Living as we do in a modern age that must attend to the insights of scientific discovery, an age in which it's pretty difficult to imagine that heaven is up above past the clouds and hell down below our feet, we must attend to the question of what resurrection might entail. In previous discussions on this site I know that some find this idea problematic at best. But there are alternative views to consider, ones that allow us to fathom the idea of eternal life and even resurrection. I posted earlier from Hans Kung's book Eternal Life.
Kung notes that modern anthropological insights do not allow for a body/soul dichotomy. So, when we think about resurrection we can't understand it as the "natural continuance of a spirit-soul independent of our bodily functions." Thus, we are a new creation, a transformation of what was to what is.
He writes further:
Is it then a bodily resurrection, a raising up of man with his body? yes and no. No, if we understand "body" in physiological terms as this actual body, the "corpse, " the remains." Yes, if "body" is understood in the New Testament sense as "soma," not so much physiologically as personally: as the identical personal reality, the same self with its entire history, which is mistakenly neglected in the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, even though the latter stresses the new (admittedly earthly) corporality. When we talk of the resurrection of the body, we mean then as the Catholic theologian Franz Josef Nocke expresses it, "that not only man's naked self is saved through death, when all earthly history is left behind, all relationships with other human beings become meaningless; bodily resurrection means that a person's life history and all the relationships established in the course of this history enter together into the consummation and finally belong to the risen person." (Eternal Life, Doubleday, 1984, p. 111).
The issue, Kung points out, is not about the continuity of the body "as a physical entity and consequently scientific questions like those about the whereabouts of the molecules simply do not arise." It is the person's identity -- what John Polkinghorne spoke of an a Speaking of Faith episode as the "patterns" of our identity -- which are continued and indeed possibly recreated.
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