Resurrections

It's odd: this story from Scripps Howard says that most American Christians don't believe that they will be physically resurrected after death, even though this is a central article of faith, at least "officially," for most Christian churches. On the other hand, however, this story from the Washington Post suggests — even citing a three-year-old Scripps Howard poll as evidence! — that American Christians are increasingly embracing a "literal" view of the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus. What I think this suggests — just a hypothesis — is that many people are willing to accept strongly counterintuitive claims when they apply specifically to a divine being (and, I suspect, it makes it easier to accept when the events in question are supposed to have happened once for all, thousands of years in the past), but that when it comes to their own physical carcasses, they are less likely to be able to picture themselves staggering up out of their tombs and thus, intuitively, they reject the doctrine of resurrection in the flesh. Think of the great theological polemicist Tertullian, (late 2nd c.), who wrote in his On the resurrection of the dead (63,1) that "this body will rise again, this very body, this entire body, this whole body" ("Resurget igitur caro, et quidem omnis, et quidem ipsa, et quidem integra"). Boo-ya.