Philoponus writes,
Is there anywhere in the NT where they argue for an afterlife, or is it an assumption shared by all the authors of the NT? Passages?
Before I answer this question, there are a couple of logically prior questions of considerable interest. First, is there any argumentation at all in the NT? Second, does Jesus argue for anything, or does he just make gratuitous (unsupported) assertions? (If he was, and eternally is, God, that would be his prerogative, right?) The answer to both questions is in the affirmative, as you can see from the following quotation from Dallas Willard's essay, Jesus as Logician:
(2). Another illustrative case is found in Luke 20:27-40. Here it is the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, who are challenging Jesus. They are famous for rejecting the resurrection (vs. 27), and accordingly they propose a situation that, they think, is a reductio ad absurdum of resurrection. (vss. 28-33) The law of Moses said that if a married man died without children, the next eldest brother should make the widow his wife, and any children they had would inherit in the line of the older brother. In the 'thought experiment' of the Sadducees, the elder of seven sons died without children from his wife, the next eldest married her and also died without children from her, and the next eldest did the same, and so on though all seven brothers. Then the wife died (Small wonder!). The presumed absurdity in the case was that in the resurrection she would be the wife of all of them, which was assumed to be an impossibility in the nature of marriage.
Jesus' reply is to point out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage and reproduction. They will have bodies like angels do now, bodies of undying stuff. The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any 'resurrection' must involve the body and its life continuing exactly as it does now. So the supposed impossibility of the woman being in conjugal relations with all seven brothers is not required by resurrection.
Then he proceeds, once again, to develop a teaching about the nature of God–which was always his main concern. Taking a premiss that the Sadducees accepted, he draws the conclusion that they did not want. That the dead are raised, he says, follows from God's self-description to Moses at the burning bush. God described himself in that incident as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (Luke 20:35 ) The Sadducees accepted this. But at the time of the burning bush incident, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been long 'dead', as Jesus points out. But God is not the God of the dead. That is, a dead person cannot sustain a relation of devotion and service to God, nor can God keep covenant faith with one who no longer exists. In covenant relationship to God one lives. (vs. 38) One cannot very well imagine the living God communing with a dead body or a non-existent person and keeping covenant faithfulness with them.
(Incidentally, those Christian thinkers who nowadays suggest that the Godly do not exist or are without conscious life, at least, from the time their body dies to the time it is resurrected, might want to provide us with an interpretation of this passage.)
Luke 20: 27-40 shows three things: there is argumentation in the NT; there is argumentation by Jesus in the NT; and to Phil's query, there is argument about the afterlife in the NT, in the form of argument against and for the resurrection of the dead.
It is now my turn to ask questions inasmuch as I am no scholar of the NT, nor do I play one in the blogosphere.
Q1: Did the Sadducees, in rejecting the resurrection of the body, equate that rejection with the rejection of personal immortality tout court? My guess is yes.
Q2. Did any of the rabbis hold to a personal immortality along Platonic lines? My guess is no.
Nescio ergo blogo.
Finally, was it true that Jesus was a logician? Well he certainly was a not a theorist of logic along the lines of Aristotle or Frege. Nor is Dallas Willard claiming that he was. But Willard succeeds in showing that Jesus did argue and make typical logical moves. The difference is that between logica docens and logica utens if I understand that distinction. It is the difference between logical theory and logical practice.
I first discovered Dallas Willard (1935-2013) as an undergraduate fascinated with Edmund Husserl and his quest to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft. Willard was a Husserl man, and a good one. Only much later did I discover that this USC professor was a Christian apologist. May he rest in peace.
Here is my tribute to him.
