In the finance and economic world, there are a lot of theories and models. Someone engaging the free markets certainly appreciates these elements. For example, a trader may make use of the Black-Scholes model to define his or her risk on a trade that is theoretically unlimited in risk. The Black-Scholes model is a pricing model for derivatives, but it may also serve as a guide to determine a range of how far a particular security is likely to move within a certain time. However, at the end of the day, theories are not enough to pay the bills. Theory is sterile enough to be devastated on occasion by theoretically highly improbable events and so an experienced trader would take into account ways of mitigating that risk. In the end, theory is always appreciated but what is done is what is pays the bills.
The spiritual resurrection of Jesus that denies a physical resurrection could be likened to a theory that lacks the power to pay the bills. When I read the passages on Jesus’ appearances I do not get the impression that they were talking about a spiritually resurrected Jesus devoid of a physically resurrected body. The apostle Paul’s writings on our own resurrection and glorification does not give me that impression either. The resurrections about which I read in the New Testament look like they involve resurrections of persons with physical bodies. In essence, if Jesus’ resurrection was solely spiritual, I see no reason why the early church was so obsessed with the second advent of Jesus, who was said to return in similar manner to they way he ascended, or why they would endure martyrdom for the belief in Jesus and his resurrection.
It seems to me that the early church’s belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus, the eyewitnesses testimonies to a Jesus with a physical body, and the willingness to die for this Jesus indicates that a physical resurrection was something that actually happened and it was what paid the bills, so to speak.
the archives near Emmaus 
If I understand you correctly, you’re suggesting that the idea of a spiritual resurrection cannot account for the aftermath of the disciples encounter with the resurrected Christ and their belief in his parousia? If they believed in merely a “spiritual” or ethereal resurrection they would have sat on their hands in Jerusalem waiting to die when they could join their Lord in a disembodied afterlife.
Yes, that’s exactly it. The impression I get from a spiritual resurrection is a rejection of the physical body as something good and something integral to a person. I’ll have to read more from the proponents of the spiritual resurrection but that my first impression of spiritual resurrection.
I’m trying to remember if someone like Borg might argue that the earliest disciples understood Jesus’ resurrection to be “physical”, but that there understanding is faulty, so we need to demythologize it (if you will) to the point where we can retain something palatable that we might find across the great religions, like postmortem, ethereal existence of a “soul”.
I appreciate you bringing up this topic, JohnDave, and the careful thought represented. Certainly still an intriguing mystery to me, much (!) as I’ve studied it. I’m not saying you are necessarily doing this, but I think we limit the potential reality by using a popular dualism that is only very roughly “real” (and potentially misleading): that “spiritual” means non-physical and vice-versa. I don’t think Paul’s understanding can be given its due in this model. He seems to speak of a 3rd kind of “reality” or state of being: a “spiritual body”. (I don’t know how deeply this can be pushed, exegetically, but for now, I’m satisfied that it helps to make sense of the range of scriptural “data”.)
That Jesus’ appearances were at least not traditionally “physical” is also seen in the Gospel accounts. However, they have many signs of being largely literary accounts with tons of “literary license” and not “eyewitness accounts”. (Thus our inability to “harmonize” them.) Why no one directly experiencing an appearance, other than Paul, chose to write it down (and it survive) is interesting. (It may well be that none of the “Twelve Apostles” or other direct disciples themselves could or did write much of anything.)
But I don’t see, at all, why a physical resurrection, vs. visionary “appearances” (which may indeed have been quite “real”, not hallucinatory) is needed, or even instrumental, in explaining willingness to be martyred for the disciples’ particular brand of Judaism and messianic expectation (as I see it, though differently for Paul). Rather, it seems that kind of thing was (and still is, in many settings) quite common.
JohnDave wrote “Yes, that’s exactly it. The impression I get from a spiritual resurrection is a rejection of the physical body as something good and something integral to a person.”
Such a view (spirit good / flesh bad) would be very similar to the Gnostic perspective, since the Gnostics were very influenced by the manichaeans.
@Howard, I would add to this conversation that Paul’s discussion on resurrection in 1 Cor. 15 is often misunderstood. “Spiritual body” is not quite an accurate translation of the word Paul is using, and thus the problem.
Paul uses two terms, psychikon and pneumatikon, to discuss the differences between plain ol’ earthly bodies and resurrection bodies. These words are both unique to Paul, meaning that their intended connotation is a little less than certain—after all, if we wanted to be literal, we would really talk of the difference between “mind-” or “soul-bodies” and “spirit-bodies,” which is really puzzling. I like the way one of my professors put it: the controversy in 1 Cor. 15 is not about whether the final resurrection will be an embodied one, but in what way we will be embodied. The pneumatikon is not an ethereal ghostly body, but a body that is fully empowered—we might say transformed—by the very breath (Spirit) of God.
That’s a good point worth making Joshua.
@JohnDave, I don’t think we can/should make too much of Paul’s statements and, frankly, interpretations of his own experiences in I Cor. 15 (or elsewhere). I can’t divert much into revelation/authority issues here, but there are numerous thorny ones that involve Paul as well as the other biblical authors, but Paul particularly as introducing more novelty than anyone else (upon which Acts, particularly, builds and probably somewhat other NT books also, or are reactions TO Paul).
I don’t think one can easily brush aside “upon what (potentially divine) authority can we take Paul’s words and theology?” questions. But if one does take Paul as reliable direct revelation (as far as human language can represent it), it still leaves us with whatever he says as more direct (i.e. first-had vs. at least 2nd or 3rd hand for the Gospels/Acts) description of experiences. And, as I implied, I don’t think we even have an attempt, in the Gospels, to convey actual “resurrection experiences”, in literal descriptions, of the women and men who followed Jesus. Literal “reporting” not only doesn’t make sense literarily (or exegetically), it doesn’t seem to fit the small amount of historical data we do have (including in Acts) of the situation for days, weeks, months and years in Jerusalem following Jesus’ death. I can/will explain further what I mean if you’d like me to.
Part of what that leaves a void about is where Jesus’ physical body actually was 2-3 days and following after his death. I find it quite feasible (again, after a lot of study from all angles and types of experts, over decades) that Jesus’ body may have been (as one possibility) in a different grave than where Jos. of A. first placed it; and remained there, while Jesus ALSO appeared in some dramatic fashion on more than one occasion to various of his followers around that time and probably for a while after. (Paul’s experience, apparently, according to what he was aware of theirs, being of the same basic type and nature.)