Are our bodies like prison cells?

[Darryl1958]

The unorthodoxy is in the division of ourselves into body and soul.
There is no such a division in proto-orthodox Christian forms, at any rate.

To the extent that Platonism has transformed even the orthodox message of Christianity to where we can speak of body and soul as two distinct entities, this is a corruption of the message.

Our bodies are not exterior to ourselves. The body is not a one-sie pyjama that we can slip into, or slip out of. It is not a prison, like Plato conceived of it.

We can exist outside our clothes, but we cannot exist outside of our bodies. Our bodies are who we are.
This does not negate that we are Spirit. It does not negate that we have Will, Emotion, Intelligence, that we are Soul as much as we are Body.

The snake in the Garden of Eden derives its form from an ancient mythic form in which primitive ancient people understood the Snake as having immortality, and somehow tricking people out of theirs. The genesis of that belief was the new snake perpetually crawling out of their old skin, a seeming eternal regeneration.

We however do not crawl out of our body. We are Redeemed as Spiritual Body. Incorruptible, Eternal, Perfected in every way.

That is Orthodox Christian belief. It is gnostic and Platonic understanding that this could not be so, and hence the great debates on the nature of Christ in early Christianity.

In the end, Descartes has been rejected by Catholic teaching. There is no mind/soul duality in orthodox Christianity.
We have no existence separate from the Body.

Eternal life outside of the body is derived from pagan Greek thought and Platonic forms.

And that is a corruption of the original proto-orthodox message from outside heterodox Christian forms.

It is probably more commonplace belief too throughout Christianity than the idea that we are now redeemed from our bodies, but our redeemed as our bodies.

 

[Robert_Sock]

The unorthodoxy is in the division of ourselves into body and soul.
There is no such a division in proto-orthodox Christian forms, at any rate.

To the extent that Platonism has transformed even the orthodox message of Christianity to where we can speak of body and soul as two distinct entities, this is a corruption of the message.

Our bodies are not exterior to ourselves. The body is not a one-sie pyjama that we can slip into, or slip out of. It is not a prison, like Plato conceived of it.

We can exist outside our clothes, but we cannot exist outside of our bodies. Our bodies are who we are.
This does not negate that we are Spirit. It does not negate that we have Will, Emotion, Intelligence, that we are Soul as much as we are Body.

The snake in the Garden of Eden derives its form from an ancient mythic form in which primitive ancient people understood the Snake as having immortality, and somehow tricking people out of theirs. The genesis of that belief was the new snake perpetually crawling out of their old skin, a seeming eternal regeneration.

We however do not crawl out of our body. We are Redeemed as Spiritual Body. Incorruptible, Eternal, Perfected in every way.

That is Orthodox Christian belief. It is gnostic and Platonic understanding that this could not be so, and hence the great debates on the nature of Christ in early Christianity.

In the end, Descartes has been rejected by Catholic teaching. There is no mind/soul duality in orthodox Christianity.
We have no existence separate from the Body.

Eternal life outside of the body is derived from pagan Greek thought and Platonic forms.

And that is a corruption of the original proto-orthodox message from outside heterodox Christian forms.

It is probably more commonplace belief too throughout Christianity than the idea that we are now redeemed from our bodies, but our redeemed as our bodies.

What happens when we die (prior to the resurrection)? Again, it my understanding that our soul goes to Heaven (if we lived righteously). Therefore, the soul certainly can exist without the body.

 

[CrossofChrist]

What is the purpose of the resurrection of the body if our bodies are “cells”? I understand the idea of dying so as to be with God, but that’s more to do with breaking free from sin rather than breaking free from our bodies.

 

[mytruepower2]

The unorthodoxy is in the division of ourselves into body and soul.
There is no such a division in proto-orthodox Christian forms, at any rate.

To the extent that Platonism has transformed even the orthodox message of Christianity to where we can speak of body and soul as two distinct entities, this is a corruption of the message.

Our bodies are not exterior to ourselves. The body is not a one-sie pyjama that we can slip into, or slip out of. It is not a prison, like Plato conceived of it.

We can exist outside our clothes, but we cannot exist outside of our bodies. Our bodies are who we are.
This does not negate that we are Spirit. It does not negate that we have Will, Emotion, Intelligence, that we are Soul as much as we are Body.

The snake in the Garden of Eden derives its form from an ancient mythic form in which primitive ancient people understood the Snake as having immortality, and somehow tricking people out of theirs. The genesis of that belief was the new snake perpetually crawling out of their old skin, a seeming eternal regeneration.

We however do not crawl out of our body. We are Redeemed as Spiritual Body. Incorruptible, Eternal, Perfected in every way.

That is Orthodox Christian belief. It is gnostic and Platonic understanding that this could not be so, and hence the great debates on the nature of Christ in early Christianity.

In the end, Descartes has been rejected by Catholic teaching. There is no mind/soul duality in orthodox Christianity.
We have no existence separate from the Body.

Eternal life outside of the body is derived from pagan Greek thought and Platonic forms.

And that is a corruption of the original proto-orthodox message from outside heterodox Christian forms.

It is probably more commonplace belief too throughout Christianity than the idea that we are now redeemed from our bodies, but our redeemed as our bodies.

No; that’s not true. Dualism was adopted by the ancient Jews long before Jesus even incarnated, and it remained a part of Judaic religion and thought throughout the late Old Covenant period and well into the Christian era, when Christians also adopted it.

For examples of this, every time the Old Testament speaks of those who’ve died, and gone to “Sheol,” this doesn’t imply that their bodies went to a place called Sheol after they died, because the Jewish practice was to keep track of the dead bodies, and there would have been no mystery surrounding where they went. The idea of the Jews willingly adopting this from the Greeks is also somewhat laughable, given that many of these sources come from around the time of Alexander the Great (who virtually conquered their nation without swinging a single blade,) through the time of the Maccabean revolt (in which some of the Jews went to open war with one of the remaining kingdoms of the old Greek Empire.) At their best, the Jews of the Old Testament times were xenophobic by religious decree, so it was much more unlikely for Hellenistic thought forms to penetrate their civilization, than it would be for practically any other nation in the world.

Monism, by contrast, has always had rather meager representation in the Catholic Church. It wasn’t endorsed by the saints, it wasn’t endorsed by the popes. In fact, doctrines of the Catholic Church have been established pertaining to the soul, and its state and fate after the moment of death, often in the face of high opposition.

The popularity of monism originates in the modern world (the last couple of hundred years,) when the chaos caused by Protestantism and the “enlightenment” philosophers had resulted in practical naturalism all through the world, and naturalists don’t believe in anything non-physical. These thought forms eventually began to seep into theological discussion through ecumenical dialogue, and so contaminated the thoughts of otherwise-promising theologians in the modern world. However, nothing about it is true to Christianity, and to call monism “more orthodox” has all the makings of a joke.

I don’t believe in monism -or- dualism, really, but monism is less likely, because I know that at least part of me is my mind, and my mind has thoughts about rubber balls, elephants, giant flowers and golden trees. Are those thoughts real? Do my thoughts really exist, and if so, where are they in my body? What part of me can you cut open, and discover the golden tree I was thinking about just now?

The only answer I’ve ever heard a monist give is that our thoughts are just illusions, that are actually nothing more than electrical signals in the brain, but in that case, what’s experiencing the illusion, and where in the body does the illusion take place? Like it or not, the monist has to face the problem of a non-physical reality to our thoughts if they want to answer these questions, and I’ve never heard one address this sufficiently.

P.S.: At later points in your post, you seem not to be defending monism, and talk about how “we are Spirit” or “we are Soul as much as we are Body.” Yet, these are contrary to the statement you made when you said “Our bodies are who we are.”

If the body is who we are, then monism is correct, and the death of the body is also the death of the person. This also means that there is no “afterlife” in the strictest sense, since the body that’s raised from the dead isn’t connected to the body that died through the intervening time. The person existed, then was nonexistent, then existed again. However, this raises all sorts of messy philosophical questions about how we can even be sure it was the same person, if there was a period of time where the person didn’t exist.

Please clarify your position, because, like some other people I’ve heard of, you seem to be making statements that are contrary to one another, and I don’t see any way to make them fit.

 

[GEddie]

No; that’s not true. Dualism was adopted by the ancient Jews long before Jesus even incarnated, and it remained a part of Judaic religion and thought throughout the late Old Covenant period and well into the Christian era, when Christians also adopted it.

For examples of this, every time the Old Testament speaks of those who’ve died, and gone to “Sheol,” this doesn’t imply that their bodies went to a place called Sheol after they died, because the Jewish practice was to keep track of the dead bodies, and there would have been no mystery surrounding where they went. The idea of the Jews willingly adopting this from the Greeks is also somewhat laughable, given that many of these sources come from around the time of Alexander the Great (who virtually conquered their nation without swinging a single blade,) through the time of the Maccabean revolt (in which some of the Jews went to open war with one of the remaining kingdoms of the old Greek Empire.) At their best, the Jews of the Old Testament times were xenophobic by religious decree, so it was much more unlikely for Hellenistic thought forms to penetrate their civilization, than it would be for practically any other nation in the world.

Monism, by contrast, has always had rather meager representation in the Catholic Church. It wasn’t endorsed by the saints, it wasn’t endorsed by the popes. In fact, doctrines of the Catholic Church have been established pertaining to the soul, and its state and fate after the moment of death, often in the face of high opposition.

The popularity of monism originates in the modern world (the last couple of hundred years,) when the chaos caused by Protestantism and the “enlightenment” philosophers had resulted in practical naturalism all through the world, and naturalists don’t believe in anything non-physical. These thought forms eventually began to seep into theological discussion through ecumenical dialogue, and so contaminated the thoughts of otherwise-promising theologians in the modern world. However, nothing about it is true to Christianity, and to call monism “more orthodox” has all the makings of a joke.

I don’t believe in monism -or- dualism, really, but monism is less likely, because I know that at least part of me is my mind, and my mind has thoughts about rubber balls, elephants, giant flowers and golden trees. Are those thoughts real? Do my thoughts really exist, and if so, where are they in my body? What part of me can you cut open, and discover the golden tree I was thinking about just now?

The only answer I’ve ever heard a monist give is that our thoughts are just illusions, that are actually nothing more than electrical signals in the brain, but in that case, what’s experiencing the illusion, and where in the body does the illusion take place? Like it or not, the monist has to face the problem of a non-physical reality to our thoughts if they want to answer these questions, and I’ve never heard one address this sufficiently.

You certainly don’t believe that the object of your thoughts has a physical reality in your head or body, do you?

I have no problem whatsoever with “monism”. Our minds as a spiritual process that is subserved and sustained by our bodies, make more sense to me than “pure spirit soul” using our body as transportation.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Qoeleth]

The unorthodoxy is in the division of ourselves into body and soul.
There is no such a division in proto-orthodox Christian forms, at any rate.

To the extent that Platonism has transformed even the orthodox message of Christianity to where we can speak of body and soul as two distinct entities, this is a corruption of the message.

Our bodies are not exterior to ourselves. The body is not a one-sie pyjama that we can slip into, or slip out of. It is not a prison, like Plato conceived of it.

We can exist outside our clothes, but we cannot exist outside of our bodies. Our bodies are who we are.
This does not negate that we are Spirit. It does not negate that we have Will, Emotion, Intelligence, that we are Soul as much as we are Body.

The snake in the Garden of Eden derives its form from an ancient mythic form in which primitive ancient people understood the Snake as having immortality, and somehow tricking people out of theirs. The genesis of that belief was the new snake perpetually crawling out of their old skin, a seeming eternal regeneration.

We however do not crawl out of our body. We are Redeemed as Spiritual Body. Incorruptible, Eternal, Perfected in every way.

That is Orthodox Christian belief. It is gnostic and Platonic understanding that this could not be so, and hence the great debates on the nature of Christ in early Christianity.

In the end, Descartes has been rejected by Catholic teaching. There is no mind/soul duality in orthodox Christianity.
We have no existence separate from the Body.

Eternal life outside of the body is derived from pagan Greek thought and Platonic forms.

And that is a corruption of the original proto-orthodox message from outside heterodox Christian forms.

It is probably more commonplace belief too throughout Christianity than the idea that we are now redeemed from our bodies, but our redeemed as our bodies.

What you are saying is totally unorthodox. I fear you have been mislead by some kind of “Beginner’s Theology 101”, taught by some kind of ill-informed radical.

In fact, the idea that the separation of the soul and body is a “Greek invention” is a popular myth among people who have obviously never read the Hebrew Scriptures (or the Jewish Scriptures in Greek- Wisdom, Sirach, etc.), and never read the Greek authors. Hellenistic thought had already influenced Hebrew though, especially by the time of Christ.

This “proto-orthodox Christianity” (as opposed to the real Orthodox Fathers) is a myth, and a dangerous one. If there is a basis for it, please point it out. All the Church Fathers, from the very earliest, assume a strong body-mind dualism, and assume the immortality of the soul, and the destruction of the current body, to be replaced/transformed by some kind of mysterious, glorified “spiritual body”.

I recommend you stop reading Jon Dominic Crossan, and such heretics, and study the Scriptures. Then begin with the earliest Church Fathers (Justin, Clement of Rome, Tertullian, Cyprian, Cyril, Athanasius, Ambrose, etc.), and form a proper idea of the “Orthodox Teaching”. I cannot think of one single early Church authority who does not assume a soul/body dualism. Can you?

Sorry, if I seem to be a little harsh, but it is important fully to be conversant with the primary sources, the Greek and Latin Fathers, rather than refer to some imaginary “Proto-Orthodoxy”, pushed by people who seek to destroy the basic assumptions of Christianity, and replace it with some kind of neo-pagan “Earth Mother” religion.

 

[mytruepower2]

You certainly don’t believe that the object of your thoughts has a physical reality in your head or body, do you?

I have no problem whatsoever with “monism”. Our minds as a spiritual process that is subserved and sustained by our bodies, make more sense to me than “pure spirit soul” using our body as transportation.

ICXC NIKA

That’s not what monism is. Monism is the belief that the variety of existing things can be explained in terms of a single reality or substance; such as the claim that Darryl1958 made when he said “we are our bodies,” thus seeming to repudiate the reality of both the spirit and the soul. This view is contrary to both logic and the faith.

In answer to your question…

You certainly don’t believe that the object of your thoughts has a physical reality in your head or body, do you?

No, but I’m not a monist. If I was, I would be forced to believe this, since my thoughts are clearly -some form- of reality, and monism prohibits there being more than one of those forms. If you admit the existence of the physical, our thoughts would therefore need to be physical.

On Dualism or my own view, there’s no problem, since the mind exists in the spirit, and is non-physical in nature. Therefore, our thoughts don’t need to be physical either, in order for them to exist.

 

[Darryl1958]

What you are saying is totally unorthodox. I fear you have been mislead by some kind of “Beginner’s Theology 101”, taught by some kind of ill-informed radical.

Please point out where I equated the Resurrection of the Body with an Earth Mother.

The early creeds talk about the Resurrection of the body. That is the Christianity that I advocate. This duality in which the body is somehow posited to be a prison is straight from Platonic paganism.

[/QUOTE]

 

[Darryl1958]

No; that’s not true. Dualism was adopted by the ancient Jews long before Jesus even incarnated, and it remained a part of Judaic religion and thought throughout the late Old Covenant period and well into the Christian era, when Christians also adopted it.

For examples of this, every time the Old Testament speaks of those who’ve died, and gone to “Sheol,” this doesn’t imply that their bodies went to a place called Sheol after they died, because the Jewish practice was to keep track of the dead bodies, and there would have been no mystery surrounding where they went. The idea of the Jews willingly adopting this from the Greeks is also somewhat laughable, given that many of these sources come from around the time of Alexander the Great (who virtually conquered their nation without swinging a single blade,) through the time of the Maccabean revolt (in which some of the Jews went to open war with one of the remaining kingdoms of the old Greek Empire.) At their best, the Jews of the Old Testament times were xenophobic by religious decree, so it was much more unlikely for Hellenistic thought forms to penetrate their civilization, than it would be for practically any other nation in the world.

Monism, by contrast, has always had rather meager representation in the Catholic Church. It wasn’t endorsed by the saints, it wasn’t endorsed by the popes. In fact, doctrines of the Catholic Church have been established pertaining to the soul, and its state and fate after the moment of death, often in the face of high opposition.

The popularity of monism originates in the modern world (the last couple of hundred years,) when the chaos caused by Protestantism and the “enlightenment” philosophers had resulted in practical naturalism all through the world, and naturalists don’t believe in anything non-physical. These thought forms eventually began to seep into theological discussion through ecumenical dialogue, and so contaminated the thoughts of otherwise-promising theologians in the modern world. However, nothing about it is true to Christianity, and to call monism “more orthodox” has all the makings of a joke.

I don’t believe in monism -or- dualism, really, but monism is less likely, because I know that at least part of me is my mind, and my mind has thoughts about rubber balls, elephants, giant flowers and golden trees. Are those thoughts real? Do my thoughts really exist, and if so, where are they in my body? What part of me can you cut open, and discover the golden tree I was thinking about just now?

The only answer I’ve ever heard a monist give is that our thoughts are just illusions, that are actually nothing more than electrical signals in the brain, but in that case, what’s experiencing the illusion, and where in the body does the illusion take place? Like it or not, the monist has to face the problem of a non-physical reality to our thoughts if they want to answer these questions, and I’ve never heard one address this sufficiently.

P.S.: At later points in your post, you seem not to be defending monism, and talk about how “we are Spirit” or “we are Soul as much as we are Body.” Yet, these are contrary to the statement you made when you said “Our bodies are who we are.”

If the body is who we are, then monism is correct, and the death of the body is also the death of the person. This also means that there is no “afterlife” in the strictest sense, since the body that’s raised from the dead isn’t connected to the body that died through the intervening time. The person existed, then was nonexistent, then existed again. However, this raises all sorts of messy philosophical questions about how we can even be sure it was the same person, if there was a period of time where the person didn’t exist.

Please clarify your position, because, like some other people I’ve heard of, you seem to be making statements that are contrary to one another, and I don’t see any way to make them fit.

Jewish ideas of an afterlife were very ill defined, and there were deep divisions among Jews at the time of Jesus. Ultimately for the Jews, redemption and salvation centred around being redeemed as a nation of Israel, and as a physical people inhabiting a physical piece of real estate. After life was more or less an after thought for Jews. The Sadduccees did not believe in it at all.

It was in the Maccabbean period in the times leading into the Christian era that the idea of a physical resurrection of the body came to the fore. It was the faith of the seven brothers being tortured to death where that idea was made explicit in Hellenist Jewish writing, if I recall. There are some visions in Ezekiel that hint darkly at the bringing of bones back to life, but it was more of a miraculous event that any belief in a general resurrection.
What Jews believed and believe about eternal life are very vague and involve metaphor rather than any real concept.
In Christianity though, there is nothing left to the imagination. The Resurrection of Jesus is seen as a totally historic event that was testified to by the five senses of the apostles who proclaimed precisely that good news, that death had lost its sting, and that the Body is eternal.

 

[Darryl1958]

What happens when we die (prior to the resurrection)? Again, it my understanding that our soul goes to Heaven (if we lived righteously). Therefore, the soul certainly can exist without the body.

Which creed specifies that is precisely what happens?

When we speak of the heavenly realm, we are touching on things that can only be understood through metaphor and analogy.

I myself am not a big believer in existence as disembodied ghosts, and the like.

And in terms of time, I think that eternity speaks of a mode of existence beyond time rather than within time.
But that is not credal either. It is pure conjecture, like pretty much everything else is when it comes to what people have to say about an experience that they have never had. We all exist this side of Death, after all.

 

[Qoeleth]

You have given me no reason to believe that you even know what sorry feels like.
You seem harsh, because your nature is harsh.

Please point out where I equated the Resurrection of the Body with an Earth Mother.

The early creeds talk about the Resurrection of the body. That is the Christianity that I advocate. This duality in which the body is somehow posited to be a prison is straight from Platonic paganism.

Darryl,

Please accept my sincere apologies. I over-reacted, attributing to you things you had not actually said, and disparaging your knowledge of the area, and fell into the sin of contentiousness. I fully deserve such a reprimand.

I will refrain from commenting further on the actual subject matter.

Qoeleth

 

[mytruepower2]

Jewish ideas of an afterlife were very ill defined, and there were deep divisions among Jews at the time of Jesus. Ultimately for the Jews, redemption and salvation centred around being redeemed as a nation of Israel, and as a physical people inhabiting a physical piece of real estate. After life was more or less an after thought for Jews. The Sadduccees did not believe in it at all.

This, for the most part, seems to be a red herring, since regardless of how well-defined the idea of an afterlife was for the Jews, nevertheless, they were not monists.

Yes; the Sadduccees didn’t believe in the afterlife. They didn’t even believe in the resurrection of the body. But, as Jesus pointed out, they were wrong. God is not God of the dead, but of the living.

It was in the Maccabbean period in the times leading into the Christian era that the idea of a physical resurrection of the body came to the fore. It was the faith of the seven brothers being tortured to death where that idea was made explicit in Hellenist Jewish writing, if I recall. There are some visions in Ezekiel that hint darkly at the bringing of bones back to life, but it was more of a miraculous event that any belief in a general resurrection.
What Jews believed and believe about eternal life are very vague and involve metaphor rather than any real concept.
In Christianity though, there is nothing left to the imagination. The Resurrection of Jesus is seen as a totally historic event that was testified to by the five senses of the apostles who proclaimed precisely that good news, that death had lost its sting, and that the Body is eternal.

In admitting that this belief existed by the time of the Maccabbean revolt, you effectively give away your whole case, since your original claim was that it’s more “orthodox Christian” to be a monist, and Christianity, as such, began in 33-34 AD.

With respect to your specific points…

Yes; Ezekiel envisioned a miraculous resurrection of the dead. That’s what the general resurrection is; and the wife of Lazarus recognized it as both, prior to the founding of Christianity by Jesus in 33-34 AD.

You say that the Jewish beliefs about the afterlife are “based on metaphor.” Nobody believed their ancestors “went to a metaphor.” They believed they “went to Sheol,” and as the testimony of the Maccabbean martyrs, as well as the sacrifice for the dead in 2 Maccabees 12 testify, that belief that the dead persist in some form of afterlife state, without their bodies (“descended” into Sheol, etc…) was held by the Jews prior to the time of Jesus, and was adopted as part of Christianity in its earliest stages, which is really all that needs to be said.

Finally, yes. It’s an infallible doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church that Jesus physically, bodily rose from the dead, and remains alive now. Therefore, Jesus; the son of God, came to Earth, and shed light on an afterlife which was previously mysterious. To suggest that we should go back to before that and ignore what Jesus taught us is no more valid than saying that we should go back to before Moses and ignore the ten commandments.

 

[Robert_Sock]

Which creed specifies that is precisely what happens?

When we speak of the heavenly realm, we are touching on things that can only be understood through metaphor and analogy.

I myself am not a big believer in existence as disembodied ghosts, and the like.

And in terms of time, I think that eternity speaks of a mode of existence beyond time rather than within time.
But that is not credal either. It is pure conjecture, like pretty much everything else is when it comes to what people have to say about an experience that they have never had. We all exist this side of Death, after all.

It’s may not be made explicit, but the fact that our soul alone enters into the Hereafter is implicit throughout Catholic doctrine. The common saying of the poor souls in purgatory is one implicit belief.

 

[tonyrey]

Christians believe we* are***

liberated from both physical and spiritual death by the Precious Blood of Jesus. We are certainly not in a prison because when we respond to His love we **share **His life and belong to the Communion of Saints. Jesus Himself told us that the truth makes us free and St Paul wrote:
Quote:
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1

Our worldly bodies are glorious now because not only are they designed by God but
glorified by the Incarnation and Resurrection. It is a Manichean heresy that the body is evil and the source of all temptation. The yoke of slavery exists only in the mind.
What about all the saints who believed that the body was a prison?

The saints did not believe the body is a prison in the sense that we are no longer free to do God’s Will. Why would God give us a prison in which we are punished for doing nothing wrong? Why did He give us a body at all if it is so detestable?

And the biblical references:

‘Woe is me that my sojourning is prolonged!’ (Ps. 119:5)

That is not a sentiment that can or should be applied to every stage of life. Have you always regretted having a body?

‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ (Rom. 7:24)

You have taken St Paul’s question out of its context:

21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

Far from opting out of this life the Apostle is exulting in his opportunity to serve his Lord and Master.

NB Our worldly bodies are glorious now because not only are they designed by God but glorified by the Incarnation and Resurrection. It is a Manichean heresy that the body is evil and the source of **all **temptation.

 

[Darryl1958]

This, for the most part, seems to be a red herring, since regardless of how well-defined the idea of an afterlife was for the Jews, nevertheless, they were not monists.

Clay and Spirit, literally the breath of life.
That defines the Jewish belief.

Yes; the Sadduccees didn’t believe in the afterlife. They didn’t even believe in the resurrection of the body. But, as Jesus pointed out, they were wrong. God is not God of the dead, but of the living.

The question is not whether they were wrong, or right, but whether they are part of the Jewish experience.
They were.

In admitting that this belief existed by the time of the Maccabbean revolt, you effectively give away your whole case, since your original claim was that it’s more “orthodox Christian” to be a monist, and Christianity, as such, began in 33-34 AD.

You are the one talking about monism. I am talking about the essential indivisibility of human nature. The body is not a skin that we can crawl out of, or a prison that we can escape. The body is sacramental and core to our very existence of human.
Otherwise, the resurrection of the body is redundant.

With respect to your specific points…

Yes; Ezekiel envisioned a miraculous resurrection of the dead. That’s what the general resurrection is; and the wife of Lazarus recognized it as both, prior to the founding of Christianity by Jesus in 33-34 AD.

That is Christian belief. It is not the Jewish understanding of those verses.
In the context of explaining Jewish belief, which is what we are talking about, a Christian interpretation is not that relevant.

You say that the Jewish beliefs about the afterlife are “based on metaphor.” Nobody believed their ancestors “went to a metaphor.” They believed they “went to Sheol,” and as the testimony of the Maccabbean martyrs, as well as the sacrifice for the dead in 2 Maccabees 12 testify, that belief that the dead persist in some form of afterlife state, without their bodies (“descended” into Sheol, etc…) was held by the Jews prior to the time of Jesus, and was adopted as part of Christianity in its earliest stages, which is really all that needs to be said.

Jewish understanding was eclectic on this, as the example of the Sadduccees already point out.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and the breath of life returns to whence it came. The bosom of Abraham is parable to a process we are not privy to.

Finally, yes. It’s an infallible doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church that Jesus physically, bodily rose from the dead, and remains alive now. Therefore, Jesus; the son of God, came to Earth, and shed light on an afterlife which was previously mysterious. To suggest that we should go back to before that and ignore what Jesus taught us is no more valid than saying that we should go back to before Moses and ignore the ten commandments.

I am certainly not suggesting to go back to the heterodoxy of Jewish belief, or to the Platonism or neo-Platonism of pagan belief.

Death is conquered not by the eternality of the soul in some non-material perfect Form, but in the resurrection of the body.
to put it another way, if the body is not essential to our existence as
human being, then the resurrection of the body must also be a non-essential belief.

Or let’s look at it another way. “It is not what goes into a man’s mouth that condemns him, but what comes out of his mouth”. We ought not therefore to conceive of the body as corrupting us, or condemning us, or imprisoning us, but it is our minds-our souls if you will-that are corrupting the body, condemning the body, imprisoning the body.
The OP has things twisted around, exactly 180 degrees.

Soul travel, soul sleep, the soul as essence and the body as non-essential, definitely describe the state of Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, in the world today.
All that is specifically credal though, in terms of body and soul, is the resurrection of the Body. Our bodies are the building blocks that the builders still reject, but the body is the cornerstone of credal Christianity.

Biblically speaking, Spirit and Clay are our two creators, the breath of God and the mud shaped by God’s hands.

The existence of the mind, the intellect, the emotions, the will, and anything that can be conceived of as Soul, simply do not exist independent of that which creates us.

It is the earth itself that cries out through the crimes of the soul; the earth that becomes corrupted through the blood of those we hate and will dead. If anything it is the soul that imprisons the body, and not the body that imprisons the soul. Evil is not engendered by the corrupting effects of body on soul, but it is a creation of the mind and the soul.

 

[Darryl1958]

Plato’s Thoughts On Bodies

Plato analyzes the makeup of the bodily world in two metaphors. First is that of the world. The world is made up of the four elements, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth, and that these elements are combined in a spherical body (the Earth). The Earth also has to have a center, or world-soul, its principal of life. This soul is prior to the physical elements both in time and value, so that it is fit to be their dominating and controlling partner. Since no physical creature can be eternal, all bodies must exist in time, which is described as the moving image of eternity.

Also as in the allegory of the cave identifies the world of bodies as a realm of darkness and illusion. Plato believed that the body distorts the truth and deceives the soul, distracting it from the acquisition of knowledge. The souls unfortunate relationship is compared to a prisoner in a prison cell. Reflection reveals that the soul “is imprisoned in and clinging to the body, and that it is forced to examine other things through is as through a cage.” This picture helps Plato argue that the best service philosophy can render to human nature is to liberate the soul from its attachment to its cave-like bodily prison.

library.thinkquest.org/18775/plato/bodp.htm

Obviously then, the underlying predisposition of the OP question, originates in Plotos’ Phado, and the dominance of neo-platonic Christianity.

At the heart of Resurrection of the Body theology, is a very, very different understanding of the body.

The question then becomes, must we all subscribe to neo-platonism in order to consider ourselves to be orthodox Christians?

 

[Robert_Sock]

The saints did not believe the body is a prison in the sense that we are no longer free to do God’s Will. Why would God give us a prison in which we are punished for doing nothing wrong? Why did He give us a body at all if it is so detestable?

We are always to do God’s will, but that does not mean that our bodies are not prisons that give way to evil.

That is not a sentiment that can or should be applied to every stage of life. Have you always regretted having a body?

I’ve regretted having to live this life (in this body) for the last 25 years or so. Like with David, I lament that my sojourning is so long. You don’t know what you’re missing now!

You have taken St Paul’s question out of its context:
Far from opting out of this life the Apostle is exulting in his opportunity to serve his Lord and Master.

Again, we are always to serve God while in these bodies, but that in no way diminishes the fact that we are prisoners within these bodies. St Paul is clearly stating that these bodies give rise to sin,

NB Our worldly bodies are glorious now because not only are they designed by God but glorified by the Incarnation and Resurrection. It is a Manichean heresy that the body is evil and the source of **all **temptation.

Our bodies in the world to come will be glorious, but not our bodies here in this world.

 

[tonyrey]

We are always to do God’s will, but that does not mean that our bodies are not prisons that give way to evil.

I’ve regretted having to live this life (in this body) for the last 25 years or so. Like with David, I lament that my sojourning is so long. You don’t know what you’re missing now!

Again, we are always to serve God while in these bodies, but that in no way diminishes the fact that we are prisoners within these bodies. St Paul is clearly stating that these bodies give rise to sin,

Our bodies in the world to come will be glorious, but not our bodies here in this world.

Thank you for your views, Robert. I understand how you feel…

 

[Robert_Sock]

“Just as a blind man is unable to form any idea about colors, or a deaf person to fathom what it means to hear sounds… so the body cannot comprehend the delights of the soul… For we live in a material world, and the only kind of pleasure we can understand is that experienced through our body. But the joys of the spirit are everlasting and ceaseless. There is no resemblance of any kind between the enjoyments of the soul and those of the body.”
–Maimonides

 

[tonyrey]

“Just as a blind man is unable to form any idea about colors, or a deaf person to fathom what it means to hear sounds… so the body cannot comprehend the delights of the soul… For we live in a material world, and the only kind of pleasure we can understand is that experienced through our body. But the joys of the spirit are everlasting and ceaseless. There is no resemblance of any kind between the enjoyments of the soul and those of the body.”
–Maimonides

:thumbsup:The delights of the soul are often experienced in this life as well as the next.