It's possible to reject Christ's bodily resurrection and still jerry-rig a form of Christianity that is cathartic and reassuring without violating our basic human understanding of what is and isn't possible, which is precisely why the bodily resurrection is necessary.
Christ didn't come to affirm your assumptions as you live this human life constrained by the specter of annihilation. He came to submit entropy and death to a crushing, comprehensive defeat. If that offends your comfortable natural philosophy, you only affirm why it matters.
Have you ever thought about what a Christ who is only spiritually/metaphorically resurrected tells us about what God thinks of the physical world we live in? It's horrifying, and directly opposed to almost everything lib Christianity would claim to care about.
Yeah I'm still on this, even several hours later. But a Christ who simply died and went back to heaven, wherever that is, is a Christ who clearly doesn't care about redeeming human bodies and this physical Earth and everything in it.
That Christ could maybe take us to heaven after death, but he has nothing to say about the existence of death itself. He has nothing to say about human frailty except "some day it will be over." Sin and disease and death cannot be defeated, only escaped from.
Death is a human condition, God doesn't HAVE to do anything about it. But not only did he choose to experience death, he visibly, tangibly overcame it precisely because it is OUR ultimate enemy. The metaphorical Christ simply abandons us to it.
To deny the bodily resurrection is to worship death, to place it above God himself. You make death inviolable and bend your conception of god to its will. You believe in a God who either can't defeat the false god of death or simply chose not to. It's incoherent.
When you cross paths with death and your heart says "this is wrong," it's not because you aren't "enlightened" enough to accept it, it's because your God-crafted soul KNOWS that death should not be. You hate it because God hates it, and he chose to physically eviscerate it!
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