Professor Schaff has a thoughtful mediation on the season below. Though my colleague is somewhat suspicious of me on these matters, I respond with my own. He makes this provocative but surely correct point:
Christianity is unlike most faiths. It ...is unique in that it is not we who make the sacrifice to God, but God who sacrifices himself for us. It is this recognition of an act of profound love on the part of God that sets Christianity apart from any religion I am aware of.
I would merely point out that this is seen as one of the defects of Christianity from the point of certain Orthodox Jews. Christians ask not what they can do for their God, but what their God is prepared to do for them.
That small point aside, Easter is certainly one of the most profound mysteries in the history of man's difficult relations with the Creator. In fact, what is most profoundly mysterious in it has been too difficult for most Christians to swallow. I am thinking of the resurrection of the body, which I believe to be the doctrine of all the major churches. The Biblical story is quite clear as I remember it, that Christ did not float out of the tomb but sat up, stood up, and walked out. Why else was it necessary to roll away the stone?
Most of my students, pious or not, seem to be quite ignorant of this teaching. They conceive of survival as the separation of a vaporous, cartoon body, that drifts upward and away from the discarded corpse. The gospel according to Walt Disney. I had long thought that this was a Cartesian impurity in the body of Christ, but apparently it is nothing new. Or so says this article by in Slate:
Christians in the first few centuries also had difficulty embracing the idea of a real, bodily resurrection. Then, as now, resurrection was not the favored post-death existence—people much preferred to think that after dying, souls headed to some ethereal realm of light and tranquility. During the Roman period, many regarded the body as a pitiful thing at best and at worst a real drag upon the soul, even a kind of prison from which the soul was liberated at death. So, it's not surprising that there were Christians who simply found bodily resurrection stupid and repugnant. To make the idea palatable, they instead interpreted all references to Jesus' resurrection in strictly spiritual terms.
Well. Dualism has a stronger ancient pedigree than I imagined. Here I lay some of my cards on the table. I think dualism, the view that human beings consist of two substantially distinct bodies, one physical, the other spiritual, is a big mistake. Human beings are unthinkable apart from their physical bodies, a truth that is suggested by the fact that ghosts always appear wearing clothes. It is one thing to believe in the survival of the soul, but cotton tee shirts and polyester jackets? I believe, as Aristotle did, that the soul is the essential activity of the body in the same way that pumping blood is the essential activity of the heart.
That the resurrection of the body is the teaching of the churches shows that my view is not only consistent with Darwinian biology, but also with the promise of salvation in Christ. Whether that promise is genuine is, of course, a matter of faith. But it is surely one of the greatest stories ever told, and I have nothing but admiration for it. I think it is clearly a true story in so far as it gets right what human beings are in this world.
So I am fully prepared to celebrate Easter in the time-honored American way, by imagining a man-sized bunny carrying a straw basket full of colored chicken eggs on plastic grass. Oh, and I will be going to church and later cooking a leg of lamb (sorry, Todd).
To all of our readers: Happy Easter from SDP!
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