Resurrection of the dead, the belief that the dead will be brought back to life, is a common component of a number of eschatologies, most commonly in Christian, Islamic, Jewish and Zoroastrian eschatology.
Judaism
Hebrew Bible
The earliest reference in the Hebrew Bible to raising from Sheol is found in the Song of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:6). However this is usually understood by commentators to be read figuratively not a literal expectation of God bringing down to Sheol and raising up. Resurrection passages prior to Daniel are primarily taken as dealing with national resurrection as in Isaiah's (26:19) "Your dead shall live; Together with my dead body they shall arise." This passage in Isaiah later became a touchpoint for rabbinical discussion on the resurrection. Temporary resurrections of individual dead people are found in the Hebrew Bible, such as Elijah and the widow's son at Zarephath: "Behold your son lives." (1Â Kings 17:23); Elisha and the Shunammite woman: "Take up your son." (2Â Kings 4:36) and contact with Elisha's bones reviving a dead man: "as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet." (2Â Kings 13:21)
National resurrection is found in Ezekiel's Vision in the Valley of Dry Bones reads, "Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live". (Ezekiel 37:5)
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia article on resurrection, the topic may be discussed in Job 14:13-15, 19:25-26, Isa 26:19, Dan 12:1-4.
Second Temple period
- 530 BCE to 70 CE
In the Second Temple period there is general a broad width of beliefs. The concept of resurrection of the physical body is found in 2 Maccabees, according to which it will happen through recreation of the flesh. Resurrection of the dead also appears in detail in the extra-canonical books of Enoch, in Apocalypse of Baruch, and 2 Esdras. According to the British scholar in ancient Judaism Philip R. Davies, there is “little or no clear reference … either to immortality or to resurrection from the dead†in the Dead Sea scrolls texts. Both Josephus and the New Testament record that the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife, but the sources vary on the beliefs of the Pharisees. The New Testament claims that the Pharisees believed in the resurrection, but does not specify whether this included the flesh or not. According to Josephus, who himself was a Pharisee, the Pharisees held that only the soul was immortal and the souls of good people will be reincarnated and “pass into other bodies,†while “the souls of the wicked will suffer eternal punishment.†Paul, who also was a Pharisee, believed in the resurrection of only a spiritualized body, denying that the resurrection included flesh and blood. Jubilees seems to refer to the resurrection of the soul only, or to a more general idea of an immortal soul.
Rabbinical period
The Resurrection is a core belief of the Mishnah. The belief in resurrection is expressed on all occasions in the Jewish liturgy; e.g., in the morning prayer Elohai Neshamah, in the Shemoneh 'Esreh and in the funeral services. Maimonides made it the last of his thirteen articles of belief: "I firmly believe that there will take place a revival of the dead at a time which will please the Creator, blessed be His name."
Modern Judaism
According to Herbert C. Brichto, writing in Reform Judaism's Hebrew Union College Annual, the family tomb is the central concept in understanding biblical views of the afterlife. Brichto states that it is "not mere sentimental respect for the physical remains that is...the motivation for the practice, but rather an assumed connection between proper sepulture and the condition of happiness of the deceased in the afterlife".
According to Brichto, the early Israelites believed that the graves of family, or tribe, united into one, and that this unified collectivity is to what the Biblical Hebrew term Sheol refers, the common Grave of humans. Although not well defined in the Tanakh, Sheol in this view was a subterranean underworld where the souls of the dead went after the body died. The Babylonians had a similar underworld called Aralu, and the Greeks had one known as Hades. For biblical references to Sheol see Genesis 42:38, Isaiah 14:11, Psalm 141:7, Daniel 12:2, Proverbs 7:27 and Job 10:21,22, and 17:16, among others. According to Brichto, other Biblical names for Sheol were Abaddon (ruin), found in Psalm 88:11, Job 28:22 and Proverbs 15:11; Bor (the pit), found in Isaiah 14:15, 24:22, Ezekiel 26:20; and Shakhat (corruption), found in Isaiah 38:17, Ezekiel 28:8.
Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrian belief in an end times renovation of the earth, frashokereti including some form of revival of the dead can be attested from the 4th Century BCE. As distinct from Judaism this is the resurrection of all the dead to universal purification and renewal of the world.
Frashokereti is the Zoroastrian doctrine of a final renovation of the universe, when evil will be destroyed, and everything else will be then in perfect unity with God (Ahura Mazda). The term probably means "making wonderful, excellent".
The doctrinal premises are (1) good will eventually prevail over evil; (2) creation was initially perfectly good, but was subsequently corrupted by evil; (3) the world will ultimately be restored to the perfection it had at the time of creation; (4) the "salvation for the individual depended on the sum of [that person's] thoughts, words and deeds, and there could be no intervention, whether compassionate or capricious, by any divine being to alter this." Thus, each human bears the responsibility for the fate of his own soul, and simultaneously shares in the responsibility for the fate of the world.
Christianity
New Testament
In the oldest texts of the New Testament, the Pauline Epistles, Paul the Apostle insisted that the resurrection did not involve “flesh and bloodâ€, arguing that we instead will be resurrected with a spiritual or pneumatic body. (1 Corinthians 15:44) As a number of scholars have pointed out, according to Paul, flesh is simply to play no part, as we are made immortal. In the Gospels however, the resurrection, as exemplified by the resurrection of Jesus, is presented with an increasing emphasis on the resurrection of the flesh: From the empty tomb in Mark; the women embracing the feet of the resurrected Jesus in Matthew; the insistence of the resurrected Jesus in Luke that he is of "flesh and bones" and not just a spirit or pneuma; to the resurrected Jesus’ encouraging the disciples to touch his wounds in John.
Using the "Sign of Jonah" in Mathew 16 and Luke 11, Jesus implies the resurrection of the dead.
In Acts of the Apostles chapters 4, 17, 23 and 24, the Apostles and Paul of Tarsus argued in support of the doctrine.
Nicene Creed and Early Christianity
Most Christian denominations profess the Nicene Creed, which affirms the "resurrection of the dead"; most English versions of the Nicene Creed in current use include the phrase: "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."
The Christian writers Irenaeus and Justin Martyr, in the 2nd Century, wrote against the idea that only the soul survived. Martyr insists that a man is both soul and body and Christ has promised to raise both, just as his own body was raised.
While the Christian doctrine of resurrection is based on Jewish belief, how the emphasis on this involving the actual flesh increased parallel with Christianity succeeding among the Greek populace may, as first pointed out by scholar of religion Dag Øistein Endsjø, connect to traditional Greek beliefs that true immortality always had to involve both body and soul. Although the Greeks held that a few individuals had been resurrected to physical immortality and that this really was the best fate possible, there was no ancient Greek belief in a general resurrection of the dead. Indeed they held that once a body had been destroyed, there was no possibility of returning to life as not even the gods could recreate the flesh. As also first demonstrated by Endsjø, several early Church Fathers, like Pseudo-Justin, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, and Athenagoras of Athens, argue about the Christian resurrection beliefs in ways that answer to this traditional Greek scepticism to post-mortal physical continuity. The human body could not be annihilated, only dissolved â€" it could not even be integrated in the bodies of those who devoured it. Thus God only had to reassemble the minute parts of the dissolved bodies in the resurrection.
Traditional Christian Churches, i.e. ones that adhere to the creeds, continue to uphold the belief that there will be a general and universal resurrection of the dead at "the end of time", as described by Paul when he said, "...he hath appointed a day, in which he will judge the world..." (Acts 17:31 KJV) and "...there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust." (Acts 24:15 KJV).
Roman Catholicism
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia: ""No doctrine of the Christian Faith", says St. Augustine, "is so vehemently and so obstinately opposed as the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh"... This opposition had begun long before the days of St. Augustine."
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church the body after resurrection is changed into a spiritual, imperishable body:
999How? Christ is raised with his own body: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself".553But he did not return to an earthly life. So, in him, "all of them will rise again with their own bodies which they now bear," but Christ "will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body," into a "spiritual body."
According to the Summa Theologica, spiritual beings that have been restored to glorified bodies will have the following basic qualities:
- Impassibility (immortal / painless) â€" immunity from death and pain
- Subtility (permeability) â€" freedom from restraint by matter
- Agility â€" obedience to spirit with relation to movement and space (the ability to move through space and time with the speed of thought)
- Clarity â€" resplendent beauty of the soul manifested in the body (as when Jesus was transfigured on Mount Tabor)
Lutheranism
Although Martin Luther personally believed and taught resurrection of the dead in combination with soul sleep, this is not a mainstream teaching of Lutheranism and most Lutherans traditionally believe in resurrection of the body in combination with the immortal soul.
According to the Lutheran Churchâ€"Missouri Synod (LCMS), on the last day all the dead will be resurrected. Their souls will then be reunited with the same bodies they had before dying. The bodies will then be changed, those of the wicked to a state of everlasting shame and torment, those of the righteous to an everlasting state of celestial glory.
Anglicanism
There are many theologians, such as Thomas Oden, popular Christian writers such as Randy Alcorn, and Christian scholars such as the Anglican Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright, who have defended the primacy of the resurrection in Christian faith.
Interviewed by Time in 2008, senior Anglican bishop and theologian N. T. Wright spoke of “the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their ‘souls going to Heaven,'" adding: “I've often heard people say, ‘I'm going to heaven soon, and I won't need this stupid body there, thank goodness.’ That's a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.†Instead, Wright explains: “In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state." This is "conscious," but "compared to being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep." This will be followed by resurrection into new bodies, he says. "Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death."
Methodism and other evangelicals
The Reverend M. Douglas Meeks, professor of theology and Wesleyan studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, states that "it is very important for Christians to hold to the resurrection of the body." F. Belton Joyner in United Methodist Answers, states that the "New Testament does not speak of a natural immortality of the soul, as if we never actually die. It speaks of resurrection of the body, the claim that is made each time we state the historic Apostles' Creed and classic Nicene Creed", given in The United Methodist Hymnal. In ¶128 of the Book of Discipline of the Free Methodist Church it is written "There will be a bodily resurrection from the dead of both the just and the unjust, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, they that have done evil unto the resurrection of the damnation. The resurrected body will be a spiritual body, but the person will be whole identifiable. The Resurrection of Christ is the guarantee of resurrection unto life to those who are in Him." John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, in his sermon On the Resurrection of the Dead, defended the doctrine, stating "There are many places of Scripture that plainly declare it. St. Paul, in the 53d verse of this chapter, tells us that 'this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.' [1 Corinthians 15:53]." In addition, notable Methodist hymns, such as those by Charles Wesley, link 'our resurrection and Christ's resurrection".
The Doctrinal Basis of the Evangelical Alliance affirms belief in "the resurrection of the body, the judgment of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, with the eternal blessedness of the righteous, and the eternal punishment of the wicked."
Baptist Churches
James Leo Garrett Jr., E. Glenn Hinson, and James E. Tull write that "Baptists traditionally have held firmly to the belief that Christ rose triumphant over death, sin, and hell in a bodily resurrection from the dead."
Anabaptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Restorationists
Several churches, such as the Anabaptists and Socinians of the Reformation, then Seventh-day Adventist Church, Christadelphians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and theologians of different traditions reject the idea of the immortality of a non-physical soul as a vestige of Neoplatonism, and other pagan traditions. In this school of thought, the dead remain dead (and do not immediately progress to a Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory) until a physical resurrection of some or all of the dead occurs at the end of time, or in Paradise Restored on earth, in a "general resurrection". Some groups, Christadelphians in particular, consider that it is not a universal resurrection, and that at this time of resurrection that the Last Judgment will take place.
Millennialists
Some commentators interpret the Book of Revelation as requiring two resurrections of the dead, one is before the Millennium, the other after it.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
According to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), before the resurrection, the spirits of the dead are believed to exist in a place known as the spirit world, which is similar to yet fundamentally distinct from the traditional concept of Heaven and Hell. It is believed that the spirit retains its wants, beliefs, and desires in the afterlife.
LDS Church doctrine teaches the Jesus Christ was the first person to be resurrected, and that all those who have lived on the earth will be resurrected because of Jesus Christ, regardless of their righteousness. The LDS Church teaches that not all are resurrected at the same time; the righteous will be resurrected in a "first resurrection" and unrepentant sinners in a "last resurrection."
The resurrection is believed to unite the spirit with the body again, and the LDS Church teaches that the body (flesh and bone) will be made whole and become incorruptible, a state which includes immortality.
There is also a belief in LDS doctrine that a few exceptional individuals were removed from the earth "without tasting of death." This is referred to as translation, and these individuals are believed to have retained their bodies in a purified form, though they too will eventually be required to receive resurrection.
Modern de-emphasis
Early church fathers defended the resurrection of the dead against the pagan belief that the immortal soul went to the underworld immediately after death. Currently, however, it is a popular Christian belief that the souls of the righteous do go straight to heaven.
At the close of the medieval period, the modern era brought a shift in Christian thinking from an emphasis on the resurrection of the body back to the immortality of the soul. This shift was a result of a change in the zeitgeist, as a reaction to the Renaissance and later to the Enlightenment. Dartigues has observed that especially “from the 17th to the 19th century, the language of popular piety no longer evoked the resurrection of the soul but everlasting life. Although theological textbooks still mentioned resurrection, they dealt with it as a speculative question more than as an existential problem.â€
This shift was supported not by any scripture, but largely by the popular religion of the Enlightenment, deism. Deism allowed for a supreme being, such as the philosophical first cause, but denied any significant personal or relational interaction with this figure. Deism, which was largely led by rationality and reason, could allow a belief in the immortality of the soul, but not necessarily in the resurrection of the dead. American deist Ethan Allen demonstrates this thinking in his work, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784) where he argues in the preface that nearly every philosophical problem is beyond humanity’s understanding, including the miracles of Christianity, although he does allow for the immortality of an immaterial soul.
Influence on secular law and custom
Formerly, it was widely believed that to rise on judgement day the body had to be whole and preferably buried with the feet to the east so that the person would rise facing God. An Act of Parliament from the reign of King Henry VIII stipulated that only the corpses of executed murderers could be used for dissection. Restricting the supply to the cadavers of murderers was seen as an extra punishment for the crime. If one believes dismemberment stopped the possibility of resurrection of an intact body on judgement day, then a posthumous execution is an effective way of punishing a criminal. Attitudes towards this issue changed very slowly in the United Kingdom and were not manifested in law until the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832. For much of the British population it was not until the 20th century that the link between the body and resurrection was finally broken as cremation was only made legal in 1902.
Islam
In Islam, Yawm al-QiyÄmah (Arabic: يوم القيامة‎ "the Day of Resurrection") or Yawm ad-Din (Arabic: يوم الدين‎ "the Day of Judgment") is believed to be God's final assessment of humanity. The sequence of events (according to the most commonly held belief) is the annihilation of all creatures, resurrection of the body, and the judgment of all sentient creatures.
The exact time when these events will occur is unknown, however there are said to be major and minor signs which are to occur near the time of Qiyamah (End time). Many Qur'anic verses, especially the earlier ones, are dominated by the idea of the nearing of the day of resurrection.
The Day of Resurrection
Nearing the end of time, the trumpet will be blown and creation will cease to exist. God, Almighty, says:
“And the Trumpet will be blown, and all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth will swoon away, except him whom God wills.†(Quran 39:68)
It will be blown a second blowing, and all creation from the beginning of time till the end of time will be resurrected. God, the Exalted, tells us:
“And the Trumpet will be blown (i.e. the second blowing) and behold! From the graves they will come out quickly to their Lord.†(Quran 36:51)
People will be standing naked, barefooted and uncircumcised. The Prophet described to us what will happen, he said:
“You will be gathered, barefooted, naked, and uncircumcised (as God says):
“As We began the first creation, We shall repeat it.†(Quran 21:104)
Technology
In his 1994 book The Physics of Immortality, physicist Frank J. Tipler, an expert on the general theory of relativity, presented his Omega Point Theory which outlines how a resurrection of the dead could take place at the end of the cosmos. He posits that humans will evolve into robots which will turn the entire cosmos into a supercomputer which will, shortly before the big crunch, perform the resurrection within its cyberspace, reconstructing formerly dead humans (from information captured by the supercomputer from the past light cone of the cosmos) as avatars within its metaverse.
British physicist and pioneer in the field of quantum computing, David Deutsch, agrees with Tipler's Omega Point cosmology and the idea of resurrecting deceased people with the help of quantum computers but he is critical of Tipler's theological views. No-cloning theorem is used.
Italian physicist and computer scientist, Giulio Prisco presents the idea of quantum archaeology or the idea of simulating, on quantum computers, and find quantum information in the universe about each human to resurrect everyone with reversible computing. Quantum information can't be destroyed or copied.
In his book Mind Children, roboticist Hans Moravec showed how a future supercomputer would be able to resurrect long-dead minds from the information that still survived. This information can be memories, filmstrips, medical records, DNA...
Ray Kurzweil, American scientist, inventor and futurist believes that when the singularity happens it will be possible to resurrect the dead by digital recreation.
Russian philosopher and transhumanist Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov advocated resurrection of the dead using scientific methods. Fedorov tried to plan specific actions for scientific research of the possibility of restoring life and making it infinite. His first project is connected with collecting and synthesizing decayed remains of dead based on "knowledge and control over all atoms and molecules of the world". The second method described by Fedorov is genetic-hereditary. The revival could be done successively in the ancestral line: sons and daughters restore their fathers and mothers, they in turn restore their parents and so on. This means restoring the ancestors using the hereditary information that they passed on to their children. Using this genetic method it is only possible to create a genetic twin of the dead person. It is necessary to give back the revived person his old mind, his personality. Fedorov speculates about the idea of "radial images" that may contain the personalities of the people and survive after death. Nevertheless, Fedorov noted that even if a soul is destroyed after death, Man will learn to restore it whole by mastering the forces of decay and fragmentation.
In their science fiction novel The Light of Other Days Sir Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter imagine a future civilization resurrecting the dead of past ages by reaching into the past, through micro wormholes and with nanorobots, to download full snapshots of brain states and memories.
Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans who cannot be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Cryonics procedures ideally begin within minutes of cardiac arrest, and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation. However, the idea of cryonics also includes preservation of people long after death because of the possibility that brain encoding memory structure and personality may still persist or be inferable in the future. Whether sufficient brain information still exists for cryonics to successfully preserve may be intrinsically unprovable by present knowledge. Therefore, most proponents of cryonics see it as an intervention with prospects for success that vary widely depending on circumstances.
See also
- Dying-and-rising god
- Intermediate state
- Preterism
- Reincarnation
References
External links
- Catholic Encyclopedia: General Resurrection
- Jewish Encyclopedia: Resurrection
