Jessica’s Reviews > Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church > Status Update

evolutionary optimism - the belief that things will continue to improve to utopia

"The result is that death, which was always part of the natural transience of the good creation, gains a second dimension, which the Bible sometimes calls 'spiritual death.'"

No: in order to explain historically how all the early Christians came to the belief they held, that Jesus had been raised, we have to say this: that the tomb was empty, except for some grave clothes, and that they really did see and talk with someone who gave every appearance of being a solidly physical Jesus, though a Jesus who was strangely changed, more strangely than they were able fully to describe.

"The cross, we note, already had a symbolic meaning throughout the Roman world, long before it had a new one for Christians."

"In content, resurrection referred specifically to something that happened to the body; hence the later debates about how God would do this- whether he would start with the existing bones or make new ones or whatever."