Paul writes, “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Given the associations we have with the term “spiritual”, it has been easy for many people to assume that the antithesis Paul is talking about here is between a physical body and a non-physical body. Many of our translations of 1 Corinthians 15 do make it seem that Paul is contrasting a natural physical body with an incorporeal spiritual body. Tom Wright explains this passage from the original Greek: “He speaks of two sorts of body, the present one and the future one. He uses two key adjectives to describe these two bodies. Unfortunately, many translations get him radically wrong at this point, leading to the widespread supposition that for Paul the new body would be a spiritual body in the sense of a nonmaterial body, a body that in Jesus’s case wouldn’t have left an empty tomb behind it.... The contrast he is making is not between what we would mean by a present physical body and what we would mean by a future spiritual one, but between a present body animated by the normal human soul and a future body animated by God’s spirit.... Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble post-mortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death.... “The first word, psychikos, does not in any case mean anything like ‘physical’ in our sense. For Greek speakers of Paul’s day, the psyché, from which the word derives, means the soul, not the body. “But the deeper, underlying point is that adjectives of this type, Greek adjectives ending in –ikos, describe not the material out of which things are made but the power or energy that animates them. It is the different between asking, on the one hand, ‘Is this a wooden ship or an iron ship?’ (the material from which it is made) and asking, on the other, ‘Is this a steamship or a sailing ship?’ (the energy that powers it). Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psyché (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God’s pneuma, God’s breath of new life, the energizing power of God’s new creation. “This is why, in a further phrase that became controversial as early as the mid-second century, Paul declares that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s Kingdom.’ He doesn’t mean that physicality will be abolished. ‘Flesh and blood’ is a technical term for that which is corruptible, transient, heading for death. The contrast, again, is not between what we call physical and what we can nonphysical but between corruptible physicality, on the one hand, and incorruptible physicality, on the other.” The early church, which spoke Greek as its native tongue, understood these distinctions. In fact, the distinction between physical resurrection and a purely “spiritual” nonphysical resurrection was absolutely central in dividing the true Christians from heretics like the ancient Gnostics. It was the early Christian’s understanding of physical resurrection which, perhaps more than any other doctrine, served to polarize the church of the canonical tradition from the anti-creational orientation of the Gnostics. Not only Irenaeus, but Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, the writers of the Didache, Justin Martyr, Tertullian and many other early Christian writers went to great lengths to make clear that the bodies of departed Christians will be raised in a way comparative to the resurrection of our Blessed Lord. This doctrine found expression in the Nicene Creed and was reaffirmed in frequent Christian polemics against the Gnostics. Far from matter and spirit being in competition with one another, the Christian doctrine of resurrection points towards the grand consecration of creation. It points to a time when our physical bodies will be taken up and transformed by God’s spirit to be everything they were meant to be (and more) before sin entered the picture. While the resurrection body will be many things that we cannot even now imagine (1 Cor. 2:9), we can be sure of this: it will be physical. Two rival theological understandings Because the doctrine of bodily resurrection has so often been sidestepped for a Platonic doctrine of the soul’s immortality, and because it is often assumed that we will enjoy immortality in a disembodied state, Christian thinkers have often assumed that there is something unspiritual about our material existence. Instead of seeing the great antithesis between the spiritual and the material, we fall into the error of seeing the great metaphysical divide being between the spiritual and the material. This false dualism, which Randy Alcorn calls “Christoplatonism” in his excellent book Heaven, has had a huge impact on our understanding of death. The notion that the dead are in heaven waiting for their resurrection bodies has largely been eclipsed by the false idea that going to heaven is itself the primary Christian hope. This has had a major impact on Christian funeral liturgies. colsoncenter.org/the-center/columns/call-response/17747-raised-a-spiritual-body
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 15:51:59 +0000
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