beyond Scriptural assertions of the goodness of matter (cf. Genesis 1) and the re-embodied nature of resurrection (cf. 1Corinthians 15), these ideas can be accessed by a fairly simple philosophical argument:
Resurrection is a corollary of the need for selves to be embodied, and the goodness of matter is a corollary of embodiment.
The self (or "soul") is at least a nexus of experience, in which the flow of sensations, feelings, thoughts, and ideas is experienced as "I" or "me" who has an inner world and is able to react and decide based on experience.
The self has no way to interact with a reality external to the self, unless it has a body. To have sensations of anything, a self needs to have senses which perceive the world external to the self. And to have senses, one must have a body of some type. We could speak of an objective, external, shared world of experiences compared with a subjective, inner, private world of experiences. The point of interaction between the objective and subjective is the body.
Without the body, there is no way to relate to objects in an external world. Without the body, there is no way to relate to other selves. Without a body, the only kind of "other self" a self could interact with would be an Omnipresent Self which can directly appear within the thoughts of the individual self. This of course would be "God" directly interacting with the self.
If "God" is real, it seems that "God" wants the individual self to interact with other selves beyond "God". This is glimpsed by (a) the fact that we all have an experience of embodied life in an objective reality shared with other embodied selves; (b) the fact that all of the Great and Time Tested Spiritual Paths insist that there is a Divine Dimension of Reality which desires selves to be embodied and interact within a larger world.
So we are left with two options regarding the self and the body: First, it could be the case that there is a "God" (omnipresent self) who desires the individual self to be embodied within a larger world which is the Creation of God. Second, it could be the case that even without "God" the individual self needs a body to experience and interact with a larger world which includes other selves to interact with. Either way, the body is the NECESSARY completion of the individual self.
Since the body is a necessity, then that which makes the necessity actual is therefore good. If a cup of tea requires (1) a cup, (2) tea leaves, and (3) boiling water to become actual, then 1, 2, and 3 are "goods" which enable the cup of tea to exist. Likewise, if an objective body is necessary to complete the individual subjective self, then whatever is necessary to make the objective body actual is good. And in order for an objective body to exist, some type of publicly sensible matter is needed to make up bodies, and the objective shared world that bodies exist within.
Or put another way: An objective world is a kind of spacetime in which objects can interact. Matter is that which has extension in spacetime, such that it can become an object with location and coordinates, and interact with other objects that have location and coordinates. Thus, spacetime and matter are “good” as that which allows bodies to exist in a shared world, which in turn allows selves to interact with each other, to experience, to learn, and to grow so they fulfill their potential. This is one philosophical rationale to make sense of the repeated insistence in the first creation poem that creation is “good… good… good… good… good… good… very good” (Genesis 1).
And it is important to note that matter is still good and necessary despite its limitations. Because in order for matter to create bodies which fulfill individual selves, then that matter must necessarily be finite. If it was infinite, filling all things in all ways, there would be no way to differentiate individuals from one another so that they may interact and relate to one another. So, at a minimum, matter must be finite in space, thereby allowing multiple finite bodies to exist in a spatial environment, and thus relate to one another. A similar argument may be made regarding time and matter necessarily NOT existing for an infinite, unending amount of time. And since it appears spacetime is one unified reality, a finite limitation on space also implies a finite limitation on time as well.
However, finitude has certain costs. Although matter is inherently good, finitude implies that matter comes to an end, both spatially and temporally. Furthermore, finite material entities rely on finite material resources to continue existing. This implies that individual selves embodied in matter will need to use other material resources to continue existing, or enhance existence. And this implies that they also could misuse such resources, perhaps including the bodies of other selves. The reality of material limitations and the possibility of individual misuse of matter thus implies the possibility of pain and suffering, both physically (in the body) and internally (in the self).
Furthermore, if selves exist as part of communities in material environments, this entails that vast systems of pain and suffering could affect selves across the environment. And when we turn from this abstract meditation on the nature of selves, bodies, and matter, to our own embodied experience, we see this is in fact the case. Life in our actual material world, while often including meaningful relationships and joy, also includes vast amounts of pain and suffering and death (the ending of embodied life).
But pain and suffering and death seem to be definitionally evil. They are states of being avoided by all embodied creatures that we can observe. Furthermore, if there is a "God" who desires for embodied creatures to exist, then pain and suffering and death are contrary to this Divine desire. So we have the deep paradox of theodicy found in the fact that what is definitionally good (selves, bodies, matter) inevitably leads to what is definitionally evil (pain, suffering, death). What is needed then is an Ultimate Reality which not only participates in this paradox of theodicy, but also will finally heal and restore the problems inherent in this theodicy, in order to transform it into maximal life. This is precisely what happens in the Incarnation of God in Christ, and the resurrection wrought through the Incarnation. It is the necessary and final completion of matter and embodiment.
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