Nota bene

The Christian doctrine is that the bodies and souls of the departed will be reunited at the Resurrection and Body and soul are completely integrated. So resurrection from the dead means nothing unless it is a resurrection of both body and soul. I was a Lutheran preacher's kid and I never heard this growing up - not even once. If this was a core Christian belief across the board, then surely all Christian churches would forbid cremation?

Roman Catholics, Orthodox Catholics, and Anglican Catholics count for alot of Christians, and I think they all have a Creed with "resurrection of the body" included.

"The Christian doctrine is that the bodies and souls of the departed will be reunited at the Resurrection" and "Body and soul are completely integrated. So resurrection from the dead means nothing unless it is a resurrection of both body and soul." "I'm not sure if I heard of this within my Christian upbringing. It, certainly, wasn't emphasized. It does help to explain why some Christians place so more emphasis on the bodily resurrection than others." Watsy and Erik: I think the reason for the lack of awareness of these ideas is the fact that much of modern Christianity has moved away from its historical moorings. I grew up as a Baptist, then a Pentecostal and never heard this either. But these historical understandings of the body, burial, resurrection, etc., are still taught in those churches which have maintained a connection with the Church's patristic roots, i.e., the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and the more traditional Anglicans. The further away one gets, theologically speaking, from the historical foundation, the less one hears about things like this, whereas in the groups mentioned above, such understandings are well nigh universal (apart from liberalizing trends), as they were in the early Church.