This post was published in two parts on Bart Ehrman's blog. I'll put both parts in this one post here.
Materialism, Personal Identity, and Resurrection: Part 1
Dennis J. Folds, Ph.D.
In this two-part post I’ll explore the link between a biological reality (the human body), the identity of a specific individual, and what resurrection of that person might mean. In Part 1, I explore the link between personal identity and resurrection. In Part 2, I attempt to relate the notion of resurrection to modern thought, and offer my personal reflections.
Sometimes when we think we are being clever, we consider the rhetorical question: In the resurrection, will I come back as myself in my prime? Surely I won’t be a newborn baby, or a toddler, or an adolescent, or a mixed-up teenager. And heaven knows I don’t want to be a demented octogenarian or whatever decrepit state I might be when I die. Will I be 24? 36? 48? Of course there’s no answer to that question.
But it does pose the question of just who is this person that will be resurrected? Let’s consider a purely hypothetical subject called Bart. Physically, Bart was lots of things over the course of his life. From embryo and fetus through newborn baby, toddler, adolescent, teenager, young adult, middle aged adult, senior adult, and grumpy old coot, Bart’s physical composition evolved over many decades. Bart’s personality also evolved. He grew out of his early shyness, was for a time overconfident in his religious beliefs, had those beliefs shattered by the world he lived in, and eventually became a quite pleasant fellow – until the grumpy old coot stage, that is.
If we wanted to describe Bart as a biological entity, how could we do that?
Biological basis of identity. Bart is a biological procession, with a fuzzy beginning as a fertilized egg and a fuzzy ending as a dying old coot. But between the two fuzzies there is a fairly straightforward procession of living human diploid cells, the vast majority of which have identical DNA that formed when the egg was fertilized, with one strand coming from Bart’s father and the other from his mother. Given that our Bart does not have an identical twin, there is no other person in the world with this specific DNA. As an adult, at any one point in time there are 10-12 trillion of these diploid cells, each a part of some tissue or organ that forms Bart’s body. A few of these, such as some neurons in the brain, form in the embryo and persist throughout life. Most, though, do not persist individually, but replenish themselves by dividing to form new cells. Each of these cells can trace its lineage to some cell that formed during embryonic development. But there’s more! In addition to these cells, Bart also has about 25 trillion red blood cells that do not contain Bart’s unique DNA, although they are definitely human cells. These cells primarily exist to carry oxygen to Bart’s diploid cells, and to carry carbon dioxide away from those cells. And that’s not all! In addition to these ~35 trillion human cells, there are about that many non-human cells that live in Bart’s body and contribute (positively or negatively) to its functioning. And all these ~70 trillion cells are bathed in this life soup, this fluid that is constantly circulating. When it’s in the blood vessels we call it blood plasma; when in the lymph system we call it lymph fluid, and everywhere else we just call it interstitial fluid. It carries the red blood cells of course, but also carries nutrients to cells and waste from cells. The individual known as Bart cannot be defined by a snapshot taken at any one point in time; Bart can only be defined by that biological procession with the two fuzzy ends. So, then, how can this entity ever be reconstituted at some point in the future?
New Testament: Hebrew View. The unambiguous New Testament (NT) message about the afterlife is that there will be a bodily resurrection of those who will live eternally. This message is rooted in a traditional Jewish (let’s call it Hebrew) way of thinking, in which it is impossible to imagine a personal identity separate from the body of that person. The person is the body, animated by the breath of life from the creator. So in the Hebrew way of thinking, the only way that individual could have eternal life is if that individual body was reconstituted from the dust to which it had decayed. There are many, many references to the resurrection of the body in the NT.
Christianity: Greek View. In the greater Mediterranean area, there was a strong influence of Greek thought (including Hellenized Jewish communities), and from that perspective the notion of an immortal soul entered both Judaism and Christianity. In this framework, the true self is largely synonymous with the immortal soul. The present body is simply a temporary tent inhabited by a soul that cannot die, and it matters little exactly which tent is inhabited. The immortal soul is the essence of the person. (This view is largely preserved in our modern culture, in which we quite well understand the premise of such movies as Freaky Friday or Big, or many others, that depict a real person as being somehow transferred to a different body, retaining the underlying true identity.)
This idea of an immortal soul eliminates the need for a resurrection. If, when the present body dies the soul just goes to live somewhere else, then why would that decayed body somehow be reconstituted for the soul to re-inhabit? Moreover, given that the soul is immortal, it has to be somewhere at all times. Thus, Christians came to believe that when a person dies, the immortal soul immediately goes to heaven, or to that awful other place where it’s so dreadfully warm. (Or to a third place where the ultimate destiny is at first undetermined, in some frameworks.)
Early Christian thought wrestled with integrating the Hebrew emphasis on bodily resurrection with the Greek notion of an immortal soul. This tension is evident in the writings of early Church fathers like Augustine, who sought to harmonize these seemingly divergent ideas (unsuccessfully, in my view.)
The teaching I received in my childhood was that, at death, the soul goes to heaven (or that awful other place) and lives in a temporary body, until the resurrection after the return of Christ. Subsequently, the body is reconstituted (“glorified”, for us Christians), as the permanent abode for the immortal soul. In this three-deck universe, disembodied souls migrate from the original body (on the middle deck) to a temporary body (on the upper or lower deck), and then finally to the glorified body. Both the Hebrew and Greek frameworks are incorporated into this view.
I suspect both these conceptual frameworks are hopelessly mired in antiquity, reflecting the cosmology of the ancient world. To believe either one requires us to ignore modern science in general, and modern cosmology, biology, and psychology specifically. In Part 2, I’ll explore what modern thought might offer on this topic.
Materialism, Personal Identity, and Resurrection: Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I explored the link between a specific individual and the idea of the resurrection of that individual. I contrasted the Hebrew notion of the resurrection of the body and the Greek notion of the immortal soul. I found both to be rooted in the cosmology of the ancient world, almost impossible to express in modern terms. In this second part, I’ll see what I can do to relate the notion of resurrection to modern thought.
Modern Science and Resurrection: Modern science – biology and psychology – are more aligned with the Hebrew viewpoint of what constitutes a person than the Greek. Although there is still a lot of uncertainty and debate about whether there is a non-physical answer that can explain consciousness, it is clear that consciousness has some sort of biological basis. (Consciousness is altered by biological phenomena such as sleep, coma, drugs, fatigue, and disease.) In this framework, no matter how consciousness is ultimately explained, the person cannot be defined separately from the human body. But, to many modern scientists (physicists, psychologists, and neurobiologists), the explanation of consciousness as an emergent property of biology is entirely insufficient. A mechanistic, purely material universe might give rise to complex biological entities, but not to consciousness as we experience it. It seems that there is something else at work – we just don’t know what. It does appear that our experience of consciousness is at least mediated by the biological reality of the human body – that procession through time. It is the body that is conscious or at least has consciousness, not some immaterial entity inhabiting the body.
Then can we make sense of the doctrine of resurrection? There are at least two categories of solutions to this problem.
Reconstitution of the Biological Procession. First, there is the notion that the biological procession will be reconstituted (as a deleted data file might be re-loaded from a backup copy), and then resume as a procession. In such a view, the resumed procession would begin at whatever arbitrary reconstitution point was chosen by the restorer. It might be at a snapshot that corresponded to some actual configuration of the original biological entity, or it might be constituted as a configuration that was derived from the original entity, not corresponding to any particular point. More tangibly, this category of solution allows the initial state of the resurrected body (person) to be any age chosen by the restorer (let’s say God). Presumably, this resumed procession exists in a different environment, one without disease or death (or with constant agony and isolation, if in that awful other place.) This reconstituted existence now has a sharp beginning, and an undefined end point. Still, though, this reconstituted existence presumably involves some sort of procession over time, having new conscious experiences. The resurrected person gets to converse with others, and learn about things they always wondered about. They see all their departed loved ones and reminisce, get to talk to Paul, and Moses, and Jesus of course, and eventually they even come to understand the infield fly rule. This goes on forever. In modern thought, such an explanation could be rooted in something akin to the simulation argument – the notion that we are living in a simulated reality. What controls the simulation? We might as well call it God. God could retrieve our Bart from memory, transform him, and resume the procession in a new environment. Why? Just because he wanted to.
Enshrinement of the Biological Procession. The other category of solutions is that the original biological procession gets somehow enshrined in a state where it never ceases to be. It is made eternally alive, either exactly as it was lived, or in some derivative in which only certain portions or aspects are preserved. As a metaphor, consider the making of a movie about a specific person. Imagine that some sort of recording occurs every day, maybe every second of every day, from gestation to death. Resurrection, in this framework, means that some aspect of the recordings gets preserved forever on a metaphysical DVD. It might be the entire recording, down to every second of every day. Or it might be that only a subset is preserved – maybe only the things that are worth preserving. That original procession does not resume existence; it does not have new conscious experiences. Rather, that original procession continues to exist, as preserved by God. To modern science, a view in this category is not nonsense, at least to theoretical physicists. Some believe that our fourth dimension of time is an illusion; our space-time continuum already exists as our universe from beginning to end. For example, Block Universe Theory (or Eternalism) holds that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously in a “block universe.” Time, as we perceive it, is an illusion; instead, every moment exists eternally. We only seem to travel through that fourth dimension, experiencing novelty, when in fact it’s already a done deal. It’s as though the character in a movie doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the next scene as the movie is being played, but to an observer outside the movie, all the scenes exist at the same time on that DVD.
So we have a fundamental question of materialism: is a person more than (or other than) that material, biological entity, that biological procession with a fuzzy start and a fuzzy end? If the real person is an immortal soul, the NT notion of a bodily resurrection is simply a vestige of its Hebrew roots, and can be quietly dropped (or at least disregarded) in favor of a doctrine that emphasizes the destiny of the immortal soul. But if the person is that biological procession, then bodily resurrection must either mean that the procession is reconstituted so it can continue in a different milieu, or that it becomes (or has already become) enshrined so it can be forever recalled.
Scripture? There’s nothing at all in the Hebrew Bible, and the NT doesn’t give us much to go on. 1 Corinthians 15 is the only place I find any relevant remarks:
35. But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”… 37 …you do not sow the body that is to be…38 But God gives it a body as he has chosen… 42 So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body.
So Paul, at least, believed that the resurrected body would be derived from, but not simply a continuation of, the deceased body. What emerges from a germinated seed is not simply a revived seed, but something pulled out of that seed into a new existence.
Personal Reflection. My view? I have no idea. We’re like some kernels of corn, on a corn cob enveloped by the husk on an ear of corn, alive on a cornstalk in a corn field, speculating and arguing about what it will be like when we are planted and then sprout out of the ground. There’s no way those kernels of corn have any inkling about what is to come. All they have is wishful thinking.
I do think that the person is indistinguishable from the bodily procession, and that on our own, when it’s over, it’s over. If there’s anything beyond this, be it bodily resurrection or some other form of afterlife, it’s all God’s doing. It’s his project, not ours. I have no say in it.
I’m comfortable with the idea that, metaphorically, God takes the recording of our entire life, makes his director’s cut to cut out and burn the parts he doesn’t like and keep what he values, enshrined so those parts never die, but somehow keep existing without further modification. Think of a shelf with a multitude of DVDs (or VHS tapes, for us old timers), each one a movie about a particular person. Any one of them – or all of them – can be put into a player, where for all eternity they can continue to reenact whatever the director decided to save. And, for all we know, it may have already happened, and we’re lucky enough to be able to experience the wonder of passing through it. We continue to exist because God remembers us.
Whether through a bodily resurrection akin to a seed sprouting anew, or a divine ‘director’s cut’ preserving what God values, the enduring mystery of what makes us ‘us’ underscores the wonder of being created in God’s image and of processing through this world as we do. It reminds us that we live with unanswerable questions—and, in that uncertainty, I find hope.
