This chapter examines Sunday’s meditation, which encompasses fourteen scenes depicting encounters between the resurrected Christ and his followers, including episodes not recorded in the Gospels. The unmediated encounter with the risen Christ can be understood, following Bernard of Clairvaux, as the reward granted to the fervent soul who has diligently engaged the Meditations on the Life of Christ throughout the week. The images of Christ’s Ascension guide the reader-viewer in her transition from earthly to spiritual vision.

Going beyond the philosophical horizon of the foregoing, the Epilogue attends to two defining absences at work in the Gospel of Mark, regularly regarded as the first of its genre: first, the centurion sees Jesus die and, on the basis of this death, avows that Jesus is God’s son, yet seemingly without empirical support; second, the best manuscripts end the text without narrating any resurrection appearances, a scandal to early readers and to some contemporary commentators. The theological development of aletheism argues that these two absences are Mark’s way of capturing the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.”

Dante encounters a convention of famous minds moving circularly in unison, like the sun, an image of perfect intelligibility. He focuses on Aquinas’s synthesis of faith and reason, which purports to resolve those perplexities that vex previous Heavens. Dante’s doubts disrupt the harmony; he wonders how it’s possible to err, to “wander” from “the straight way,” as he had done. “Thomas of Aquino” addresses Dante’s wonder.

Dante’s verdict on Aquinas’s synthesis turns on the difference between the “Angelic Doctor” and Solomon. Their relative rank reflects the capacity of prudence and poetry versus law and deduction from abstract principle to understand and guide humanity. These alternative views of wisdom rest, in turn, on the question of happiness or the true good, the prior, shared concern that both faith and reason address. Aquinas’s thought answers to a particular view of good, one that makes this Heaven’s inhabitants exult on hearing that their “desire for their dead bodies” will be fulfilled.Dante thus brings readers to ask if the intrinsically individual good of resurrection can be the supreme good for a being that can ask the question of happiness, a being that can “wander.”

Explores various Jewish conceptions of an afterlife: immortality of the soul; resurrection; reincarnation; and the legacy concept—that immortality consists in one’s impact on the future. Working through a wide range of reasons for and against each position, the chapter notes the variety that exists in the kinds of reasons advanced. It then discusses whether an afterlife has value and why there is death.

This chapter examines how the death of Jesus of Nazareth, as portrayed in the canonical Gospels – especially Luke – became a foundational narrative in Christian memory and western thought. It explores the final phase of Jesus’ life, from his prophetic warnings of suffering to his betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection. Emphasis is placed on Jesus’ articulation of martyrdom as “testimony” (martyrion), framing suffering and persecution as meaningful within a divine plan. The narrative also analyzes the Last Supper and Jesus’ transformation of a shared meal into a redemptive ritual – the Eucharist. Luke’s account of Jesus’s passion reveals both the brutality of Roman execution and the crowd’s hostility, while also portraying Jesus as forgiving and self-possessed. The chapter traces how Jesus’s resurrection not only fulfilled scriptural prophecy but also redefined expectations about divinity, justice, and life after death. Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances are interpreted as both literal and symbolic events that conferred authority on his disciples. The chapter concludes by considering the enduring legacy of this narrative and how it became a template for Christian theology, moral reflection, and cultural memory across centuries.

Chapter 1 introduces the instrument doctrine in Aquinas’s thought and explores its foundations in Scripture, focusing on Aquinas’s biblical commentaries. In his commentaries on Romans and 1 Corinthians, among others, Aquinas argues that the logic of scriptural teaching suggests that Christs’ humanity causes divine effects as instrument of the divinity, including our resurrection. The chapter shows how Aquinas interpreted the Scriptures as coherent with the Catholic tradition, especially the conciliar teaching on Christ in the early ecumenical councils. Aquinas thinks that the doctrine should be understood within the conceptual matrix of these early councils’ teaching on Christ.

Over the time of his ministry, Augustine came more strongly to see that only in heaven will we find the fullness of peace. This chapter reviews Augustine’s preaching on heaven and its peace first in its ecclesial and liturgical settings. It then takes into consideration objections faced by his people to Christian faith in the resurrection of the dead. Then it reviews the face-to-face vision of God and the communal dimensions of the heavenly Jerusalem where angels and saints experience peace together. The chapter focuses on Augustine’s preaching on the words “amen” and “alleluia” that express our whole activity in heaven’s peace.

This chapter draws together the whole argument of the book to face the defining question that it must answer, and through that answer to unfurl the full significance of incarnational theology. The question is, what happens when God’s purpose to be with us now and forever meets with a refusal? Addressing the question of humankind’s alienation from God, itself and the wider creation is not, from the point of view of incarnational theology, the central dynamic of Christianity, as it is in conventional accounts. But the utter with-ness of Jesus inevitably encounters the profound, widespread and powerful resistance to God’s embrace: and the truth of God is thereby revealed like never before. Jesus does not ‘come to die’: yet in his death and resurrection he exposes the forces that oppose him and displays the dynamic that sent him and settles the only questions about existence and essence that ultimately matter.

Hamlet is thrown into a state of uncertainty about the eternal. Indeed, his famed “delay” is a response to the thought of eternity. He is given “pause” by imagining “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”. The eternal is the “rub”. The chapter tackles this obscure rub by turning to Soren Kierkegaard, who references Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in his Philosophical Fragments. Resurrection, for Kierkegaard, is a movement through non-being to being. Negativity here plays a critical role. To be “born again”, the learner must “become[] nothing and yet … not [be] annihilated”. Hamlet’s struggle with the eternal opens him to an expansive view of humanity that goes beyond Claudius’s will to power or Laertes’s customary honour. It brings him to a new political vision, outside the violent and reductive dynastic politics of Denmark. Hamlet seeks what would seem impossible within revenge tragedy: the incalculable. The “eternal” is here used in an inclusive sense to show how the obscure but liberating thought of the timeless or untimely allows ideas of justice, charity, equality, and forgiveness to enter the play. The eternal suggests an imaginary perspective that negates our current preoccupations and political economies.

The resurrection of Jesus, pivotal to Christian history and praxis, is universally attested in early Christian sources, even if often critiqued or sidelined as myth or apologetics in modern scholarship. Paul’s letters and of the Gospels in their narrative diversity document the resurrection’s transformative and abiding impact on Jesus’s followers. In bringing the aspirations of myth and metaphor to fruition in time, the resurrection of Jesus is both an event in history and yet constitutes a new reality that transcends the register of available language and analogy.