Christian Physicalism?

[hume]

8/6/06:

"For the fate of people and the fate of animals is the same. As one dies, so dies the other; they all have the same breath. People have no advantage over animals, for everything is futile. All are going to the same place; all come from dust, and all return to dust." -- Eccl. 3:19-20 (HCSB)

"His spirit departs, he returns to the earth; In that very day his thoughts perish." Ps 146:4 (NASB)

Some (especially recently) have tried to maintain a Christian physicalist view of human nature: we are just dust, just our bodies; even so, the hope of resurrection is our hope of eternal life.

Nancey Murphy speaks of "a more biblical view of the human race -— one that recognizes that, as with the other animals, God formed humans from the dust of the ground. In English we lose the Hebrew pun in calling the first human adam because he is formed from adamah, dust or ground (Gen. 2:7). We can recapture the imagery if we think of ourselves as humans, made from humus [i.e, topsoil]." [from "Scientific Perspectives on Christian Anthropology," in CTI REFLECTIONS, volume 8.]

This viewpoint can seem unsettling, but this reaction is partly derived from interpreting physicalism in light of strong dualist assumptions. Thus we worry that "no immortal soul" means "no eternal life." This is not the case. True, a Christian physicalist is thrust back upon radical contingency -- all our hopes would depend on God, since we are in no sense immortal in and of ourselves. But, the message of the New Testament is especially poignant to a physicalist: the promise of a bodily resurrection is the promise that God will not forget us, will not leave his creatures in the dust to which they've returned.

[hume]

8/6/06:

Is the intrinsic immortality (as distinct from the possibility of eternal life in God) of humankind a biblical teaching? Perhaps not. As Josh has pointed out in another forum, based on Genesis 2:9 and 3:22, "Adam and Eve don't appear to have been created intrinsically immortal. Apparently, their 'protection' from death came from a source outside themselves -- God's provision in the Tree of Life." I take it Josh is referring only to Adam & Eve's physical mortality, leaving open the possibility that they were spiritually immortal. But if our bodies were never immortal, why would our souls have been? It seems like an odd dichotomy, the fusing together of two substances that have seemingly disconnected destinies.

Indeed, God's punishment of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 --

"'The man ... must not be allowed to ... live forever.' Therefore he banished him from the Garden of Eden"

-- reads strangely if one assumes that Adam and Eve possessed immortal souls. It's rather like the concept of resurrection for a Gnostic: basically, what would be the big deal? If God's "curse" simply caused Adam to shed his body in death, releasing the immortal soul from bondage, God would seem to be doing Adam a favor.

If we are truly mortal, what of the afterlife? It's true that the Christian Physicalist view doesn't allow for a "standard-issue" disembodied afterlife; instead one's hopes are pinned on a grand, final resurrection event. However, there are a couple interesting options that make room for some form of existence / consciousness during the period between death and resurrection:

1. Since God is said to be outside time, the whole notion of "between death and resurrection" may be ambiguous. If the dead immediately join God in eternity then it may be correct from their point of view to say that the Resurrection of the Dead, as an event in time, has already happened.

2. There's a quite beautiful Jewish teaching that God preserves us in his memory (God's memory of course being something far more substantial and meaningful than our own):

"We know that God is ominiscient. He knows all and does not forget. God knows every thought and memory that exists in our brains. There is no piece of information that escapes His knowledge.

What, then, happens when a man dies? God does not forget, and therefore all of this information continues to exist, at least in God's memory ...

We may think of something existing only in memory as being static and effectively dead. But God's memory is not a static thing. The sum total of a human personality may indeed exist in God's memory, but it can still maintain identity and self-volition, and remain in an active state. This sum total of the human personality existing in God's memory is what lives on after a man dies."

www.windsofchange.net/archives/006567.php

-- Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan

[Josh]

8/7/06:

Just a side note- go one verse further in Ecclesiastes and you'll find somewhat of a backtrack..

I think we must say it was a very 'live' question for the ancient Hebrews, exactly what happened after death and exactly how the spirit did or did not differ from the body. As you've pointed out elsewhere, it's probably easier to rule out what they clearly DIDN'T believe rather than come up with a systematic OT view of the afterlife. Heh, just the inclusion of the book of Ecclesiastes in the OT pretty much rules out most systematic treatments of anything in the OT:

20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?"

[hume]

8/14/06:

Given the overall passage (verses 16-22), I'm inclined to take verse 21 as a rhetorical (or even mocking) question -- but maybe it's best to take it as a comment on this entire discussion: in the end, we're speculating about things we can't know with any confidence in this life. Verse 22: "I have seen that there is nothing better than for a person to enjoy his activities ... For who can enable him to see what will happen after he dies?"