Dale Allison has a chapter of Night Comes that struggles with the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. He spends much space on the idea often expressed in historical theology that some material from my present body must get used in the resurrection body. He reduces this idea to absurdity in several ways. Our bodies decay and disintegrate. They get taken up into plant life. They may even be eaten by animals or cannibals. In any case they end up part of other people’s bodies. So who gets my molecules at the resurrection?
He says that his students get impatient with this line of argument because, of course, their idea of the Christian hope is more spiritual than that. I must say that I shared this impatience. However, Allison argues that the idea that some material from the body survives is intrinsic to the doctrine of the resurrection of…
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