Gaude, Maria Virgo, cunctas hæreses sola interemisti in universo mundo!
The Church proclaims the resurrection of the body, and there is no such thing as a "spiritual body". It is impossible to sustain out of Scripture the view according to which newly disembodied souls entered immediately into their final, but incorporeal, bliss or torment.
Serious Protestant theologians do not hold it, although that does leave them with only the original Protestant position that until the General Resurrection, souls were effectively as dead as their bodies. But Catholics cannot hold it, since the Assumption is the standing contradiction of it.
"The original Protestant view that until the General Resurrection, souls were effectively as dead as their bodies"?
ReplyDeleteFor all the talk of oxymoronic "spiritual bodies", the people in the pews would be shocked to learn that many of their most revered leaders have held, and openly if obscurely continue to hold, the original Protestant position that the souls of the dead were unconscious until the General Resurrection, effectively as dead as their bodies.
DeleteThat can at least claim some relationship to Scripture. But the idea of Christianity as baldly "based on the Bible" is purely sixteenth century, and it has been minoritarian and contentious from the day that it was first proposed.