 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
[ 50 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
lifetimes. He compared the relation of one’s earthly body to one’s resurrected
body, which for him was equivalent to the resurrected person, to a plant that in
seeming to die leaves a seed, from which its life continues in another plant of the
same sort: “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow
is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some
other grain. God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its
own body.”
18
But if this is the model for resurrection, questions about identity quickly arise.
Chief among these questions, for those who are sensitive
to the distinction
between exactly the same
and exactly similar
(that is, between numerical
and qual-
itative
identity), is whether the plant that produces a seed and then dies is numer-
ically the same plant as the plant that subsequently grows from that seed or
merely one of its ancestors. Ordinarily we suppose that a single plant remains the
same plant throughout its life, in spite of changing in various ways, but that
plants that grow from its seeds, even if exactly similar to the parent plant, are
different plants. So, if the relationship of a person on earth who dies to his resur-
rection replica is like that of a present plant to future plants that grow from its
seeds, then a resurrection replica is not numerically the same person who died
but merely a qualitatively similar descendant. Not all of the early church fathers
seem to have been sensitive to this distinction.
Another question has to do with whether the bodies people have on earth will
be the same as the ones they acquire in the afterlife. Apparently, Paul’s answer
was that they would not be the same: “There are celestial bodies and there are
terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terres-
trial is another”; “So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is per-
ishable, what is raised is imperishable”; “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a
spiritual body”; and, “I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the
kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the
imperishable.”
19
But if
earthly and resurrected bodies are not the same, that further complicates the
project of accounting for the numerical identity of the people on earth with their
resurrected counterparts. This is especially true if, as Paul assumed, people are
just their bodies.
Early Christian thinkers drew on a variety of images to speak of the transi-
tion from earthly life to the afterlife. Some were natural images, derived either
from Paul or from their own imaginations: seed to plant, darkness to dawn, one
season to another. Some were images that had to do with the making of artifacts:
one piece of pottery to another, one statue to another. Some, such as the return of
the phoenix, were derived from mythology. Curiously, Christian writers often
used images such as these in ways that suggested that they had not yet begun to
 |