Visited Christ Church Southport this morning. Great music group, and very friendly. They didn't seem to bother with liturgy though. Maybe that was at the earlier service. Maybe it was because they used SongPro or something instead of PowerPoint (just re-read a grove booklet - PowerPoint is intrinsically Anglican!)
Ormskirk MotorFest this afternoon.
Then home for F1, an omelette, and a film. "Limitless". Which was about taking drugs, or possibly drinking coffee. The premise is that there's a drug that enables you to use the 80% of your brain that you don't normally use, and so it makes you very smart. An interesting idea, although of course functional MRI scanning has shown that we do use pretty much all our brains anyway. The fictional drug in the film is far more powerful than any real neuroenhancer. I was hoping there would be a moral point about how the effects of drugs never lasts, but that seemed missing by the end.
There's still an embedded question of some interest though: what would it be like to be smarter? Cleverer? In a nod to Groundhog Day, the "hero" learns to play the piano, in just a few days. And is able to learn other languages, and analyse the stock Market. That kind of thing.
I always wanted to be clever. Really clever, not just quite clever or slightly above average at some things, or vaguely interested in the things that clever people are interested in. My memory has never been very good, though. I avoided memory-intensive subjects at school, like Latin. I liked chess until I found out that to be really good you had to memorise other people's games. The guy in Unlimited has perfect recall. My memory has never been very good.
Did I mention that?
We sang a nice song this morning - There Is a Day. Though I had to check for eschatological exaggeration. "We will meet Him in the Air" gets me a bit nervous It's the most obvious translation, though if the "Air" means the sky means the place of clouds means the place of God's presence then there's less levitation involved which I'd really prefer.
Once we get rid of the idea of an entirely spiritual life in heaven, and get down to the more biblical resurrection of the body (because that's what happened to Jesus) then we can start to ask, what kind of body? People in St Paul's churches had already got that far in their thinking; we are far behind them theologically in many ways.
I'd like to think the resurrection body has greater capacity in every way. I might finally be able to remember things. I wouldn't expect that we'd suddenly be able to play the piano. But the capability would be there. And with (enjoyable) study, the end result would I expect be better than anything we know in this world. Unless it's all harps, of course. Maybe we only get one string each? Then we'd only get harmony by learning to play together. The music group or orchestra models community. Or should do.
It's getting late now, so I'll get on to the technological metaphor for the resurrection tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's St Paul - possibly failing to know that seeds aren't dead, but merely dormant:
1Corinthians 15
35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” 36 How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.
Location:Shed
Love the tune of "There's a day" and many of the words. Like you, I had to pause on the "We will meet him in the air" which, though Biblical, forms uneasy pictures of the rapture - oh yeah, I don't like the "Oh yeah" words either!
ReplyDeleteI like the song's "clothed in immortality", alluding to 1Cor 15:42, just a few verses after your quote.
I don't accept that we will be raised physical. Paul said we will not be raised with physical but spiritual bodies, just 2 verses on v44. Jesus says in Mark 12:25 that the raised are "like angels in heaven". So I don't see why a Christian should 'get rid of' ideas that we are raised to a spiritual life in heaven... or am I misunderstanding you?
Firstly, the 'oh yeah' grated with me too! But I couldn't find anything unbiblical in the lyric.
ReplyDeleteNow more contentiously, my whole idea of resurrection and afterlife were shaken up by reading Tom Wright's book 'Surprised by Hope'. I really would suggest you have a look at that - extremely interesting whether you take on board everything he says or not. It does resonate for me with a question I had as a child: why was Jesus' body not in the grave? If His resurrection is spiritual rather than physical, why not?
I won't go into all the arguments here, but he does go into what Paul and others thought about resurrection. Tom says that in 1Cor 15 the physical vs. spiritual body divide is a mistranslation in RSV offshoots (p. 167) The contrast is between corruptible and incorruptible physicality.
In v. 44, the usual word for body/flesh (soma) is used 4 times - twice qualified as physical/natural, twice as spiritual. What we tend to do is read into that a Greek/Cartesian idea of dualism between 'body' and 'soul' - which isn't there - and then go on to think a 'spiritual' existence is somehow disembodied. But Paul is clearly talking about two types of body.
Can't remember if NTW deals with Mark's angels. I suppose the question is, in what way are we like angels?
This subject is very difficult to discuss using single quotations. My own studies have been into the understandings of the Pharisees and Essenes and how their teachings were picked up by the Gospel authors - how they were developed into Christian theology. As you will be aware, the understandings had already developed from Sadducaic ideas to the stage where a spirit separates from the body at death to gain a new body on the day of resurrection. That was Jewish teaching. Jesus moves the theology even further. It is a huge subject and every quote should sit against a huge context which needs to be described. For similar reasons, I will not go into details about angels suffice to say that they were seen as spiritual beings who, unlike us mortals, had eternal life.
ReplyDeleteI may read the book but having little time (busy writing my own book!) I will probably get a friend to read it for me! :-)
There is definitely a development in the theology of the afterlife in the Bible, from shadowy Sheol in the OT to Paul getting in trouble for preaching Resurrection all the time. I thought the Sadducees (unlike the Pharisees) didn't believe in resurrection? ( that's why they were sad, you see! ... Sorry couldn't resist that one!)
ReplyDeleteI have an idea of what 'soul' might be which I'll do in the next post.
Feel free to advertise your book on this blog if you like! What's it about?
Sadducees didn't :-) - I was taking that as the starting point.
ReplyDeleteOn the book - For over a decade, I've been studying the way in which the Gospels are structured and how they use their sources - where the pericopes come from and how they are placed together. The work has been so succesful that I now have a lifetime of books to write! The first book demonstrates the (significant) impact of this work on Mark's Gospel.