Whenever one discusses the soul and life after death, sooner or later someone will point out that “Christians don’t believe in the immortality of the soul, they believe in the resurrection of the body.”
I think any objective observer would concede that biblical studies and theology are no more immune to fads and trends than other intellectual disciplines, and for some time now it has been fashionable to downplay the Hellenistic elements in Christianity and emphasize the Judaic ones. No doubt there are sound intellectual reasons for this, but it also seems to be driven in part by a political agenda. After all, Hellenism (and especially Greek philosophy) is identified with bad, oppressive, logocentric, patriarchal Western civilization. Whereas Judaism can easily be identified with oppressed and marginalized people, and so (therefore?) Jewish metaphysics is deemed somehow superior or more life-affirming than those wicked old Greeks. Judaism, so it goes, has a holisitic outlook that affirms the body and the created world, while Greek philosophy sought the disembodied soul’s flight from the world.
Anyway, let it be stipulated that Christians do indeed believe in the resurrection of the body. I mean, it’s right there in the creed and everything, and when Jesus appeared to the disciples after his Resurrection he made a point of letting them know that he was not a ghost or a disembodied soul, even going so far as to eat fish and invite Thomas to poke around in his innards. So there you go.
The emphasis on the resurrection of the body is also often held to be more compatible with the “modern scientific worldview,” and especially neuroscience which clearly shows the strong connection between our conscious states and the physical states of our brains.
However, troubles begin when one tries to seriously think about what is involved in the notion of resurrection. I take it that no one today adheres to the old-fashioned view that God will literally raise my physical body out of the grave, a la Night of the Living Dead (except happier). Obviously, the bodies of millions of people no longer exist except as particles dispersed throughout the world (many of them, no doubt, presently lodged in other, currently existing bodies).
So, it seems we’re driven to the now popular view that God will, at the Last Judgment or immediately after death, provide me with a “new” body. (Augustine said that our resurrection bodies would be our bodies at the age of 30 – our supposed physical peak – but I’m hoping for one with more hair.) The idea that God gives us new imperishable bodies also seems consistent with Paul’s talk of a “spiritual body.”
But, who is the “me” that receives the new body? It seems that we need some principle of continuity between my earthly life and the resurrection life that ensures that it is I who experiences that life. This is where most Christian philosophers have suggested that the soul is necessary. Since the soul is the essential part of me that bears my identity, when the soul is clothed with the glorious resurrection body, it is the same person who lived on earth.
Some philosophers who deny the existence of a soul and take a materialistic view of the human person (i.e. that humans are composed entirely of material parts) have suggested that God could at the resurrection simply “re-create” me anew. That is, God would create a person who is identical with me in certain crucial respects (memory, personality, etc.) and this person simply is me resurrected.
The obvious rejoinder is that such a person would not in fact be me, but would simply be a copy of me (though presumably different in important respects, such as having an immortal body). Intuitively, this seems to me like a strong objection. Imagine that instead of waiting until I died, God were to create such a person now in heaven. Would that person be me? I think we’d all say not – I’m me! But suppose that I then died, would that person then become me? But why would that person now have a claim to be me, rather than a person who merely resembles me in certain important ways? But if that’s the case, then what reason do we have to think that a resurrection copy of me created after I died is me? I think this shows that our sense of personal identity is strongly bound up with the notion that there needs to be some kind of substantial continuity between my earthly self and my resurrection self.
Some non-dualist Christian philosophers have seen the force of this objection and have looked for ways to introduce some principle of continuity between the earthly self and the resurrection self. Peter van Inwagen has gone so far as to speculate that at death God miraculously transports our cerebral cortex (or however much of it that would be necessary to ensure continuity of identity) to heaven, while replacing it with a duplicate! (In case anyone were to look in the grave, God wouldn’t want them to discover a missing cerebral cortex!) This looks a little desperate, and may incline one to think that there’s something to be said for dualism after all, at least from a theological perspective.
I don’t mean to suggest that any particular view of the mind-body relation is obligatory for Christian theology. Obviously the whole topic is rife with mystery, and there’s much that we can’t know. But there are good reasons, I think, for saying that appeals to the resurrection of the body, however essential, don’t necessarily settle the issue of the existence of the soul.
A Thinking Reed 
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