To many or even most of you, what I’ve brought in to speak about may be so rudimentary that it is either boring or laughable. For me, this was a revelation which re-charted my worldview quite dramatically, but for you who discovered it long ago, or perhaps even had the good fortune of never needing to “learn” the lesson at all, having grown up in nutritious soil, what I have to say may be like going back to multiplication tables. Still, if there is any one of you who has not given contemplation to this thought—and it is certainly not a sin if you haven’t—I encourage you to work out the wondrous consequences.
The truth, previously hidden from me, to which I refer, is this—that this body, according to St. Paul, these very hands and this hair and these fingernails, is in some mysterious way, headed towards immortality. Again, this would seem too obvious to merit comment, but it is a resounding note indeed to someone who, all his life, has assumed that only his disembodied consciousness was eternal, to which the body was but a temporary husk.
This all began to boil when I undertook to answer the question “What was it exactly that the first apostles brought to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean when they announced the euangelion for the very first time?” How would any of you choose to summarize the Christian gospel to those who have never even heard of it? Would you start with the Creator God, as Genesis does? Or the Ten Commandments, the natural law imprinted on the heart of humankind? Perhaps Yaweh’s dramatic actions on behalf of Israel? The foretelling and incarnation of Jesus? His moral teachings? It is certainly typical of modern evangelists to start with the actions on the cross, especially as they concern our atonement theology. All of these threads are found in the kerygma of the first apostles, but there is one idea super-eminent, to which these truths are but supporting points; important structural pieces to the central fact which the apostles made their theme to the Gentiles: The Resurrected Christ. When Paul entered the agora, before he discoursed on propitiation or justification, he announced that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. I Corinthians 15:3-4 says “for I entrusted to you in the foremost, even what I received, that the Messiah died for the sake of our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.”
It is fitting here to open I Corinthians 15, Paul’s defense of and treatise on the Christian resurrection doctrines. It is often quite correctly said that the Jewish hope of the 1st century, while widely expecting a Messiah, did not expect one that would mildly dismiss their revolutionary hopes by ordering them to “render unto Caesar.” It is similarly true that the Jewish hope of the 1st century, while expecting, at least among the Pharisees, some sort of universal resurrection of the dead, did not anticipate the Messiah to be slain, and then, before the general resurrection, raised himself. This is why Paul calls him the aparche, the first-portion of the general resurrection. “For since through a man, Death, even through a man, the resurrection of the dead. For just as in Adam all died, thus even in the Messiah all will be made alive.” Jesus is therefore the archetype to which we look for our own hope, and the means by which that hope will be realized.
What can we know about our own hope? The accounts of his early appearances are certainly stranger than fiction. The Lord’s body and countenance were changed, but also recognizable. He passed through doors and over long distances in the manner of a ghost, but it is clearly recorded, in each account, that his body carried on normal functions. It could touch, be touched, and eat a piece of fish. N.T. Wright, the Anglican theologian, has suggested calling this state “transphysical”—the body which is a human body, but no longer subject to death, corruption, or apparently, some of physical laws which otherwise govern us. Our hope is our own body, but changed. Paul says “it is sown in corruption, but raised in incorruption, sown in dishonor, but raised in glory, sown in weakness, raised in might, sown a soulish body, raised a spiritual body. If there is a soulish body, there is even a spiritual, and thus it is written the first man Adam became unto a living soul, the last Adam unto a life-making spirit.”
I have neither the time nor the expertise to give a full analysis of this passage, but I ought to say that there have been some very bad mistranslations of this passage, given precedent by a liberty in the KJV for psuchikon as “natural” instead of “soulish” which has led to some confusion on what sort of hope we have. Neither was the psuche, in Paul’s language, an eternal consciousness which was merely housed in the body before its release at death, but it was rather the animating principle of a man’s “natural” and “supernatural” existence. What Paul says in these few verses is not “through Adam we exist in bodies, through Christ we will exist without bodies in heaven.” If so, he would contradict 41 preceding verses on the importance of the resurrection! Paul says through Adam we are creatures whose existence is “animated” by our own souls now…through Christ, we will be made alive by being “animated” by God’s Spirit.
What then, are we able to take from this? First, we ought to rethink our future hope, especially as it’s expressed in our hymnody. We are neither “going to a golden shore,” “escaping this world of woe” or “going to the blessed land.” A great deal of our talk about “getting to heaven” has to be rethought and reinterpreted through the resurrection of the body. It would be much more to St. Paul’s point to suggest that heaven is coming to this flesh, this hair, these kneecaps.
Secondly, we shouldn’t give any ground to the Platonic dualism in which the body/matter is evil, and the spirit is good. There are some passages in John’s writings that lean towards this, but his indictment of the flesh, or sarx, never goes so far as to say that it is irredeemable. In other words, we mustn’t think that the Messiah came only to save our souls…he came to save our lives, body and soul, and we don’t help ourselves by attempting to scapegoat the one and sever ourselves. This world, this whole cosmos, is promised a redemption/resurrection as well, and there is likewise no place in Christian political theory for writing the whole thing of as a doomed venture headed for destruction. Whatever destruction does come, there is a revivification to be had afterwards.
And lastly, the doctrine of the resurrection gives enormous dignity to what you and I are doing. You see, if the extent of our future hope is to simply exist as disembodied vapors of personality (and I realize I’m considerably underselling the reality that, even in this theory, we would be vapors in the presence of God’s throne) there would be very little point to whatever we do on this physical earth. St. Paul would suggest we ought to be pitied above all men, if there be no resurrection. D.L. Moody, laboring under this mistake, once suggested that he was aboard a sinking vessel and his task was to get as many souls into lifeboats as he could. But what if we were not only to save souls, but to salvage the ship itself? And, to extend the analogy, what if the repaired ship might some day come into harbor? If the dead are raised, let us write symphonies, let us teach children about the Pythagorean Theorem, let us read Herodotus and build universities. “Where then, O Death, is your victory, and where is your sting? But thanks be to God, who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
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