Believing in the body
by Martin Davie:
It was revealed last week that the new interim head of the Anglican Centre in Roman, John Shepherd, appears not to believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead.
In an Easter message from 2008 unearthed by the conservative Anglican commentator David Ould, Dr Shepherd, who was then the Dean of Perth Cathedral in Western Australia, declares:
‘The Resurrection of Jesus ought not to be seen in physical terms, but as a new spiritual reality. It is important for Christians to be set free from the idea that the Resurrection was an extraordinary physical event which restored to life Jesus’ original earthly body.’
He goes on to say that:
‘Jesus’ early followers felt His presence after His death as strongly as if it were a physical presence and incorporated this sense of a resurrection experience into their gospel accounts;. But they’re not historical records as we understand them. They are symbolic images of the breaking through of the resurrection spirit into human lives.’
As he sees it, the truth behind the bodily imagery used to describe Jesus in the resurrection accounts in the Gospels is that ‘Jesus lived … as a transformed spiritual reality.’[1]
In response to criticisms of what he said in this message, Dr Shepherd has now stated: ‘It is my faith that Jesus rose from the dead and I have never denied the reality of the empty tomb.’[2]
How is one to square this new statement with what he said in 2008 (and which he has never repudiated)? As far as I can see, the only way to make sense of his position is to say he believes that the tomb was empty because Jesus’ physical body came to be transformed into a new form of existence which was entirely spiritual, and therefore non-corporeal. There was no body in the tomb because the body had ceased to exist.
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