Neurotheology and the Resurrection: Memory, Trauma, and Personal Identity Beyond Neurological Death

This article examines a problem that sits between neuroscience and Christian resurrection theology: what happens to personal identity when memory is damaged, fragmented, or lost? Dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, severe amnesia, and traumatic memory make the question difficult because autobiographical memory is closely tied to brain function while also playing a major role in how people understand themselves. If neurological disease can remove access to decades of personal history, it becomes necessary to ask what Christian theology means when it claims that the person who dies is the person whom God raises. Drawing on neuroscience, philosophy of personal identity, early Christian accounts of bodily resurrection, and theological work on dementia and disability, this study argues that personal identity cannot be reduced to successful memory retrieval or to the final neurological condition present at death. It proposes a model of restored memory based on embodied personal continuity, divine recognition, and transformation. Dementia may destroy access to autobiographical memory without destroying the person to whom that history belongs. Trauma presents the opposite problem, where the past remains painfully present. Resurrection need not require either permanent forgetting or the preservation of traumatic suffering. Instead, traumatic memory may remain historically true while losing its pathological power over the person. The article concludes that Christian resurrection is best understood neither as neurological reconstruction nor as the preservation of an untouched immaterial memory store, but as the restoration and transformation of the same embodied person. Memory is therefore neither erased nor made the sole basis of identity. It is healed and reintegrated within a person whose continuity ultimately rests not upon perfect self-recollection, but upon being known and raised by God.