This book starts off from a philosophical premise: nobody can be in the
world unless they are born into the world. It examines this premise in
the light of the theological belief that birth serves, or ought to
serve, as a model for understanding what resurrection could signify for
us today. After all, the modern Christian needs to find some way of
understanding resurrection, and the dogma of the resurrection of the
body is vacuous unless we can relate it philosophically to our own world
of experience.
Nicodemus first posed the question How can anyone be born after having
grown old?
Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born? This
book reads that problem in the context of contemporary philosophy
(particularly the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty,
and Deleuze). A phenomenology of the body born from below is seen as a
paradigm for a theology of spiritual rebirth,
and for rebirth of the body from on high.
The Resurrection changes everything in Christianity--but it is also our
own bodies that must be transformed in resurrection, as Christ is
transfigured. And the way in which I hope to be resurrected bodily in
God, in the future, depends upon the way in which I live bodily today.