{"id":441,"date":"2011-03-11T08:45:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-11T08:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=441"},"modified":"2011-03-11T08:45:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-11T08:45:00","slug":"giles-frasers-thought-for-the-day-and-the-christian-hope-of-conquering-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=441","title":{"rendered":"Giles Fraser&#8217;s Thought for the Day, and the Christian hope of conquering death"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Giles Fraser gave the Thought for the Day on Ash Wednesday. I have had two people ask me what I thought about it! The transcript is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/religion\/programmes\/thought\/documents\/t20110309.shtml\">here<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>What Fraser actually says &#8211; so far as it goes &#8211; I would actually largely agree with, ie I also don&#8217;t &#8220;subscribe to Platonic ideas about the immortality of the soul. When you die, you die&#8221;, and also, &#8220;When theologians&#8230; speak of entering eternity they mean something altogether different from this: for eternity is outside of time&#8221;. So far so good (nb great weight on &#8216;Platonic ideas&#8217; about immortality, not immortality per se). Where Fraser goes against orthodoxy, so far as I can tell, is that he stops there. What he has missed out is the rather central teaching about resurrection!! Orthodoxy doesn&#8217;t teach a disembodied future, it teaches that there will be a general resurrection, wherein we will each experience in the future what Jesus experienced in the past. If I am right in how I read him, I have to say I have difficulty understanding how he can do what he does. Without some sort of anchoring in this non-symbolic conquering of death I think Christianity loses its point, and becomes just another form of feel-good therapy.<\/p>\n<p>For a good summing up of orthodoxy see Byron&#8217;s recent post <a href=\"http:\/\/nothing-new-under-the-sun.blogspot.com\/2011\/02\/why-im-not-going-to-heaven.html\">here<\/a> and listen to this:<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.churchtimes.co.uk\/content.asp?id=109366\">a little more from Giles Fraser her<\/a>e, which would suggest that he does accept the resurrection! Well that&#8217;s alright then \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Giles Fraser gave the Thought for the Day on Ash Wednesday. I have had two people ask me what I thought about it! The transcript is here. What Fraser actually says &#8211; so far as it goes &#8211; I would &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=441\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[60,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resurrection","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-77","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}