I am attracted to this opt!.
ion, and hold it to be a usable notion for Christians; but hawing defended elsewhere a physicalist conception of survival of death through resurrection, I will discuss it no further here. 1Another option is to collapse talk of resurrection into talk of the immortality of the soul. A closely related move (and a popular one in recent theology) is to interpret resurrection in a spiritual rather than bodil y sense (if this in the end differs significantly from immortality). Such a view will doubtless be based on some version of mind-body (or soul-body) dualism. Let us define dualism as the doctrine which says that (1) human beings consist of both material bodies and immaterial souls; and (2) the soul is the essence of the person (the real you is your soul, not your body). It then can be added that the body corrupts at death and eventually ceases to exist but the soul is essentially immortal.It is surprising (to me at least) that so many twentieth century Christian thinkers are tem!.
pted toward some such notion as this. For it is quite clear, both in Scripture and tradition, that classical dualism is not t he Christian position. For example, the biblical viewer is not that the soul is the essence of the person and is only temporarily housed or even imprisoned in a body; human beings seem rather to be understood in Scripture as psycho-physical entities, i.e. , as unities of body and soul. And the notion that the body is essentially evil and must be escaped from (an idea often associated with versions of classical dualism) eras condemned by virtually every orthodox Christian thinker who discussed death and res urrection in the first two hundred years after the apostolic age; the Christian idea is rather that the body was created by Sod and is good; the whole person, body and soul alike, is what is to be saved. Finally, the biblical notion is not that we survive death because immortality is simply a natural property of souls; if we survive death it is becaus!.
