What will our resurrected bodies look like? Will we be young or old? Marked by the physical imperfections of our earthly lives? Does this flesh we carry now rise or is it something other? What does our modern knowledge of the world contribute to our understanding? Brian Schmisek traces developments in the Christian understanding of resurrection, explores the topic in light of biblical data, and mines scientific insights. What results is a synthesis that expresses the essence of the apostolic kerygma in modern terms. Schmisek's impressive combination of solid theological and biblical scholarship with an accessible and welcoming style makes this book an excellent resource for adult education groups, deacon formation classes, undergraduates, and other nonspecialists.

Annotation In this intriguing discussion of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Dale Martin contends that Paul's various disagreements with the Corinthians were the result of a fundamental conflict over the ideological construction of the human body (and hence the church as the body of Christ). This led to differing opinions on a variety of theological viewpoints--including the role of rhetoric and philosophy in a hierarchical society, the eating of meat sacrificed to idols, prostitution, sexual desire and marriage, and the resurrection of the body. Book jacket.

The heretics against whom this work is directed, were the same who maintained that the demiurge, or the god who created this world and gave the Mosaic dispensation, was opposed to the supreme God. Hence they attached an idea of inherent corruption and worthlessness to all his works--amongst the rest, to the flesh or body of man; affirming that it could not rise again, and that the soul alone was capable of inheriting immortality.

As Catholics, we believe in the resurrection of the body. We profess it in our creed. We're taught that to bury and pray for the dead are corporal and spiritual works of mercy. We honor the dead in our Liturgy through the Rite of Christian burial. We do all of this, and more, because when Jesus Christ took on flesh for the salvation of our souls he also bestowed great dignity on our bodies. In Hope to Die: The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body, Scott Hahn explores the significance of death and burial from a Catholic perspective. The promise of the bodily resurrection brings into focus the need for the dignified care of our bodies at the hour of death. Unpacking both Scripture and Catholic teaching, Hope to Die reminds us that we are destined for glorification on the last day. Our bodies have been made by a God who loves us. Even in death, those bodies point to the mystery of our salvation.

In the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second life as critical theory, challenging the notion of an autonomous self and driving early modern avant-garde poetry. As an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology transformed the ancient hope for the resurrection of the flesh into the fantasy of a soul or mind living on separately from any body, literature complicated the terms of the debate. Such poets as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson picked up the discarded idea of the resurrection of the flesh and bent it from an apocalyptic future into the here and now to imagine the self already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the resurrection body. Fate of the Flesh explores what happens when seventeenth-century poets posit a resurrection body within the historical person. These poets see the resurrection body as the precondition for the social person’s identities and forms of agency and yet as deeply other to all such identities and agencies, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. This perspective leads seventeenth-century poets to a compelling awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to re-imagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in its light. By developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materiality within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They frame their poems neither as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers assembled around a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Jesus truly is alive today. But compared to his atoning death, Jesus' resurrection sparks relatively little discussion in the church. Inadvertently,we can become so focused on the good news that Christ died for our sins, that we almost forget he was "raised for our justification" (Romans 4:25). In Raised with Christ, author Adrian Warnock exhorts Christians not to neglect the resurrection in their teaching and experience. Warnock takes his cue from Acts, where every recorded sermon focuses on Jesus' resurrection. He stresses that Christians who faithfully proclaim both the death and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and live out the implications of that message in vibrant,grace-filled churches, will be enabled to reach a world that lives in death's dark shadow. The power of the risen Christ is active in every true Christian, transforming our lives. Raised with Christ will help you discover afresh the massive implications of the empty tomb. Jesus' resurrection really has changed everything.

Karl Barth saw Chapter 15 as the center of 1st Corinthians, arguing that a misunderstanding of the resurrection underlies all the problems in Corinth. In this volume, he develops his view of biblical eschatology, asserting that Chapter 15 is key to understanding the testimony of the New Testament. Barth understood the "last things" not as an end to history but as an "end-history" with which any period is faced. "He only speaks of last things who would speak of the end of all things, of their end understood plainly and fundamentally, of a reality so radically superior to all things that the existence of all things would be utterly and entirely based upon it alone, and thus, in speaking of their end, he would in truth be speaking of nothing else than their beginning." Page 104

Explores ancient beliefs about life after death, highlighting the fact that the early Christians' belief about the afterlife belonged firmly on the Jewish spectrum, while introducing several new mutations and sharper definitions, forcing readers to view the Easter narratives not simply as rationalizations, but as accounts of two actual events: the empty tomb of Jesus and his "appearances." Simultaneous. Hardcover no longer available.

Gerald O'Collins, SJ, is professor emeritus of the Gregorian University (Rome) and now adjunct professor at Australian Catholic University. An international authority in the area of resurrection studies, he has published seven books and dozens of articles on the resurrection of Jesus.