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On Disembodied Resurrected Persons: A Reply
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
In a recent article in Religious Studies, Professor P. W. Gooch attempts to wean the orthodox Christian from anthropological materialism by consideration of the question of the nature of the post-mortem person in the resurrection. He argues that the view that the resurrected person is a psychophysical organism who is in some physical sense the same as the ante-mortem person is inconsistent with the Pauline view of the resurrected body; rather, according to him, Paul's view is most consistent with that which affirms the disembodied survival of the person. ‘I want to argue’, he writes, ‘for the thesis that a Pauline resurrection body may well be ontologically the same as a disembodied person (204).’ I intend to show that Professor Gooch has failed to provide any support for this view and indeed that his own view falls prey to the criticisms which he has raised against other views.
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References
page 225 note 1 Gooch, P. W., ‘On disembodied resurrected persons: a study in the logic of Christian eschatology’, Religious Studies XVII 2 (06 1981), 199–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 225 note 2 Gooch's switch from ‘person’ in (i) to ‘body’ in (ii) is confusing and the cause of certain ambiguities in the treatment. For example, he seems to fail to realize that to say of the resurrected or re-created that he is the same person as the deceased is not necessarily to claim or even to entail that he has the same body.
page 228 note 1 Reichenbach, Bruce, Is Man the Phoenix? A Study of Immortality (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 171–2.Google Scholar
page 228 note 2 I have developed these in ibid., ch. 4.
page 229 note 1 Reichenbach, Bruce, ‘Monism and the possibility of life after death’, Religious Studies XIV, 2 (1978), 27–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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