Originally Posted by Tony888
So, you agree that Catholic doctrine teaches Christ, one part of the Trinity has a physical body of flesh and bone (with additional properties from his Glorified state)
LDS do not teach differently.
We do not put limits on God or Jesus by claiming they both have a physical nature.
Why wouldn’t Catholics believe that Jesus had a body of flesh and bones? He is the Incarnation. He is God, that lowered Himself and became man.
I disagree that LDS don’t put limits on the Father by claiming He has a body, because it implies that He was once human and is nothing more than we are, or can be. That’s a flat out lie. He was never human, and He never had a body of flesh and bone, at any point in time. We and the entire physical and the spiritual realms would cease to exist if He stopped thinking about it for a fraction of a second. He created it all out of absolutely nothing. He’s not a fancy spaceman that those Ancient Alien guys keep preaching on TV. He’s not some weird human from another planet with special powers, like Superman. He’s certainly not the mere figment of Joseph Smith’s grandiose imagination, that’s an unspeakable insult to His true Power and Glory. He’s Almighty God. All of humanity that has ever existed on earth, is less than a speck of dust in a million universes, compared to Him.
Telstar is correct. The Father is not human, is not a spaceman walking around in a robe on a planet near Kolob. He is not like Zeus, with a beard and a glowing robe. The Father resides outside space and time, outside any and all material realities. All that exists is His creation, all contained in His thought, continually being maintained in existence from moment to moment by Him. He is spirit, never having taken on human form. That is what the Son did in the Incarnation, when He entered the domain of matter, space, and time. Heaven is not a place within our universe or any possible universe. Like the Father, it also transcends space and time. This is difficult for us to understand and imagine, rooted as we are in a physical universe. God’s ‘throne’ in heaven is not on some planet near Kolob, part of his own Creation, which he organized out of pre-existing matter, coeternal with Him. God resides in heaven outside of his Creation, above and beyond any and all material creations and universes. Jesus, Mary, and the Saints are all ‘there’ with Him (whatever that means; ‘there’ is an inappropriate word as it denotes place, but that’s all we have to describe a place that’s not ‘here’ with us in the physical universe). This is something no one living has experienced nor can it be imagined (though some have been granted glimpses of it by the grace of God), rooted as we are in the material cosmos where the laws of physics, space, and time all apply. All our conceptual points of references are tied to and depend on the material cosmos, hence our difficulty.
To say that Jesus’s resurrected body is made of matter is inappropriate. The term ‘matter’ as we understand it doesn’t apply to anywhere except the physical universe. To say that Jesus became a man, took on flesh and bone, occupied a particular space in that physical universe, then ascended to heaven with that material body does not mean that Jesus’s resurrected body is made of matter in the same way it was comprised of matter during Jesus’s life. This is where Mormons (and others who mistake the imaginable with the real) get tripped up. They begin from Joseph Smith’s false premise that spirit is refined matter and that spirit, matter, and God are coeternal. No wonder they have difficulty with the idea of resurrected bodies that transcend the limits of space and time and no wonder they keep trying to enflesh the Father. When they think of the divine essence, which is spirit, they keep trying to force it into concepts tied to the material universe (e.g., the trinitarian god is a ‘substance’, a floating mass, a gas). No wonder they can’t conceive how the Father can simultaneously exist and also be non-material (be pure spirit). But imagination is not conception. We can conceive how this can be, even if we can’t imagine it. We have help with our conceptions through revelation and Tradition. From this we know that the Father is spirit and is utterly transcendent. Joseph Smith’s testimony is not credible in the least. We can, therefore, dispense with his false notion that spirit, matter, and God are coeternal.
In sum, we don’t know what resurrected bodies are made of - Jesus’s, Mary’s, or anyones. We have difficulty with the notion of a resurrected body of flesh and bones that transcends time and space because our points of reference are all necessarily tied to the physical universe, which is nothing but matter, energy, time, and space. Whatever they’re like, they’re the kind of bodies that are able to transcend the limitations of space and time. Are they made of matter? Not the kind of matter we know, that’s for sure. They wouldn’t transcend, if so. Anything more than that is speculation and guesswork. One fascinating attempt at creating a plausible notion of what such a life might be like is C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce”. Highly recommended.
