The Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh and the life everlasting…was inexplicable in terms of natural science when Saint Paul enunciated it; and, to nineteenth-century men of science, it was a teaching plainly incredible. Yet, we now know that the nineteenth-century understanding of matter – including the human body – was mistaken. Twentieth-century physicists instruct us that you and I are composed of negative and positive particles of electricity, as is all other matter; that, in short, we are energy, rather than solid substance; and that energy may neither be added to nor destroyed – merely transmuted. What once has been assembled, and then dispersed, may be reassembled once more. Conceivably, these bones may rise again.
From: The Politics of Prudence by Russell Kirk (Wilmington: ISI Books, 1993), p. 204.
Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was editor of University Bookman and the only American to have earned the highest arts degree of Scotland’s senior university – doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He is considered to be one of the builders of the modern (post-World War II) American conservative movement.
