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.

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.