Thread by @kennethtanner

THREAD: I find it amusing, this great befuddlement that befalls some intelligent Christians when it comes to the definition of resurrection.

On Holy Saturday the New York Times published an interview with the president of Union Theological Seminary in which she mentioned Christian “obsession” with the physicality of our Lord’s resurrection.

Count me among the obsessed.

There are so many witnesses in the New Testament but John’s witness that Jesus Christ ate with his disciples, and his words to Thomas that “a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you *see* I *have*”, takes the guess work out of it.

This is someone who remains flesh of our flesh & bone of our bone *beyond* death, the grave & hell. Yes, the body of Jesus Christ walks through walls & vanishes &—before resurrection—walks on water. There is great mystery here, no doubt, but we’re talking about embodied mystery.

One doesn’t have to be a skeptic or a confused cleric, this is not about a class of over thinkers. No, misunderstanding of the resurrection is ubiquitous among a wide variety of believing American Christians, who have a tendency to make a ghost of Jesus...

...who tend to think of Jesus as bodiless in eternity, a state many American Christians consider superior to embodiment. Americans in general have a fundamental philosophical misapprehension of human nature that assumes we are mere ghosts in machines/spirits in a material prison.

Whereas Christian anthropology trusts—insists—that our created earthiness is essential to our humanity, now and for eternity; that one does not have resurrection without a body, even if that body has a transfigured physics.

As Cyril reminds us, echoing Paul, if Jesus does not rise again in a body of flesh—not only for a moment but forever—then death is not defeated, neither is the sin that bound in the grave and in hell everyone who shares human nature.

The first Christians are clear about this: the one human nature we all share has been rescued from death by the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is not a small matter where different opinions and perspectives are allowed.

You can struggle with its enormity and not comprehend it (who does), and doubting is part of being human—the “ants in the pants” of faith, as Buechner reminds us—and talking about and debating the mystery of it all is part of having faith in community with other persons, but...

...that resurrection involves cells and skin and eyes and tongues and hearts and lungs (“he breathed on them”) and empty tombs because transfigured material bodies have somehow escaped them is a settled matter for Christians.

Yes, it’s spiritual and mysterious and beyond science and nature, and, yes, the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ is an apt metaphor now for existence and nature and our personal struggles—yes,now death is the not the end of anything or anyone, resurrection is!—but...

...resurrection as a word has that *power* because death is defeated when this one human is raised bodily and brings us all with him.

correction: his words to *his disciples in Luke (not Thomas)