Monday, June 18, 2007

matrices!


i used to be a mathematician.
well, i did lots of maths at high school.
7 units in my final two years, to be precise!

and it may be (unless you include counting animals in the ark), that we finally have a use for maths in Theology!

John Polkinghorne, in his chapter in The End of the World and the Ends of God (Trinity Press, 2000) on Eschatology, suggests that an understanding of matrices may help us understand the nature of the resurrection!


the current state of forgiven sinners is that which is portrayed in the first 20 chapters of John's Revelation.

but what then happens when we die? are we bodiless? do we go do the limbo rock?

Polkinghorne postulates:
What [we] would naturally think of as the vector spaces of the old and new creations could be "alongside" each other, with the continuity of resurrection being the result of a structure-preserving mapping from one space into the other. From this point of view, it would be conceivable that all persons arrive at the general resurrection at the same "time," irrespective of the time of their deaths in this world. (p40)


no limbo, no "sleep", no bodiless resurrection, no playing harps in clouds.

but does it hold water?

4 comments:

Mark said...

I'm so not on the same page as this guy ...

psychodougie said...

you just can't cope with my infinite nature!

is it your issue comprehending 2-, or even n- dimensional time?

Mark said...

There's a great exchange in the film "I [heart] Huckabees" that's sums up my feeling (ie. Albert's line):

Vivian Jaffe: Have you ever transcended space and time?

Albert Markovski: Yes. No. Uh, time, not space... No, I don't know what you're talking about.

psychodougie said...

i need to watch that film again.

the perfect follow up to sophie's world