Write-up1 (as at 16/08/2026 23:55:41): Resurrection (OBT)
Introductory Note
- My aim in this discussion is not to be sceptical of the concept of resurrection, but to raise some questions from a Christian perspective in the hope of getting feedback.
- This paper is purely philosophical but, in preparation, I have written three further papers on 1 Corinthians 15 which are useful prior reading2 and of interest as it’s in these that I engage with the Scriptures:-
- "Todman (Theo) - Thesis - 1 Corinthians: 15": I have ‘footnoted’ the whole of 1 Corinthians Chapter 15.
- "Penny (Sylvia) - The Resurrection Chapter: 1 Corinthians 15": a set of footnotes on Sylvia Penney’s March 2026 article in Search, and
- "Ozanne (Charles) - If there is no resurrection of the dead … What then? An exposition of 1 Corinthians 15", a further set of footnotes and comments
- I would have liked to take "Wright (N.T.) - The Resurrection of the Son of God" fully into consideration but haven’t had time. I have, however, read the much briefer "Wright (N.T.) - Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All - Reflections on Paul’s Anthropology in his Complex Contexts", but haven’t had time to write up my notes thereon.
- For my ‘secular’ thoughts on the topic of Resurrection, see:-
- "Todman (Theo) - Thesis - Resurrection": The Note that forms part of my Thesis on Personal Identity.
- "Todman (Theo) - Thesis - Chapter 11 (Resurrection)": The full Chapter on Resurrection in the above.
Preliminaries
- It is often claimed that two of the major attractions of ‘a religion like’ Christianity are an escape from the supposed futility of a finite life and the prospect of continued life after death. Paul connects these two aspects together in 1 Corinthians 15, seeming to claim that it is the mere finitude of our lives that would make them in some sense worthless (if this is the import of the repeated ‘in vain’ passages).
- However, there are two prior questions that might arise.
- Firstly, just what sort of future life is envisaged by the NT writers, Paul in particular?
- Secondly, how do we get to it?
- The NT answers are that the future life is in some sense corporeal – achieved by resurrection – but this has been taken to raise problems for those whose mortal bodies have been dispersed and whose material may have formed parts of other persons’ bodies.
- I’ve been studying the topic of Personal Identity3 formally and informally, on and off, for the last 20 years.
- The early modern concern with the topic ‘took off’ in in 1694 when John Locke (1632–1704) added the chapter (Book 2, Chapter 27) – in which he treats of persons and their persistence conditions – to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding4. Locke’s motivation was to provide an account of resurrection that was not open to sceptical objections. At the time, when the scientific revolution was in its early days, there was a division amongst ‘natural philosophers’ as to whether ‘thinking matter’ was coherent – could ‘mere matter’ think and be conscious or was an immaterial soul needed? Locke claimed to be agnostic on the question, but his intuition was that God could have enabled things so that matter could think, and he wanted an account of personal identity in which resurrection – in the absence of a soul that would provide the link between the pre- and post-mortem individual – made sense. The important issue in resurrection – or any other survival of death – is that the survivor should be the very same individual that died, even though that individual might have changed many of his properties.
- Locke made the seminal distinction between the ‘person’ and the ‘human being’ – a person is – he claims – “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places”.
- So, for Locke and most modern philosophers, there can be persons who are not human beings (God, angels – even a rational parrot. These days aliens and, maybe, AIs in the future, would be added and – at the lower end – certain clever non-human animals). Maybe (and controversially) there can be human beings who are not persons, for at least part of their lives (when they are fetuses, neonates or the demented, say). ‘Person’ is a technical term in modern philosophy and there’s a disputed list of properties an individual needs to have to qualify, sometimes gerrymandered to exclude the non-human animals.
- The important point – for Locke – is that it is mental states – in particular memory – that define the person, who – he claims – can ‘hop’ from one body to another. If a prince’s consciousness ‘informs’ the body of a cobbler ‘all’ would allow that the cobbler is the prince, Locke claims. Likewise, if the resurrected individual inherits enough of the mental states of the person who died, it is the same individual for Locke and his modern followers. Locke was particularly concerned to ensure the right individual got the right judgement in the great post-mortem assize.
- Most contemporary philosophers – and most people, most likely – are neo-Lockeans in adopting a ‘psychological view’ of personal identity. This leads to some odd results. An individual suffering Multiple Personality Disorder can be literally two or more people inhabiting the same body. If an individual’s personality changes too radically over time they are – literally – not the same person. Much more could be said, but not here.
- Those holding the minority view, to which I belong, are known as ‘animalists’. They hold that human beings are essentially human animals. We survive as long as the human animal – an organism5 – does, irrespective of its mental states. While our mental states are – for the most part – what matter to us – we don’t cease to exist if those mental states change radically or cease altogether. My view is that personhood is a ‘phase sortal’ like being a teacher. A human being doesn’t cease to be when they lose their job or become a different individual if they change it. Similarly, a human being doesn’t literally become ‘a different person’ if they suffer a radical personality change. Neo-Lockeans worry their heads about just how much of a change of personality an individual can undergo before they become a ‘different person’. Animalists will have none of this.
- This distinction is important when it comes to resurrection. If we are essentially human animals, there’s a problem if we claim that the resurrected individual is the very same individual that died. Normally, we would deny that if something is totally destroyed that it – that very same thing – could be recreated. If a bicycle is dismantled, cleaned up and repaired most would agree it’s the same bicycle. But if it’s mulched up and remanufactured we might doubt it was the same one. It might be just as good, but not the very same thing any more than two exactly similar bicycles coming off the production line are identical6. Atheistic animalists deny that resurrection of the very same individual makes any sort of sense7. I note here that the case of Jesus’ resurrection isn’t really a paradigm case. Jesus’ body – while it had truly died – was not totally destroyed, and the continuity between the pre- and post-mortem individual is clear.
- There is still – for the neo-Lockean who focuses on our psychology – something of a problem with the Christian view of resurrection. We are – presumably – not resurrected with exactly the same personalities – with all their sinful inclinations – as when we died, especially if we died in a demented state. So, just what is it that defines us – in the absence of an immaterial soul – if it is neither our bodies nor our mental states?
- A point that’s worth stressing – and which aligns well with the Christian view of resurrection as the means of post-mortem survival – is that we are what’s known in the philosophy trade as ‘concrete particulars’ – in contemporary terms we are bits of hardware. There’s a view around amongst today’s technologists and transhumanists that we are ‘software’, ‘patterns in information space’ and that ‘we’ – that is our mental states as stored in our brain’s ‘connectome’ – might – in principle at least – be uploaded to a digital computer where we might live on indefinitely. Were this to be possible – which I very much doubt – and if a digital computer could be conscious – which I also doubt – it would be the computer (or a partition there of) that would be the new ‘us’, not the program or data.
- Before proceeding further, we need a quick discussion about ‘identity’. We talk about ‘identical twins’ but they are at best exactly similar. It is often said that ‘identity’ as a relation a thing bears to itself and nothing else. It is a logical relation and has nothing to do with our narrative ‘identities’ – how we see ourselves fitting into the wider society in which we live. It is a mathematical equivalence relation – reflexive, as just noted, transitive and symmetric. So, A is identical to A; if A is identical to B and B is identical to C then A is identical to C; and, if A is identical to B then B is identical to A. Only the second relation is really interesting as it features in a lot of philosophical ‘thought experiments’ in the topic of personal identity.
- Take the fun example of teletransportation as portrayed in Star Trek. This is usually ‘explained’ as your body being scanned, information sent to a remote location where it’s used to build a ‘new you’. As in all philosophical thought experiments, you have to put out of your mind all sorts of impracticalities unless they are logical or physical impossibilities. Assuming this technology works, then, is the individual who is ‘beamed up’ you – and therefore teletransportation – as the name suggests – is a convenient form of travel, or is it the creation of a duplicate? If the scanning process – under anaesthetic, hopefully – leads to your body’s destruction – do you die? The logic of identity comes into play here to suggest that you do. If it’s information that is sent, then there’s nothing to stop two ‘you’s’ being created. They are not identical to one another, even if originally exactly similar. So, they cannot both – by transitivity – be identical to you or they would be identical to one another. Given that it would be arbitrary to choose one, neither can be you. This is highlighted in the ‘bungled branch-line case’ where your original body is not destroyed and you regain consciousness. You would not be happy to be terminated given that you have allegedly travelled to Mars or wherever.
- A final point has to do with first person experience – it may seem convincing, but may not give the true situation. In the above thought experiment, each ‘clone’ of you would have your memories, character, exactly similar body and so on, and would think itself ‘you’. But it would be deceived. It would only know the truth from the testimony of others or from a consideration of logic. I like to say that there is a distinction between forward and backward psychological continuity. My clone has backward psychological continuity with me – all his memories convince him he’s me. But in this case I would have no forward psychological continuity – I just die and that’s it (or maybe I die and am resurrected somewhere completely different, taking the Christian view; but for the sake of the thought experiment, we assume secular materialism; what I don’t do is wake up on Mars).
- The notion of sleep is interesting. How do I know, after a peaceful night, that it’s me that wakes up in my bed? If it was not me, but some clone with my memories and so on, how would I ever know, from the inside? For all I know, yesterday’s ‘me’ went into oblivion and a new me was substituted. This new ‘me’ would think of himself as me unless someone successfully convinced him otherwise. Would this strange state of affairs really make any difference? Well, it would, in that it is we ourselves who want to survive and not some imposter just like us. It might also make an awful practical difference. Maybe in some ‘slasher movie’ version of the Truman Show there’s a big conspiracy. Each night the then ‘me’ is carted off, subjected to unspeakable tortures in order to create a clone of me that – with the willing compliance of those around me – is plopped back in my bed to awake none the wiser. That is not a good state of affairs – certainly not one conducive to a good night’s sleep should I get to know about it.
- There you have it. All these crazy-sounding thoughts are designed to show the sorts of issues that complicate the idea of resurrection. On we go.
Christian Philosophical Views on Personal Identity
There are three that I know of.
- Dualists: Relatively rare amongst contemporary philosophers, but the traditional Christian view. We are – basically – souls that ‘have’ bodies – an earthly one and later a heavenly one. The reason this is now doubted by philosophers is that there’s no scientific evidence for the existence of souls and – given the closure of physics – how could they interact with matter? Some Christian philosophers hold the view that the existence of the immaterial souls is a Christian doctrine they must believe and tough it out. I might just note that the same problem arises for ‘spirit’ if it’s taken to be some extra ‘fizz’.
- Materialists: Our current persistence conditions are basically those of animals. How they deal with resurrection is covered in the next session. Most Christian materialists seem to hold view the Constitution View below.
- Constitution View: We ‘are’ animals in the sense that we are – currently – constituted by them but are not identical to them. The analogy is with a statue and the marble of which it is made. Actually, it’s easier to explain the distinction if the statue is made of squishy clay. The statue cannot survive being squished into a ball, but the lump of clay can, so they cannot be identical (it is said; identical things have to have identical properties, including ‘modal’ ones – possible situations and all that). We are – it is claimed – essentially persons, who have a ‘first person perspective8’ on the world. We are essentially embodied, but not necessarily by the same body. This ‘first person perspective’ is reified and it is claimed that it can hop from one body to another, as at the resurrection. Note that this first person perspective isn’t an immaterial soul but is something ‘had’ by the body that currently constitutes the person. I have my doubts about this. If the first person perspective is a property of a body, then can that property really hop from one body to another. And couldn’t it hop onto multiple bodies, causing the logical difficulties we’ve seen before.
Resurrection Options for Materialists
There are three proposals by modern Christian philosophers who are ‘materialists’ – in denying the existence of incorporeal souls – not put forward as ‘actual’ but to show the logical possibility of resurrection:-
- Body Snatching (Peter Van Inwagen): God miraculously swaps out our pre-mortem ‘corpse-to-be’ with a simulacrum and whisks away the original to the future world where it repaired and ‘spiritualised’.
- ‘Falling Elevator’ (think ‘Looney Tunes’ – the hero hops out of the falling elevator just before it crashes to the ground; Dean Zimmerman): God sets up a miraculous mechanism that causes the dying body to connect to – and be continuous with – the future resurrection body in the next world. This is really a slightly less ludicrous version of the above.
- Luz Bone9 (Roderick Chisholm): there is some ‘atom’ or other small particle that survives corruption and is the ‘continuity particle’ on which the resurrection body is built (much like a pearl on a grain of sand). Some ancient Jews equated this, absurdly, with the Coccyx.
Questions and Suggestions
The above considerations about resurrection would be easier to address if we were clearer on what Scripture means on certain matters. We are exhorted to give a ‘reason for the hope that lies within us’, and being completely muddled about – what many see – as the most attractive element of the Christian message is a bit of a disgrace. Some of the questions below arise from the other documents discussing 1 Corinthians 15.
- Any outstanding questions or clarifications concerning this paper?
- Any comments on the three papers on 1 Corinthians 15 mentioned in the Introduction?
- Is heaven a place? In the expression ‘the heavenly places’, ‘places’ is added to the English translation … the Greek just says ‘the heavenlies’ (epouranioi). If it is a place, or set of places, where is it? Is it part of this universe or another?
- When Jesus ‘ascended to heaven’ was he actually going somewhere, zooming off like a space-rocket? Or is this a demonstration of departure?
- Is Christ now essentially embodied, or was his resurrection body – again – for the purposes of demonstration?
- Therefore, is our resurrection body like the one Jesus was resurrected in / as, or like the one he eternally ‘inhabits’, if he does?
- Why is a body – in the future life – so important? What would be so wrong with a disembodied existence as the Greeks hoped for?
- Just what are we, metaphysically-speaking?
- Paul is right to say that if – as an absolute general rule – there is no possibility of resurrection then Christ could not have been raised. But the fact of Christ’s resurrection – from a fresh corpse – doesn’t seem to be much evidence that those whose bodies have been dispersed could be resurrected. Does Paul consider this anywhere?
- Where do you expect to enjoy your eternal life. Goodies can be reserved for us in heaven but enjoyed – in the future – on earth.
- Paul – in 1 Cor. 15 – starts off by suggesting that death is a necessary precursor to the future life, and then seems to have a forehead-slapping moment … what about those who are still alive at the Lord’s return? Clearly, they will need to be ‘changed’ – and identity-preservation is easier to maintain in their cases as there’s a process of continuity. How does this affect Paul’s earlier arguments?
- When Paul says ‘star differs from star in glory’ is ‘glory’ a place – as some old Bereans seemed to believe? If so, it’s rather an odd thing to say – if there are two stars, then they differ, wherever they are. Rather, isn’t he saying that one is more – or differently – glorious than another?
- Charles Ozanne suggests that Paul mentions the differently glorious heavenly bodies because he thinks resurrected believers will be differently glorious depending on their ‘calling’ (or works). Is he right?
- Which – if any of the three ‘wheezes’ for getting us from here to the future life do you prefer? Do you have a better idea, or is it just a case of ‘God will find a way’?
- Are Paul’s arguments about the vanity of life in the absence of resurrection peculiar to his own situation and that of his fellow evangelists or of general applicability? If there is no resurrection, then the gospel is undermined because Christ has not been raised. Fair enough – they would be wasting their time and misrepresenting God. But is it really the case that whatever we do in this life – in the absence of a future life – is empty and we’d be as well to spend it partying? Doesn’t that make Christians seems somewhat venal – being virtuous for some future reward? If a person sacrifices his life to save his child, is this ‘in vain’ if he’s not resurrected to collect the cash? What about the idea of ‘leaving the world a little better off for your time in it’, irrespective of anything you get out of it (other than the rewards of life’s journey itself)? It is true that – when the general consensus on the possibility of life after death started to wane – some philosophers (eg. Bertrand Russell) – pointed out what they saw as the absurdity of life in the face of the ultimate heat death of the universe – and the myth of Sisyphus eternally rolling his boulder up the hill just for it to roll back down again was invoked (eg. by Camus and some contemporary nihilists). But isn’t this an over-reaction, and how should it be presented to unbelievers?
- Some Christians preach a ‘death to self’ doctrine. Derek Parfit – an atheist, I think – argued that even if we personally didn’t survive some misadventure – because (as in the thought experiments above) – we don’t have strict identity – we could have ‘what matters’ in survival if our works survive us (or our ‘continuer’ on Mars carries out our projects for us). This is a very selfless notion and in sharp contrast to Woody Allen’s quip that he doesn’t want to live on in his work – he wants to live on in his apartment. Should it matter if there were to be a multitude of saints harping their harps in heaven who weren’t – strictly speaking – us?
In-Page Footnotes
Footnote 1:
- This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (16/08/2026 23:55:41).
- Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 2:
- I originally wrote ‘essential prior reading’, but realise time is short. But it’s in these documents that I engage with the Scriptures rather than sticking to philosophy.
- You really only need to read the footnotes.
Footnote 3:
- My magnum opus – still in the course of construction – is here.
- The Chapter on Resurrection (and related matters) is here.
- You don’t need to read these documents!
Footnote 4: Footnote 5:
- The persistence conditions of organisms – what it takes for us to continue in existence – and as the same organism – are complex because they exchange matter with their environment.
- Enough to say here that we want to say that my dog Bertie remains the same dog from day today despite all that eating and pooing.
- The animalist claims that our persistence conditions – what it takes for them to continue in existence – are the same as those of dogs, though what matters to us – mostly our mental states – may differ to what matters to dogs.
Footnote 6:
- I discuss the difference between ‘identity’ and ‘exact similarity’ later in this paper.
Footnote 7:
- The situation is more difficult for resurrection than the bicycle case. For artifacts it’s to some degree up to us what we take to be the same article after some misadventure. In this case, as the same material is used to make the new bicycle, we might allow that it is the same one. But in the case of an organism, it doesn’t have a fixed collection of matter and some of its matter at one time may form part of another at others.
Footnote 8:
- I think the idea of a first person perspective is important. It is – in the sense of being our conscious ‘window on the world’ – what matters to us.
- However, Christian materialists have spotted that non-human animals also have a conscious ‘window on the world’ , so they ratchet up the requirement to include being able to contemplate your own death and worry about it. If it could be demonstrated that some animals could do this – and surely cows in the slaughter-house do – they would ratchet it up some more.
Footnote 9:
- This attempt isn’t completely without motivation.
- It can be considered to be an analogy to the recently-discovered existence of ‘imaginal discs’ in the caterpillar that ensure the continuity of its development into pupa and thereon to imago.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)