In this episode Trent sits down with Cy Kellett and walks him through philosophical and theological challenges to the doctrine of the Resurrection from the dead.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. It’s still Easter, which means it’s still the most appropriate time of the year to celebrate not just Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, but our resurrection from the dead, the general resurrection from the dead, the resurrection of the body. Why that matters? We’re going to find out about that today. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn.
Trent Horn: About a month ago, I did a two-hour episode on Catholic Answers Live on Easter Monday and what was really cool about it was when we have holy days at Catholic Answers, we prerecord the shows because nobody’s going to be in the office. And Holy Week is really cool because nobody works on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Monday. So everyone’s kind of out so we prerecord the shows, and a lot of people enjoy them because they don’t have callers. Callers are great. Sometimes though, callers can take us down different paths when it’d be nice to dive deep into a subject.
Trent Horn: So I wanted to share with you in this episode an excerpt of the deep dive that Cy Kellett and I did on the resurrection of the body because there’s lots of people that do not understand this crucial doctrine of our faith. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to survive our death? What happens to our bodies after death? All of these important questions. What does it mean to rise from the dead? We have to be able to get that right in order to articulate our hope in our risen savior. I wanted to share that with you, but be sure to go to Catholic Answers Live, check out the past shows and episodes to get even more great content, and be sure to support us at trenthornpodcast.com. If you’re watching this on YouTube, definitely hit the subscribe button. If you’re listening on the podcast app, leave a review at iTunes, Google Play. I always enjoy listening to those. And now, here’s my conversation with Cy Kellett on understanding the resurrection of the body.
Cy Kellett: We could just start with a very, very basic question, and whether you want to take a theological or a philosophical answer to it, what is the resurrection of the body?
Trent Horn: Well the resurrection of the body is the doctrine that we will be reunited … That after death at the last judgment, our souls, the souls of the elect, those who will spend eternity with God, as well as the souls of the damned, those who will spend eternity apart from God, our souls will be reunited with our bodies. This is what the catechism says in paragraph 997. “In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God in his almighty power will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them with our souls through the power of Jesus’s resurrection.”
Trent Horn: To understand the resurrection of the body, then the key elements here are that we will be reunited with our bodies after death at the final judgment, but they will not be the … It will be the body we had on earth, but it will not be in its same form. It will be glorified through the power of Christ’s resurrection and it will be given incorruptible life. That’s something that, when you see the early Christian proclamation, even St. Paul trying to preach the resurrection, many people in the ancient world, even today, misunderstood it. In the ancient world, people are thinking, “Wait, wait, wait. Okay. So we’re going to rise from the dead. What are we going to get back? Our old bodies? Am I going to be just like … ”
Trent Horn: Because in ancient Judaism, you collected bones as a bone box. It’s like, “So wait, are you saying I’m going to …” Now, this would be more the Pagans who would say this, not the Jews, because many of the Jews believed in the resurrection of the dead and they didn’t think you came back as a skeleton from a bone box, but Pagans might of thought, “Well wait. What do you mean? Am I going to be like a zombie or something?” That’s something, Cy, that even atheists are critical of when we talk about that Jesus rose from the dead. They’ll say, “Oh, you worship a zombie.” No, a zombie is a person who lacks consciousness. So a zombie is a corpse that is animated, that acts, but it has no consciousness whatsoever. It’s not aware of anything or maybe the very minimal, “Brains,” but we’re not going to be zombies because we will be fully alive in Christ. We’ll have a consciousness beyond what we have now and a body to go right along with it.
Cy Kellett: Okay. So it’s interesting to think about that this is not something the ancient person was like, “I get it,” and we modern people struggle with. It’s a idea that requires a lot of clarity and explanation because there’s a lot of ways to get resurrection wrong.
Trent Horn: Absolutely. So resurrection is not resuscitation.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: That would be being brought back. So what we’ve talked about so far is zombification.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: That would be if your body comes back to life in its decomposed state, but it lacks consciousness.
Cy Kellett: Can I just ask you real quick? Did you ever hear about Bob Hope’s zombie joke?
Trent Horn: No, I have not.
Cy Kellett: So you were just describing a zombie. There’s a famous Bob Hope movie and I don’t want to offend anyone with this. It’s just a silly Bob Hope joke, but the person is describing a zombie to Bob Hope and it’s like, “Walks around without a mind of its own,” and all these other descriptions that are very like that it’s kind of helpless and it doesn’t think for itself and it follows along. Bob Hope goes, “Oh, you mean a Democrat?” That was very funny back in the day, I think, but I don’t know. Maybe people are too polarized now to think that that’s funny.
Trent Horn: Guess what, Cy. You’re canceled.
Cy Kellett: Am I canceled?
Trent Horn: You just got canceled.
Cy Kellett: It’s just an old Bob Hope joke.
Trent Horn: You and Bob Hope got canceled. Everybody before 10 minutes ago got canceled. But you know what, Cy, though? If someone is canceled, we say they’re offensive, but we bring them back. It’s kind of like resurrecting their career.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: It’s brought back, but in an even more glorious form in order to bring it back.
Cy Kellett: I’m so sorry that you’re description of zombies just made me want to say the Bob Hope joke, but you can’t just say it because then people will think, “Oh, that’s what you really think about Democrats.” It’s just an old Bob Hope joke.
Trent Horn: Well it’s like a lot of jokes where you insert group you want to poke fun at.
Cy Kellett: Right, but I couldn’t think of one. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of a good group to throw in there. What would you say? Oh-
Trent Horn: Catholic Answers apologists. This is how we all are.
Cy Kellett: That’s not right at all.
Trent Horn: Whenever in doubt, Cy-
Cy Kellett: That doesn’t work.
Trent Horn: Whenever in doubt, whenever in doubt, you can always go to self-deprecating humor. It may fall flat, but at least nobody gets offended.
Cy Kellett: Yeah, that’s true. All right.
Trent Horn: Yeah.
Cy Kellett: Okay, so-
Trent Horn: But yes, you’re right.
Cy Kellett: … we’re not talking about zombification.
Trent Horn: No, we’re not talking about zombification because you’ll be fully conscious and aware, not like a zombie or something like that. We’re also not talking about resuscitation because some people say, “Well why is Jesus’s resurrection such a big deal?” I mean in scripture, there’s a lot of people that come back to life, right? Like Lazarus comes back to life, comes back from the dead. The widow at Nain’s son comes back from the dead. Jairus’s daughter is dead or close to death depending on how you read it, but there’s multiple people that are described as coming back from the dead. The resurrection from the dead is not a mere coming back from the dead even with our conscious state because it is also the fact that we arise to glorious immortal life. So when Lazarus came back from the dead, recorded in the Gospel of John, he eventually died again. So he would eventually die-
Cy Kellett: Ah, right, right, right.
Trent Horn: … one more time.
Cy Kellett: Okay.
Trent Horn: The same for everyone else in scripture. Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, however, one, is done under his own power. So it’s not like Lazarus was raised by someone else. Christ rose himself, though we can say the Father and the Spirit raised Jesus because the actions of the trinity are manifested in all three persons. God raised Jesus from the dead means the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all equally involved, but that means Jesus fully raises himself. In John Chapter 2, He says, “Destroy this temple,” referring to himself, “I will build it back up again. I will raise it up again. So He has risen, but he will never die again. He has glorious immortal life. I think it’s Revelation 118, I want to say. It’s in the Book of Revelation. Jesus says … In here, this is the vision of Jesus in heaven. He says, “I once was dead and am now alive. I hold the keys to death forever.”
Trent Horn: So yeah, we’re not zombification, not resuscitation, not transmigration of the soul. Resurrection is not just the soul leaves the body and it’s just your soul in heaven forever. That’s a very common error that goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, that they believed that eternal life, that that was basically just your soul in the pits of Tartarus or the Elysian Fields. Your soul was who you were. Your body didn’t matter. So they didn’t really have a concept of the idea of resurrection. I’ll give you an example of that from the Book of Acts. So when Paul was in Athens and he was preaching to them, he saw the city was full of idols as Acts 17:16 and so he wanted to preach the gospel to them. He went into the marketplace, the agora, the agora to do that, and it says, “Some of the Epicurean and stoic philosophers met him and some said, ‘What would this babbler say?’ Others said, ‘He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities,’ because he preached Jesus and the resurrection.”
Trent Horn: So here, the Greeks thought that when Paul was speaking about resurrection, which in Greek was anastasis or agaro depending on which word you used, but typically anastasis, they thought this was another god he was talking about along with Jesus, not like a thing that would happen to you. It was a very foreign concept to them.
Cy Kellett: One other thing that does not happen and I think Christians are confused about this, resurrection does not mean you become an angel in heaven.
Trent Horn: Yes, and this happens sometimes, Cy, when you hear especially the death of a child for example.
Cy Kellett: Right.
Trent Horn: It’s always hard when someone is grieving. People will say things and thoughtful things like, “Well now, you have an angel in heaven.” I’ve heard a lot of people though say like, “I thought when you died, you became an angel.” I really want to write a book called The Alternative Baltimore Catechism. I feel like there’s this old, very, very old Catholic folk theology that everyone heard from their grandparents and that’s one of them.
Cy Kellett: Yes. Right, right.
Trent Horn: It’s like when you die and go to heaven, you’ll become an angel. That’s its roots. It’s like, “Well no, that’s not what happens.” When we say, “You have an angel in heaven,” that can mean you have a beloved child who is interceding for you in heaven. If that’s what you mean-
Cy Kellett: Right.
Trent Horn: … that’s completely appropriate, but if what you mean is your child is now a literal angel-
Cy Kellett: No.
Trent Horn: … well no, because angels, what they are is that they’re pure spirits. They’re just intellect. So they are beings who have intellect, but do not have bodies and never will have bodies. What makes humans different is that we have bodies and that we’re not … This is what can be hard for people. We are not a human being without our body. So when we die and go to heaven, it’s hard. You can’t even really say that you’re in heaven or you’re in purgatory. It’s more proper to say your soul is in heaven or your soul is in purgatory because who we are as human beings, we are a composite of body and soul.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: If you don’t have the body, upon death, you don’t have a human being anymore. You have a corpse, a deceased body that is no longer alive, and you have the soul. So when Christ … Christ’s existence as a human being if you will, I want to be careful with my terms here, ceased upon his death because his soul separated from his body. Now of course because He is a divine person, because He is a divine person, He is united to his soul and his body through his divinity, through his divine person. That is what allows him uniquely to resurrect or reunite his soul and body. For the rest of us, we wait for God’s almighty power to reunite our bodies with our souls at the last judgment, at the final judgment, the resurrection of the dead when all things will be made clear and then there will be eternal life, well eternal good life and eternal bad life meted out to us.
Cy Kellett: Trent Horn is our guest. We’re going to keep talking about the resurrection. I got a whole bunch more questions for Trent about the resurrection. It really is good news and the news gets better and better the more you know what Christ and his church actually teach about resurrection. I hear you on the I want to write that alternative Baltimore catechism, but I’m going to say don’t do it. I just don’t think you can catch lightning in a bottle like you did with Things the Saints Never Said again. I think that’s a one-time thing and I wouldn’t give it a shot. We’ll take a quick break. We’ll be right back with more Trent Horn on the resurrection right after this.
Cy Kellett: So if I were to go back and say talk to St. Paul who writes quite a bit about resurrection because I think there’s some confusion among … I think it’s the Ephesians who got confused about resurrection if I remember the letters correctly. Wait. I don’t have any audio for … Go ahead. We didn’t have your audio for a second.
Trent Horn: Oh, okay. Well in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul does talk about resurrection and well especially the Lord’s coming in some of his other letters like Thessalonians, but 1 Corinthians-
Cy Kellett: Oh, that’s it.
Trent Horn: … 15 is probably his most extended treatise on the resurrection. There, he is responding to people in Corinth who were doubting there will be a resurrection of the dead at all. His argument is essentially, “Okay. You’re saying there is no resurrection of the dead. If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not raised, but Christ is raised. Therefore, there is a resurrection of the dead.” So he’s running this particular argument saying Christ resurrection shows us there is a resurrection of the dead and we have that hope in him. He says that Christ is the first fruits of the resurrection. This is an agricultural term to refer to the part of the crops that show the harvest is almost here because these first parts of the crop are now ready. Christ represents that for us. If Christ is risen, because we have died with Christ in baptism as Paul says in Romans Chapter 6, we will rise with him as well in his resurrection because we’re united with him.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: We’re united in his dead. Because of that, we are also united in his resurrection. So in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul lays out, “Well what do you mean by resurrection?” He says, “We will be changed in the twinkling of an eye,” and he talks about corruptible, incorruptible bodies, the stars and the animals and plants. There’s different kinds of bodies. He says, “Look, there’s different kinds of bodies and we’re going to have a different kind of body,” but he makes it clear. He talks about what is sown corruptible will be raised incorruptible.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: In Philippians 3:21, he’s very clear and we’ll probably talk about this in the second hour because some people try to say Paul thought we were going to get a new body in heaven. The body’s waiting for us up there we’re going to get. No, in Philippians 3:21, Paul says, “Christ will change our lowly bodies to be like his glorious resurrected body.” We will keep the same body, but we’re going to get a really good system upgrade.
Cy Kellett: So if I could just ask you a question about resurrection almost from a philosophical point of view then? Resurrection implies that there’s a corpse which is raised so that there’s some connection. I have heard it proposed, and I wonder to your philosophical mind if this makes sense, that it is actually what happens and that there’s no problem even if your body is entirely, say, disintegrated down to the atomic level, let’s say-
Trent Horn: Right.
Cy Kellett: … that it’s nothing for Jesus to, in his divine mind, just track those atoms through history and raise you from the dead. We know from modern science, in other words, that there’s a conservation of matter and energy.
Trent Horn: Right.
Cy Kellett: So there’s no circumstance in which resurrection thought of as the actual resurrection of your body is impossible.
Trent Horn: Well this might be fun to jump into the philosophy a little bit of it, Cy, to go back and forth because there are some philosophical puzzles that arise even when we understand … Okay. Because yeah, that could be a difficulty to an ancient person who might have thought that your body at some point could be annihilated and so it no longer exists in the world in any form. Now, we understand at the most basic level you’re right. Even if you were disintegrated in an explosion or something like that, the atoms that constituted your body at your death would still exist in some form. It doesn’t seem hard for Jesus to say, “Here they all are, put them back together again, there you are,” but there are still some philosophical problems that arise. One of the problems would be that some people die and their atomic structure is scattered. It probably ends up in the grass.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: The grass gets eaten by a cow. The cow gets eaten by you or me when we go get a burger, and then we die right after we eat that burger.
Cy Kellett: Wait. I have to sing the Circle of Life now. I think that’s a requirement of radio. If someone says that stuff you just said, you have to sing the Circle of Life. Are you ready?
Trent Horn: If you want to. I will belt it out if you want.
Cy Kellett: Oh, no. All right. I’m going to break radio rules.
Trent Horn: (singing)
Cy Kellett: There we go. I’ll start-
Trent Horn: (singing)
Cy Kellett: Don’t make me cry, Trent.
Trent Horn: (singing) Oh, that was terrible.
Cy Kellett: Gosh, Elton John.
Trent Horn: That was just awful.
Cy Kellett: Elton John, just hitting it out of the park with Lion King. Okay. So it does move us all. All right. I’m sorry.
Trent Horn: I think I killed the Lion King soundtrack so much, I don’t even think in God’s omnipotence, He could have resurrected it.
Cy Kellett: You can’t resurrect that.
Trent Horn: I annihilated it. It went out of existence. So yeah, so what if? But then what if some of the atoms in your body belong to another person’s body?
Cy Kellett: Sure. Okay. Yeah. Oh, I see. So there’s a philosophical problem there. Yeah, right, but also here’s the thing though. When I was born, I was a baby.
Trent Horn: That is very philosophically astute.
Cy Kellett: Okay. So I’m not a baby anymore. There’s been a turnover of the atoms and molecules in my body throughout my life. So there’s a whole history of atoms and molecules. I’ve left a trail of atoms and molecules that are dispersed across this earth and maybe even into outer space.
Trent Horn: Cy.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: I’m so glad that you’ve raised this response-
Cy Kellett: Okay.
Trent Horn: … because this is essentially … What you just said is essentially St. Thomas Aquinas’s answer to the problem.
Cy Kellett: We’re practically the same, me and Thomas Aquinas.
Trent Horn: You guys are-
Cy Kellett: Yeah, we’re like buds.
Trent Horn: … running on the same wavelength.
Cy Kellett: Yeah, he was born a baby too.
Trent Horn: Right. Yeah. This is what he says about the problem of sharing atoms with other people. For him, the illustration of the problem are cannibals. What do you do with somebody who feasts on human flesh? For him, he didn’t think of atoms are going to be … He didn’t have atomic structure thinking like, “Oh, that’s where it’s us.” For him, it was a more immediate problem. What do you do as someone as part of their diet, they eat human flesh so that is what constitutes part of their being? So his answer is essentially that there is no set fixed unit at the end of our life or anything like that where these and only these are the atoms that make up me.
Trent Horn: This is what Aquinas writes. “In respect to matter of course, the parts are in flux, but this is not an obstacle to his, the deceased, being numerically one from the beginning of his life to the end of it, including when we are raised. An example of this can be taken from fire. While it continues to burn, it is called numerically one because its species persists. Yet, wood is consumed and new wood is applied. It is also like this in the human body. For the form and species of its single parts remain continuously through a whole life. The matter of the parts is not only resolved by the action of the natural heat, but is replenished anew by nourishment.” So just like you might say, “Okay, I have one campfire here. It’s the same campfire throughout our whole camp out, but there’s been different wood that’s been put in and out to keep the fire going.”
Cy Kellett: Right.
Trent Horn: So there’s no difficulty in saying that our bodies take in matter, nutrients, shed them, different atoms compose them. So what Aquinas would say is, “Well even if you share body parts with other persons, God in his omnipotence, there’s nothing to prevent him from creating new matter to be continuous with the matter that’s been resurrected-”
Cy Kellett: Got it.
Trent Horn: “… to kind of fill in the gap.” Then he even goes further to say like, “Oh, what if the cannibal only ate cannibals, only ate human flesh? What if his parents only ate human flesh?” And he has all these qualifiers that show, “Okay. There’s still a seed he gets from the parents that’s unique to him that God can take from that seed to give him an entire resurrected body that’s continuous with his previous one.” I give him credit for thinking it all through.
Cy Kellett: Yeah, it’s gross.
Trent Horn: Fortunately for … It is and fortunately for Thomas, there is no one whose entire life is fed on cannibalistic diets that we know now, but he was trying to think it ahead. I’ll give you one other one though for a philosophical difficulty, and if we have to talk about it after the break, we will. A modern philosopher Peter van Inwagen gives this example. He says, “Okay. God raises you up from the dead. Is it me though?” He said, “One night, I was walking down, my kids went to bed, and I knocked over the wood blocks my four-year-old had been stacking or my two-year-old had stacked in the living room. I knocked them over so I just re-stacked them, acted like nothing happened, and went back to bed. Is it the same stack though?” A puzzle we need to resolve when we return.
Cy Kellett: Trent Horn is our guest. We’re talking about resurrection and if we seem happy, it’s because it’s the Easter season and the Lord is risen. We’ll be right back with more Easter and resurrection with Trent Horn right here on Catholics Answers Live.
Cy Kellett: This is actually very difficult issue, the father who knocks over the stack of blocks, because both Trent and [Darren 00:22:53] who’s running the board have toddlers, a lot of toddlers at home, and for parents of toddlers, who knocked over the blocks is actually a daily crisis in the home. This is not at all theoretical for you two, is it?
Trent Horn: No, it’s not. The child makes what seems to be a valid point like, “You ruined it. It’s gone.”
Cy Kellett: Yeah, you ruined it.
Trent Horn: Then so what van Inwagen tries to do is it’s like, “Oh, I’ll just put them back together again,” but it’s like, “Wait. Is it the same stack?” I mean even I use molecular precision to get them in exactly the same place, we couldn’t say that it’s the same thing, the same stack that my child had built. So he offers this as an objection. Now, I don’t think he actually considers this a sound objection to the resurrection. As a philosopher, he just offers it for thought to say, “Well okay. Even if God puts all of our parts back together, how do we know that it still is us?” Just as I put all the blocks back together, it’s not the same stack. Maybe we’re not the same person. We were talking about this to say that, “Well wait a minute. There’s no …” How do we resolve, I guess, the dilemma here?
Trent Horn: I think the key is to show that the stack of blocks and me as a person, there is a crucial disanalogy between the two, and that is that the stack of blocks exists as an aggregate. They have … Their only identity is the action that was done to them in the past. There’s nothing that unites them together into a single object. Their singular identity as a tower is only in the mind of a child who built them. They’re an aggregate. They’re just a collection together. That is what gives them their identity, the child’s thought about them. So yeah, you can’t recreate something that the kid made, but what makes you and I, what gives us our unity is not just a thought about us, well not just a thought, but it’s God’s thoughts about us and thinking about us and uniting our parts in an immortal soul that gives us continuity.
Trent Horn: So take van Inwagen’s example, I might say, “Well imagine I have my grandfather’s watch.” Okay. He built this pocket watch for me and I decide to go and get it cleaned. So the watchmaker takes apart the watch, cleans it, puts it back together again, and I wear it. Is it still my grandfather’s watch? I think there, we’re much more likely to say, “Yeah, that’s still my grandfather’s watch.”
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: Even if the watchmaker took it apart and cleaned it and put it back together, the assembling of the watch is not like the reassembling of the blocks, the tower. The watch has more, a function and a purpose and something that gives it more of an intrinsic unity to it. So then how much more so would we as organisms united with an immortal soul, how much more kind of unity would we have that would allow us to maintain that continuity that is necessary in something like the resurrection?
Cy Kellett: Okay. I mean on the one hand, that philosophical assurance that you just gave me does help me. On the other hand, we have the Lord’s promise. So we don’t-
Trent Horn: Right.
Cy Kellett: So you can go either way. For people who are philosophically disposed, you can solve these problems one by one, but it’s also true it’s okay to just accept the Lord’s promise that you’ll be raised.
Trent Horn: Well I mean essentially, we might have philosophy that could show us that resurrection is not logically impossible, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: What gives us our hope that we’ll rise from the dead is not just that it’s possible, but that it already has happened for our Lord Jesus Christ and He has promised that those who believe in him, they will rise as well. That’s the source of our promise. You go back to John Chapter 11 and talking about Lazarus and the resurrection, and it’s interesting when Jesus goes to speak with Lazarus’s sister, He says to her, “Don’t you believe your brother will rise?” She says, “Yeah.” Whenever I read it, I want to read it in this tone.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: “Yeah, I know on the resurrection.” We always read it like, “Yes, I know on the resurrection,” but almost it’s kind of like when somebody dies and they’re sad and we tell them like, “Well you know they’re alive. You’ll see them again.” You want to say, “Yeah, I know.” It hurts now though. It hurts now.
Cy Kellett: Right.
Trent Horn: Even if I get this promise in the future, that’s doesn’t take away from it hurting now. The resurrection of the dead, it’s kind exasperation like if any other person is telling me this, whatever, but what she doesn’t realize of course is what Jesus then says, “I am the resurrection. I am. Your brother will rise because of me.”
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: “Just to show you that you can have a full and complete trust in this promise, I will give you a sneak preview right now.” Then He yells and then … I wish I could have been there. Well I wish I could see all of Jesus’s ministry, but to just see Lazarus, his head’s covered and his feet are … He’s jumping. It’s almost like a cartoon a little bit. He’s bound up in burial-
Cy Kellett: I see what you mean. He’s jumping out. That’s right, yeah. Yeah, he’s kind of got to hop his way out of the tomb. Right.
Trent Horn: Then it’s just like, “You’re here.” I imagine it’d be something like, “What happened? What’s going on? [inaudible 00:28:23]” You got to add a little bit of levity in these situations. It’s a joyful thing-
Cy Kellett: It is.
Trent Horn: … a miracle.
Cy Kellett: Right. Then Jesus says of course those words that also are for each of our hearts, “Untie him and let him go free.” I mean such a beautiful teaching there about the role of the church in the life even of those who have new life.
Trent Horn: Think about it. Think about it. Even that when we look at the resurrection of the dead even going back to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, death instills a terror in us that’s universal. I mean people either want to try to escape it with technology. I mean throughout human history, people have always tried to escape death. Through most of human history, they wanted to achieve immortality through their name. If I can do something, build something, have progeny, have a kingdom, even if I die in my body, I live on in my name, I guess would be-
Cy Kellett: Oh, I see what you [crosstalk 00:29:18]. Yeah. Right.
Trent Horn: Think about it. Everyone has wanted to escape death. I think throughout a lot of human history, they’ve tried to escape death through vernacular immortality. I become part of the vernacular. My name lives on. Even if it has to be infamy, I’m still alive in some way. People won’t forget about me. Then today, you have people who want to upload your brain to a computer or reverse the aging process. Just the idea that we could just become nothing and not matter to anyone and be forgotten and be gone and that’s it, it fills us with fear, but that’s why in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul says, “Oh, death, where is thy sting?”
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: We naturally have an apprehension about death because it was not a part of God’s plan, but it doesn’t debilitate us as Christians because of our hope in the resurrection of the dead, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that fear of death that might bind us and make us afraid to do anything, Jesus, through his resurrection, can say, “Untie him and let him go free.” We are untied from that fear and can go free now.
Cy Kellett: Do you think … Now, this is a little off-topic, but as you’re saying it, I was thinking about all the people who built the world that we live in today, just these thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of men and women who chose the celibate life and built the monasteries that built Europe and all that. Do you think that that’s … I can’t think that … Well a couple things. One, it’s unique in all of history. It never happened ever before or since that there’s this great wave of people who just devoted themselves entirely to the service of others and went out and transformed even the physical landscape of Europe is nothing like it was because of these people. It couldn’t have happened, I don’t think, unless they had faith in the resurrection. It does seem to me that we often trade in this glorious doctrine of the resurrection for a kind of modern kind of shrug and, “I don’t know what happens after death, but I know I’ll see my relatives again,” or something like that. That’s really not good enough, is it?
Trent Horn: I think the problem, Cy, is that a lot of people suffer from Patrick Swayze syndrome or Patrick Swayze in Ghost syndrome, the idea they think like, “Who are you?” They think you just are your soul. You ever seen Ghost? Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, right?
Cy Kellett: Oh, I know the movie.
Trent Horn: Whoopi Goldberg?
Cy Kellett: I’m not sure which problem you’re referring to. Oh, yeah, Whoopi Goldberg, yeah, and the whole thing and then the clay pot thing that’s so famous, but I don’t want to talk about that.
Trent Horn: Right. No, but remember in the movie Patrick Swayze as a ghost, it’s just the astral projection of him and he’s wearing all his clothes and he looks like us and then he jumps into Whoopi Goldberg’s body and starts talking through her.
Cy Kellett: Oh, yeah.
Trent Horn: It incorporates this idea that you are just your soul. Your soul is just this floating version of you like in a cartoon or something like that, but your soul … I like the philosopher Edward Feser. He put it in kind of a grim way. He said a human soul without a body is like a dog that doesn’t have its leg, its tail, its eyes, its tongue, or its ears. Its still a dog, but it’s a really, really diminished dog in all of its capacities.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: It’s really missing a lot.
Cy Kellett: Right.
Trent Horn: So that’s … Go ahead.
Cy Kellett: Okay. Now, we don’t want to panic people about the intermediate period. I just want to say heaven is heaven. You’re going to be fine.
Trent Horn: Right. The reason you’re going to be fine when you are a soul in heaven is because God is going to give you everything you will need to have complete joy with him while you’re in heaven. I mean your soul doesn’t have eyes, right? Eyes are a part of the body.
Cy Kellett: Right.
Trent Horn: So souls can’t see anything, but God could infuse knowledge of his heavenly existence directly into your soul so you’re not missing out on anything. St. Paul’s very clear in 2 Corinthians 5 that a soul without a body is like a body, a naked human body without a tent. It’s like this is just really awkward. I do not want to be-
Cy Kellett: This is so awkward.
Trent Horn: … in this position.
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: So we think heaven, we only think of it as just souls up there, these astral Patrick Swayze Ghost projections when the fullness of it will be having our resurrected bodies though in the interim period, God will not allow you to suffer want when you’re in heaven because He can give you anything you need to make you happy while you’re there. So I think that’s important. Then it also comes into what we can talk about here as we round out is understanding that it’s important that going to heaven and the resurrection is why we don’t focus only on souls after death. We focus on bodies. We understand getting our bodies back are important and so while God’s omnipotent, we show that respect by burying our bodies-
Cy Kellett: Yeah.
Trent Horn: … by treating the body with respect even after death because it’s still a vital part of you. That’s why the church is teaching that it is preferable to bury someone and that there are rules related to cremation are so important to follow.
Cy Kellett: Because we don’t want to accidentally … Because our actions do educate us in a certain way. So by taking certain actions-
Trent Horn: Absolutely.
Cy Kellett: … we could teach the wrong lesson about what we believe about the body.
Trent Horn: Right. Yeah, it’s not like … We’re not going to … If you use the adoration chapel as a place to watch a movie, you can’t cause Jesus pain, but it’s not good for you, it’s not good for others to fail to respect the sacrament and its presence even though that doesn’t take away from God in any way because He’s infinite. Much the same way, if we are not respectful of the body and do something like scatter your ashes over the ocean or at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland which people did not infrequently and it’s gross, they shut down the ride and its-
Cy Kellett: Oh, that’s awful.
Trent Horn: Yes, it is, but there’s a lot of people just love Disneyland and they want to be with the ghosts at the Haunted Mansion. I don’t … So that’s why the church in 2016 had a document called Instruction [inaudible 00:35:29] Con Cristo about the burial of the deceased and ashes in cremation. So what it says about cremation is that the church raises not doctrinal objections to it since God in hiss omnipotence can raise us from the dead. So the cremation does not negate the doctrine of the soul’s immortality. So cremation is not prohibited unless it was chosen for reasons contrary to Christian doctrine like you just scatter the ashes because you think nothing is ever going to happen with them anyways. So what the church would say is you can’t divide the ashes, you can’t put them in jewelry, you can’t keep them in your home. It has to be kept in the same way you would for a buried body essentially. So the church has a preference that we would bury someone’s body, but given the modern age and space requirements and health and environmental issues, cremation is now certainly tolerated by the church.
Cy Kellett: Trent Horn is our guest. He’s the author of Why We Are Catholic. You can find all of Trent’s work at catholic.com. If you want to buy the books, you can go to shop.catholic.com. We’re talking about the resurrection of the Lord. Well we’re talking about resurrection in general this hour and we’ll get more specific into some of the details of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus in the second hour with Trent, but something I find very comforting about the resurrection, Trent, is I have always found this belief that some people have, and I believe Buddhists would have a belief like this, which is what happens when you die is you just go back to the source and you’re like a drop of water returning to the ocean. I never wanted to be a drop of water returning to the ocean because the drops of water in the ocean are completely indistinct and have no-
Trent Horn: Oh, they’re gone. They’re done for.
Cy Kellett: You can’t-
Trent Horn: They’re [donezo 00:37:22].
Cy Kellett: You can’t get a drop back out of the ocean.
Trent Horn: It’s kind of like there’s this … I remember there’s a comedian who did a bit about the leaves at fall. We’re like, “Oh, it’s so pretty to watch the leaves change at fall,” but in reality, the leaves are dying and if they were aware, they would be like, “We’re dying! Ah!” We’re all like, “This is so pretty,” and they’re just like shriveling up and drying.
Cy Kellett: Just death everywhere.
Trent Horn: It’s like Raiders of the Lost Ark. They’re all shriveling up or Last Crusade when he drinks from the wrong cup. The leaves, it’s like, “You chose poorly.” They fall. If we’re like, “Oh, it’s beautiful, a drop back into the ocean,” if that drop were like conscious, it’s like, “No, no, no, not like this. Not like this. Not like this.” It goes in and they’re like, “Ah!”
Cy Kellett: Exactly, but the resurrection gives a sense of the Lord’s love-
Trent Horn: Yes.
Cy Kellett: … for us body and soul as individuals and He doesn’t intend to take our individuality away from us. He intends to perfect it.
Trent Horn: I don’t know if my leaf and water droplet screams are FCC appropriate. I don’t even know if these can go out on airwaves.
Cy Kellett: A lot of this-
Trent Horn: If they let my Lion King out, I’m sure this can go out too.
Cy Kellett: All right. I made a Democrat joke. This has been a horrible hour as far as you and me, but still, the resurrection is beautiful and glorious.
Trent Horn: Even if death tries to cancel us, Cy, we will never be canceled because we believe in Jesus.
Cy Kellett: Right. That’s right. You can’t be permanently canceled because He’ll raise you right back up again.
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