Life Everlasting
I believe in …. The resurrection of the body and life everlasting ….
Will graves be opened and corpses revived?
I think not.
Resurrection of the Body
The Bible uses the word resurrection on its own throughout the Gospels (e.g. Matthew 22.23-30, Mark12.18-23, Luke 20.27,35, John 11.24,25.) Other references may be found using the words resurrection of the dead and resurrection from the dead. But, Scripture does not speak either of the resurrection of the body or of the resurrection of the flesh. However, the Creed says resurrection of the body, and for me this is a stumbling block.
Life Everlasting
I doubt resurrection for a Christian implies a return to earthly life. I agree with Joan Chittister who wrote in her book In Search of Belief, Life has a purpose that does not end in the grave. We believe that the God who created us did not create us to abandon us but to bring us finally, somehow, home to the fullness of life. Resurrection is simply another part of the process of growing into God. ‘Life’ as we know it, ‘time’ as we chart it, are simply temporary points to an eternal journey in a universe of unlimited mystery and endless possibility. She concludes.Life everlasting is a becoming into the fullness of the self that knows no boundaries, grows in form, lives in the Spirit, and has no end.
Amen
The Apostles’ Creed is over 1800 years old. Do we still need it? Should it be re-written? Creeds generally have an 'apologetic' basis. That is they have been adopted to deal with a particular theological problem of the time. Would it be possible to compose a creed acceptable to all denominations today? Probably not without a few heresy hunts. Should it just be discarded altogether, as was put to me when I commenced writing this series?
A Scottish theologian when asked by William Barclay if the Apostles’ Creed should be updated, replied, The Church must never be allowed to produce a modern and up-to-date creed, for, if they do, they’ll expect us to believe in it. Barclay says this response was not as cynical as it first appeared. He noted the difficulties in writing a modern creed and having it accepted by all, and wrote,It seems at least to us that we are far better with a situation in which the truth is stated symbolically, poetically, pictorially, a situation within which orthodoxy is not so much a straight-jacket as an atmosphere in which a man’s mind has room to think, a situation in which a man does not have all his thinking done for him but in which, so to speak, an area is defined, and within that area his mind is free to move.
What do you think?
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