Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

kozuh, am sure i read somewhere that all who have ever lived would be resurrected on the end day.
Something to do with if all weren't then it would not prove Jesus was eternal. Not sure why or why not. Sorry i forget.

Whatever the IDEA, in my eyes it's all a cute fairytale. This on first glance looks to be a bit new for me me .. excerpt ..

The doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The continuity of Ratzinger’s theological views from his apparently-radical past is seen in his best known, most systematic book, Introduction to Christianity. The book seeks to explain the Apostles’ Creed in the light of contemporary Roman Catholic dogma. When Ratzinger approaches the clause, “I believe in the resurrection of the body”, he recognises that this doctrine is a “stumbling block to the modern mind” (p 232). His definition is both strange and ambiguous. “Resurrection”, he writes, “expresses the idea that the immortality of man can exist and be thought of only in the fellowship of men” (p 172).

Ok, i've always thought the resurrection was a good idea. Is Ratzinger there saying it is only
an idea? So one is eternal in other peoples minds? That's the only eternal I ever thought made any sense.

The doctrine, he claims,creates a “curious dilemma” (p 238) because modern liberal theologians no longer believe that body and soul can be identified as separate entities, something that Ratzinger dismisses, together with the immortality of the soul, as a Greek notion which has “become obsolete” (p 241).

Ratzinger’s book, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, covers, amongst other things, the nature of the resurrection. He notes that the accepted view among modern Roman Catholic and liberal Protestant theologians is that body and soul expire at the point of death and that “the proper Christian thing, therefore, is to speak, not of the soul’s immortality, but of the resurrection of the complete human being and of that alone” (p 105). He notes that the word soul has disappeared from Roman Catholic liturgy (also from Roman Catholic Bible translations) as a consequence. Ratzinger offers his own new definition of the soul: “The ‘soul’ is our term for that in us which offers a foothold for this relation [with the eternal]. Soul is nothing other than man’s capacity for relatedness with truth, with love eternal” (p 259). The soul is therefore defined heretically as the capacity for relationship rather than real spiritual substance; having a soul means “being God’s partner in dialogue”.

Sounds like Benedict was saying that an atheist not having a dialogue with God would not have a
soul. Since the soul is only an idea anyway that's only one less idea an atheist would have. Not so bad. LOL

In Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger explicitly denies the resurrection of the body. “It now becomes clear that the real heart of faith in the resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of bodies, to which we have reduced it in our thinking; such is the case even though this is the pictorial image used throughout the Bible”. He says that the word body, or flesh, in the phrase, the resurrection of the body, “in effect means ‘the world of man’ . . . [it is] not meant in the sense of a corporality isolated from the soul” (pp 240-41).

Ratzinger is deliberately using a meaning that is impossible in the context, in order to explain away the clear meaning of the text. This is also done in relation to the word for body (Greek: soma), which he says can also mean self. He draws the conclusion that “one thing at any rate may be fairly clear: both John (6:63) and Paul (1 Cor 15:50) state with all possible emphasis that the ‘resurrection of the flesh’, the ‘resurrection of the body’, is not a ‘resurrection of physical bodies’. . . . Paul teaches, not the resurrection of physical bodies, but the resurrection of persons, and this not in the return of ‘flesh body’, that is, the biological structure, an idea he expressly describes as impossible (‘the perishable cannot become imperishable’) but in the different form of the life of the resurrection, as shown in the risen Lord” (p 246).

Ratzinger could not be more explicit about his interpretation of “the biblical pronouncements about the resurrection”. He says that “their essential content is not the conception of a restoration of bodies to souls after a long interval; their aim is to tell men that they, they themselves, live on . . . because they are known and loved by God in a way that they can no longer perish . . . the essential part of man, the person, remains . . . it goes on existing because it lives in God’s memory”

http://christianobserver.org/does-the-pope-believe-in-the-resurrection/

It's sure complicated gobbledegook for this guy. Yours was much simpler, and thanks for it. In my tomorrow
I'll have a look at both of these again, just in an effort to understand the superstitions people still hold.

In your mind is your post of the Pope's position on resurrection consistent with the one above?

Anyway, your story was a nice one.