In the Bible, the resurrection is when the dead are raised back to life. The central part of the gospel message of Christianity is that Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, has risen from the dead on the third day. Those who are believers in God and Jesus Christ are resurrected unto eternal life, and those who are not believers are resurrected unto eternal judgment. Those who are worthy to obtain the resurrection unto eternal life will receive a glorified body like that of Jesus, who has proven this by being raised from the dead after three days of being laid in the tomb following His crucifixion. Paul the Apostle had stated in his first epistle to the Corinthians (15:17) that if Christ had not been raised, then their faith in Christ would have been in vain.
Resurrection in philosophy and theology[]
The notion of resurrection, where the dead come back to life corporeally, is preposterous to some cultures. In the Acts of the Apostles, when Paul was speaking to the devoutly pagan people of Athens, the audience started to scoff when Paul spoke of the resurrection of the dead (anastasis). Paul was first speaking to the Stoics and Epicureans before he was invited to present his foreign ideas to the Areopagus/Mars Hill. Typically, the Greeks believed that salvation was the liberation of the soul from the body, as opposed to resurrection.
The orthodox understanding of Jesus' resurrection is that His resurrection is corporeal. There was an early Christological heterodox doctrine known as Docetism as it emphasized Jesus' divine nature and discounted his human nature, such as His suffering during His passion. Here, Jesus really did not die and He cannot have been bodily resurrected. In the Gospel of John, the disciple Thomas was incredulous when the other disciples reported that Jesus had appeared to them and was resurrected and announced that he would only believe in Jesus' resurrection only if he was able to put his finger through where the nail holes on his hands and put his hand through his side that he would believe. Jesus appeared to Thomas and allowed him to do as such. The Gospel of Luke had Jesus announce that His resurrection was real and corporeal since He exhorted the disciples to look His hands and feet and touch Him. He specifically dismissed that He was a ghost or apparition (Luke 24:37-39), since Jesus did have flesh and bones. In the Gospel of Luke, the resurrected Jesus also eat a piece of broiled fish in the presence of His disciples, but He was not explicitly reported to actually consume fish in the Gospel of John where Peter caught 153 fish. Jesus did broke bread and the fish and give them to His disciples though.
One philosophical problem of the resurrection is the maintenance of the identity and consciousness of the resurrected with their prior life. In many eschatological scenarios, God is supposed to judge the resurrected for their religious faith and deeds that they had commissioned during their prior life. Thus, there has to be an authentic connection between the resurrected consciousness and their prior life to maintain justice in the last judgment. The most popular solution of the continuity of identity in modern theology is to posit the existence of an immaterial soul of an individual that is not liable to bodily corruption. In the Left Behind series, the deceased Tribulation saints, their souls, go to heaven instantaneously after they die. Here, the souls would be united with new resurrected bodies that presumably have some resemblance to their bodies in their prior life. Another solution is the hypothesis that God retains the identity of an individual once that person has died, but during the resurrection, God would recreate that person with their identity intact. During the interim between death and resurrection, that person effectively ceases to exist (outside of God's memory) and would be considered to be in a state of "soul sleep".
One solution to the issue may come from the metaphor where death is described as "sleep". In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that the deceased Lazarus is merely sleeping (John 11:11), but obviously Jesus did not intend His usage of the word "sleep" to correspond to the conventions of language (John 11:13). When a person sleeps, they become unconscious but their identity persists despite the discontinuity of conscious experience. Whatever account there is for resurrection, the relation between the resurrected and their past identity may be similar to a person who has woken up from sleep, since the awakened person retains most of her identity from when she had fallen asleep.
The Apostle Paul referenced an Epicurean aphorism that one should enjoy her life by "eating and drinking" today because she would eventually die and not be able to enjoy the pleasures of life (1 Corinthians 15:32). The implication being is that if there is no resurrection of the dead, there is no accountability for one's deeds and there is nothing to hope for in the afterlife, so one should enjoy the tangible pleasures available to us now.
The power of resurrection is intuitively understood to be in the sole province of God. The resurrection of Carpathia is one way that Satan was able to deceive and captivate the world during the Tribulation. Shortly after Carpathia's resurrection, Carpathia rhetorically asked, "Who but the most high god has power over death?" In Left Behind: The Kids: The Rise of False Messiahs, Janie McCanyon was perplexed while she was watching a Global Community broadcast of a false messiah resurrecting a deceased young woman named Talitha. Janie thought that only God could resurrect the dead. In Qur'an 2:73, Allah commanded (in one instance) that one should strike the body of the deceased with a piece of a cow. That would be a sign of God's power because only God could produce an extraordinary effect, resurrection, through a rather mundane, preposterous cause, as striking a dead body with meat normally would not resurrect it. Under an occasionalist causal regime, where God is the only entity that has true causal efficacy and therefore created objects have no power, it is trivial to state that God only has the power of resurrection because it is only God that has the power to cause any event, and thus resurrection is not merely a special power of God.
Resurrection in the Left Behind series[]
The resurrection of believers occurred twice in the Left Behind series — first at the Rapture of the church, and then later at the Glorious Appearing of Christ when those who were martyred for their faith were resurrected along with the Old Testament saints. The resurrection of unbelievers took place at the Great White Throne judgment following the Millennial Reign in Kingdom Come.
Satan resurrected Nicolae Carpathia from the dead by dwelling within him from the midpoint of the Tribulation until the Glorious Appearing, when Satan was cast out of Carpathia. Tsion Ben-Judah emphasizes that Carpathia really did die and became indwelt by Satan during his prophesied resurrection, in contrast to those who claim that Carpathia would just appear dead. Orcus, the "wonder worker" agent of Carpathia, used his power to briefly resurrect those who he had slain with the same power before he caused them to die again.
After Carpathia's resurrection when he was indwelt by Satan, he did not require sleep, drink, or food. However, when Satan momentarily withdrew his presence from Carpathia while Carpathia was in the Global Community One World Unity Army command bunker in Solomon's Stables, Carpathia became wizened, decrepit, and enervated to the point that he was nearly dead. In contrast, the faithful who are resurrected by God are given glorified bodies not liable to corruption.
In the Kids Series book Wildfire!, Z-Van mocked the resurrection of Jesus while proclaiming the resurrection of Carpathia: “Nobody’s ever experienced what we did today. I know you guys believe Jesus came alive, but that was in some cave in Israel, and nobody saw it happen. This was live, in front of cameras and millions of people. His Excellency doesn’t do anything in secret.” Some people such as Patrick Rose doubted that Carpathia supernaturally resurrected himself, saying that it was a "medical miracle" but that he saw through the act.
In Death Strike, Judd Thompson Jr. attempted to witness in his religion class at Nicolae Carpathia High School by arguing that the resurrection of Jesus proved His divinity, unlike the other belief systems that were being propounded in the class by Mr. Syncrete who is partial to eastern religions. Judd wanted Mr. Syncrete to concede that if Jesus was resurrected it would change everything that Mr. Syncrete was teaching and that it would prove Christ's claims. After that, Judd intended to provide evidence to the class that Jesus was indeed resurrected, but Mr. Syncrete did not allow Judd to return to the issue. However, from a philosophical perspective, the resurrection of Jesus itself (or any other miracle that Jesus had performed) does not really prove Jesus was divine, anymore than the resurrection of Carpathia later on in the story proves that Nicolae Carpathia was divine since resurrection could occur by the power of sorcery.
Just before the raptured and Tribulation martyrs returned from heaven, Rayford asked Chaim Rosenzweig what kind of relationship he would have with his first wife Irene Steele now since Rayford had married Amanda White in Irene's absence after Irene was raptured. Rayford did note that his question is similar to the question the Pharisees asked in order to confound Jesus on eschatology (in Matthew 22:23-33 and Luke 20:27-40), but Rayford was genuinely interested in the answer. Rosenzweig replied that Jesus said that in the Resurrection (although Irene really was not resurrected) they would neither marry nor be given in marriage and be like the angels of God in heaven (since they would have glorified bodies). In the Gospel of Luke, it also uses the phrasing "those who are worthy to take part in the age to come" which Rosenzweig quotes. Somehow Rayford interprets that to mean that those who reach the Millennium alive can marry have children since it implies that those who are saved yet survived the Tribulation are not worthy to take apart in that age. It may mean that those saved individuals who are alive immediately after the Tribulation do not really reign with Christ in the Millennium. When the awkward moment came of Rayford meeting Irene and Amanda, Irene told Rayford that she did not begrudge Rayford a good wife and companionship.
Members of The Other Light believed that Satan would be given power to resurrect those who have died as martyrs for the cause when he successfully leads the last generation of its members to victory against God and Jesus Christ. However, Abdullah Smith points out to Sarsour, a former member of The Other Light, that Satan would not be given that power, so that even if their army wins, the whole cause still loses.
External links[]
- Resurrection at Theopedia