Dead Men Stay Dead ... Almost All the Time, Then and Now

Dead Men Stay Dead ... Almost All the Time, Then and Now | Al Kresta | Ignatius Insight

"Jesus' resurrection shattered the after-life expectations of the ancient world," I told a friend last week. He replied that "people back then believed in resurrections—resurrections weren't that incredible." Feeling superiority over past generations is a form of self congratulation that C.S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery." Could my friend really think that Roman executioners didn't really believe that dead men stayed dead? That those crucified bodies on the roadsides were not regularly eaten by dogs, or dumped into a grave to rot, or the bones polished and placed in an ossuary?

Electromagnetism, string theory and stem cells haven't changed our fundamental human confidence in direct sense perception. When we and the ancients notice that a person hasn't been breathing for a few hours and feel his body grow cold, we both know that he's dead, not merely sleeping. Crypts and corpses formed as firm a union in the 1st as in the 21st century.

Why do we patronize the ancients? Wouldn't you think that life without refrigeration, anesthetics, flush toilets, and first class travel would incline a person to adopt a tough-minded approach to life's likely outcomes? Don't deprivation and suffering hedge against holding extravagant expectations of what life ultimately holds for you? The hardships of ancient peasant life, I'm sure, seemed pretty good prima facie evidence to many that life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" in the famed phrase of David Hume. Our first century ancestors were probably less Pollyannaish than we are about the material world's stern refusal to fulfill our fondest desires when and where we want. It's hard to imagine a smiley face bumper sticker urging us to "Expect a miracle today" decorating the rump of a jackass in 70 A.D. Jerusalem. Prayers were not more commonly answered, miracles were not more commonly performed in olden days. Far more than ourselves, the old holies found themselves companions to infant mortality, famine, drought and disease despite their prayers and because of God's economy of miracles. The Psalms and Qoheleth as well as Christ's warnings and the Apostles' betrayals leave no doubt that unbelief about God's control of human history is an equal and chronic temptation for the antique and the modern.

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Comments

[Georges]

"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" is from Hobbes' Leviathan.