Catholic: Dr John Lamont

The Resurrection - Christ's and ours

Resurrection is life after death. To understand it, we need to get rid of an idea taken from pagan philosophy (and reintroduced by the French philosopher René Descartes), which holds that we are immaterial souls, with material bodies as a nonessential part of ourselves. This pagan view is the idea behind reincarnation, in which our selves, which are immaterial souls, move from body to body like moving from house to house.

It is linked to a disdain of the physical world as a prison, and of matter as something which our souls benefit by escaping from. In fact, we are not immaterial beings like angels, but animals - animals that have the power to reason. Our souls are a part - the most important part - of us, but they are not the same as us; as St. Thomas Aquinas says, 'my soul is not me'.

After death, our souls continue, but we do not. Only by having our souls reunited to our bodies can we exist again. That is the notion of the life to come in the Scriptures. Even in death, our souls continue to be linked to the matter that made up our bodies in life, and our resurrected bodies must contain matter that belonged to our bodies in this life - otherwise they would not be our bodies. Our souls are completed and fulfilled, not imprisoned, by being reunited to their bodies.

The first resurrection is that of Christ. In it, his human soul was reunited to the corpse that was taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb, and this reunion revivified that corpse. It is this very same body that is really - that is, physically - present in the Holy Eucharist.

The human race as a whole will be resurrected at the Second Coming of Christ, an event whose time no-one knows, but that is some specific number of days, hours, minutes and seconds in the future. (The Blessed Virgin Mary will not be resurrected then, as she is now already living body and soul in heaven; whether or not she died and was resurrected prior to her assumption into heaven is an open question in theology.) The divine justice is the primary cause of this general resurrection.

Only at the end of history can all the effects of our actions on earth be manifested, and only by being resurrected can we ourselves - as opposed to our souls - be judged for these actions. This justice works through Christ's resurrection; both through his resurrection bringing him back to life so that he can exercise his function of judging us, and through the life of his resurrected body being communicated to the bodies of the saved, as part of their reward. The bodies of the saved will not have the kind of life they possessed prior to death, but the glorified life belonging to Christ's body after his resurrection. Theologians have described this life as involving immunity to suffering and death, complete obedience of the body to the will, and radiant beauty. The resurrected bodies of the damned will be immortal, but will not have this glorified nature.