Book Review: The Resurrection by Fabrice Hadjadj

I was alerted to this little book by a fantastic quote about how God surrounds us like a mother:

God envelops us so thoroughly that we almost have good reason to think that he does not exist (and, in fact, he does not exist in the same way as creatures do). ... The fetus does not see his mother; and if he can think that he has no mother, it is just because everything is a sign of of her presence, because she is present everywhere–and not only somewhere inside her belly.

It took a long time to get a hold of this book, translated as it was from French and only available online as an e-book (and with a kind of weird cover I must say), but with the help of my librarian friend we tracked it down, and I'm here to say it was worth it. The whole book is like that quote.

Hadjadj is a French Catholic philosopher with six kids -- so I "get" his life -- and he meets the challenge of portraying deep, paradoxical theology in ordinary language as well as anyone since C.S. Lewis. This stands out against the modern "default deism" thinking and shows how faith brings the world alive. Particularly, a whole section on how you should preach to your mobile phone like St. Francis preached to the birds stood out to me.

One of Hadjadj's main points is that God is present in the ordinary, making it extraordinary. His book takes ordinary language and metaphors and makes them extraordinary as well, so you could describe this book as a fruit of the resurrection down to its very style. Wonderful, profound stuff here.

The Testimony of Owen Barfield

In general, all three books I've read by Owen Barfield (whether "real" books or collections of essays) become more "Christian" as they go along. That description would certainly apply to "Philology and the Incarnation" in The Rediscovery of Meaning. If you have time, go read the whole thing here. It is Barfield's "Why I Am a Christian" essay: why a lawyer raised an agnostic, and following his reasoning about evolution (the evolution of consciousness, but still!) would end up believing through reason that the lynchpin of history is Jesus.

The key to Barfield's conversion (if such a gradual process can be called a conversion, really) is his observation of a "reversal in direction of man's relation to his environment" over the course of history. Specifically, he noted this change must have taken place somewhere between Alexander the Great and St. Augustine (two personalities that exemplify the change). More specifically, the change involved the way the word "logos" was used, by Greeks and Jews somewhere around Alexandria, sometime around 1st century BC (definitely, he's thinking of Philo here). He notes that this change took place right after the Stoics* first used words like 'objective' and 'subjective' the same way we do, the first time the self was really defined. Then he found in Jesus the kind of words that would change history in that way -- "the words of life" as Peter put it.

In the introduction to The Rediscovery of Meaning, he put is this way: "Here is the antecedent Unity of unities, here is the interior Transforming Agent of evolution, here is the positive meaning of life on earth, here is the meaning of Meaning itself staring me in the face!"

A million Christians have a million stories of why they are Christians. I find this one oddly comforting, and thought it should be repeated. Can I get an amen?



* = I thought of how NT Wright describes Paul's Mars Hill speech in Acts 18 as an acceptance and confrontation of Stoic and Epicurean doctrine, and now I want to go back and read it with "Barfield glasses" on. For one thing, Paul's quotation of and affirmation of the Greek statement "we are his children" would be right along with Barfield. There's an interesting project there, in how the words of Jesus through Paul are interacting with the words of the Stoics. And Paul's deliberate, even off-putting insistence on bringing it all together by pointing out the impending Judgment Day (something we'd culturally avoid these days) is perhaps a model of the confrontation of Stoic philosophy with the idea of resurrection. Is that the verbal impetus that steered the trajectory of thought?

A Weird Time

(I really do have a continuation of the Barfield sequence of posts half-written, but once again a Sunday of education led to some thoughts about time and science and faith ... )

Scripture has a strange sense of time. For example, there's the way the author of Hebrews takes a Psalm referring to the Exodus and says, "This is talking to you, today." But it goes beyond that. Skeptics take a dim view of the way John's gospel appears to place the crucifixion on a different night than the others (probably so, but slightly debatable in my opinion), and of how Matthew's King Herod and Luke's Census couldn't overlap. (Nevermind the unanimity of the four on the essential points, but that's another post for another day.) And the "simple explanation" of 6 24-hour days of creation runs aground very quickly on the mountains of evidence supplied by biology, chemistry, and physics.

We play with time as a church. The way we keep repeating Christmas and Easter, bringing the birth and death of Christ into the rhythm of the seasons, re-enacting the past in the present with pagaents and parades. The very day of Easter skips about in time so that a musician's family always has to check the calendar to see when the spring "crunch time" will be this year. Not to mention the time-spanning remembrance built into the Eucharist, looking back to that upper room and forward to the New Jerusalem.

Many theological puzzles are really questions about time. Your sins are washed away, or is it they have been washed away, but why is there still such struggle in so many places? Theodicy is not really a question of why not but why not yet? Why do we not yet see all things subjected to him? What has happened already, what is happening now, and what will happen later? When is it time to quote 1 Corinthians 15 (looking forward to the future putting-right of the resurrection) and when to quote 2 Corinthians 4 instead (always bearing about his death that his life may be made manifest ... bringing the past into the present)?

All of these indicate an unconscionable mixing of time in Scripture and the church. It seems that trying to straighten out exactly when Galatians was written relative to Acts can be maddeningly elusive if you insist on being 100% sure. Time is weird in the Bible.

But we never see how science takes just as weird a view of time. If I'm to be a scientist, I'm to control time, to run the experiment so many times I know the future from a large enough sample size of the past. I count on my experiment to be clean and elegant enough that I can do it over and over again and it won't wear out or bend or change. These assumptions predicate that I can step through time when I really am trapped in its flow, and only in limited cases can I pretend to lift myself out of it for a moment. And even then, that phrase, "for a moment," belies that time still goes on.

If you try to run a controlled experiment with who you're going to marry ... well, you're going to end up like Newt Gingrich. That's not good, folks. Us normal folks can't do that, and it doesn't seem to improve things. For the biggest decisions, science can inform but it must take a back seat to the fact that my life is unique and so is every moment of every decision I make.

Science works better the simpler (and therefore the more repeatable) the system -- until you simplify so far you run into the Uncertainty Principle and the entanglement of time and space in a single coordinate system. When the speed of light and time-space come into conflict, it is time-space that bends and gives way!

We cannot escape the weirdness of time any more than we can escape the weirdness of our own souls and viewpoints embedded inside and itself entangled with these mortal frames.

What gives me hope is that Christianity, with its timeless God living from 4BC to 30AD, is as strange as time itself, even with the same flavor of strangeness and beauty as creation.

I don't expect this to convince anyone, but I know it sustains me. The incarnate, eternal, uncontrollable God reflected 66 ways in the books of the Bible is weird -- the right kind of weird. If that's not a hymn, then maybe it should be.

Unmaking the Messiah

As my church goes through a series on Genesis 1-3, there's a danger of becoming "nearsighted" by focusing so much on the first few chapters that we start to miss the message of the rest of the book. I only say that because I'm guilty of doing it myself. But the practice of cross-referencing in the text of Scripture as the preacher preaches paid off again today, because a new connection jumped out.

There are two parts of the Hebrew Bible where the technical word "created" is used again and again, as always with God as the creator: Genesis 1 and Isaiah 40-55. That initial connection is true for other words as well. In particular, the statement that the earth was "without form" in Genesis 1:2 is echoed in this section of Isaiah as well. First in Isaiah 44:2 YHWH states "I formed you from the womb", and the calling of this figure is focused in the later passage:

Just as many were astonished at you,
So His visage was marred more than any man,
And His form more than the sons of men;
So shall He sprinkle many nations.
Kings shall shut their mouths at Him;
For what had not been told them they shall see,
And what they had not heard they shall consider.
Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
(Isaiah 52:14-53:2)

Here, late in the Isaiah 40-55 poem, the figure of the Servant is emerging as a single person, as the refrain of "creation" with the special Genesis language is repeated again and again. God's promises to bring all nations to Jerusalem are somehow fulfilled in this person, and the shocking thing is that he's beat up and marred. He is "without form" like creation itself in Genesis 1:2. It's like old creation has gone wrong, and this Servant steps forward, takes on the wrongness in literally being unmade, and beyond anything he can do, he is remade into new creation. His "unmaking" is active, and at the hands of his fellow men, but when he is unmade he is remade again, and all the promises of new creation are true in him. The nations come to Jerusalem. The veil of death is taken away.

The "unmaking" happened on another level as well, in Philippians 2:
Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,
who, being in the form of God,
did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,
but made Himself of no reputation,
taking the form of a bondservant,
and coming in the likeness of men.

The "kenosis" of Jesus was creation in reverse, an emptying, a humbling, and an obedience. It was a loss of form, a reversion of God himself to the empty blank slate of creation in Genesis 1:2.

That the "unmade man" would be remade by the literal recreation of a dead man tortured by the state was something no one expected. It was more true than anyone expected, that the Servant would destroy death this way. But in Isaiah 40-55, maybe there's a glimmer of how someone who knew the Scriptures and saw God active in every word could see that all this could come together in a man dead for three days and brought back "according to the Scriptures", replacing and fulfilling Temple and Torah itself. Remaking everything in a new creation, one event in the middle of history anticipating the great event at its end.

This is how prophecy works. This is how God works. Words from different centuries all come together as one stream of living water, from one source, flowing into the future, consistent from Genesis to Isaiah to the Gospels to the Epistles. The only way to describe it is as the Word of God.

Square:Cube::Ex nihilo:ex vetere

(Yes, another theology post, sometimes it just works out this way!)

This is a quote from a Q&A Panel at a recent Wheaton conference about N.T. Wright, which included much critical commentary on his scholarship, including the fact that he wrote a book Jesus and the Victory of God (JVG) in 1996 about the historical Jesus, followed by a book about the resurrection in 2003. One question is, why did you do that? How can you write about Jesus without talking about the resurrection (even if you eventually devote more pages to the latter than the former)? How can you know anything about Jesus from just history without the resurrection? Here's his answer and a follow-up about JVG.

NT Wright: What we see going on in John 20 and 21 in the encounters with the risen Jesus with Thomas and Peter and even before that with Mary as well in the garden, is, among many many other things, the introduction of a new sort of knowing, a new way of knowing. And this is not to collapse back into an Enlightenment category and say “This is not objective knowing but it’s purely subjective or spiritual knowing,” because I really don’t want to say that. It is a knowing which goes beyond merely what you can put into a test tube or whatever, but it includes that because this is about new creation, and new creation is a creation ex vetere not ex nihilo. That is to say it is a transformation of the old creation so that the old epistemological rules still apply but they are like the 2 dimensional version and we now have a 3 dimensional thing . If you have a cube, a cube is still a square if you look at it from one point of view and how you know a cube is to know it in 3 dimensions but that doesn’t take away the first 2. So I want to say that the historical knowledge you know, the knowledge of Cicero, or Seneca or Julius Caesar -- to take figures from Roman history of the same period, we can know quite a lot about who they were about what their motivations were, about why they thought what they thought, about why they did some of the strange things that they did -- we can explore that as historians and that is fine, that’s part of the 2 dimensions. What we get in the resurrection is a 3^rd dimension – a new creation which doesn’t deny but rather enhances, I would say, the 2 dimensions we’ve already got. In order to have a discussion about real knowledge and how we know things and what is true you need to have an entire conference on epistemology and set up those questions but I think this is a place to start anyway. I would be interested to know what Marianne says.

Marianne Meye Thompson: I don’t have a lot to add to that, but it was Richard’s phrase that the resurrection is an epistemological key or clue to knowing Jesus, but I think the 2/3 dimensional thing may be helpful there, but the question that Richard put to you, Tom, is now that you have written the resurrection of the son of God would you do the Jesus project differently or would you say that the Jesus who is known through the resurrection is the 3 dimensional Jesus which renders any other Jesus, including the Jesus of JVG, a 2-dimentional Jesus or at least a limited – or not the whole story… and maybe that’s the question we are after.

NT Wright: Yes, that’s very interesting. In fact I’ll respond to that because I think it is germane to the question asked. I think granted that much of the quest for Jesus was basically 2 dimensional in that sense. I think what I was doing in JVG was saying okay let’s accept those terms of the argument and let’s describe those 2 dimensions as thoroughly as we can and point after point we find those 2 dimensions saying actually there is more – actually we think there is probably a cube here and not just a square.

A Small Casket

I just returned from a memorial service up north for a member of Laurie's extended family. Two days before her eighth birthday, Rachel Anne Vekved died when the family minivan hit a patch of invisible ice on a bridge and swerved into the oncoming traffic. Her mother and little sister were also in the car, but Rachel was taken and those two were left. No one was speeding, and there was no warning or time to say goodbye.

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I didn't know her that well personally, but we did see her from time to time, and I remember visiting her parents, Laurie's cousin Tim and his wife Nancy, in summer 2001 when Rachel was a baby and we were just beginning to think it might be time for one of our own. What I remember best is how quiet and peaceful the house was. I also have a short video of me pulling her little sister around, along with Sam and Aidan, in the back of a wagon when Aidan was 1 and Sam was 2 1/2. So we were at the graveyard literally blocks from Rachel's grandparents' house (where I pulled that wagon around) and watched that little-sister-turned-only-sister put a teddy bear on that casket, the one that seemed wrong, too small to be a casket. It should be too small to be a casket, but there it sat.

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The night before Laurie and I were watching TV and I got angry at the TV. Not just yelling-at-the-refs angry but ready-to-throw-the-thing-out angry. We were watching a taped show and when she pressed stop the TV channel came in as PBS, some guy looking a bit like Terry Bradshaw was standing on a stage with a Fibonnacci spiral behind him (and you can bet your down payment that guy didn't really know the first thing about fractals, and thought it looked cool). He was talking about something about how nothing bad really happens, you have to tune in to the universe, the typical "Secret" Gnostic crap. Usually I can watch those to laugh at them and mock them a bit. But this time I couldn't even handle the sight of that faux-spiritual garbage and couldn't turn it off fast enough. My mouth actually tasted bad after that.

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Seeing (and tasting) that made me understand John's writings in the New Testament a little better. It's jarring how he veers from love to radical exclusion of evil, especially to people like me who want to tolerate everyone. But John had friends who had been mashed up by the gears of evil, in this case, the Roman Empire or the local religious institutions (or both). And people were going around like this Terry Bradshaw wannabe telling people if they'd just get their mind set right they'd rise above their problems, like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix movies. That's not just laughable -- it's evil, although get me straight, it's evil that should be dealt with the way Jesus dealt with it.

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I also noticed that during the memorial service, the pastor gave one of the deepest, most real homilies I've ever heard, but in one little case I wanted him to go farther. He read Psalm 13, where David is in anguish and asking why-why-why? He skipped a few verses, all of those asking God why he lets David's enemy triumph over him. I understand him doing that, but reading that now, after studying Paul, I suddenly see that the ultimate enemy behind all other enemies is Death himself. In fact, most evil enemy types are those who are in league with death, who will use it to intimidate and get their way. Once a tyrant kills a dissident, that dissident is gone, or so the tyrant hopes. The reversal of Jesus's resurrection shows that the ultimate enemy of all, Death himself, is going to be crushed and reversed and wiped away. So keep those verses in your reading of the Psalms, reading "enemy" not as one of death's inconsequential henchmen in David's life, but "enemy" as Death, however he shows up. And in every echo of the enemy hear Paul's victory celebration in 1 Corinthians 15: Death is toothless and defeated, and we only have to wait worship and work until God brings all enemies under Jesus' feet.

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Death will be the last to go. Obviously Death is still very much here. By faith we hope that in God's future, when Jesus is king, Death will be destroyed as surely as David's enemies were.

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And I'll look forward to getting to know Rachel Anne a little better, and seeing Scott Becker again (and asking him to play Rainbow Connection for Sam), and my grandmother and grandfather and all those who have gone before in Christ.

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Till then, there's time to reach a new normal, and to give your kids a little more grace today. And try to avoid PBS when that guy's on.

On the Eighth Day

It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb.

Did you catch that? It was Sunday. This wasn't church day back then (yet), but it was first day of the workweek. To them, it was "Monday." John is making a point here, a point that has to do with Creation Week itself. He's saying the counter is starting over. We have moved into a New Creation, a new week of possibility opened by the creator himself. It's the first day again.

She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb and came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved. 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb,' she said, 'and we don't know where they have put him.' ...

In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, ....

Did you catch that again? This isn't just "any Monday" for St. John. It's THE first day all over again. It's the Eighth Day of Creation. The Creator is moving and is stepping into creation. This may seem redundant but if it's important enough for John to repeat I figure I should repeat it 7 or 8 times.

Let's finish out the scene for one more hint.

... the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, 'Peace be with you,' and, after saying this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy at seeing the Lord, and he said to them again, 'Peace be with you. 'As the Father sent me, so am I sending you.' After saying this he breathed on them and said: Receive the Holy Spirit.
In Genesis 2, the breath of God entered Adam and he became a living soul. Now the Creator was breathing again, and the disciples were receiving the Holy Spirit. Creation continued anew, with the same Creator moving and breathing and bringing life.
Right after this is the story of Thomas, which is a story of faith as much as it is of doubt. After all, Thomas demands evidence of the resurrection, and demands that it come to him. God gives him his request, but when the chance comes he is the first to call Jesus "my Lord and my God." This man whose body stands before him is also God, and is making all things new, starting with Thomas' own heart. Aidan, as you know, we gave you Thomas as your second name, in part because of this story (also Thomas More and Thomas Beckett and a few others!).
Let there be light. Let there be science. Let there be art. Let there be healing. Let new creation happen in his name.
One thing science-types like me are guilty of losing sight of when we spend so much time talking about creation is that we don't talk about our belief in new creation at the same time. While interpreting Genesis 1 is important, I think interpreting John 20 and Matthew 28 and Mark 16 and Luke 24 and 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 8, that's even more important. That's why this series needs an eighth day, and the Gospel of John gives the clear Biblical basis for saying so. I think all of these chapters, with far more words than Genesis 1, are records or eyewitness accounts of a singular, unrepeatable event that gave impetus to the extreme energy of the early church. To be a little facile, they're journal articles by different researchers on an experiment done by the Creator, an experiment done once that changed the world.
If it's unscientific of me to believe that, then it's also unscientific of me to study history and come to conclusions about anything happening that I haven't personally seen or controlled myself. In the resurrection I see God stepping into history to transform it in such a way that those who witnessed it were themselves changed. There were no disinterested observors of the event because there could be none -- one look turned Thomas from skeptic into theologian.
So on the eighth day God was active, and he presaged an event that He will carry out for everyone at a time of his choosing. In that light Christians have no choice but to live for that day by doing everything in light of that day.
If anyone is in Christ -- new creation. Eventually all will be healed -- so I'll start by trying to heal now. Eventually I will know as I am known -- so I'll work toward that now, because I know that those good things will persist into the Age to Come.
If anyone is in Christ -- new creation. J.R.R. Tolkien did an act of "subcreation" in making Middle Earth because he intuitively understood that in doing so, he was following Jesus. Each of us has to find the niche of subcreation the Creator has assigned.
In anyone is in Christ -- new creation. You become a new Little Big Bang, a cornucopia of blessing, and you can extend this goodness back into a warped and fallen creation, remaking and renewing it. This is the challenge for scientists, to redeem the world, knowing that we'll mess it up but hoping that grace will be there to help us get it right once in a while. It's neither the hubris or the fear that you see in popular accounts of science like Jurassic Park. Rather, it's a specific job, with limited reach, good days and bad days, with the potential to hurt if misused but the potential to heal if used right.
God is not a passive God doing untraceable and unexplainable creation events 5000 years ago, but God is an active Creator who steps into his own story and writes in a real-life Return of the King halfway through history. The Resurrection means the veil is rent and God is revealed as a first-century rabbi. God chose to be trapped for all time in that mode. He did not choose to be trapped in the gaps of creation, which we find as we watch those gaps get narrower each day. Every new finding about the relatedness of creation connects it all the more, but you must not forget that the same science that leads you to Descent with Modification also leads you to the crystal clear creation event that is the Big Bang. God has not carved his name on the moon, nor in the DNA or gaps between different species' proteins, but He has chosen to be trapped in history in other ways:
1.) The Big Bang singularity (the Father's hand?)
2.) The person of Jesus and the historical event of the resurrection
3.) The continuing work of the Spirit, seen clearly in the history of the early church
4.) The image of God in you, which is your sense of self and non-transferrable consciousness, represented by your name (see Day 6)
[For more on point 2 and why I'm so unreasonably confident in labeling the Resurrection as history, I highly suggest reading NT Wright's 800-page behemoth of a book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, which is far more readable than any 800-page book has any right to be.]
Those four items above are why I believe in God, and I think they are the most important things to pass on to you, my two sons. If you've gotten this far, Sam and Aidan, congratulations, this is all for you.
The event of the resurrection is also the only reasonable explanation I have found for how, two thousand years ago, there was a man (probably Jewish) who looked at the life of the man Jesus and started to write about him as the Creator of the universe, something no Jew and indeed no human would have done without an earth-shattering event observed first hand. Because John had seen and touched the living body of Christ, he knew the creator was once again moving, and was moving in the pattern shown by Jesus. So he took up his pen and wrote:
In the beginning was the Word / and the Word was with God / and the Word was God / He was in the beginning with God / All things were made through Him / and without Him nothing was made that was made / In Him was life / and the life was the light of men.
Sam, Aidan, I pray that God will show you how he wants you to take part in the grand symphony He wrote. You can be part of it. You can let there be light.
There was morning light into the empty tomb. The eighth day of creation was begun, and it continues to this day.
Love, Dad
PS: Thank you to all (both?) of my readers. Please let me know what you think of all this if you ever get the chance.

Body vs. Flesh, Spirit vs. Soul: 1 Corinthians 15 Questions

Ok, I'd like to bring this discussion out to the front page, because it's important. The question stems from a general discussion of Bauckham and Wright's work, and it focuses on 1 Corinthians 15 in particular. Just what was Paul saying in that chapter?



I'm going from memory, but my sources include intense study of the epistle a year ago starting from Thiselton, Hayes, and Wright's commentaries, as well as the central points from Wright's 3rd book in Christian Origins and the Question of God and a tip of the hat to Bauckham as well, since evaluating his arguments is what got us here in the first place (although I only just read his book, and his book does not deal with Paul much at all, but rather the gospels and the early church fathers).



So the disclaimer is that I have studied all this on my own in some detail, but of course this isn't my day job. But I want to talk about what I think from reading the epistle and why, and this blog is the place to do it. I also can't vouch for any real organization, because I just want to rattle off my answers to various questions posed in particular by Stephen Carr in the previous comment section. (By the way, Stephen, hello, I've noticed your comments on some other blogs, including Mark Goodacre's NT Gateway blog if I'm not mistaken?)



OK, let me start with my bottom line. I don't know much Greek beyond the alphabet but I have studied this intently, and I've also been reading the Bible all my life (well, since I was 5 ...). So what I have here is a layman's perspective but a layman who practices the sciences and is trying to be the same person in the lab and in the pew. I'm obviously predisposed to trust the Biblical source because of my background. That's just where I'm coming from.



Coming from this perspective, growing up, reading 1 Corinthians and Romans always fascinated me but it seemed like there were passages and points that Paul spent time on, but didn't fit into my nice little evangelical Roman Road tract. Reading NT Wright's big book series made those odds and ends passages make sense and cohere, and also fit with my intuitive understanding of the passages from my personal reading. So that's a major influence, but it always comes down to a test of, what does the text mean? And that's the issue here: what is Paul saying in 1 Corinthians about the resurrection?



I think he's saying it's physical but different/transformed. Here's some motley points as to why:



1.) Let's start with the big negative statement: "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" -- yes, and sarx (flesh) is not soma (body). Paul obviously has a negative attitude toward flesh as something to be gotten rid of. But Romans (written in Corinth soon after this letter) shows that flesh is one thing, a physical body is another. The whole point of the passage is that the body can be transformed, the flesh can be shedded. Paul's using "soma" so much he's wearing out his little sigma: "body" is the best way to describe his subject. That is unabashedly physical, although he seems to be struggling to describe its difference from our ordinary stuff, our "flesh and blood." If he's just talking spiritual, he'd be a lot better off just talking about spirit all the time. What's his body fixation if he's really thinking spirit?



2.) Paul does call some (it's important to keep in mind that the church was so fractured no one statement can describe them all) Corinthians fools for succumbing to the pressures of the culture around them, for believing that "there is no resurrection of the dead." But rather after death "God gives it a body as he pleases" with the metaphor of a seed. The seed produces something physical and continuous with itself. If Paul's trying to say God takes the spirit to heaven for eternal life he picked a terrible metaphor for it. Rather he picked a metaphor of something physical that disappears in the ground and dies (indeed, decaying a little) but reappears transformed. It's a much better metaphor for a physical transformation than for a spiritual translation of some sort.

By the way, this "foolishness" motif fits very well with the first 4 chapters of the letter. Also, in Chapter 5, Paul objects to their lawsuits because they bring church matters before the Romans, so their economic/legal habits are conforming to the Greco-Roman world. Chapter 6 = Paul objects to their sexual habits conforming to the Greco-Roman world. Chapter 8-10 = Paul deals with their tendency to go to dinner feasts in Roman temples (a nuanced treatment, but obviously caused by the tendency of the Greco-Roman world to influence them). Practically every problem Corinth has is caused by their going along with the Greco-Roman way of looking at things. Chapter 15 is no different, they're adopting the Greco-Roman attitude toward resurrection and God's ultimate justice. I can see how new believers would be pulled to be "more reasonable" with their crazy beliefs about the resurrection: Can't the resurrection just be spiritual in nature? The pressures from the surrounding world are evident throughout this letter, and the Roman pressure would be to spiritualize (Platonize) the resurrection, to remove the embarrassing Jewish Ezekiel/Isaiah-type physical dry-bones elements. Paul's basic point with Corinthians is to show how crucifixion and resurrection matter to all these areas. Chapter 6, especially, makes no sense whatsoever if physical resurrection is removed from the argument: "The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also." How can this mean anything else? The body matters intensely, and resurrection involves this body, the logic of the argument demands it. How could it be "for the Lord" if it'll just die and decompose? I don't think Paul's talking about donating your body to the great Carbon Cycle of Life when he says it's for the Lord -- he means something about it will persist through resurrection, and that is God's body now -- this physical arrangement of cells will be raised. To paraphrase an early church father, I don't know how he'll do it, but if he created it, he can re-create it.

3.) Back to Chapter 15, The next metaphor of different bodies first goes through species, then moves to the heavenly bodies. (A nice reference to the end of Daniel and the concrete resurrection prophecy there.) The point is a different kind of splendor from one thing to another, explicitly stating that heavenly and earthly things are different but also that earthly differs from earthly and heavenly differs from heavenly. If the point is physical vs. non-physical, again, Paul's making his point in kind of a strange way. Why does "star differ from star in splendor" just like men from animals? If the central point is the heaven-earth contrast, why explicitly include all of creation differing from each other? Now, if the point is that the creator can re-create, that makes sense. It doesn't make sense as simply distinguishing earthly from heavenly bodies. The point is God's power to create and create something as glorious as the moon. Sure, the bodies are different and glorious, but they're still bodies!



4.) "Natural" vs. "spiritual": I'm always reminded reading this how back in Chapters 8-10 Paul says that the Israelites wandering in the desert are "spiritual" food and drank "spiritual" drink. Spiritual food can be physical -- there's nothing more physical than the wandering in the desert. So the "spritual body" must be like the manna and water from the rock: provided from heaven, but real, tangible, and here.

5.) Back to the creed that is "of first importance": if it was a spiritual experience, why is it always "after three days"? Why is it emphasized that Christ was "buried" then raised (by the way, that would make an empty tomb -- and what's interesting is our two earliest sources on the resurrection are complementary: Paul talks about the appearance of the risen Jesus and Mark talks about the empty tomb. Both don't mention the other element, but together they are undoubtedly as early as we have -- so there's no evidence that one of these two elements preceded the other)? And of the "five hundred at once", if Paul's talking about a vision, that's some vision first off, and his statement "of whom the greater part remain to the present", why bother telling people to check a vision like that? I don't know of any other "multiple party" visions in ancient literature, and even if there are, I doubt that any of them include the "and they're still around" statement that is proof -- I don't doubt that people have visions, I doubt that they see something physical.

6.) Why is Christ the firstfruits if others have fallen asleep? If all we're talking about is life after death, the others would have joined him. If all we're talking about is Christ's exaltation, then he wouldn't be the firstfruits, he'd be the only fruit! This phrase is telling: what happened to Jesus will happen to the rest.

7.) Baptism for the dead: I don't think anyone really knows what to make of this. I think Thiselton had listed more than 30-40 theories on the practice. I'm not willing to draw any conclusions from it, since it's probably a bizarre local practice that justifiably withered away.

8.) Why must the corruptible "put on" incorruption if there is no physical continuity? That's a strange choice of words (why the concept of a corruptible core?) unless there's significant continuity.

9.) Destroying death doesn't make sense if the body's still decaying. The reversal, death's defeat, must be as real as the enemy for the enemy to be destroyed. For Paul's little victory dance to make sense, this is not an evasive maneuver: it is a destruction.

(And speaking of destruction: for stomach and food, Ch. 6 "God will destroy them both" is a statement of judgment, not of categorical abolition. God's judgment will destroy the glutton; that doesn't mean all stomachs and all food will be destroyed. It's a witty way of passing judgment on the Corinthians by reversing their own statements, and says nothing about the nature of the resurrection body. Judgment on the one hand, resurrection on the other.)

Either Paul's such a bad writer that he can't choose a metaphor to save his life, or he actually communicated his intention through these words.

For these reasons and more that I'm just not thinking of now (this is off the top of my head), I have always read 1 Corinthians 15 as being about the actual reversal of death, something strange and offensive and hard to describe, but something real and reported in great detail in about 50 AD, as something "handed down" in a polished, creedal form. How can that happen, that fast, among a group of fishermen following a dead rabbi? If you start from the point that there must be a normal explanation, I guess you'll be able to find one. I just don't find it plausible, myself.

Hayes, Wright, and the others have helped me see how the parts fit in to what has always been my basic reading of the text. So, for all the words back and forth, I can't see how I can change my mind from this position. It ties the chapter together, it ties the chapter to the rest of the letter, to the other Pauline letters, to the gospel, and to the Jewish prophets. I have studied and read this for myself more than most other parts of the Bible, and this is how I read it. This is a well-founded opinion based on evidence and a lifetime reading this passage, and the more I look into it, the more it fits with everything else.