Re: Question for Clergy

Following up on a comment of George Murphy, let me share what John
Polkinghorne writes in _Quarks, Chaos & Christianity_, p. 92-93. After
agreeing with the Hebrew understanding that we are "unities," "animated
bodies" rather than "embodied souls," he goes on:

    "So, what is the soul, then? It must be the 'real me'. This certainly
isn't the material of my body, because that's changing all the time. I have
very few atoms left among those that were there a few years ago. Eating and
drinking, wear and tear, mean that they're continually being replaced. The
real me is the immensely complicated 'pattern' in which these ever-changing
atoms are organized. It seems to me to be an intelligible and coherent hope
that God will remember the pattern that is me and recreate it in a new
environment of his choosing, by his great act of final resurrection.
Christian belief in a life beyond death has always centered in a
resurrection, not survival. Christ's resurrection is the foretaste and
guarantee, within history, of our resurrection, which awaits us beyond
history."

At this moment in my journey toward wisdom and understanding, this
explanation makes as much sense as any and more than most. It also seems to
me to be a coherent hypothesis that the ground of our pattern lies in our
DNA.

Bob Schneider

----- Original Message -----
From: "D. F. Siemens, Jr." <dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
To: <tandyland@earthlink.net>
Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006 7:22 PM
Subject: Re: Question for Clergy

> There are various contributions to the question of the resurrection body
> that I'm not resending. I too have various surmises on the matter, but I
> cannot prove them with the paucity of evidence available. The one thing I
> am confident of is that the Almighty is fully competent to produce ME in
> a state that continues my current individuality yet fits me for his
> presence. One of my surmises is that human beings are only at home with a
> /soma/, but the current /soma/ is not the /soma pneumatikos/ which awaits
> the saints. If it involves atoms and molecules, they are somehow
> different from those currently composing bodies. At least this applies if
> our resurrected bodies are like those of our risen Lord. Whatever the
> state, none of us will be able to say, "This is not as good as what I
> anticipated." But there always seem to be some creatures who think
> they're smart enough to ask, "Say, God, did you think of ...?"
> Dave
>
Received on Fri Apr 21 13:41:16 2006