Shit Only Matters If It’s Matter

“To speak of the resurrection of dead is at the same time to speak of the transformation of heaven and earth. The preoccupation with our own personal and private destiny, so often encouraged by talk of the immortality of the soul, is radically thrown into question. The destiny of the soul is tied to the destiny of the earth. The doctrine of the resurrection, then, entails a profound solidarity with the earth.”

-Ted Jennings, Loyalty to God,

“The Christian dogmatics, which thought of the awakening of souls as coinciding with the resurrection of the flesh, was metaphysically more consistent — more enlightened, if you will — than speculative metaphysics; just as hope means corporeal resurrection and knows through its intellectualization that it has been robbed of what is best.”
-Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

“Poverty means death. If we are conscious of that fact, we can find a language to speak clearly about the resurrection of Christ.”
-Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Church of the Poor”

“It was not just that God defeated death, but that God did so in human flesh, and this has profound implications for flesh itself. It bursts from the tomb, the same but different: a flesh no longer made for cleaving nor for oblivion. … For a Christian, death does not even threaten the end of bodiliness, but rather becomes a physical experience/encounter with the divine.”
-Elizabeth Stuart, “Queering Death”

“The resurrection was not for Jesus an exit from our brutal world into heavenly bliss above… The first witnesses identified the risen Jesus by the marks of his crucifixion. The body of the risen Jesus can be identified by us in the bruised and bleeding body of mankind with which he identified himself.”
-Carl Braaten, The Future of God

“So perhaps for us the resurrection of the body as new vegetation from composed soil might be the natural sacrament of a deeper transformation to which we point, but whose reality lies in the hands of God from whom all things came and are renewed.”
-Rosemary Radford Reuther, address to the Catholic Theological Society

“[The resurrection] did not take place in a heavenly or supra-heavenly realm, or as part of an intra-divine movement or a divine conversation, but before the gates of Jerusalem in the days of Tiberius Caesar and therefore in the place and time which are also ours, in our sphere.”
-Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4.3.298

HT for the idea and title of this post to Jonnie Russell.