JELEEN, I don't see much point in debating with you when you consistently use words to mean strange things that they don't normally mean. If you say that it is possible for two truths to be inconsistent, then you are quite literally speaking nonsense. If two propositions are both true then they simply cannot be inconsistent - that is a fundamental law of logic. Either you are saying something incoherent or you are using the word "truth" (or indeed the word "inconsistent") to mean something other than what it usually means - and yet you don't bother to alert anyone to this fact. So there's really no profit in discussing this stuff under those conditions.
But I'll respond briefly to a couple of your points anyway:
Your conclusion is flawd. First off, reason and reasoning implies the application of logic to a subject. As regards your example, it's a simple matter of statistical analysis, so no belief is involved: you can simply assume the next US president will be a millionaire. However, you can also believe the next president will be a millionaire because of prejudice. (Which would not be rational.) So it's possible to arrive at the same conclusion either by logic (ratio) or irrational belief. (I leave aside here that prejudice may very well have a rational basis.)
I don't think you understand what I was trying to say. The example of the president is certainly statistical analysis. My point was that this statistical analysis can produce belief.
If I believe that the next president will be a millionaire because I have done a simple statistical analysis, then
I believe this claim. This is not difficult to understand. Moreover,
my belief is rational. And, yes, I could also acquire the same belief by an irrational method, such as prejudice. So you are quite right to say that it's possible to reach the same conclusion by either rational or irrational means. My point is that either way, the conclusion will be a belief. The word "belief" implies neither reason or irreason (if that's a word). It refers to a certain kind of psychological state, without saying anything about how one arrives at that psychological state.
Incidentally, you seem to equate thinking
rationally with thinking
logically. I don't think that is right. Logic is a subset of reason, not the same thing as it. One can behave rationally without involving logic at all.
Another matter is the absorption of 25 December - or solstice - as the birthday of Jesus, which is unknown. It goes to establish a pattern: the christianization of previously pagan holidays.)
There certainly was such a pattern, but your example is wrong. The solstice is 21 December. Under the Roman calendar, it fell on 24 December.
I'll sign off with a remark on an earlier comment to the effect that I seem to be very knowledgable on the subject of Jesus. Given the scarce records pertaining to the actual life of Jesus, that's not so very hard. If one brushes aside all the mythological stories on Jesus (christology), what's left is a quite vivid portrait of the person that was Jesus.
Right - so how do you tell the difference between "mythology" and the truth? Do you really think it's as simple as all that?
I was reading a very interesting book that was a collection of narratives of missionaries trying to preach Jesus to the people of the Zulu Empire under Dingane. The book was mostly about the attempt of the missionaries to find a suitable indigenous word for "God."
They first were using Tixo, which is actually a Khoisan name for a trickster hero. When they discovered that Khoisan folklore contained evidence of more nefarious deeds attributed to Tixo, they scrambled for an alternative. They ended up using two Zulu names, Umveliqangi, which orinally referred to a sort of chief of the heavens, and Unkulunkulu, which means "great-great one" and was sometimes used in folklore to describe the first human being, who was very involved with the creation of the world.
By using Unkulunkulu for their concept of God, they rewrote Zulu religion to be monotheistic. Missionaries operated under the assumption that "primitive" religions contain memories of the original Christian God. I think that many traditional African religions were reimagined as monotheistic. Before missionary contact particular beliefs may have been pantheistic or polytheistic, or conceived of a supreme being as having two genders, or acting more like a force or energy than a real person. And of course people probably had different ideas of how the earth was created or what the origin of death was, especially if they did not have a priesthood to standardize beliefs. But now, anytime you google a traditional African belief, you will read that "the Kikuyu believe in a supreme being called ngai" or "the Ashanti believe in a supreme being called Nyame," when Nyame could have originally been a concept more like the Hindu Atman, a name for the natural universe, or meant many things to different people before missionaries standardized its use.
That is very interesting and I didn't know that, although I did know that divine names were typically taken from pre-Christian religions. For example, my girlfriend's parents are Isoko from Nigeria, and they are Catholics: they call God
Oghene, the name of the supreme god in traditional Isoko religion. However, I would be careful about ascribing too much to the European missionaries in this regard. The Isoko, for example, Christianised themselves without any help from Europeans, and presumably decided themselves to use the name
Oghene for the Christian God. This sort of thing happened frequently in Africa: indigenous peoples themselves spread Christianity (even when they didn't convert themselves, they might talk about it to other indigenous peoples). This meant that (a) when missionaries brought the gospel to new tribes, they usually found that the people were already at least aware of it, and (b) often European missionaries weren't involved at all.
Anyways, one part of the narratives that really interested me was that the Zulus objected to many Christian teachings on proto-scientific grounds. Many of the missionaries, who I believe were Anglican, kept preaching about a concept of resurrection of the dead at Judgment Day. Most people thought the idea was ridiculous, and asked questions such as "Will we come back in the same bodies? Or different bodies? How is that possible after so many years?" They really weren't buying any of the ideas the missionaries brought, and questioned how they could be so sure of their teachings without any evidence or proof.
Those sound like pretty standard questions! I don't know if I'd call them objections on scientific grounds - more just basically rational grounds. There is an interesting work attributed to the second-century theologian Athenagoras called
On the resurrection of the dead (it is not certain if it is by him or by a later theologian, perhaps from the third or fourth centuries), which addresses such questions and shows that people were asking them in the early days of Christianity too. You can read it
here.
One thin about the narratives confused me. I grew up as a Christian in the USA and I never heard of the concept of resurrection of the dead. The cosmology I was familiar with posited that when you die, you immediately join with God in Heaven. Your body is no longer important. Something does happen at the end of days and the world is finished, but there is no resurrection of dead bodies. I did some more reading and found out that resurrection of the dead was THE belief of Christianity prior to this century. At People were even buried facing east so when they were bodily resurrected they would face God. Mortuary science in the united states even became popular because of resurrection of the dead beliefs. Protestant theologians thought that there was some sort of "soul sleep" that the dead experienced before they were bodily resurrected and united with God on judgment day.
So my question is, what are the Catholic and Protestant beliefs of the Resurrection of the dead, and how have they changed over time. Why is it that you rarely hear about the resurrection of the dead in Christian circles nowadays?
Yes, you're quite right that the resurrection of the dead has traditionally been one of the central doctrines of Christianity. In fact the first Christian theologians of the second and third centuries, writing defences of their religion for a pagan audience, generally focused on only two points - monotheism and the resurrection of the dead - as if Christianity consisted of nothing else.
I'm surprised that you could have been brought up as a Christian and never noticed this doctrine, though. It is absolutely central to Paul's theology in the New Testament. Pretty much the whole of 1 Corinthians 15 is on this subject. Notice in particular:
1 Corinthians 15:12-14 said:
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.
1 Corinthians 15:20-23 said:
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
The "first fruits" thing is the key to all this. Paul was a Pharisee. The Pharisees believed that one of the signs of the coming of the kingdom of God, and the end of the world, would be the resurrection of the dead. Some other Jewish sects did not believe in this, the Sadducees famously amongst them. This is the background behind Matthew 22:23-33, where Sadducees quiz Jesus about the resurrection, obviously assuming that Jesus shares the doctrine of the Pharisees; Jesus' answer indicates that he does. So for Paul,
Jesus' resurrection is a sign of the coming kingdom and the end of the world. But clearly the world hasn't ended, and indeed only one person has been raised from the dead. This is because Jesus is the "first fruits" (a horticultural metaphor: the "first fruits" are the very earliest fruits to ripen, indicating that a great harvest is on the way). He is, as it were, the pioneer. His resurrection is the original and the prototype, and all believers will share in it, because all believers are united to Christ, which means that they share in what happens to him:
Romans 6:3-5 said:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
Paul talks about the death to sin in the past tense, but the resurrection in the future. In fact for Paul, both resurrection and salvation are always something in the future (if you had asked Paul if he had been saved, he would have said, "Not yet"). So because of the union of believers to Christ, they will share in his resurrection, which will come - as in standard Pharisaic eschatology - at the end of the world.
Now later Christians combined this basically Jewish notion of the resurrection of the body with the basically Platonic notion of the immortality of the soul, a quite different idea which held that when you die your soul goes floating off to somewhere nice. The resulting doctrine was fairly well established by the end of the fourth century. It held that, at death, the body and soul are separated (this was a standard Platonic definition of death). The body decays and the soul goes off to a sort of foretaste of its final end. The soul of a Christian will go to God and enjoy a kind of partial vision of him, while the soul of a wicked person will suffer. Then, at the end of time, God will miraculously restore everyone's bodies and reunite their souls to them. Then there will be the final judgement, after which Christians will go to their eternal reward while the wicked will suffer in hell. In both cases, this will be bodily. Augustine goes on about this at considerable length in the final book of
The city of God, which you can also read
here:
Augustine said:
As for what happens after death, theres nothing wrong with saying that death is good to the good, and evil to the evil. For the spirits of righteous people which have been separated from their bodies are at rest; but those of the wicked are punished until their bodies rise again. The bodies of the just will rise to life everlasting, and of the others to death eternal, which is called the second death.
Subsequently, the doctrine developed so that there were a number of different places that souls could go to after death. Basically, heaven, hell, purgatory, and limbo. Purgatory is for souls who have been saved, but who need to be purified (ie, most Christians). Heaven is for souls who are so good they don't need purification, and they can go straight to the vision of God (ie, the saints). Hell is for bad souls (ie, heretics, non-Christians, etc). And limbo is for people like the Jewish patriarchs, who lived before Christ but were still good; there is also a limbo for children. After the resurrection and judgement, everyone would be sorted into just two groups - those going to salvation, and those to damnation. Confusingly, these are also often called heaven and hell, but they differ from the immediately post-mortem states in being physical places where people experience either joy or suffering in their bodies. This is the "new heaven and the new earth" described in Revelation 21.
This is the standard, orthodox Catholic view of the matter. So you'll find that Thomas Aquinas teaches:
Thomas Aquinas said:
Although spiritual substances do not depend on a body in respect of their being, nevertheless the corporeal world is governed by God by means of the spiritual world, as asserted by Augustine (De Trin. iii, 4) and Gregory (Dial. iv, 6). Hence it is that there is a certain fittingness by way of congruity of spiritual substances to corporeal substances, in that the more noble bodies are adapted to the more noble substances: wherefore also the philosophers held that the order of separate substances is according to the order of movables. And though after death souls have no bodies assigned to them whereof they be the forms or determinate motors, nevertheless certain corporeal places are appointed to them by way of congruity in reference to their degree of nobility (wherein they are as though in a place, after the manner in which incorporeal things can be in a place), according as they more or less approach to the first substance (to which the highest place it fittingly assigned), namely God, whose throne the Scriptures proclaim heaven to be (Psalm 102:19, Isaiah 66:1). Wherefore we hold that those souls that have a perfect share of the Godhead are in heaven, and that those souls that are deprived of that share are assigned to a contrary place.
And:
Thomas Aquinas said:
It is written (Job 19:25-26): "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth, and I shall be clothed again with my skin," etc. Therefore there will be a resurrection of the body.
Further, the gift of Christ is greater than the sin of Adam, as appears from Romans 5:15. Now death was brought in by sin, for if sin had not been, there had been no death. Therefore by the gift of Christ man will be restored from death to life.
Further, the members should be conformed to the head. Now our Head lives and will live eternally in body and soul, since "Christ rising again from the dead dieth now no more" (Romans 6:8). Therefore men who are His members will live in body and soul; and consequently there must needs be a resurrection of the body.
Now the orthodox view was usually that the resurrection body would be physical, but it would still be rather different from our bodies now. This again comes from Paul:
1 Corinthians 15:35-44 said:
But someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies... What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.
Some people had very "physical" understandings of the resurrection, where they largely ignored the "spiritual" aspect of this and imagined that the resurrection body would be much the same as the normal body. The (Pseudo-) Athenagoran treatise mentioned earlier takes this line. Others went the other way and had a very "spiritual" understanding of the resurrection body, according to which it would be quite unlike normal bodies. In the third century, Origen was most famous for taking this view, and after his death "Origenism" often meant effectively denying the reality of the resurrection. This was one of the main reasons that Origenism was eventually condemned in the sixth century and most of Origen's works destroyed, meaning that no-one really knows what Origen actually taught on this matter.
The usual, orthodox view comes somewhere in between. Just as the risen Jesus could eat fish but also pass through locked doors, so the resurrection body would be genuinely a body, yet be transformed into something spiritual.
Now you're also right that some Christians have rejected elements of this, especially the idea of the soul going somewhere in the period after death but before the resurrection. In the fourteenth century, Pope John XXII taught that the saints were not in heaven after all, and that no-one gets to enjoy the beatific vision until after the general resurrection of the dead. This was enormously controversial because if it were true then there was no point in praying to the saints, which was rather an important part of Catholicism at the time. His successor, Benedict XII, taught that in fact the saints do experience the beatific vision immediately after death, and that was the official Catholic view thereafter.
In the Reformation, most Protestants also rejected elements of the Catholic teaching about life after death. Luther rejected the doctrine of purgatory and so did most of his followers. Many Protestants went further and rejected the notion of the immortal soul going anywhere, which they held (rightly) to be Greek in origin and largely unbiblical. Matthew Tyndale, for example, wrote:
Matthew Tyndale said:
The true faith putteth the resurrection, which we be warned to look for every hour. The heathen philosophers, denying that, did put that the souls did ever live. And the pope joineth the spiritual doctrine of Christ and the fleshly doctrine of philosophers together; things so contrary that they cannot agree, no more than the Spirit and the flesh do in a Christian man. And because the fleshly-minded pope consenteth unto heathen doctrine, therefore he corrupteth the Scripture to stablish it.
So for them, what happens after death is nothing at all - you die and stay dead - until the final judgement, when God raises you up. In the twentieth century, views such as this enjoyed a renaissance, as many theologians sought to return to a more biblical, holistic understanding of the human person as an integrated body-soul complex, which rules out the possibility of the survival of a disembodied soul. For example:
Karl Barth said:
What is the meaning of the Christian hope in this life? A life after death? An event apart from death? A tiny soul which, like a butterfly, flutters away above the grave and is still preserved somewhere, in order to live on immortally? That was how the heathen looked on the life after death. But that is not the Christian hope. I believe in the resurrection of the body. Body in the Bible is quite simply man, man, moreover, under the sign of sin, man laid low. And to this man it is said, Thou shalt rise again.
And of course, philosophically speaking, the notion of the survival of the soul is pretty dubious, since it seems to require substance dualism, a position very unpopular among philosophers today.
So at the theological level, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is probably more respectable these days than that of the survival of the soul, although both remain important in Catholicism, and probably the doctrine of survival is more important at the popular level in Christianity in general - as you attest yourself. But still, every Christian (or most of them at least) recites the Apostles' Creed at most church services, which ends like this:
The Apostles' Creed said:
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting.