• Archive of "Eschatology" Category

    I Want My Body!

    July 8, 2009 // No Comments »

    Robert Harrison is the host of Entitled Opinions, which is for my money the best podcast on the web. He had this to say in a recent episode entitled “Epilogue: The Earthly Paradise”:

    …for human beings happiness outside of the body is very difficult to imagine, and impossible to desire. We can desire deliverance from the body, and desire it very ardently, but that’s another matter. The best proof of this in my mind is the fact that the beatified souls, the saints in Dante’s Paradise, anticipate with a surplus of joy the resurrection of their flesh at the end of time. One could say that their bliss in heaven is incomplete in fact until they recover in time what time has robbed them of: namely their personal identities which were bound up with their flesh. So, as I tell my students sometimes when I teach Dante, all of us on earth insofar as we are in our bodies, are more blessed than the saints in Dante’s heaven.

    We can’t desire happiness outside our embodied existence. We can try to imagine it, but it’s probably an exercise in futility. We can, as Harrison points out, ardently desire deliverance from our bodies and all the limits, risks, joys, and uncertainties we are confronted with on a daily basis as a result of indwelling them. Buddhism, Hinduism and Platonism all offer this hope, and with good reason, as do all the those who deny any afterlife. Those that would advocate the afterlife’s denial are clearly a minority in our human history. But their case, when compared with pictures of eternity sans our bodies, whether they come in Eastern or Western forms, seems far more down to earth. So we are left with a decision. We either hope for a future life where all the happiness and goodness we have know is left behind and we go on existing without our fleshly mortal coils. Or we can deny any future eternity after death, fixing our hopes, dreams, and yes our happiness on what we can do in the limited span of years we are given to function.

    Then there’s the Christian and Jewish hope: resurrection. Resurrection is neither the denial of the future life, nor does it have much in common with the stories about our eternal destiny that want us to be uncomfortable “in our own skin”. The biblical promise of redemption doesn’t merely involve  the resurrection of our bodies and with it the assurance that there remains a future for our old friend our body. It involves the promise that embodied existence will continue, but in a way better than we could hope or dream. What would it mean to meet our bodies again for the first time?

    Posted in Eschatology

    Suprised By Colbert

    June 26, 2008 // No Comments »

    N.T. Wright on the Colbert Report. Must watch….

    Posted in Bible, Culture, Eschatology