This chapter examines whether agnosticism with respect to personal ontology should lead us toward agnosticism with respect to the possibility of life after death. Two afterlife scenarios are considered: resurrection and reincarnation. It is argued that all the major accounts of personal ontology are compatible with both resurrection and reincarnation, except for the non-self thesis, which is incompatible with resurrection. Various arguments for the conclusion that resurrection or reincarnation are impossible are considered and rejected. But it is argued that reincarnation faces a difficulty: the standard evidence cited for reincarnation, namely the presence of mental states apparently from a previous life, would, even if corroborated, not show that one is identical with someone from a previous life. What’s more, it would not provide any evidence for substance dualism.

Focusing on Romans 11, this chapter argues that Paul here concludes his larger argument by making the case that gentile incorporation does not suggest that God has abandoned his people Israel but rather is the very means by which God is saving not only one subset of Israel (that is, the Jews) but all Israel (Judah and Israel), with transformed gentiles effectively becoming resurrected Israelites. In the process, the chapter addresses Paul’s arguments about the remnant and the olive tree and observes that Paul concludes his argument by highlighting God’s removal of “impiety” from “Jacob,” tying this passage to the very beginning of the argument in Romans 1.

This chapter works through Romans 10 and Galatians 3:10–14 in conversation with other early Jewish evidence, arguing that Paul is participating in a long-standing Jewish debate about the relationship between repentance and Israel’s redemption. Specifically, will Israel’s repentance initiate the restoration or will God’s redemptive intervention produce Israel’s repentance? Paul comes down squarely on the latter side, arguing for a divinely-initiated redemption through the obedient fidelity of Jesus, whose status and authority as “the just one”—the figure divinely appointed to bring about redemption—was validated by the resurrection. In the process, this chapter provides an elegant solution for the longstanding problem of how to understand Paul’s citations of Lev 18:5 and Deut 30:12–14 in these passages.

This chapter argues that Paul’s gospel was based on the conviction that God’s promises through the prophets—specifically the promise of a renewed covenant with Israel—were being fulfilled through Jesus’ death, resurrection, and the gift of the spirit. Working primarily from 2 Corinthians 3 and the central chapters of Romans, this chapter puts Paul in conversation with Jubilees, a variety of texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QS, CD, 1QPHa, etc.), Philo of Alexandria, and more. The chapter demonstrates that all of these texts bear witness to a view of Israel as having fallen under the Torah’s curses for covenantal disobedience and awaiting a restoration that includes an ethical transformation through divine intervention.

This final chapter wraps up the study as a whole, assessing how this argument about gentile incorporation into Israel and the role of Torah in Paul’s thought fits into the larger context of Paul’s thought and why, if Paul believes gentile men are being transformed into Israelites, he argues against requiring physical circumcision of non-Jewish men who receive the spirit. The chapter closes with an assessment of how this model accounts for the development of Pauline thought in early Christianity as the movement became more gentile-dominated.

Through attention to Augustine’s teaching on the Resurrection and Ascension, this chapter draws to the fore the ecclesiological consequences of the book’s christological proposal, emphasizing both the nature of the Church as the mutual recognition of Christ in one another, and the Church’s intrinsic dependence on and receptivity to the world beyond it.

Three Indian religions are considered, in the likely order of their origin. In each case a history and analysis are first offered before a specific issue is addressed in more detail. For Jainism it is the question of reincarnation. Here it is suggested that similar concerns for justice underly both Jainism’s almost physical embedding of karma in the universe and western theism’s postulation of a doctrine of resurrection. If so, it is what is scientifically and metaphysically possible which is in dispute (the status of soul and body) rather than different moral values. With Buddhism its moral approach is considered, partly through using Gavin Flood’s comparative study on asceticism and partly through drawing parallels with the influence of Stoicism on early Christian ethics. Finally, the impersonal character of the divine advocated in Sikhism is given sympathetic treatment through considering some issues raised by Neo-Platonism. Each of these questions will be considered further in subsequent chapters.

The ignominious death of Jesus on the cross was the starting point of the history of Christians. It could have meant the end of the followers of Christ, especially because soon the body of Jesus also disappeared. However, the Christians succeeded in interpreting the events for themselves by speaking of the resurrection of Christ and cultivating the expectation of his return (parousia). Such ideas seem strange to modern observers, but they were apparently convincing for enough contemporaries that the followers of Christ survived. However, they were continually dependent on words, because relics were initially lacking and only memories could help spread faith in Jesus.

As he developed his own faith, working it out as he lived and wrote, Tolstoy responded to varieties of religious experience and expression, including English ones. From early on, Tolstoy found in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and the novels of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others, information about English religious life and examples of how to novelize religious experience. In turn, when Tolstoy emerged, later in life, as a religious seeker and moral authority, English readers responded to Tolstoy both as a novelist and as a thinker.

Tolstoy’s works have been adapted into film more often than any other Russian writer except for Dostoevsky. This chapter covers Russian and world cinematic adaptations of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, and various shorter works of Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s novels, with their vast length, broad canvas, and complex plots, create unique challenges for prospective filmmakers. While some directors attempt to film his texts as closely as possible, others choose to single out particular aspects of his novels as their foci. Adapters of Anna Karenina, for instance, often focus almost exclusively on Anna and Vronsky’s love affair, while minimizing the plotline involving Levin. Cultural factors often come into play, for instance in Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, which adapts Tolstoy’s text in light of the Brezhnev-era demand for monumentalism, and for conveying the patriotic aspects of the novel. Shorter works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata have inspired particularly creative approaches, as directors often freely combine Tolstoy’s short narratives with other texts and set them in remarkably different social, historical, and cultural contexts.