The Infinite Resurrection

Speaker 1

Micah Redding grew up as a preacher’s kid, spent eight years as a rock musician, and was once involved in the high-speed pursuit of a spy plane. Now he develops software and writes about the intersection of human values and technology. Micah is Executive Director, a board member, and a founder of the Christian Transhumanist Association. Thanks, Micah.

Micah Redding

Thank you guys very much. So I don’t know what the timeline will look like, but if we have any extra time, I’d love to kind of get your comments or questions. and see if any of this makes sense to you or kind of what you’re thinking about it.

Micah Redding

So I think in many ways Christianity is the religion of resurrection. And it’s not just that at the center of our religion we have this A story about a man who comes back from the dead. It’s also that from the very first moments, Christians are going out into the world declaring. The resurrection of every human being who has ever lived both good and evil.

Micah Redding

And I think there’s this kind of remarkable fact about our world that if you were to survey a large number of people across the country or across the world, both Christian and non-Christian, and ask them what the central idea of Christianity is, and most of them would say something like, Well, you have an immortal soul, and when you die, you get to go to heaven. And I think what’s remarkable is that the first Christians would not have recognized that as their message or their story.

Micah Redding

You see, across the ancient world, lots and lots of people believed in the immortality of the soul. But the idea of the resurrection of the body was almost unheard of outside of ancient Judaism.

Micah Redding

And so the New Testament and the book of Acts is full of stories about people being introduced to Christianity for the first time, and they mostly go a little bit like this. An apostle stands up before a crowd and starts to say, This is what we’re about. And he says, there is one God. We are all children of that God. Abraham was commissioned to bless the nations. That’s why we have Israel. That’s how we got Jesus. And that’s why I’m here to talk about the resurrection of the dead.

Micah Redding

And you can almost hear the kind of record scratch at that moment. Because the people up until that moment have been curious and intrigued and interested, and where are these people going with this? And then they hear resurrection of the dead, and they kind of go into uproar, maybe even violence some of the time.

Micah Redding

Early critics of Christianity were sometimes convinced that Christians had made a mistake. They’d read Plato and they’d heard about this afterlife idea and they’d been confused and thought that we were talking about bodies coming back. It’s probably kind of a simplistic, uneducated mistake to make, but we got you. But the Christians were insistent that this was their message, the resurrection of the dead.

Micah Redding

And so one of the early Christian writers says, If all we were saying was that we had an immortal soul, then we had Plato and the philosophers, why did we need Jesus?

Micah Redding

I think this is a difficult distinction for us to make in this day and time. It’s difficult for us to understand. What’s so significant about the resurrection, specifically the resurrection of the body? Why did they care so much? Why were they so adamant about spreading this idea that was so. so opposed by the culture of the time.

Micah Redding

So I want to talk about three different things that I think are significant about the idea of resurrection and why it was so important to them. and why it might be important to us.

Micah Redding

The first one is simply that resurrection affirms the value of physical material existence. One of the early competing philosophies to Christianity was called Gnosticism. And Gnosticism, like a lot of philosophies, affirmed the immortality of the soul and denied the resurrection of the body. And they denied it because they believed that physical reality was intrinsically evil. So the resurrection was almost a contradiction in terms.

Micah Redding

Now the ideas of Gnosticism have been compelling over the years. They’re always compelling. They always kind of come back to haunt us. And the reason why is because they can give us a compelling answer to the problem. Evil. When we look around the world and we see suffering and pain and struggle, and we ask why is this happening, Gnosticism can say, I know why. It’s because material reality is fundamentally bad. And you’re not going to get anything else until you escape it.

Micah Redding

That’s in contrast. To the ancient Jewish view that God had created a good world, that physical material reality was fundamentally good. And in affirming that physical reality was fundamentally good, they didn’t have a good answer to the problem of evil. It’s not easy to deal with the fact that there is suffering in the world. When we say that the physical existence has value, we don’t have a great way to just kind of wrap that up. All we know is that when we see suffering and evil and anguish and pain, it means that we have to overcome it.

Micah Redding

And so this is the stark contrast between the position that the world is evil and must be escaped or ignored or destroyed and the position that the world is fundamentally good and must be transformed. And the resurrection affirms that physical reality is good and must be transformed.

Micah Redding

Second thing I think is significant is the fact that the resurrection affirms the significance and intrinsic value of life. Gnosticism and other philosophies like that often see death as being the gateway to the real reality, to the real experience of whatever’s good. And so the things that we do here don’t have any intrinsic value. We’re just kind of biding time.

Micah Redding

And that’s in distinct contrast. To the ancient Jewish view that life was the preeminent value, the thing that overrides almost everything else, life being a thing to be cherished and protected and held on to and fought for. And death being an unmistakable tragedy.

Micah Redding

The resurrection of the body affirms that the things we do right now Our food, our drink, our meals, our work, our efforts, our families, our play, all have intrinsic worth and that we’re not just biding time for death.

Micah Redding

The third thing that I think is significant about the resurrection Is that the resurrection affirms that we have a shared path to the future? This is a little tricky, but

Micah Redding

In Gnosticism and other philosophies like that, when you reach the end of your physical life, then things go in two different directions. Your soul goes off into other realms to begin another journey, another process. And it goes off into its own future, while the rest of the world goes off into its future. This means it fundamentally affirms the idea that we have two distinct futures, two distinct ultimate concerns.

Micah Redding

And in that kind of framework, it becomes hard to understand why we should care about what’s going to happen after we’re gone. It’s hard to care about what happens down the road. Why would you plant a tree now if you’ll never see it actually bloom or blossom?

Micah Redding

And in contrast to that, the Jewish concept of the resurrection is always thought of in terms of the restoration to life in the community of the people of God. The dead are brought back to participate with the people of God and the ongoing efforts of humanity and the world.

Micah Redding

And so there aren’t two futures or multiple futures, there’s one future in which everyone is concerned.

Micah Redding

And what this means is that the consequences of your actions Matter. The things that you do that are good today, that are working for good in the world, you experience the results of that, the fruits of that down the road. And the things that you do that are bad or that are investing in your own short-term benefit at the expense of the health of the larger world, you experience the fruits of that as well.

Micah Redding

And so, at the culmination of Paul’s biggest discussion on resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, he says, Stand firm, knowing that your labor is not in vain. Because for Paul, this was the takeaway of resurrection: that none of your efforts were wasted, that it all had value, because it was all building towards a shared future which we would all participate in together.

Micah Redding

So up to this moment, I’ve simply been describing resurrection as understood by the ancient Jews. And so we could ask the question: what did Christians bring to this? What did they have to offer? And I think it’s only one thing.

Micah Redding

Christians believed that in Jesus the resurrection had already begun. And because the resurrection had begun, they could no longer think of it as one event in history. one isolated phenomenon. Instead, they have had to come to see it as an ongoing organic process, an ever unfolding, unending process of growth and transformation.

Micah Redding

And so Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 can talk about the resurrection as starting with Jesus, moving outward through his followers, outward into all humanity, into the eradication of death itself. And then in Romans 8, he can see that continue on through the entire cosmos to the transformation of the entire creation so that the creation itself is liberated to participate in the joy and the freedom of the children of God.

Micah Redding

And so they fundamentally saw the resurrection not as one event, but as this unfolding process that they were compelled and called to participate in. This is how Christians understood their own work. This is how they took biblical injunctions such as heal the sick, feed the poor, free the captives, raise the dead. And they took them and applied them to their own work and their own lives.

Micah Redding

They understood themselves in every aspect of their world to be playing a part in the unfolding advancement of life and the pushing back. Death.

Micah Redding

I think this is why we see so many metaphors in the New Testament that are organic, such as the body of Christ or the first fruits of the harvest. It’s all part of this vast connected system that’s happening, the ongoing transformation of the universe through the power of the Spirit of God, which indwells His people.

Micah Redding

So, what I’m trying to say is that there are lots of philosophies and theologies that offer us comfort or offer us ways to think about our place in the world. But I think that the early Christian understanding of resurrection offers us something different. It offers us a comprehensive way of looking at how to engage our entire beings. And what’s happening.

Micah Redding

Fundamentally, resurrection provokes action. And action is dangerous. Maybe the most dangerous idea in the world.

Micah Redding

And I think this is why the ancient world was so up in arms. By this idea, so opposed to this idea. As the early critics of Christianity kept saying, the Christians are turning the world on its head. And of course, that was exactly the idea. Thank you.