I'm not claiming that the idea of resurrection in the gospel is the best idea ever, but it has quite a lot over its major alternatives—and not because it's a way of escaping death, because it isn't. In fact, the idea of resurrection in the gospel is written across the idea of death. That's why the idea of incarnation is not only that the confronting face of God comes to have muscles and blood and skin and bones, but even more that it does so with all the vulnerability to injury of our soft tissue. Indeed, orthodox traditions maintain that it was sinful flesh that was assumed by God. We carnal creatures live for a while and we die. Immortal souls lack that particularity, that ephemerality, that beautiful temporality. Bodies that might by some miracle, some startling surprise, be resurrected, do not. But they do not only if resurrection is not the prolongation of broken time, the adding of new seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. An infinitely long succession of moments dissolves particularity in a sea of prolongation. Resurrection is rather the glorification of the brief moment of human life, the bathing of that moment with an unbroken life, an unbroken time, i.e., "eternity," "time-fullness." Resurrection is a "Yes!" to the brief moment in the face of the "No!" of death, a "Yes!" that lives as an unbroken gratitude in the embrace of God that is commonly called God's Reign.