The realism of the resurrection

"We also believe, and so we speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence. (...) So we do not lose heart.

Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. (...) because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary but what cannot be seen is eternal." 2 Corinthians 4:14,16,18

Hebrew anthropology and Greek anthropology
The idea that the soul is immortal and destined for eternity and that the body, which it embodies for a time, is mortal and as such destined to disappear, has everything to do with Greek dualistic anthropology and nothing to do with biblical way of thinking.

In Hebrew and biblical anthropology, neither the soul is immortal nor the body mortal. In our being, the corporeal and the spiritual dimensions form an indivisible whole.  If during our earthly life the body has a soul that animates it, then in our afterlife, the soul has a body that gives it form, a body that is not physical but spiritual. It has the same form as the physical, but not of the same nature.

Visible matter is made up of invisible things
We have always assumed that matter is visible and spirit is invisible; in reality, this is not the case. The quantum physics of our times, which has dethroned Newton’s mechanistic and materialistic physics forever, tell us that visible reality is made up of invisible realities.

The atom, considered to be the "building block" of matter, is invisible and is made up of an electron that is always in motion, inside a nebula or cloud, the centre of which is composed of neutrons and protons; these in turn are made up of quarks, which are further made up of the most elementary particle discovered recently and dubbed "the God particle". From this we can conclude that simplistic definitions such as: the matter is visible and spirit is invisible have nothing to do with modern physics.

The water metaphor
Water, without ever ceasing to be what it is, exists in nature in three different states: solid, liquid and gas. In its gaseous state, water, without losing anything that characterizes it in its essence, exists in an intangible and invisible form.

Just like how water can exist, without ceasing to be what it is in its essence, in an invisible and untouchable form, so we as people can also exist in an invisible and intangible form in our spiritual body, which replaces our physical body after death. Our physical body is our way of being and existing in time and space; our spiritual body will be our way of being and existing beyond time and space.

Coming back to our analogy, water in its solid and gaseous state is like being in limbo because it is in a pure state. But it is only the principle of life when it exists in the liquid state, that is, not pure but drinkable. When water vapour condenses, in the form of rain or dew, it penetrates mother earth, and after acquiring a "physical body" formed by the mineral salts that make it up, it is born from the earth, which is why it is called a "water source".

Mineral salts are the physical body of water, as they transform it from pure to drinkable and fix it inside every living organism. Pure water, without the mineral salts, is not the principle of life because, unable to retain it in its pure state, living beings would dehydrate and die.

When water evaporates, it lets go of the mineral salts which were its way of being in this world and returns to its pure state. The evaporation of water is like our death; just like water, which does not need mineral salts to be water, we do not need our physical body to be what we are, children of God: it is not, therefore, our physical body that identifies us before God, but our spiritual body.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Ressurection or Reincarnation?

"So, it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body." 1 Corinthians 15:42-44.

Reincarnation is a Hindu and Buddhist concept that the New Age has spread to the Western Christian world. The fragile and often inconsistent way of thinking of today’s man, fascinated by the possibility of having seven lives, like a cat, has uncritically assimilated this concept. It is common to find Christians who believe in both resurrection and reincarnation, without realizing that the two concepts are mutually exclusive.

Like everything that is authentically human, faith will always escape the magnifying glass of the scientific method of knowledge; man is not an object of science. However, in order not to degrade into pure superstition, faith must be married to reason. Superstition is irrational, faith, while not rational, is at least reasonable, plausible, and must make sense. Let us put both concepts to the test of reason:

Reincarnation – As in Greek philosophy, for Easterners the soul is eternal, it existed before and is independent of the body it embodies. In an ascending process towards perfection, each life, each body, that the soul incarnates is an opportunity to progress towards perfection, successively incarnating in higher and increasingly more perfect forms of life. Contrastingly, when the soul misbehaves, it regresses, or it reincarnates in the next life in a lower form of existence, which can even be an animal, a cow for example.

Astronomy – Reincarnation seems to assume that the world has always existed and will always exist; but current astronomy says that the world came into existence with a Big Bang and will cease to exist one day, when the universe has used up all of its energy.

Demographics – For reincarnation to be possible, it assumes a planet with the same population throughout time.  Demographics tells us that man began inhabiting this planet 5 million years ago; it is estimated that the world population at the time of Jesus was 300 million people, now we are at 7 billion.

Evolution of Species – Life started with a unicellular organism that diversified and progressed to ever higher and more intelligent species until it reached the human being. The science of evolution of species does not acknowledge any regression. Between us and animals, there are millions of years of evolution that cannot be reversed.

Genetics – The combination of genes in the genetic code of each living being is unique and exclusive in the life history of this planet; part of human dignity is due to this fact. It makes no sense for a soul to have a genetic code for each life it lives, nor does it make sense for several bodies of the same soul to have the same genetic code.

Regression – How then do we explain certain therapies that lead people to regress and learn what they were in another life and what type of person they were? If there is any truth to this phenomenon, it could be explained by the notion of "collective unconsciousness", proposed by Carl Jung, a follower of Freud.

People would not therefore regress to other lives they have had, but rather, through meditation and regression techniques, they would connect to psychic materials that do not come from personal experience but are found in what Jung calls the “collective unconsciousness”; this is a kind of database of the inheritance and heritage of all humanity, which contains everything that human beings are and have done throughout human history.

Resurrection – This concept owes no satisfaction or explanation to any of the sciences described above, because it is not in conflict with any of them. In the Judaeo-Christian thinking, the soul is not eternal and is intrinsically and forever united to a body; there are no bodies without souls, nor souls without bodies.

By God’s grace, every human being is naturally a candidate for eternal life, his or her entire being, body and soul transformed into an immortal form of existence, that is, the spiritual body or glorious body (1Cor 15:42-44). Those who respond negatively to God’s grace, denying it in their lives and living with their backs to God, are probably making themselves candidates for eternal death, that is, a return to the nothingness from which God created everything.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC