"Dr. Blake Nelson" wrote:
> --- 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.
I am not sure what "this" you are referring to. The point I
tried to make is that resurrection of the body (not mere resuscitation)
is not only "not ruled out by science" but the kind of thing that
scientists ought to hope for in a religious claim. That is of course no
proof of the resurrection but it does point up how odd it is that
scientists should be especially nervous about the Christian claim or buy
into the arguments of Borg et al. The Winter 1999 issue of dialog has
relevant articles by Gerald O'Collins, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Steven
Paulson and myself.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 01 2002 - 23:15:51 EDT