Sorry. I digress. Often.

Concerning Lazarus: Now we’re really splitting hairs. Let’s see if I can stop it. My point about decomposition is not the middling degrees of it (or beginning degrees either), but the total and near-total phases of it. But if you want to lump Lazarus in with the people who walked around on the day Christ died, I’ll let you. It doesn’t change the essence of either of our points enough to tip the scales.

Concerning Jesus: You’re missing my point. My point ISN’T that our bodies wouldn’t die if they were “good”. My point is that our flesh is the repository of our sin. It’s the part of us that can’t be joined to God because it is corruptable. The suffix is critical here. Corruptable doesn’t mean corrupt. It means the POTENTIAL to be corrupt. My contention is that every human EXCEPT Jesus has followed through on the potential. That made his first body uncorrupted, though still mortal. He had to die, not only to pay the penalty for our sin, but to shed the mortal body and put on the incorruptable body. (Or, from your point of view, to bury the mortal body and raise it as the incorruptable body.) Paul makes it pretty clear that only those who are alive when the “twinkling of an eye” thing happens (I was very careful not to say “rapture”. Are you proud of me?) will be transformed in an instant. Until then, the only way to “change clothes” so to speak is to die.

Concerning the last concerning: Please pay attention to my qualifiers. I told the story about my cousin for a reason. I said “can be a copout” (not “IS a copout”) and limited it to discussions of logic for a reason. And here is the reason: Debating atheists and deists is very helpful because the good ones who really love you will show you the holes in your argument. I was too often ending arguments with, “God can do whatever he wants” because it was easy. That is, I was being intellectually lazy, and my faith allowed me to get away with it. Since he didn’t share my faith, he called me on it. On issues where we CAN’T know something (like this one), “God can do anything he wants” is indeed the ultimate answer. I brought up the possibility of a copout just to make sure we aren’t trotting out that answer before its time.

And for that matter, God can make a transphysical body out of different stuff that looks just like our original stuff if he wants. So the ultimate point is that the “God can do it” argument works both ways, which effectively takes it off the table for the purposes of debate.

In thinking about this more, I want to push my thoughts a little bit further.

Concerning your statement regarding Lazarus not being dead ‘that long’: It appears from the context that his body started to rot somewhere along the way since he already began to stink by the time Jesus showed up. So, there again, we have a break down of tissues, cells, atoms, whatever. Something is decomposing by that time. His body was changing chemically by then.

Concerning Jesus body: I find it interesting that you use this as an argument. Since your whole point is that our bodies aren’t ‘good’ or they wouldn’t die. As you also point out, Jesus’ body, like the rest of him, was without sin, and yet he died. How can that be if his body was ‘good’?

Lastly, concerning my supposed copout: Whatever. You can call it a copout if you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that God can and does do things that we can’t explain logically. And I’m glad! For if I could explain the way God does things, then there would not be a reason for trust. And, btw, raising the dead, even if it was Jesus, is not something that can be explained logically. The dead do not come back to life. That is what human logic tells us. And yet, we have more than one account of God doing just that.

Peace be with you.

+ OD