One traditional Christian view of survival of death runs, in outline form, something like this: On some future day all the dead will be bodily raised, both the righteous and the unrighteous alike, to be judged by God ; and the guarantee and model of the general resurrection (i.e., the raising of the dead in the last days) is the already accomplished resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.My aim in this paper is to explain and defend this basic view of resurrection. There are many ways it might be understood, of course, and perhaps more than one is coherent and even from a Christian point of view plau sible. I shall defend one particular interpretation of the theory-an interpretation advocated by very many of the church Fathers, especially second century Fathers, as well as by Augustine and Aquinas.It may help clarify matters if I first provide a brief map of where we will be going in this paper. After introducing the topic, I will discuss in turn what I take to be the three most important claims made by the ve rsion of the theory I wish to defend. Then I will consider one typical aspect of the traditional theory that has important philosophical as well as theological ramifications, vis., the notion that our resurrection bodies will consist of the same matter as do our present earthly bodies. Finally, Once the version I Irish to defend envisions a period of existence in a disembodied state, I will defend the theory against some of the arguments of those contemporary philosophers who find the very notion of disem bodied existence incoherent.There are several wars in which the basic concept of resurrection sketched in the opening paragraph can be fleshed out, One option is to understand the nature of the human person, and hence the nature of resurrection , in a basically materialist or physicalist way. Perhaps human beings are essentially material objects; perhaps some version of identity theory or functionalism is true.
