(Debate): Will There be a Future Physical Resurrection of the Dead?

Debate Introduction and Moderator Announcements

All right, welcome to Revealed Apologetics. It is my honor and pleasure to be for the first time hosting a formal debate between Chris Date and Michael Miano over the proposition. There will be a future physical resurrection of the dead.

Chris Date will be affirming, Michael Miano will be denying. I'll go in a little bit more detail with regards to the format, but just a couple of brief announcements and then we'll kind of jump right in.

We want to give the debaters an opportunity to kind of have the time that they need, but just a couple of things. Tomorrow, I will be having Dr. Hugh Ross back on to discuss old earth creationism. I know a lot of people have gotten a lot of positive feedback from the last interaction with Dr. Ross and Dr. Jason Lyle, but I'm actually going to be having him, Dr. Ross back on to talk a little bit more about old earth creationism.

That was kind of the original plan and then Dr. Lyle coming in was just an extra added treat, but Dr. Ross expressed his desire to come back on and maybe hash a couple of questions that I have with regards to that topic.

But stay tuned for that. That's tomorrow at 4 .30 Eastern. Well without further ado, let's jump right into this. Again, just a quick reminder, if you have any questions for the debaters, they will be taking live questions.

And of course if you want to support the channel too, you can send in a super chat and your question will go right up to the top and the debaters will address those questions as they come in.

All right.

Well, without further ado, I want to introduce each debater. They're going to share a little bit about themselves and then I'm going to break out, break down the format of the debate and then we'll, we'll begin.

So let me bring in Chris Day. Here we go. Hey Chris, how's it going?

Good, Eli.

How are you doing?

I'm doing good. So why don't you take a few seconds here and introduce yourself and tell folks a little bit about yourself.

Sure.

I am most known for my work with the ministry Rethinking Hell, where we are conservative evangelicals who have become convinced that the Bible does not teach the traditional view of hell as eternal torment, but instead teaches conditional immortality or annihilationism.

People can find out more at RethinkingHell .com. I was also recently hired as an adjunct professor of Bible and theology at Trinity College of the Bible and Theological Seminary. That's the seminary of which Braxton Hunter is the president and Jonathan Pritchett is the vice president for academics.

They host the Trinity radio show, which I think we're all pretty big fans of. And I could say more, I'll just end though with I've been married for 20 years to my wife and we have four sons and we live in the Pacific Northwest where I work full time as a software engineer, but hope one day to teach Bible and theology at the seminary level full time.

So that was me in a nutshell.

All right.

Very, very good. Thank you so much. And now I would like to introduce Michael Miano. Why don't you take a few moments to tell folks a little bit about yourself, Michael.

All right.

Thank you, Eli. Hi, my name is Michael Miano, pastor at the Blue Point Bible Church. I am director of the Power of Preterism Network, which you can find at powerofpreterism .com and also The Apologist through Miano Gone Wild Apologetics.

I've also published two books, one more of a testimonial, Understanding My Life Into Christ and Then How I Came to Understand Preterism. The book is titled Freaked Out by the New Covenant. And then also I've published a book about demons, angels, hell, et cetera, entitled.

Wicked.

Both of those are available on Amazon .com and I've been a professing folk preterist for the last 10 years and have participated in numerous debates on the topic.

All right.

Thank you so much for that, Michael. I know a lot of people will be watching this and may already know a little bit about the debaters here. Again, Revealed Apologetics is hosting. That does not mean I necessarily agree with everything with regards to some of the other theological convictions that the debaters hold, but we are hosting this and I think it's a great opportunity to talk about a very important topic.

So I just thought it might be useful to throw that out. Well, without further ado, I'm going to break down the format here. We're going to have 20 minute opening statements by each side, an eight minute rebuttal by each side and a 30 minute each cross examination.

Okay.

The questioner controls the time. This is going to be a whole half hour of one person questioning the other. So that gives a nice big chunk of time. No running or skirting issues, you know, to answer questions as directly as you can.

If I feel that someone is kind of skipping around the issues, I may jump in and say, you know, let's stay focused. So that should be fun. Two 30 minute cross examinations and then an eight minute closing statement by each side.

And of course, towards the back end, we'll be having a question and answers, which will be somewhere around 10 to 20 minutes. We'll see how that goes.

All right.

Well, without further ado, I want to repeat the proposal for tonight's debate. There will be a future physical resurrection of the dead. Once again, Chris Date will be affirming, Michael Miano will be denying.

So first up is Chris Date, and I will kind of remove Michael from the screen. We'll put you back on later on. Okay. And let's okay. So I'm going to put my timer, get my timer ready, and then I'll let you know when you can start.

Once I click, I will disappear. I will magically disappear and you'll have you'll have the floor.

All right. Ready?

And start whenever you're ready.

Chris Date’s Affirmative Case for a Future Bodily Resurrection

All right.

I'd like to very quickly thank my opponent, Michael Miano, for agreeing to participate in this debate, as well as Anthony Uvenio for arranging it and to Eli Ayala for hosting and moderating. I'd say more words of thanks, but I've got a lot of material to cover.

So I'm going to go ahead and dive right in. Before I present my case, though, let me begin by explaining why I use the terminology I do to refer to my opponents and my views and why this debate is so important.

I am what historically has been called simply a preterist. According to historic preterism, several end times prophecies were fulfilled in and around 70 AD when the Roman army sacked the Jerusalem temple.

And this includes things like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the number of the beast and so forth. But some end times prophecies have yet to be fulfilled in our future, including most especially the second advent of Christ and the general resurrection of the dead.

Now this view definitely isn't futurism, and it's not any sort of partial preterism. You see, preterism and futurism have historically been competing theories of apocalyptic interpretation, among others, and all of them have affirmed that some end times prophecies will be fulfilled in our future.

Thus, in the mid -1800s, William Sinnington could say the preterist theory applies all but one or two chapters at the end of Revelation to events long ago past. That's simply my view, preterism, full stop.

By contrast, my opponent's view I call hyper-preterism, and according to his view, all end times prophecies were fulfilled in and around 70 AD, and indeed all biblical prophecies whatsoever have been fulfilled in our past.

Now why should we call my opponent's view hyper-preterism? Because as fellow preterist Kenneth Gentry explains, preterists like me gladly accept the basic doctrines of universal Christian theology, but hyper-preterists do not.

Hyper-preterism is to preterism what hyper-Calvinism is to Calvinism. It's a theological error created by pressing legitimate concerns too far. In fact, hyper-preterism contains many serious theological errors, but perhaps most important is its denial of the physical resurrection of the dead, because the physical resurrection of the dead has been definitional of historic Christianity.

In the second century, Irenaeus' popular rule of faith said, I believe in the—or sorry, the church has received the faith in the beloved Christ Jesus and his appearing to raise up all flesh of all mankind.

In that same century, the precursor to the Apostles' Creed had Christians confess, I believe in the resurrection of the flesh. The early church deemed the denial of physical resurrection to be heresy, and thus Tertullian wrote it would be better for the heretic to acknowledge the resurrection of the flesh.

He will not be a Christian who shall deny this doctrine. In fact, scripture itself condemns hyper-preterism as heresy. In 2 Timothy 2, Paul writes to Timothy of Hymenaeus and Philatis, whose teaching was spreading like gangrene, who he says departed from the truth and who were ruining the faith of some because they were saying the resurrection has already taken place, just as my opponent.

Does.

The word gangrene, by the way, in the Greek refers to a terrible, nasty disease that can include a cancerous spread of ulcers that eats away the flesh and bones. This is a very, very serious issue. But it's not only in tonight's topic, the general resurrection, that hyper-preterists deny core Christian doctrines.

They also maintain a Gnostic-like view of human nature, in which bodies are essentially superfluous, a Gnostic-like denial that Christ still has a physical body, and a Gnostic-like dualism in which the physical world will forever be full of evil, pain, disease, and death.

So this issue we're debating tonight is of utmost concern, and my opponent's view must not be accepted unless there's tremendous, insurmountable biblical proof for it. And as I think we'll see tonight, there's just not.

Now let me begin making my case for a future physical resurrection of the dead, beginning with the interrelated topics of life and redemption. I'll begin by demonstrating that to be a living human being is to be physically embodied and breathing the life-giving breath of God.

You see, in Genesis 2 -7, God creates a man from dust and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, at which point he becomes a living creature. The phrase is nefesh chayah, which is the phrase used also in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis to refer to swimming creatures, land animals, and even birds.

And what makes humans, swimming creatures, land animals, and birds living creatures, or nefesh chayah, is that they all breathe the breath of life. And that's why in the flood narrative in Genesis 6 -7, the flood is said to kill all creatures that breathe the breath of life.

According to Job 34 and Psalm 104, this happens when God takes back his life-giving breath, causing those who breathe it to die. But Ezekiel 37 and Revelation 11 include pictures of God giving back the breath of life to formerly dead human beings in resurrection, causing those people to come back to life.

Thus, salvation, as we've seen, sorry, to be a living human being is to be physically embodied and breathing the life-giving breath of God. Next, consider the language of the New Testament that talks about salvation as guaranteeing eternal life.

Salvation, you see, guarantees believers will overcome death and live embodied forever. The most famous verse in the Bible, John 3 -16, says, God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

The Greek word here, apollumi, used in the middle voice as it is here, means to physically.

Die.

So whoever believes in God won't ultimately physically die, but will instead live forever. Indeed, in the immediately two preceding verses, Jesus compares himself to the bronze statue of a serpent that Moses held up in the wilderness, to which people who had been bitten by otherwise venomous snakes would have their lives saved if they just looked at that staff.

You see, believing in Jesus is literally a life or death proposition. This theme of salvation resulting in embodied life forever spans the Bible from cover to cover literally. Thus, in Genesis 3, God kicks Adam and Eve out of the garden so they cannot eat from the tree of life and thereby live forever.

But that tree of life reappears at the other end of Scripture in Revelation 22, where only the saved have access to its fruit, symbolizing that the saved will live forever. We see this predicted in such texts as Isaiah 25, 7, and 8, in which Yahweh promises to swallow up the veil that has spread over all nations.

That is, he will swallow up death forever. The phrase all nations, kol hagoyim, literally means all Gentiles, and the word translated death and its cognates are used all throughout Isaiah to refer to physical death, which here Yahweh promises to swallow up one day.

That's the only kind of death that covers all the goyim, all the Gentiles. One Greek Santuaget translation of this text reads, death has been swallowed up in victory. And Paul connects this by quoting it to the topic of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 54.

Earlier in that chapter, Paul makes clear that death being swallowed up forever means that the last enemy to be destroyed will be death. The word translated destroyed here means to cause to cease to happen.

And throughout 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the word translated death and its cognates to refer to ordinary physical death, like that of Christ. So physical death will cease to happen after the resurrection.

The text in Isaiah further says God will wipe away tears from all faces, which John quotes in Revelation 21, 4, right after the passage on the resurrection. And he adds, death shall be no more. Again, the word death and its cognates are used all throughout Revelation to refer to ordinary physical death.

And John here says it won't exist anymore. In fact, it's God speaking from the throne here in Revelation 21, 4. Paul says in Romans 6, 23, that the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.

And leading up to Romans 6, 23, Paul had been using the word death to refer to the physical death of Jesus. And immediately after Romans 6, 23, just two verses later, he uses life and the verbal cognate of death to refer to the ordinary physical death of a husband that frees his wife to remarry.

So the free gift of Jesus is rescue from physical death onto everlasting physical life. And that's why Jesus says in John 6, that whereas the Israelites had eaten manna in the wilderness and died, those who follow him, that is those who eat from the true bread of life, the bread from heaven, will live forever.

And so we can see that salvation guarantees believers will overcome death and live embodied.

Forever.

Now, excuse me. Now, let me turn to the interrelated topics of Christ and resurrection. The third plank in my case is that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead physically, and those united to him will rise as he did.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, 4, that Christ was raised on the third day. This word translated raised, agedo, is used all throughout the New Testament to refer to the third day resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Paul goes on to say in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 20, that Christ has been raised as the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. The word first fruits here means the first of a set, the first of a larger set of like.

Objects.

Paul also says in Acts 26, 23, that Christ was the first to rise from the dead in this.

Way.

And he says in Romans 6, 5, and 9, that we will be united with Christ in a resurrection like his. He, that is, who will never die again. Now, critically, and this is important, Jesus rose on the third day physically.

In Matthew 28, women encounter the risen Christ and take hold of his feet with their likewise physical hands. That's what the word krateo means, to literally grasp or take hold of an object. In John 20, Jesus tells Doubting Thomas, famously, put your finger here, place your hand in my.

Side.

So, Jesus had a tangible, physical resurrection body. Luke 24 is particularly explicit. The disciples encounter the risen Christ and are frightened, thinking that he's a spirit, either a ghost or an angelic being.

And he says, touch me, a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones as you see that I have. So, while ghosts and angelic beings are immaterial entities, Jesus' resurrection body was very physical. And so, we've seen that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead physically, and those united to him will rise as he did.

Forth and next, I'll demonstrate that resurrection is just the rising again of the physical body. There is no other meaning to resurrection. My opponent and other hyperpreterists insist that early Greek church fathers mistakenly read physical resurrection into biblical text written from a Hebraic mindset that didn't include belief in physical resurrection.

But hyperpreterists had this exactly backwards. In Acts 17, at the Areopagus, or Hill of Aries, Paul says God gave assurance by raising Christ from the dead. And when people heard of this resurrection, some of them mocked.

Now, why did some of the Greek philosophers at the Areopagus mock when Paul spoke of resurrection, which is language simply meaning to stand up again, which implies a physical body? Because in the poem Eumenides, from a few hundred years earlier, Aeschylus depicts the god Apollo at the inauguration of the Hill of Aries, or Areopagus, saying there is no return to life when the dust has drawn up the blood of man once he is dead.

And the word return to life here is that same Greek word anastasis, a resurrection. It's not only Eumenides. Aeschylus delivers the same message in his play Agamemnon. Homer delivers the same message in the Iliad.

And Sophocles delivers the same message in Electra. In these and other Greek poets and philosophers and writers, it's clear that the idea of physical resurrection from the dead was inadmissible. It was inconceivable.

It was absurd. They had no problem with the idea of resurrection as a metaphor for restoration of fellowship, but they thought it was absolutely absurd to think that a dead man might come back to physical life.

Meanwhile, the Jewish people had full confidence that the dead could come back to life because as Hebrews 11, 1 says, the Jews had scripture recording God doing just that. Thus, in 1 Kings 17 and in 2 Kings 4, mothers have their formerly dead children returned back to them physically alive, which is what the author of Hebrews 11 calls anastasis, a resurrection.

The author goes on to say in Hebrews that there are Jewish people who were so confident that God can and will resurrect people back to physical life that they were willing to be killed by torture so as to gain a better resurrection.

There's that word anastasis again. And as an example, 2 Maccabees 7 records this series of Jewish brothers who one by one submit to death by torture because they trust that God will one day give them back their life, that is their zoe, and their breath, and even their tongues and hands.

But it's not just 2 Maccabees. It's also 1 Enoch 51 saying that Sheol and the earth will one day give birth to the dead that had one day gone into them. It's also the Greek version of the life of Adam and Eve, otherwise mistakenly known as the apocalypse of Moses, says all flesh from Adam will one day rise in the resurrection.

And it's also all throughout the Babylonian Talmud compiled by Jewish scholars a couple of centuries after Christ, but recording oral traditions that had stretched out for centuries earlier, as well as the Jerusalem Talmud.

Everywhere that Jewish authors wrote of resurrection, they meant bodily, physical resurrection, coming up out of the ground alive again. They believed, some of them did indeed deny that there would be resurrection, and they believed in a sort of disembodied bliss forever, but that wasn't resurrection in their mind.

They unanimously understood resurrection to be the coming back of a dead body to physical.

Life.

So, in the first century Jewish mind, resurrection just is the rising again of the physical body. Fifth and finally, scripture says believers will rise bodily and immortal. You see, the Jewish scholars who compiled the Talmud presented the question, how do we know that there will be a bodily resurrection?

And they answered from the law, the prophets, and the writings. Here, law is Torah. And one example of text from the prophets they thought taught bodily resurrection was this text, which is from Isaiah 26, 19, and 21, which says, your dead shall live, their bodies shall rise, the earth will no more cover its slain.

The Talmud also offers proof from the category of the writings, including Daniel 12 .2, which says those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to another fate.

Both of these texts appear in the Greek Septuagint with the New Testament language of resurrection, the verbs anistimia negato, and the Book of Daniel includes the same phrase eternal life, zoein ionion, used throughout the New Testament for the reward of believing in Jesus.

So when Paul is on trial in Acts chapter 24, when he says he believes everything laid down by the law and prophets, that there will be a resurrection of the dead, we know what sorts of texts he probably had in mind, the same texts his contemporary Jews did.

And besides all throughout the Book of Acts leading up to Acts 24, the language of resurrection Paul uses here is used of the physical third day resurrection of Christ. But here's the thing, the physical resurrection of the dead isn't merely physical.

You see, back in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is using the language of resurrection repeatedly to refer back and forth between Christ's third day physical resurrection and the future resurrection of believers.

And in verse 35, he asks, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? Now he begins to answer with an agricultural analogy. Just as one plants a seed into the ground and it seems to come back up out of the ground more glorious than when it went in, so will God give the resurrected saints a more glorious.

Body.

Now, interestingly, Paul didn't come up with this analogy on its own. It's the same analogy offered in a couple of places in the Babylonian Talmud as well. Anyway, Paul goes on to say that in resurrection, the thing that is sown, that which is sown, is sown one way and raised another.

In a series of contrasting clauses that ends with, it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. And because Paul goes on to say that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, hyper-preterists and some liberals think Paul's contrast between natural and spiritual means physical and non-physical or material and immaterial.

But that's a misunderstanding of Paul's language here. Paul had earlier offered the same contrast between natural and spiritual earlier in chapter two, where he contrasts two equally physical entities, living unbelievers in the here and now who are natural and living believers in the here and now who are spiritual.

And the phrase flesh and blood is a Jewish idiom used in the New Testament and elsewhere referring simply to mortal humanity. Thus, Ben Sirach could say in Sirach 14, that like vegetation, some of which falls and some grows, so is the generation of flesh and blood.

One comes to an end, another is born. So spiritual has nothing to do with being immaterial or not made of flesh and blood. It has to do with being immortal. Meanwhile, Paul is explicit. That which is sown is the same grammatical subject that is sown and is raised throughout his contrasting clauses.

The physical body that is sown is perishable, but that physical body is raised imperishable. The physical body is sown, a natural body, but that physical body is raised, a spiritual.

Body.

So the spiritual body simply must be the physical body that went into the ground, albeit transformed upon coming up out of it. And this is why Paul's flesh and blood language is in a Hebraic parallel.

Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, he says, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. The two ideas are basically synonymous and line up with what Paul goes on to say. This mortal must put on immortality.

It's all about the presently mortal physical body one day rising immortal. And that's why Jesus says in Luke 20, in response to the Sadducees question about resurrection, those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and the resurrection or anastasis from the dead cannot even die anymore because they are like angels and are sons of God.

So we've seen that believers will rise bodily and immortal. Now, let me sum up my case and conclude by repeating those five planks of my case that I substantiated with the various texts that I cited. Firstly, to be a living human being is to be physically embodied and breathing the life-giving.

Breath of God.

Secondly, salvation guarantees believers will overcome physical death and live embodied.

Forever.

Third, Jesus Christ was raised from the dead physically and those united to him will rise as he did. Fourth, resurrection in the first century Jewish mind just is the rising again of the physical body.

And fifthly and finally, believers will rise bodily and immortal. Now because I've got another 45 seconds approximately, I just want to repeat what I said at the beginning for people that are watching and are going to be considering the case that my debate opponent is going to be offering.

Back here in my treatment of the early church fathers, remember the earliest Christian creeds and confessions confessed belief in the resurrection of the flesh, the Greek is sarx, the Latin is caro. The denial of the physical resurrection of the flesh was deemed heresy and scripture itself says that if the resurrection wasn't in the past but you say it is, you're spreading gangrene that is ruining people's faiths.

And if you accept my opponent's view, you will end up with these Gnostic-like views of human nature, that Christ doesn't have a physical body anymore, and that the world is like dualism in which the physical world will forever be full of evil, pain, disease.

And death.

This is a very serious issue, so please take it seriously. Thank you.

All right, thank you so much for that. I think I might have removed, whoops, I think I accidentally kicked Chris out, but that's okay since it's Michael's turn to give his opening statement and hopefully Chris can reconnect there.

I don't know what happened there. There we go. Good. He's alive.

All right.

Michael, if you have that slide, you want to share it and then I will disappear and I will put your slide up there and you can do whatever you need to do in your opening statement there.

Okay?

Great. One moment. Just going to throw it up on the screen.

Sure.

Just let me know.

All right.

It should be there.

Okay. So it's here and I'm going to start your clock right now.

Go.

Michael Miano’s Negative Case: Covenant Death, Time Texts, and Israel’s Hope

All right.

Thank you.

First and foremost, I'd like to thank Chris for his willingness to participate in this debate and of course thank him for his work with RethinkingHell .com, much of which I have benefited from. Also thank you to those who have worked together to make this debate happen, especially Eli from Revealed Apologetics as well as Anthony from New York Apologetics.

Tonight I am in the negative, which means the bulk of my presentation will be me highlighting the problems with a yet future physical resurrection of the dead. However, I do believe I will be able to mark out and give further insight into what the proper biblical understanding of the resurrection of the dead is.

I hope that everyone involved, us presenters, those of you who are watching tonight at home with pen and paper in hand, taking note of things that you'll be marking out to study to show yourself approved, will be humble, intellectually honest, and will follow through with the searching of the scriptures as the noble Bereans did in Acts 17, verse 11, to see what was true.

Also may our time together provoke each of us to heed the apostle Paul's instruction to study to show ourselves approved, rightly dividing the word of truth, 2 Timothy 2 .15, and examining everything carefully, 1 Thessalonians 5 .21.

Chris is affirming that at some later date in our history, as we are almost 2 ,000 years removed from the original audience that Christ had spoke to, there will be a time when Jesus Christ will appear in physical but spiritual form, whatever that might mean, and all those who have died will rise in the body that they died in to be judged by God, whatever what many refer to as the great white throne judgment.

Chris also believes that when this happens, this will usher in a time without sin, without death, without sickness, et cetera, and all will be given their eternal estate, heaven or hell, irregardless to what you might believe about both those realities.

An obvious thought and question that comes to mind is, if the resurrection and the judgment is in our future, what happens to people when they biologically die now? I encourage you to pay special attention to how Chris responds to that tonight, and honestly ask yourself, is that what you believe?

How and why do you believe that? Or how and why do you believe whatever it is that you believe happens to people when they die now, they biologically die now, and what will happen in the future? Where did you get these views from?

I will readily admit from the outset of this debate that to the average Christian who gathers with any local church today, the view that Christ has already come and all those of us who study and teach theology refer to as eschatology, that those details are in the past, which includes the millennial reign, the resurrection, and the judgment, that sounds strange.

I will encourage you to be honest with yourself as you listen tonight, and as we go through these details, I hope we can all readily admit that just because something is new to our ears does not make it wrong.

Modern biblical scholars, teachers, pastors, or anyone doing diligent study of the Bible and having conversations with others will readily point out that the church is sick, direly affected by historical and biblical illiteracy.

It's a sad reality that many Christians simply continue in their presuppositions, what they believe about certain things before they've done the necessary study, assuming that is what everyone else believes.

Or worse yet, many Christians simply don't believe understanding historical details or how the ancients of let's say 6 ,000 or even 2 ,000 years ago viewed the details that we are reading to be all that important.

The good news about that is that not only is the necessity of understanding historical perspectives and history in general is something that Chris and I would agree upon, it's also further good news that the tide is changing in contemporary Christian circles.

Visit your local Christian bookstore and you will see a host of new materials highlighting the importance of learning what these details meant to the original audiences. Sondra Van, a major Christian publisher, recently put out the First Century Study Bible.

They also published the Cultural Background Study Bible. And N .T. Wright, a widely recognized scholar and theologian, recently published a book titled The New Testament in Its Own World. N .T. Wright even goes on to highlight the need for, and quote, the recovery of the Jewish basis of the gospel, which he continues to note that, quote, we are so fortunate in this generation that we understand more about first century Judaism than Christian scholarship has for a long time.

And when you do that, you realize just how much was forgotten quite soon in the early church, certainly in the first three or four centuries, end quote. Couple that with the following insight by Richard B. Hayes, another of one of the world's leading New Testament scholars, who said, quote, the Christian tradition early on lost its connection with the Jewish interpretational matrix in which Paul lived and moved.

Consequently, later Christian interpreters missed some of Paul's most basic concerns, end quote. By the way, these men are not full preterists, yet they clearly see the need for the recovery of the Jewish basis of the gospel, which means they also believe that it had been lost early on within the first three or four centuries of the church history.

That being so, as I already said, we need to be intellectually honest with our handling of these details, not leaning on our own presuppositions or the presuppositions of anyone else, be they church fathers or anyone even in contemporary scholarship.

I have to belabor this point about us not necessarily trusting in what we think about this topic, because oftentimes in these debates, those who hold to the popular common view will depend upon those presuppositions.

In a recent debate I had on this very topic, the man I was debating tried to mock my view by saying that everyone he asked, pastors, average church members, even people on the street, agreed that the resurrection of the dead is a time when all the dead will raise out of the graves.

That should trouble us, being that, as I just noted, a larger majority of Christianity is historically and biblically illiterate. The Apostle Paul tells us these things are to be spiritually understood in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, so it should trouble us that pop culture, even the average unbeliever, can conjure up a perspective of this yet future resurrection of the dead.

There really is so much to be said about this topic, so much reframing, reorienting and redefining that is necessary when it comes to studying the end times, especially this topic, the resurrection of the dead.

Debates between the variety of views have been had in abundance, especially over the last few years. So much has already been said in those debates. Therefore, my goal this evening is to clearly mark out a few of the issues which I believe will make my case and encourage us to further study.

May we lament, like the Apostle Paul did about his generation, that many have a zeal for God, but that zeal is not based upon knowledge. You can go ahead and read that in Romans chapter 10. I want to mark out five points tonight that are problematic with this future physical resurrection of the dead view.

Number one, of first importance is the very source of this topic. In Acts chapters 24 and 26, the Apostle Paul is on trial and is offering a defense of the gospel. He repeatedly says in his preaching of the resurrection of the dead that his source is the law and the prophets, in other words, the Old Testament.