--- george murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
> JW Burgeson wrote:
(snip)
> > One has to read Borg to grasp his arguments. He
> does make a clear
> > distinction between Jesus the man and Christ the
> Lord. And he is no flake or
> > dumbbell.
>
> 1) & it's rather puzzling that today, when
> we are coming more & more to
> an understanding of the human as
> body-soul-spirit-mind unity, that some
> Christians want to talk about some sort of
> disembodied survival as meaningful in
> the case of Jesus.
> Abandonment of belief in resurrection
> of the body (i.e.,
> transformation of the body which has died) means
> also abandonment of the idea
> that the material world has any significance for the
> future God intends for
> creation. It's hard for me to see how a Christian
> who is a
> scientist, & thus by
> his or her vocation is committed to understanding
> the material world as God's
> creation, can go for this.
The statement is a bit fuzzy. I am not sure what is
being asserted. Is it being asserted that Jesus was
not resurrected in a bodily form or somehow taken up
into the life of God? If one asserts this, they are
no longer a Christian. The Jewish and Christian hope
are clearly in some new form of body (soma
pneumaticon) and concomitantly a new creation in which
this creation is redeemed.
One can be scientific and still believe in a bodily
resurrection. Aside from many others who have written
about this, Polkinghorne has discussed this most
recently rather fully, discussing how a bodily
resurrection is not ruled out by science. He
analogizes it to the "impossibility" of
superconductivity until the effect was discovered.
The "physics" of resurrection would thus be a sort of
special case condition. Most recently, he discusses
this in the God of Hope and the End of the World. I
can discuss this much more at length, but I do not
know how fruitful it would be since the claim here is
not well-defined.
If your assertion is against dualism, I think that
modern trends in theology are recapturing the early
Christian view (reflected in the NT) that people not
embodied souls, but animated bodies. There are two
excellent articles on this in the latest issue of
Science and Chistian Belief by Malcolm Jeeves and Joel
B. Green. If you are critiquing Cartesian or Platonic
dualism, I wholly agree.
> 2) Paul's emphasis on "Christ crucified"
> shows the identity
> of Jesus the
> man and Christ the Lord. It is the Christ who was
> crucified. The resurrection
> is significant because it is the resurrection of the
> crucified.
True, to clarify it is Jesus, the God-man, who was
shown to be the Christ because the Father raised Jesus
from the dead (or took Jesus, the God-man, up into the
life of God -- however, you want to phrase it).
Peace
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