Re: Question for Clergy

I am not a clergyman, but let me dip my oar in anyway. It seems to me that I
Cor 15:35-49 has a lot to say about this issue:

 35But someone may ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will
they come?" 36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.
37When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed,
perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38But God gives it a body as he has
determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. 39All flesh is not
the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and
fish another. 40There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies;
but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the
earthly bodies is another. 41The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another
and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.
 42So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is
perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43it is sown in dishonor, it is raised
in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44it is sown a natural
body, it is raised a spiritual body.
      If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45So it is
written: "The first man Adam became a living being"[e]; the last Adam, a
life-giving spirit. 46The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and
after that the spiritual. 47The first man was of the dust of the earth, the
second man from heaven. 48As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the
earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.
49And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we[f]
bear the likeness of the man from heaven.

While I pretty much fit in thepartial preterist camp, I'm with Jack on the
resurrection of the body. I think the body that is resurrected is a spiritual
body -- which shouldn't be interpreted in the modern sense (spiritual =
ethereal). Somewhere it is written that the spiritual precedes the material. I
believe that in some sense -- which I can't define -- the spiritual body will
be more "solid" than the material body. It will be perfect, and resemble the
earthly body in some way -- so that the term "resurrected" can legitimately be
used.

--- drsyme@cablespeed.com wrote:

> If the correct interpretation of the resurrection of
> believers is that the self same body will be raised out of
> the grave, in the same way that Christs body was raised,
> how do you counsel people regarding things such as
> cremation, donating organs, terminal illness, and
> amputation?
>
> I am asking this question in all seriousness. If the same
> body is going to be raised how can this ocurr if the body
> was cremated and scattered in the ocean? Surely that
> "body" would be incorporated into other things, even other
> people over time. If someone has a progressive illness,
> would they be better off dying quickly to avoid further
> deterioration; or if someone needs an amputation to save
> their life, would they be better off dying from gangrene
> but still have all their limbs for eternity? If you are a
> cadaveric organ donor and they harvest your heart, lungs,
> liver, etc after you die, what happens after you are
> raised? There are many other implications to this idea,
> and frankly it is foreign to me.
>
> I must have missed the class that taught that our self
> same bodies will be raised after death. I never had the
> understanding that the self same body will be raised after
> death, so when I came to understand the preterist view, I
> quickly went from accepting partial preterism, (after I
> read RC Sproals "The Last Days According to Jesus.") to
> full preterism, because the biggest objection the partial
> preterist have with preterists is the nature of the
> resurrection body. But I already was believing along the
> same lines as the preterists, long before I knew what
> preterism was.
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Bill Hamilton
William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
248.652.4148 (home) 248.303.8651 (mobile)
"...If God is for us, who is against us?" Rom 8:31

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Received on Thu Apr 20 17:35:29 2006