by postodave » February 11th, 2008, 10:40 pm
I've been holding back on this for a while because I've done a lot of arguing with Mitch recently. I was hoping someone else might pick up on this. Mitch, I suspect you've misunderstood Wright. Just to be clear when he talks of the intermediate state (and I think this is an Anglican term, because Anglo-Catholics tend to identify it with purgatory, though evangelical Anglicans don't) he is not talking of a state in which people are unconscious, nor is he talking about a kind of zip from death to the resurrection at the end of history. Rather he is talking about a state in which people are conscious in some way and with God but without embodiment. Now it seems to me that this view has the great advantage of allowing for both the resurrection of the dead and the communion of saints. You can't have communion with someone who isn't conscious and you can't, at least in Jewish thought, have a resurrection without a body. If the people who wrote the Nicene creed had meant simply to say that they believed in survival after death they could have done that but instead they chose to drag into Greek and Roman culture all this talk of resurrection. In other words I think this view or something very much like it is the orthodox view and has been for centuries.
I'm told the best recent text on this is John Cooper's Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate.
Though I can't say I've read it. Historically the classic book on this idea was The Christian Doctrine of Man by H Wheeler Robinson. That begins by looking at Old Testament views of man and works through history from there. It's greatest weakness is that it ignores the understanding of man in Eastern Christianity though you can supplement that by reading the relevant chapter in Lossky's Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
