Abstract
Orthodox Christianity affirms a bodily resurrection of the dead. That is, Christians believe
that at some point in the eschatological future, possibly after a period of (conscious or
unconscious) disembodied existence, we will once again live and animate our own bodies.
However, our bodies will also undergo radical qualitative transformation. This creates a
serious problem: how can a body persist across both temporal discontinuity and qualitative
transformation? After discussing this problem as it appears in contemporary philosophical
literature on the resurrection, I will argue that George Berkeley's immaterialist metaphysics
is more successful than either physicalism or dualism in escaping objections to resurrection
based on the problem of qualitative transformation. In order to accomplish this, I will first
discuss Berkeley's views on the metaphysics of so-called 'ordinary' objects, including human
bodies, and then apply this view to the resurrection of the dead, ultimately showing that, for
Berkeley, the radical transformation of the body in the resurrection is no more problematic
than the case of a straight oar appearing bent when one end is inserted in water.