A Comparative Consideration of the Grounds of Tendency to Bodily Resurrection in Islam and Christianity

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Authors

1 MA, Imam Khomeini Education and Research Center, Qom, Iran

2 Assistant professor, Imam Khomeini Education and Research Center, Qom, Iran

Abstract

Some Muslim and Christian intellectuals adopt a monistic position about the human being, and thus, provide a merely bodily portrayal of resurrection. Bodily accounts of resurrection in Islamic and Christian contexts imply that the intellectuals in both religions have gone the same path. Points of similarity and difference between these thinkers are brought out by contexts of monism and bodily accounts of resurrection in Islamic and Christian contexts. In this paper, by a consideration of the work of Muslim and Christian corporealists, we highlight their motivations, concluding that the grounds for the formation of physicalism in Islamic and Christian contexts are dissimilar. Given the abundant textual evidence for bodily resurrection, Muslim intellectuals have taken it for granted, and in order to prove bodily resurrection, they reduced the human nature to the body and the bodily things, while in the Christian realm, because of the development of empirical sciences and a physicalist outlook of phenomena in the world, dualism about the human nature was called into questions. For this reason, Western intellectuals turned to bodily accounts of resurrection to prove the doctrine of resurrection. In the Islamic context, the growth of philosophical thoughts and rational sciences led to the establishment of dualism and rejection of bodily account, whereas in the Christian context, the growth of rational and philosophical schools led to the rejection of dualism and tendency toward materialistic accounts of the human nature, and hence, of resurrection.

Keywords

References

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