On The Resurrection Of The Flesh

The heretics against whom this work is directed, were the same who maintained that the demiurge, or the god who created this world and gave the Mosaic dispensation, was opposed to the supreme God. Hence they attached an idea of inherent corruption and worthlessness to all his works--amongst the rest, to the flesh or body of man; affirming that it could not rise again, and that the soul alone was capable of inheriting immortality.

Early Christian writers preferred to speak of the coming resurrection in the most bodily way possible: the resurrection of the flesh. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth took the same avenue, daring to speak of humans' eternal life in rather striking corporeal terms. In this study, Nathan Hitchcock pulls together Barth's doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, anticipating what the great thinker might have said more systematically in volume V of his Church Dogmatics. Provocatively, Hitchcock goes on to argue that Barth's description of the resurrection--as eternalization, as manifestation, as incorporation--bears much in common with some unlikely programs and, contrary to its intention, jeopardizes the very contours of human life it hopes to preserve. In addition to contributing to Barth studies, this book offers a sober warning to theologians pursuing eschatology through notions of participation.

Early Christian writers preferred to speak of the coming resurrection in the most bodily way possible: the resurrection of the flesh. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth took the same avenue, daring to speak of humans' eternal life in rather strikingcorporeal terms. In this study, Nathan Hitchcock pulls together Barth's doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, anticipating what the great thinker might have said more systematically in volume V of his 'Church Dogmatics'. Provocatively, Hitchcock goes on to argue that Barth's description of the resurrection - as eternalization, as manifestation, as incorporation - bears much in common with some unlikely programs and, contrary to its intention, jeopardizes the very contours of human life it hopes to preserve. In addition to contributing to Barth studies, this book offers a sober warning to theologians pursuing eschatology through notions of participation.

In the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second life as critical theory, challenging the notion of an autonomous self and driving early modern avant-garde poetry. As an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology transformed the ancient hope for the resurrection of the flesh into the fantasy of a soul or mind living on separately from any body, literature complicated the terms of the debate. Such poets as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson picked up the discarded idea of the resurrection of the flesh and bent it from an apocalyptic future into the here and now to imagine the self already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the resurrection body. Fate of the Flesh explores what happens when seventeenth-century poets posit a resurrection body within the historical person. These poets see the resurrection body as the precondition for the social person’s identities and forms of agency and yet as deeply other to all such identities and agencies, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. This perspective leads seventeenth-century poets to a compelling awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to re-imagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in its light. By developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materiality within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They frame their poems neither as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers assembled around a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Annotation In this intriguing discussion of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Dale Martin contends that Paul's various disagreements with the Corinthians were the result of a fundamental conflict over the ideological construction of the human body (and hence the church as the body of Christ). This led to differing opinions on a variety of theological viewpoints--including the role of rhetoric and philosophy in a hierarchical society, the eating of meat sacrificed to idols, prostitution, sexual desire and marriage, and the resurrection of the body. Book jacket.

What will our resurrected bodies look like? Will we be young or old? Marked by the physical imperfections of our earthly lives? Does this flesh we carry now rise or is it something other? What does our modern knowledge of the world contribute to our understanding? Brian Schmisek traces developments in the Christian understanding of resurrection, explores the topic in light of biblical data, and mines scientific insights. What results is a synthesis that expresses the essence of the apostolic kerygma in modern terms. Schmisek's impressive combination of solid theological and biblical scholarship with an accessible and welcoming style makes this book an excellent resource for adult education groups, deacon formation classes, undergraduates, and other nonspecialists.