Christianity isn't 'spiritual': what 'resurrection' means.

There is a distance between what people think they believe, and what they actually believe. Most Christians might say they agree with every single word of the Nicene Creed, but I am not sure this would hold up under serious questioning. I'm not concerned here with the question of hypocrisy, that is, the question of how can we say that we believe these things and still live as badly as we do; I find that very easy to understand. Living up to what the words of the Creed mean would demand of us a transformation that involves great struggle, and a willingness to enter into a dangerous relationship with the Living God. Our hypocrisy is easy to understand, if tragic.

What I mean is that when we say, "I look for the resurrection of the dead, and life in the age to come," this does not square with what you often encounter when talking with many Christians about what they think of death, and life after death. I could be wrong, but the belief of most Christians seems to be much closer to Neoplatonism than to anything truly Christian, and it has no biblical basis. Or it involves a strange Cartesianism, in which the soul is a kind of "ghost in the machine," the machine being the cruder part of the duality, the body. Most people think of the soul as something that goes somewhere else when the body dies. This certainly squares with ancient pagan belief, where, in Hades, souls were "shadows of their former selves" and existed in a kind of half-life. The Neoplatonism comes in when the state of the liberated spirit is seen as superior to the poor embodied soul, trapped in mortal flesh.

This is important, because when a misunderstanding becomes pervasive, and when the misunderstanding involves something central to a religious tradition, the tradition itself is challenged: It isn't only "a part" of the teaching but the point of the teaching, that is called into question.

In the case of Jesus' Resurrection, what I believe is a common Christian misunderstanding is a challenge to what the Incarnation means, and moves the tradition from the Bible into a form of Neoplatonism. Although most Christians would be willing to say "Christ will come again," this is not a central part of their faith. They hope for a "life after death." This is not really a Christian phrase, or it is at least totally insufficient.

There is life--you have it or you don't--and there is death. A corpse is what it looks like. What you see is not a shell whose true but hidden tenant has gone somewhere else. It is the person you loved, dead.

When we say that we believe in the resurrection of the dead we confess a hope that the God who is the source of life will raise this loved person (who would never have existed without God's love) to a transformed life, one which will include the body, at the time when God heals and renews the obviously wounded universe we live in. We do not know what this life will be like, or feel like; we cannot imagine it. But we do not believe that we will be completely what we are called by God to be until we have been raised from the dead.

The question of "where the soul is" between the time of death and the time of resurrection has led to a lot of speculation (including the idea of purgatory), but it has always seemed to me that too much imagining and too little of what might be called holy agnosticism has been involved in the thinking. It could be that, because death ends "now" and "then" (time being as physical as the flesh), we find ourselves after death in the presence of God, whose only moment encompasses all moments, including the time of universal restoration. We might find ourselves resurrected.

But no one really knows, and it is not faith, but a strange curiosity, that leads us to speculate this way. It can also lead us to inappropriate defensiveness and fear. Some religious people feel terribly threatened by those scientific investigations that locate consciousness completely in neurons, and memory in a combination of nerve-firings and chemistry. The soul is meant to be "spiritual" (which from this point of view means "nonmaterial").

My own feeling is that science of this sort can only threaten Neoplatonism. Nothing could be more truly materialistic, in one important sense, than the tradition which affirms the resurrection of the body. The Christian vision cannot be demonstrated scientifically. It requires a great leap of faith to believe that the God who knew us before time began, who willed us into being, will give us a some-how embodied life because God loves us. But it is not Christian teaching that a soul escapes the body to go somewhere better, leaving all material being behind, to live as a pure spirit in a better place.

That is not unimportant, because the Incarnation itself gives a holiness to flesh which is, as the Scripture insists, a scandal. That holiness is affirmed in the idea that we do not live disembodied after death, but we can be complete (and our death can be truly overcome) only in resurrection. Death is indeed part of life--and dreadful. Death is overcome only when life--which means life in the body--is given to us as it was meant to be, not as it has been wounded by sin and by death's temporary triumph.