What kind of resurrection?

Christians have two central beliefs about life after death. The first is that we believe in the “resurrection of the body” and this belief is rooted in the prior and more foundational belief in Jesus’ resurrection as the “first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (I Cor. 15:20). Because Christ has been raised we believe we will be raised to live with him in eternal blessedness.

Things get messy, of course, when we try to spell this out in greater detail. Generally there are two extreme views on the resurrection that most Christians would want to rule out. The first is an extreme physicalist or literalist view that sees the resurrection as an actual re-constitution of Christ’s (and our) selfsame body. In ages past believers perhaps took too literally images of the dead rising from their graves, leading to debates about what would happen at the resurrection to someone whose body had been consumed by a wild animal and suchlike (though this picture was often qualified by theologians).

The other extreme is to see the resurrection entirely as a metaphor, perhaps as a special insight or “faith experience” that the disciples had after the crucifixion which provided them with a new insight into the nature of God. Certain strains of process theology also tend toward this extreme by seeing resurrection as God’s eternal remembrance of us, without conscious personal existence.

As Keith Ward argues, the biblical witness supports neither a purely physicalist account nor a purely subjectivist account of the resurrection. Adverting to Paul’s discussion in First Corinthians of the “spiritual body,” Ward argues that the resurrection body will be a body fitted to the radically different environment in which the resurrected will live:

A body is what enables us to communicate and live with others in a community, what enables us to express our thoughts and feelings, and act in a common world. The physical bodies we have are carbon-based compounds, made of the dust of dying stars, and subject to all the laws of this space-time universe. Could we, the very people we are, with all our thoughts and feelings, not have different sorts of bodies, bodies not made of carbon, and not part of this space-time universe? Could we live in another universe, another environment, where our thoughts and feelings could be expressed more fully, and where we could act in freer and more communal ways?

That is exactly what the Bible teaches–that we can and will live in such another universe, a spiritual universe of incorruptibility, glory, and power. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” says the visionary John (Rev. 21:1). In that new universe, there will be no more sea, and no sun, moon, or night. Even allowing for the poetic metaphors, this is obviously quite a different universe. Nature will be different, and its laws will be different. … So Paul’s teaching is that there will be a renewal of the universe, and we will live in it in a renewed, quite different, form. If we have a truly Biblical view of resurrection, we must never think of it in terms of bodies climbing out of tombs, or of the resuscitation of our physical bodies. The resurrection will not be in this universe at all. It will be the creation of a new universe, and we will be strange new creatures, related to our present selves and bodies as wheat is related to its seed. (What the Bible Really Teaches, pp. 145-6)

Ward thinks that the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection reinforce this idea of both continuity and radical change between the physical and spiritual body. Though the risen Christ is tangible and even eats, he also appears mysteriously in locked rooms and is apparently able to make himself unrecognizable to his disciples. Clearly the resurrection body transcends the constraints of physciality in significant ways. The way to think of the resurrection, he suggest, is not as something less than physical, like a ghost or disembodied soul, but as more than physical – a fulness of being of which physicality as we know it is a mere shadow. A similar idea is explored in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, where heaven and its inhabitants are portrayed as more solid and real than the shades visiting from hell/purgatory (it’s actually painful for the ghosts to walk on the heavenly grass!).

Resurrection, Ward says, is actually a transfiguration of the material, not a denial of it. It unveils the universe as God intends it to be:

The Christian view stands between views that see this materialon of the material, not a denial of it. It unveils the universe as God intends it to be: universe as the only thing there is, and views that see spiritual reality as lying in complete separation from the material. The Biblical position is that the physical cosmos is where persons originate. Persons are truly part of the physical world. Their decisions help to make that world what it is, and also shape their own characters as they grow and develop. But the physical world itself is to be transformed by God into a spiritual world, which will be the fulfillment as well as the transformation of its possibilities and its actualized states. As Paul puts it, “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom. 8:22). (pp.153-4)