Hope for Tom
Tom Fieldhouse died last Friday. I first met Tom in 1982, almost 43 years ago. He was a pre-teen in Maplewood Friends Church when I arrived there as a young pastor. After high school, Tom attended George Fox, but as a computer science student he never took any of my philosophy courses. Later, as a young adult, Tom and his wife Jaymi visited Karen and me for supper in our house in Newberg.
Later still (much later) I discovered that Tom and Jaymi lived on 7th street in Dundee, not far from the house Sarah and I purchased when we married in 2018. Last fall, Tom brought a piece of mis-delivered mail to our house; apparently, mail delivery mistook one house number for the other. Tom guessed that the “Philip Smith” in the address might be his friend from decades before and ventured to our door to confirm the guess.
The death was expected. I followed the progression of Tom’s cancer by reading Jaymi’s posts on Facebook. I last visited their house on Sunday, five days before Tom died and only two days after Jaymi reported that Tom had been put on hospice care.
I had no close, intimate talk with Tom. He was very frail, confined to his bed. I can’t describe his mental or spiritual state in his last days. I have no report from his own mouth about his faith. Nevertheless, Tom’s death has provoked me to think again about hope. I wrote a book on this topic, Understanding Hope, published three years ago, and my computer hosts dozens of entries in its “Hope Essays” file. I’ve thought often about hope in recent years. And with the death of my friend and neighbor, I’m thinking about it again.
Christian hope focuses on resurrection. In our science fiction, we can imagine technologies that replicate human bodies down to the last detail: variants on the Star Trek transporter beam. If God exists, what is possible in science fiction is possible for God. Since resurrection is possible, and since it is desired, resurrection may be the object of hope. Some philosophers warn against hoping for unlikely things, but others have pointed out that even unlikely hopes can contribute to the good life for human beings. But I’m not interested in exploring that debate now.
Philosophers often tell the following story.
Suppose resurrection involved something like the transporter room fiction, not that the actual molecules of a body were transported from ship to planet, but that a transporter machine “scanned” a person’s body down to the atomic level and transmitted that information to the receiving machine at the other location. The receiving station then reconstituted the body from organic compounds and free molecules. The person who walked into the sending machine would be destroyed, but an exact copy of the person would be produced by the receiving machine. We assume the reconstituted person would have all the physical and psychological traits of the earlier person, including memories, desires, and intentions.
Is this science fiction “resurrection” a good analogue to the resurrection for which Christians hope? Christian philosophers disagree among themselves. Some are physicalists, who say the physical body just is the person; Christian physicalists remind us that the New Testament hope is for resurrection, not “soul” survival. For the physicalists, the transporter “resurrection” is a good analogue for gospel resurrection. Other Christian thinkers are substance dualists, who say a person is a combination of a physical body and an immaterial soul. Christian dualists agree that the New Testament teaches a resurrection of the body, but the real person is the soul, not the body that houses it. On the dualist’s view, the person who walks into the transporter machine dies, and the duplicate who appears in the receiving machine is another person entirely. Without the soul, the new person is someone else.
I lean toward the physicalist side, but I’m not sure. The literature is full of interesting arguments, pro and con. More importantly: What do I want for Tom? What should I hope for?
I hope that God will resurrect Tom. But I believe God heals sick people, not always but sometimes and in some cases, he uses doctors. Could God use scientists to resurrect people? Suppose some future scientist uses “Jurassic Park” technology to create an Abraham Lincoln clone. That’s not a perfect analogue, of course, since the clone would have Lincoln’s DNA without his psychological history. The clone would not be a resurrected Lincoln, only a Lincoln copy. Without time travel, scientists couldn’t access or replicate the real Lincoln.
Now, I hope that Tom will be resurrected, but I also hope that he would be changed. (See 1 Corinthians 15:51.) I want the resurrected Tom to be identifiably and genuinely Tom, but I don’t want him to be exactly as he was at any point in his life, certainly not as he was in his final hours, a cancer-ridden wraith. I hope that Tom will be better and complete; certainly, I want similar things for myself.
No scientist is wise enough to make the changes in Tom that gospel hope promises. So the science fiction analogues fail. Even the transporter story, which might yield an exact replica of a person at the moment of transport, does not promise spiritual change.
Perhaps most important, I hope that the resurrected Tom will experience the love and welcome and justice of God. Tom will not be infinitely wise or good, but he will rejoice to “travel” deeper and deeper into infinite wisdom and love.
