This week, Jamie continues discussing what happens after death, focusing now on the state of bodily resurrection.
Jamie Dew: Everybody, I'm Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And I'm Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: And welcome back to our podcast. Now, since I'm doing our podcast, the towel in the basement.
Joe Fontenot: Yes. We are really picking up. This is another part in this question, we've been looking at life after death. The first one, we just looked at, the Christian doctrine of life after death, the general teaching of the church and all this kind of stuff. And then you opened up, basically, there's two different forms of this text. There's the intermediate state, which is right after we die, and this was all of what we did last podcast. So if anybody's listening to this now and they haven't listened to last one, it's best to go back and listen to the last one, because it's very helpful. It talks about a lot of interesting things there, but now, we're switching to this idea of a bodily resurrection. This is the other form of life after death. So, here's my question. What happens? Tell me about this.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Bodily resurrection. We've made the case, as you pointed out, for really life after death from a Christian standpoint has two phases to it. There's the intermediate state, that's the last podcast. Certainly go back and listen to that if you haven't listened to that yet. You want to really understand what's going on there. And then after this intermediate state, which what we said there was, this is a season, a phase of existence, if you will, where the soul exists disembodied from the body and it exists there in the presence of Christ waiting and longing for Christ to finish his work. Now, the Christian tradition says not only that Jesus has come once 2000 years ago, but that he is coming again, Book of Revelation. So now we're getting into the end time stuff, eschatology or what we call the eschaton. Eschaton is just the end of it all, when it all comes to an end.
Essentially, what Christianity teaches is that after these souls have been resting in the presence of Christ for however long, that's going to be that Jesus returns to the earth. This is where rapture and all of those types of things are going to happen. And I am not an expert on the timetables of all that stuff, but essentially when he returns, what we are told is that the dead in Christ are going to raise, which means that the physical bodies that we once inhabited on this earth now all of a sudden come back to life and they are re-embodied or re-ensouled by the soul, and that we, the whole person, body and soul live again in the eschaton. And so, there's a bodily resurrection.
Now, some people think, well, maybe it's a spiritual resurrection of some kind. And I would probably point out here, no, that really doesn't seem to be what Christianity has been teaching for 2000 years. I would base that in this debate on whether or not it's just purely spiritual thing or physical thing. I would offer several lines of evidence in response.
First of all, the Jewish tradition itself that Jesus aligns with as he teaches about the bodily resurrection, itself was a tradition that affirmed physical resurrection, not just some kind of spiritual resurrection. So, as I mentioned, I think in one of the previous podcasts, in Jesus' day, there had been this ongoing debate throughout the Jewish tradition and this idea of life after death evolves, if you will, throughout the Jewish tradition. And essentially by the time you get to Jesus' day, there's two schools of thought. The school of thought, one, from the Sadducees who deny that there's a resurrection and the Pharisees for all the times that he disagrees with the Pharisees and pushes on them. This is a place where Jesus actually aligns with the Pharisees by affirming the resurrection of the dead. And so, that tradition is a tradition that Jesus is aligning with there that affirms a bodily resurrection.
Second thing I'd say is that this is clearly what the church has taught for 2000 years. Especially during the early church period, the medieval period, even up into the Protestant tradition, what Christianity has actually said for 2000 years is that no, it's not just a spiritual resurrection, it is a physical bodily resurrection of the dead. This very same body that we are in now is going to come back to life in the eschaton and live there. So, the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition have all said that, and then biblically, I think we certainly have precedent for saying this. Three passages of scripture come to my mind.
First of all, there's the John 11 passage where Lazarus himself is raised from the dead. It's interesting because the whole chapter is kind of devoted to this, but Jesus deliberately allows Lazarus who is sick to remain sick, get worse and die before he gets up to do anything about it. As you can imagine, the people are traumatized. They're bothered, they're broken by this. They even call out, "Lord, where were you?" and "If you'd been here, he wouldn't have died," and Jesus has allowed this whole thing to come about so that Lazarus would die, so that he could raise him from the dead, and here it is, so that he could actually teach us about bodily resurrection. In other words, the whole thing was allowed to transpire precisely as it did so that Jesus could say this, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he shall die, yet he shall live." So in other words, he's parlaying this Lazarus raised from the dead who was a physical resurrection, all so he could teach us about bodily resurrection as well.
Then you have First Thessalonians Four that when the trumpet sounds Jesus returns and the dead in Christ shall be raised. Then you have First Corinthians Chapter 15. Once again, teaching us that this very same body that dies in death, it used a seed metaphor there. The seed that dies in death in the ground is raised in life. Now there are some images there, incorruptible, a spiritual body and things like that, and we just simply take that to mean what the Christian tradition has typically said there is that, ultimately this glorified body or this spiritual body is just that, it's a glorification. So, [inaudible 00:06:23] body has been glorified, Revelation Chapter One, Matthew Chapter 17, with transfiguration. So, physical things can be glorified, too, and we take it that this is a physical body that does indeed get glorified in the eschaton. So what that means is, very nicely, is that, that which is sick now or broken now or aged now, that body comes back in the eschaton and it is made whole again, and then we live forever more re-embodied in the presence of Christ.
Joe Fontenot: Okay, so I have a question about that, re-embodied.
Jamie Dew: All right.
Joe Fontenot: Tell me more. What are these bodies really like? What visual should we have in our head or what do we know about this?
Jamie Dew: Yeah. So, that's a good question. What are these bodies like? I think a better question perhaps is, what kind of body gets raised here?
Joe Fontenot: Okay, yeah.
Jamie Dew: Where I've done a pretty substantial amount of work in recent years on trying to figure that out. So, the question here is, in the resurrection, does God have to give us back a body that is just physically like the one we're in right now, that it resembles it? We call that phenomenological duplicates. So in other words, does God have to just give us back a body that's a duplicate of this body? It is a perfect physical match to the one, but it's not this one. So that's one option, is to say that the body there in the resurrection, isn't this one per se, but it's a physical duplicate body. So is a duplicate body all that he's got to give us back or does he have to give us back the actual same body? We call that numerical identity.
Okay. So, phenomenological identity is to say two bodies that are different bodies, but they resemble each other phenomenologically or physically. They look exactly like each other. Or numerical identity, numerical identity references the very actual same one. The question I think that's really important for us to think through is, well, which of those is required. Does God just have to give us back a duplicate body or does God have to give us back this very same body? And I think ultimately the way you'll answer that question will depend on your larger theological/philosophical views of human beings. So in other words, what's got to come back? It completely depends on what you say human people are.
Let me just quickly walk through three possibilities here. First of all, there's what we call the substance dualist perspective of human persons. I'll just go ahead and simply say, on a substance dualist view, all you would have to have back in the resurrection is a duplicate body. Now, I would also say that if a duplicate body is all that's required, then this is easy. There's no real problem here at all. God can clearly make a duplicate body, but let's think for a second about why I'd say substance dualism only requires a duplicate body. Substance dualism is the idea, it makes two big claims about human people. Number one, that bodies and souls are different things, different substances. One is a physical substance, the body, and the other one is a spiritual substance, the soul. So one's physical, one's non-physical, substance dualism. That's the first claim that substance dualists make.
The second claim that substance dualists make is a statement about identity. It says that you are the soul. You're not the body. You're distinct from the body. You are the soul. You are identified with the soul or you are identical to the soul. In this view, your relationship to your body is one of possession. You are not your body, but you possess your body or you inhabit your body, but you're not your body. All right, that's the substance dualist view. I call those two claims stuff distinction, bodies and souls are different kinds of stuff, and second claim, person soul identity. You are your soul. So if that view is right, then if you just are your soul, and you're not your body, well then, it really doesn't matter which body you're in. It could be this very same body that we're in now, or it can be a duplicate body. It really doesn't matter. So, if substance dualism is right then the body and the eschaton just has to be a duplicate body. And I will say, that is an easy view for God to accomplish. There's no real big problems there. Man, that's a pretty straightforward, pretty simple, elegant view. Because of that, I think a lot of Christians will prefer this view.
Now, what if, however, you are not identical to your soul? What if some other view is right? Well, then this will change what God's got to raise at the end, I believe. Let's consider two other views that say something different. Materialism. Materialism is the view that says you're not a soul. In fact, there is no such thing as a soul. You're just a physical material body that's living. There's lots of different variations of this, but in general, this idea belongs to a family of used called materialism. Materialism is that view again, that you're just your physical body, you're not a soul. You don't have a soul.
Now, if that's true, then you are identical to the physical organism that you are in right now. That's you. That body you're in as you listen to this is actually you. Well, if that's you, then a duplicate of that won't work because a duplicate of that, won't be you in the same way that a duplicate twin and two twin brothers is not you. Physical duplication does not mean actual same person, which means if materialism is true and you just are your physical body, then what that's going to mean is in the resurrection, a duplicate body doesn't preserve your life at all. That's just somebody else there. So for you to come back, the very body that you're in right now has to come back. So in other words, the body in the resurrection has to be numerically identical to the one you're in right now, not just physically identical or phenomenologically identical. It's got to be the actual same one, if materialism is true.
Now, one other view real quick, and that's the hylomorphic view. This is Thomas Aquinas. I actually prefer this view. Hylomorphism says, yes, there is a soul and yes, there is a body, but the person is identical to the body-soul composite. So in other words, this view with the dualists will admit that there is in fact stuff distinction. Bodies and souls are different kinds of stuff, but it denies that you are identical with just one of those parts, the soul. It says, no, Jamie Dew is the body that he's in and the soul of Jamie Dew, combined into a unit and Joe Fontenot, the other person on this podcast, is that particular body and that particular soul in union with each other. That's the human person. So it's dualistic in a sense for sure, but at the same time, it identifies the person with the whole, not one of the parts. Now, I would say that if that view is true, then there also, you have to get back numerically, identical bodies because this body that I'm in or that body that you're in, is part of me and therefore, a duplicate body will not work.
In the eschaton, it seems as though God has got to get us back this very same body. Christians have had a lot of different ideas about how God could pull that off. Obviously the problem there is, or the challenge with that is, our bodies decompose after death. There's a lot. There's millions and millions and millions of people, not just because of cremation, but there are lots and lots of people throughout history whose bodies just don't exist anymore because they've been decomposed or blown up in a blast or eaten by cannibal or eaten by a shark or something like that. Because of that, that looks challenging as how God can give us back the exact same bodies, but at the end of the day, we believe that God is God and he can do such things. There's lots and lots and lots of different things to say about that, but that might be beyond this particular podcast.
Joe Fontenot: I have a question about that, getting back the same body. We're constantly going through cells. Cells die off and this sort of thing. How does that play into this view?
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Part replacement over time.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Think about it. Think about what you do today. The day you're listening to this podcast, you may get a haircut, you may clip your fingernails. Not to be gross, but certainly you will use the bathroom, brush your teeth, you'll comb your hair, and in any and all of those events, little bits and parts of your body are sloughing off. Just simply wearing a shirt, that shirt's going to rub up against your body and little dead skin cells are going to rub off. Your body is constantly getting rid of parts and your body is also constantly adding in new parts. When you eat a cheeseburger or when you drink a coffee or when you eat a donut or anything like that, your body is metabolizing those parts and re-appropriating those parts into your body.
Think of your body as like a giant tornado, that's constantly sucking in new parts and spitting off old parts. That's your body. Your body's like a big storm in that regard. So part replacement. Boy, that seems puzzling for what we're talking about here. We'd have to ask the question now, well, what does it mean for my body to be my body and which particular set of parts counts as my body versus somebody else's body when parts get re-appropriated all the time? So, Joe, I love the question. Now, my friends, we are deeply in the field of metaphysics, as we talk about this, but I'm glad you asked the question because this is where, look, philosophy helps us think through these things. In short, there's lots of different theories metaphysically about that. I would simply challenge that every single part of our body changes in the course of our life.
There's a widely held idea that every part of our body changes itself every seven to 10 years. There's actually some substantial research in STEM cell research right now that suggests that's not the case. There are actually a good bit of parts in your body that you're born with, that stay there the whole ride. You may very well add more parts to it, but there's a good number of them that stay there within your central nervous system. Not all of them, of course, but a good number of them do stay there the whole time, and if that's the case that could help us solve some of these questions, I guess. People asked me a question on this note sometimes. Well, is it the parts of my body that are there at 18? Or is it the parts of my body when I'm 43? I have no idea. I really don't.
I would also add that in the eschaton, I'm not convinced it has to be all in exactly the same set of parts. It could just be some of the parts that are in my body right now, and then the rest of them, the parts that may be added in are what we call in philosophy, accidental parts. By accidental, we just simply mean parts that your body has, but it doesn't have to have. Brown hair on my head. I have brown hair, sure, but I don't have to have brown hair. There was a time it was blonde, and it wasn't just because I dyed it. When I was a little toddler, I had blonde ringlets. So it changed. Accidental parts are parts that can come and go, in other words. So anyway, again, that could be a whole podcast in itself as well, Joe. We can talk about that type of thing, how it is that God could potentially pull off a numerically identical body in the resurrection, is a really interesting question, at least in my mind.
Joe Fontenot: Yes. Quite interesting. You said something that sort of brought it all together for me at the end of the last podcast. You said, "At the end of the day, reality is on our side." To me, that was a very helpful perspective because the more we learn about this, like the old cliche, the more we learn, the less we know. That's very true, but it's also not true in the sense that we learn so much that we're seeing what we already believe and know from the Bible and from these sorts of things, we're seeing this reflected in science as we learn more as a people and that's encouraging to see it come together.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, absolutely. No doubt. No doubt.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. Well, thanks for walking through this, Jamie. This is fascinating, very interesting, and I think there are going to be more podcasts on this. I can't imagine there not being.
Jamie Dew: Awesome. [inaudible 00:19:41] good.
Joe Fontenot: All right. Hey everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again. If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it. And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way, and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.