A belief in the Resurrection does not have to include belief in the literal reanimation of Jesus’ body, that his dead human body literally came back to life and walked out of the tomb.
I suggest there are other ways of interpreting the Resurrection myth that are far less unbelievable in our modern age where science informs us that dead human bodies always decompose in their graves and do not ever spontaneously come back to life in their original form.
As Richard Rohr says of scriptural interpretation,
The literal level of meaning doesn’t get to the root and, in fact, is the least helpful to the soul and the most dangerous for history. Deep meaning offers symbolic or allegorical applications… [and] hidden meaning gets at the Mystery itself.
Rohr, “Midrash,” daily meditation, 7 January 2019
What is that “Mystery itself” with regard to the Resurrection? Well, as Rohr says, that is hidden and ineffable, because it is the Mystery itself. But we can do our best with the symbolic pointers of language.
I suggest the Resurrection is referring to the same thing that many other spiritual traditions point to in other terms such as Awakening, Enlightenment, Realization, Liberation, Moksha, etc., or even that Christianity points to with other terms like Salvation, Redemption, Rebirth, Divinization, and Theosis. It is pointing to the deep recognition of our Divine nature, our Oneness in God or the Ultimate Reality, our fundamental Essence that is inseparable from the Whole. When we “resurrect” we come to a direct and unmistakable understanding of our deeper and truer eternal Self, and that we are always already the re-incarnation of that deepest Reality into spaciotemporal form(s).
To use an analogy, the current human body we seem to have is like a wave of the ocean. A wave has a birth, a beginning, a formation, development, temporal existence, shape, uniqueness, and it will have an end when it crashes on the shore or subsides. Resurrection is not the return of that particular wave, as the literal interpretation makes it seem, rather it is the realization that one’s deeper nature is Ocean, and always has been, in whatever forms that takes throughout spacetime. The particular wave does not need to return when the Ocean can simply reform its Self into endless new waves of different forms, shapes, sizes, durations, uniqueness, etc. They are always already incarnations of the Ocean.
A literal belief in resurrection as the reanimation of a particular human body is perhaps, at worst, an egoic attachment to the ego identity, to a particular separate self, a particular human body/brain, believing that to be the extent of our identity. It may be like a wave hanging on to its particular form as the shore approaches, not knowing it is really Ocean.
As is sometimes said, “the ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.” In traditional Christianity it seems the ego wants to believe that resurrection is the continuation of one’s ego, one’s particular human identity, one’s present human body, forever! Even after the ego dies! Maybe there is a message in why many horror stories are filled with such reanimation revenant myths, including zombies, the undead, Frankenstein, mummies, ghosts, vampires, etc; perhaps the return of the dead is actually revolting and disturbing, and is not what we truly desire.
I suggest that a better interpretation of the Resurrection is not the return of the ego after ego death, or the literal return of a body after bodily death, but the return of one’s true Identity after ego death. Indeed, it is ego death that brings Awakening, it is that crucifixion which brings Resurrection, it is the dissolution of the false identity and the revelation of our true Identity as Christ. It is the recovery of One’s true Self, the One that we have always been and always will be, which we had forgotten under the veil of ego.
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I have long thought that the literal interpretation of most concepts in Christianity are unhelpful and confusing, at best, and downright crazy-making delusional at worst. It seems turning any spiritual insight into a religion is problematic, as it grows in ego as it gains momentum – the very oppositve of any worthwhile spiritual insight.
Fantastic writing, insightful as always. Thanks for sharing this wisdom.
Is this really how one learns to think about the idea of resurrection in a “Mormon” context? (If so, things in the Church are even worse than I thought…) Whether their conception is ultimately coherent or not, I think Orthodox Christians would consider “literal reanimation of Jesus’ body, that his dead human body literally came back to life and walked out of the tomb” a strawman, something no one who understands the relevant matters has ever seriously claimed. For example, David Bentley Hart writes in the postscript to his New Testament translation:
In speaking of the body of the resurrection as a “spiritual” rather than “psychical” body, Paul is saying that, in the Age to come, when the whole cosmos will be transfigured into a reality appropriate to spirit, beyond birth and death, the terrestrial bodies of those raised to new life will be transfigured into the sort of celestial bodies that now belong to the angels: incorruptible, immortal, purged of every element of flesh and blood and (perhaps) soul. For, as Paul quite clearly states, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God; neither does perishability inherit imperishability.” And, of course, he also says that those who are in Christ have been made capable of this transformation precisely because, in the body of the risen Lord, the life of the Age to come has already appeared in glory: “So it has also been written, ‘The first man Adam came to be a living soul,’ and the last Adam a life-making spirit….The first man out of the earth, earthly; the second man out of heaven. As the earthly man, so also those who are earthly; and, as the heavenly, so also those who are heavenly; and, just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man.” This is for Paul nothing less than the transformation of the psychical composite into the spiritual simplex—the metamorphosis of the mortal fleshly body that belongs to soul into the immortal fleshless body that belongs to spirit: “We shall be changed. For this perishable thing must clothe itself in imperishability, and this mortal thing must clothe itself in immortality.”
That still leaves us with the question of why divine omniscience (as the resurrected Christ—embodied or not—presumably represents, as noted in this post) would have, or appear in the guise of, a body at all, of course. I haven’t found a satisfying explanation of that. If Parley Pratt is right—”If Enoch, Elijah, Abraham, Peter, Paul, and millions of others ever attain to the immortal life, and their fleshly tabernacles be quickened by a fulness of celestial life and light, intelligence and power, then it can be said of them, they are one, as the Father and Son are one. It could then be said of each of them, in him dwells all the fulness of the powers and attributes of the Eternal God, or, in other words, he possesses endless life, together with all intelligence, knowledge, light, and power. He therefore has the same mind as all the others—is in communication and in perfect union with each and all of them.”—then what is supposed to be the point of the same mind interacting with itself in separate bodies? But really, the same question could be asked about mortality. (I guess this is turning into a soliloquy, so I’ll stop.)