Hallman, Joseph M. “The Presence of the Risen Lord: A Whiteheadian Approach.” Chicago Studies 26, no. 1 (April 1987): 51-61.

Abstract

Hallman seeks to show how a Whiteheadian understanding of the person illuminates our understanding of the resurrection of Jesus and, by implication, others. As the risen Lord intuited in communal Christian experiences, Jesus defines the meaning of personhood. Yet to show that belief in the resurrection of Jesus and others is reasonable, the Whiteheadian philosophic notion of the person is required. Hallman constructs a theory based upon this Whiteheadian perspective which purports to show that the person does indeed survive physical death and become a new person with an ongoing life. At death, a novel relationship with a new physical organism is established. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the paradigm case for our own future transformation at death: we, like Jesus, will develop “this novel relationship to the earthly Church which will function as our new physical body in time and space. The remembered actual entities of Jesus’ earthly history, as will be ours, are carried over into the new body of his members, the Church. Jesus, moreover, continues to become as a person inasmuch as he experiences the world in and through the lives of men and women in the Church. Jesus as lord informs the Church as the mind informs the body: persuasively, yet intimately and forcefully. (Barry L. Whitney, University of Windsor)

[In Process Studies 16, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 314-315.]