Resurrection edited by Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, and Michael Welker

...This book invites us to think again...

...This intermediate state is, however, said to be less than fully human, "since the restoration of full humanity would require the further resurrection act of reembodiment...

...For example, the move from nonrecognition to recognition of the risen Jesus in the Lukan Emmaus appearance and the Johannine appearance to Mary Magdalene indicates the total transformation of Jesus' humanity, no longer bound by time and space...

...It also involves a communal dimension, such as incorporation into the body of Christ...

...Rejecting a dualist conception of the human being, whether Platonic or Cartesian, Polkinghorne accepts that we are "psychosomatic unities-'animated bodies rather than incarnated souls.'" However, he retains the term "soul," rather than using "person" or "self," to designate the human identity beyond the bodily continuity of this life...

...The introduction identifies two ways of thinking about Jesus' Resurrection, the subjective and the objective...

...Catholic scholars tend to avoid such an either/or...

...Hope in God's faithfulness to creation leads Polkinghorne to believe that "all creatures must ultimately find their true fulfillment...

...For Ratzinger, "The real heart of faith in the resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of the body, to which we have reduced it in our thinking...

...But such spatio-temporal continuity is only a contingent part of a person...

...One of the more stimulating is by the physicist/theologian John Polking-horne...

...In that regard, it is worth recalling Joseph Ratzinger's observation in his Introduction to Christianity that past theological constructions sometimes exhibited a naive realism, in contrast with Paul who taught "not the resurrection of physical bodies but the resurrection of persons...

...The disciples then struggled to understand and to express the full meaning of that transforming and deputizing experience...

...The universal resurrection will be the completed symphony of all our lives performed in God's presence...

...Polkinghorne's emphasis here seems too narrowly focused on positing some sort of re-embodiment in a "new creation" with a different kind of physics at the end of history...

...In that regard, Nancey Murphy's contribution makes clear that what lasts in the postresur-rection kingdom of God must be the relationships that now make us the people we are...

...For Polkinghorne, the soul refers to "the real me," which involves a dynamic process of continuity through a lifetime, from infancy to old age, in an ever-changing body that may endure the wear and tear of perhaps seventy or even ninety years, but whose atoms are completely changed every two...

...Speculating then about the possibility of a new world, Polkinghorne argues that space, time, and matter integrated in the single scheme of general relativity is a "package deal" likely to continue in the new creation, because it is intrinsic to human beings to be embodied and temporal...

...As a state of definitive completion and immediacy to God, radically withdrawn from time and space, eternal life is understood to be radically different from this present life...

...The embodiment of the soul thus goes beyond the surface of the skin...

...Affirming that the regularities of the laws of nature reflect the faithfulness of the Creator who ordains them, Polkinghorne nevertheless proposes that these laws are to be understood not as immutable necessities, "but as holding simply for as long as the Creator determines that they should do so...

...For Murphy, the body provides the substrate for personal attributes: among other things, it allows one to be recognized and bears one's memories...

...Likening the soul to "software" running on the hardware of the body, Polkinghorne affirms that "what I am" is carried not simply by the body, but also by the nexus of relationships within which an individual's life develops...

...A "new creation" will arise from the old...

...Unfortunately, this collection gives no attention to the related Catholic discussion about the concept of "a resurrection in death," which holds that the self or soul, in death, has integrated or interiorized its bodiliness and all the relationships that shaped its identity in life...

...To borrow a metaphor from Edward Schillebeeckx, our lives are like fleeting melodies written in ink on a material score...

...For the most part, the essays in this collection respond to the earlier rejection of the Resurrection for scientific reasons...

...Accordingly, it will involve both continuity and discontinuity...

...It might be asked whether the emphasis on such re-embodiment really captures the totally transformed mode of existence envisioned in Paul's conception of a pneumatic or spiritual body in 1 Corinthians 15...

...Given this flux, it seems that the matter of the body cannot be the exclusive "carrier of continuity...

...The latter considers it to have been an objective event in nature...

...Catholic scholars share the debate about whether to use the terms self or person for our identity beyond death, rather than soul (a concept which Christianity creatively adapted from Greek philosophy during the second century and further developed during the thirteenth...

...The "universal resurrection" will be the full realization of the meaning of each human identity in its relationship with the whole of creation...

...Murphy emphasizes that God's remembering, recognizing, and relating to the individual must be conceived as equally essential to postresurrection identity...

...At the same time, references to eating and touching seek to indicate the continuity of his humanity...

...The former considers the Resurrection as a transformation occurring within the spirits of the disciples...

...That new creation will be the redeemed transformation of the old creation and not a second, totally new creation "out of nothing...

...Beyond death, the eternity of a created being retains a relationship to the ongoing earthly history, since one's decisions, for good or ill, continue to affect the history one has left behind...

...such is the case even though this is the pictorial image used throughout the Bible...

...Bernard P. Prusah Sari Rahner once remarked that the resurrection of the body is one of the truths to which the orthodox and the heretics alike give a wide berth...

...Lampe notes that Paul referred to the relational entity that continues to exist between death and resurrection only as the "me," the self...

...Similarly, Peter Lampe's essay here emphasizes that, for Paul, resurrection subjects the entire person to a transforming and newly creating act "beyond the possibilities inherent in the present creation...

...The "objectivity" of Jesus' Resurrection is related not to the laws of nature, but to the experience of Jesus as alive "breaking in on the disciples from outside...

...A consensus has emerged, across a spectrum of Catholic theologians (see my article "Bodily Resurrection in Catholic Perspective," Theological Studies, March 2000), that a physiological understanding of resurrection is inadequate for conceptualizing the transformed mode of existence that is the risen life...

...As resurrected persons we will have spiritual or pneumatic bodies, meaning that the "self" will never relinquish or be separated from the "bodiliness" and the historical process through which our individual identities were forged in a lifetime of personal/bodily relationships within the material world...

...Referring to an intermediate state between the world left behind in individual death and the life to come after Judgment Day and the final resurrection, Polkinghorne speaks of the soul being held in the divine memory...

...The self will be transformed in that new reality and our bodiliness will be integrated into the very core of our identity in union with God...

...That has implications for rethinking the meaning of an "intermediate state" between our individual deaths and the end of the world, the so-called Final Judgment, and the universal resurrection...

...The "intermediate state" is thus not an interval in which a soul awaits reunion with a body, but a transitional process wherein the self, beyond death, looks forward to the final consummation, when the material world and its history will have achieved the fullness of finality, and one's contributions and relationship to that world will be fully integrated into one's identity...

...During the eighteenth century, the rise of empirical methods in science led a number of Western thinkers to reject the Christian proclamation of Jesus' Resurrection and the very possibility of life after death-for resurrection and afterlife appeared contrary to the laws of nature...

...For Polkinghorne, the continuity between what we were in our youth and what we are in our old age is accomplished by the soul as "the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing pattern in which the matter of our bodies at any one time is organized...

...Not so in this collection of papers (most of which are written from Protestant perspectives), that brings together specialists in physics, biology, neuroscience, Egyptology, philosophy, Scripture, and theology...

...Resurrection is not the raising up of a body but the raising up of a whole person into eternal life...

...Rather, that state is taken to mean that no human identity will be fully complete until the end of material history...

...If the self or soul beyond death has interiorized bodiliness and all the relationships that entailed over a lifetime, the "intermediate state" no longer refers to a soul waiting to be reunited with a body...