e God miraculously saves us; apart from God's intervention death would mean annihilation for us. Thus Irenaeus says: "Our survival forever comes from His gre atness, not from our nature." 2It would be interesting to discuss this option further, and especially to ask why so many recent and contemporary Christian theologians are drawn toward it, how they might distinguish " spiritual resurrection " from immortality of the soul, and how they might defend the theory against criticisms such as those just noted. However, I will not do so in this paper. As noted above, my aim here is rather to explore and defend a third way of understanding the traditional C hristian notion of resurrection, a theory virtually all (but not quite all) of the church Fathers who discussed resurrection held in one form or another.' I will call this theory "temporary disembodiment."This theory of resurrection is based on a view of human nature which says that human beings are essentially material bodies and immaterial souls; the soul is separable from the body, but neither body or soul alone (i .e., without the other) constitutes a complete human being. Thus Pseudo-Justin Martyr says: "Is the soul by itself man No; but the soul of man. Would the body be called man No, but it is called the body of man. If, then, neither of these is by itself man, but that which is made up of the two together is called man, and God has called man to life and resurrection, He has called not a part, but the whole, which is the soul and the body." What this theory says, then, is that human beings are typically an d normally psycho physical beings, that the soul can exist for a time apart from the body and retain personal identity, but that this disembodied existence is only temporary and constitutes a radically attenuated and incomplete form of human existence.
