As I understand it, there is a Christian belief that the Resurrection is a mass rising from the grave. Some believe that it’s the physical body that is resuscitated (this was very common in pre-Industrial Europe, as I understand it) and others believe that a new body is given/formed.
Assuming that a physical resurrection was the common believe in Christian pre-Industrial Europe, how does this jive with the Catholic tradition of relics?
I hope I haven’t offended anybody. Thank you very much.
I’m not sure if I understand your question completely, so I apologize if this isn’t the answer you’re seeking.
The Ressurection is something which is supposed to occur in the future. It has no bearing on the relics of saints and other holy people who have already died. There’s no contradiction because they haven’t been ressurected yet.
If you’re asking whether they’ll need those bits-and-pieces back when they are eventually ressurected, some people interpret scripture to be saying that the ressurected dead will be given new, perfect bodies.
:smack: I was trying to be respectful and I guess that clouded my question.
Here’s try two:
I have encountered Christians that believe the Ressurection is of your physical body, so they eschew organ donations and amputations because they won’t be “whole” when that time comes. I was curious if Catholics had a similar view and how relics played into this. (Do only saints get new bodies? Do all the parts come together in some sort of Holy Voltron? Oh, that’s another score on the “going to Hell” tally.)
Sure, why not. If you can make a human out of dust, it’s no big deal to gather up the scraps that are distributed about to reconstruct him.
Seriously, why do people get so swept up in literalism when it comes to religion? If some people can’t conceive of things spiritual except by using concrete examples, why must that bother and annoy people?
I have a friend who’s an engineer. He quite seriously believes that Heaven is a place with gold buildings and sidewalks. That people have difficulty conceptualizing 29 dimensions doesn’t mean there’s a reason to mock the theory.
There are various beliefs associated with the final resurrection, but most of them acknowledge that it will be a supernatural event that will require special effort by God to accomplish. People hundreds of years ago were well aware that bodies rotted away, (to say nothing of bodies ripped apart by wild beasts or fish or bodies destroyed by fire (whether burnt as martyrs or simply caught in the numerous apartment fires on ancient cities or kitchen fires in eras of open hearths).)
There were two odd results of the general belief in the physical resurrection.
On the one hand, various groups (whether heretical or simply not Christian) chose to cremate their dead as a specific sign that they did not believe in such a resurrection and they would destroy the bodies to show that they knew it could not happen. It was a reaction against those practices that were intended to deny the eventual resurrection that led to the Catholic Church’s long opposition to cremation. When people stopped using cremation as a way to symbolically deny the possibility of the resurrection, (and when European cemetaries got filled up), the church removed its prohibition on cremation.
On the other hand, a body that was “incorrupted” by death became one sign that a person had been favored by God, indicating that the person was more likely to be a saint, and thus a body that did not rot away became one of the favorable signs toward canonization (although it is not one of the requirementsa and discovering an “incorrupt body” does not remove the general requirements for canonization). There have, indeed, been a number of bodies of persons considered for canonization that have been described as incorrupt. How many of them had been subject to various forms of either embalming or pickling, how many were pious frauds, and how many were naturally mummified, I do not know. (Most of the official reports indicate that they were not embalmed or mummified at the time they were inspected, on the other hand, modern forensic pathologists were not called in to verify the results of the examiners and there are burial rites that preceded embalming that would have created a nearly anaerobic environment, slowing decay.)
Just wanted to say I get a kick out of the mental image of God really needing to roll up his sleeves to pull this one off!
But somewhat more seriously, if a being is omnipotent, do certain things require more effort for them to perform than others? I know He rested on the 7th day, but was that because He was worn out from His exertions? Or is it all the same to him - water to wine, part the Red Sea, rain for 40 days and nights, raise one dead guy, resurrect all of the dead, create the heavens and the earth… Simply will it to be so and it is.
Only if you built a house of cards. Of course, many people are quite unable to spend the least time growing up in their faith, and so an awful lot of them insist that their 8-year-old self’s conception of Christianity is absolutely correct. It’s sort of be like insisting that trees MUST sway to blow the wind about (like giant fan) because I believed it when I was six. (Actually, I believed the wind was alive and just liked blowing around, personally).
