Many modern scholars have questioned the fact of the physical resurrection of Christ.
There are Catholic theologians who maintain that if the body of Jesus were found in a tomb in Israel today that this would not shake their faith in the Resurrection.
For some, the only objective experience of the risen Lord is St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus.
This is not only alarming — but completely contrary to both the Scriptures and Tradition, though it comes from a modern European philosophy, that of Immanuel Kant.
Kant did not think one could come to truth through sense experiences, especially truths about things like God. So he “reformed thinking” by redefining truth as the correspondence of the thing to the idea or human need, not the correspondence of the idea or need to the thing.
He made all truth relative.
Those influenced by this way of thinking would maintain that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead does not involve physical bodies living again, but was produced from the faith of the apostles to make sense of a life seemingly made meaningless by death on a cross: Christ is risen because the community needed him to be alive again.
The necessity of resurrection for human fulfillment is a truth that can be known even by human reason. If man must by nature have both a body and a soul, and if man can know that the soul is immortal, then it follows the body should not die. However, it does die.
Also, there is no power in the human soul or in the human body to make it live forever. The problem of human life is left in a box canyon then, with no solution, by human thought.
When Christ rises from the dead, the solution to this difficulty becomes clear: The fact of Jesus rising gives the final solution to the problem of human life. Death is not natural to man, but a result of sin.
The soul was meant for God, and the body should live forever and reflect the glory of a soul that sees God.
Jesus’ risen body was certainly like this. It is certainly flesh, as Christ showed in eating a piece of fish and inviting Thomas to put his finger in the marks of the wounds. It is his body because of the wounds.
Yet it has a whole new relation with the soul, as it can pass through walls. Jesus stood in the Upper Room despite the locked doors. As Paul declares: “If Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:17).
In the Resurrection, “things of heaven are wed to those of earth and the divine to the human” (Exsultet, third edition of the Roman Missal).
This mystery is completed when Jesus, in his risen flesh, leaves the earth in the Ascension and becomes an image to us of final human fulfillment. We are to follow where he is gone.
His humiliation before human judges is reversed when he comes to judge the world. In this judgment, all creation will be assembled before Christ in his human nature, and as Matthew 25 recounts, he will separate the good from the wicked then. The standard will be how much they have loved from grace during this life in imitation of him.
In this Last Judgment, all the secrets, thoughts and sins of the whole human race will be proclaimed before the entire assembled creation. This will add to the glory of the just, even great sinners who have converted and contribute to the confounding of the wicked.
All this will be accomplished in his physical body. Catholicism is a fleshly religion, and the flesh of Christ is still necessary for each of us to experience the grace of the Holy Spirit, even though he has gone to heaven.
The fleshly mediation is also graphically shown in the necessity of the sacraments and the hierarchical Church led on earth by the Pope, Christ’s vicar.
Christ himself established both the sacraments and the Church as the extensions of his physical body throughout time and space, that each person, in his or her own time and place, might truly participate in his offering made once bloodily on the cross, but now renewed and made present every time the Mass is celebrated everywhere in the world.
There is a sense in which the end times are already upon us. This is not in the sense that there is a heaven begun on earth through some earthly system of human creation.
In the holy Mass, the holy Eucharist, the whole heavenly court becomes present on the altar because the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ become present there. We too make the voices of this heavenly court our own, and the altar becomes heaven on earth during the sacrifice of the Mass.
In consuming other food, the food becomes us. With the Eucharist, we become the food, transformed to know as God knows and to love as God loves here on earth.
Christ as the Word made flesh enters our souls with his accepted sacrifice and transforms us to be like him.
“Into these mysteries, angels long to search” (1 Peter 1:12).
Dominican Father Brian Mullady has a doctorate in sacred theology.
He is a mission preacher and adjunct professor
at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.
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This is a great article! The parallels drawn between the flesh and the true risen Christ, his flesh and blood, which are truly present o this Earth. how blessed we are to be Catholics, to be present at the altar of our Lord’s sacrifice in communion with all of heaven and to physically partake in our salvation.
As Jesus said,” Blessed is he who has not seen, and yet believes!”
I have seen tv programs that question every aspect of Jesus’ life-as if God were incapable of doing anything! Some of these Specials are so insulting I turn them off!
I recall one program on the Shroud of Turin in the 1980s, which proclaimed with great “glee” that the Shroud was a Medieval fake! Most scientific studies as recent as 2011 proclaim that the Shroud could not be anything but genuine!
As Jesus said,” Blessed is he who has not seen, and yet believes!”
I have seen tv programs that question every aspect of Jesus’ life-as if God were incapable of doing anything! Some of these Specials are so insulting I turn them off!
I recall one program on the Shroud of Turin in the 1980s, which proclaimed with great “glee” that the Shroud was a Medieval fake! Most scientific studies as recent as 2011 proclaim that the Shroud could not be anything but genuine!
As Jesus said,” Blessed is he who has not seen, and yet believes!”
I have seen tv programs that question every aspect of Jesus’ life-as if God were incapable of doing anything! Some of these Specials are so insulting I turn them off! I recall one program on the Shroud of Turin in the 1980s, which proclaimed with great “glee” that the Shroud was a Medieval fake! Most scientific studies as recent as 2011 proclaim that the Shroud could not be anything but genuine!
Thank you, Father Mullady. This is a beautiful reflection on the truth of the greatest of all mysteries. Happy Easter! Christ is risen!!!
“Death is not natural to man, but a result of sin.” Thanks for reminding me of this. It’s in my dissertation but it is only between the lines in the post on my blog on Annual Anti-Easter Shenanigans. It’s the line I was looking for but failed to articulate. http://www.authenticbioethics.blogspot.com But y.ou are so right. Sin, in fact, IS death, it is the beginning of death in man, the wedge between the soul and the body that ultimately ends in bodily death.
Good evening Father Mullady,
Though I do not disagree with your essay, I disagree strongly with your claim that Kant is at the root of the modern rejection of physical resurrection of Jesus. You write,
“This is not only alarming — but completely contrary to both the Scriptures and Tradition, though it comes from a modern European philosophy, that of Immanuel Kant.
Kant did not think one could come to truth through sense experiences, especially truths about things like God. So he “reformed thinking” by redefining truth as the correspondence of the thing to the idea or human need, not the correspondence of the idea or need to the thing.
He made all truth relative.”
This is a straw man of Kant. Kant stresses repeatedly in his Prolegomena and the first Critique that knowledge is based on experience which requires both concepts in the understanding and sensible intuitions (i.e. sense perception formed by the intuitions of time and space). So, he does, as you say he does not, “think one could come to truth through sense experiences.” It is true that these sensible intuitions are “subsumed” by concepts in the understanding and become objectively true in this way, but he takes great pains to emphasize that sensible intuitions cannot be and are not made to fit just any concepts. All sensible intuitions can be subsumed under some concepts, but not others. He emphasizes this to avoid precisely the allegation you make against him that truth is relative. Truth is not relative, according to Kant. We all subsume sensible intuitions under the very same concepts, which is why they become objectively true. Truth would only be relative on Kant’s view if a person could choose whichever concept he wants and subsume any sensible intuition he wants under it. But Kant denies that this is possible.
He would as you say deny that one could come to truth about things like God through sense experience, but it is because he doubts that it is impossible to have a sense perception of God, not because he doubts that true is based on sense experience.
I am dismayed by this misunderstanding which many Catholic make. The real reason for the misunderstanding I suspect is Kant’s claim that things cannot be known in themselves, but here too Catholics misunderstand. To know a thing “in itself” for Kant means knowing a thing “by itself”, i.e. without any kind of sensible or intelligible experience. Understood this way, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas would all agree that it is impossible. Our intellect at the very least must engage things themselve if we are to know them.
I am not a Kantian, but I need to set the record straight. Whatever disagreements we might otherwise have with Kant, it is not I think for the reasons you’ve given.
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/christs-triumph#ixzz1rbrDJKXY
I reckon Kantian metaphysics would eventually lead to non conforming with the Catholic tradition of the Resurrection, at least the Catholic reading. Given that he was an accute Protestant and precisely by being a methodological holist, it is difficult to say that he was a relativist. Truth stands a priori, and the categories of thought transcend human experience, therefore, he didn’t make truth relative, he made truth immanent to Creation. That being said, Kant was not a theologian and had a philosophical understanding of God, much like Leibniz or Newton, even Descartes and Pascal. The philosophical God is indeed beyond any worldly experience, It is not a fleshly God who Redeems mankind, it is a rational God which is understood as a category of thought.
Just some thoughts, and thank you for this article.
Could you clarikfy some points. In the New Testament immortality is a free gift of God to one who believes in Jesus. There is no idea of an IMMORTAL soul created by God and joined to the human body. But isn’t that the doctrine now? Scripture describes the general judgment, but what about the particular judgment of the immortal soul after death?
I’m not sure a “reversal” involving “redefining” truth “as the correspondence of the thing to the idea or human need, not the correspondence of the idea or need to the thing” actually does wind up “not involving physical bodies living again”
At the end of the day, this idea understood properly, would say that the physical resurrection of Christ was indeed JUST as real as ANYTHING we call real (or even moreso). Just as real as me sitting here typing on the computer, at least.
Because in Idealism BOTH would be called products of thought, inasmuch as sense-experience unconstructed by thought is meaningless and not “real” at all.
One has to be careful with this, but in the end its not as if this method of analysis necessarily ends up treating the Resurrection differently than ANY other “reality,” which ALL (from the mundane to the supernatural) involve ideas constructing the world.
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