7.03. Resurrection
Resurrection Historical Considerations The doctrine of the resurrection of the body was from the first a cardinal and striking tenet of Christianity. The resurrection of Christ made it such. Perhaps no article of the new religion made greater impression, at first view, upon the pagan. When the philosophers of Athens “heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, and others said, ‘We will hear you again of this matter’ ” (Acts 17:32). The immortality of the soul and its disembodied existence were familiar to them. Socrates in Phaedrus 245 argues that “the soul is immortal, for that is immortal which is ever in motion; but that which is moved by another in ceasing to move ceases to live.” And in Phaedo 114, after his description of the underworld, he adds, “I do not mean to affirm that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true-a man of sense ought hardly to say that. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may venture to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of the kind is true.” “As for your body,” says Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 10), “it is but a vessel or case that compasses you about. It is but an instrument, like a carpenter’s ax. Without the soul, which has power to use it, the instrument is of itself of no more use to us than the shuttle is of itself to the weaver or the pen to the writer or the whip to the coachman.” (See supplement 7.3.1.) The doctrine of the transmigration of the soul is wholly different from that of the resurrection. In this case, the soul goes into another body than its own: “The Egyptians believed in the transmigration of souls, so that the soul in a destined cycle wandered through the bodies of every species of animals, till it returned to a human body; not to the one it had formerly occupied, but to a new one” (Heeren, Egyptians, 2). According to Rawlinson (Egypt, 10), “the good soul, having just been freed from its infirmities by passing through the basin of purgatorial fire, reentered its former body, rose from the dead, and lived once more a human life upon earth. This process was reiterated, until a certain mystic cycle of years became complete, when finally the good soul attained the crowning joy of union with God and absorption into the divine essence.” The soul of the evil, according to Lenormant, goes through transmigrations until it is finally annihilated. “This latter point is not, perhaps, universally allowed,” says Rawlinson (1.318). The early fathers maintained the doctrine of the resurrection of the body with great earnestness and unanimity against the objections of the skeptics, of whom Celsus was acute and scoffing in his attack. Most of them believed in the resurrection of the very same material body. Justin Martyr, according to Hagenbach, teaches that cripples will rise as cripples, but at the instant of resurrection, if believers, will be made physically perfect. In this tract on the resurrection (§4), he argues that the miracles of Christ wrought upon the body prove the fact of its resurrection: “The same power that could say, Arise, take up your bed and walk, could say to the dead body, Come forth. If on earth Christ healed the sicknesses of the flesh and made the body whole, much more will he do this in the resurrection, so that the flesh shall rise perfect and entire.” The Alexandrine school, alone, adopted a spiritual theory of the resurrection. Origen went so far as to assert that a belief in the resurrection of the body is not absolutely essential to the profession of Christianity, provided the immortality of the soul were maintained. The patristic view of the resurrection passed into the Middle Ages with little modification, excepting that in connection with the materialism of Roman Christianity it naturally became more materialistic. The poetry of Dante and the painting of Angelo powerfully exhibit it. In the Protestant system, a real body, and one that preserves the personal identity, is affirmed; but the materialism of the papal and to some extent that of the patristic church is avoided by a more careful attention to St. Paul’s distinction between the natural body (sōma psychikon)1[Note: 1. σῶμα ψυχικόν] and the spiritual body (sōma pneumatikon).2[Note: 2. σῶμα πνευματικόν]
Respecting the probability of a resurrection of the body, it may be remarked that it is no more strange that the human body should exist a second time than that it has existed the first time. That a full-formed human body should be produced from a microscopic cell is as difficult to believe, upon the face of it, as that a spiritual resurrection body should be produced out of the natural earthly body. The marvels of embryology are, a priori, as incredible as those of the resurrection. The difference between the body that is laid in the grave and the body that is raised from the grave is not so great as the difference between the minute embryonic ovum and the “human form divine” represented by the Antinous or the Apollo Belvidere. If the generation of the body were, up to his time, as rare an event as the resurrection of the body, it might be denied with equal plausibility. The question of St. Paul in Acts 26:8 applies here: “Why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the dead?” The omnipotence that originated the body can of course reoriginate it. Even if the extreme view be adopted, that there must be the very same material particles in order to the identity of the body, this is not an impossibility for God. For as Pearson (On the Creed, art. 11) remarks: “Though the parts of the body of man be dissolved, yet they perish not, they lose not their own entity when they part with their relation to humanity; they are laid up in the secret places and lodged in the chambers of nature, and it is no more a contradiction that they should become the parts of the same body of man to which they did belong than that after his death they should become the parts of any other body, as we see they do.” Only in this case, a particle of matter that had once been a constituent in two or more human bodies could not be a constituent of two or more resurrection bodies because this would involve the simultaneous presence of an atom in two or more places. The resurrection of the body was taught in the Old Testament, and for this reason it was the common belief of the Jews in the time of Christ (John 11:24; Mark 6:16; Mark 12:23). Passages that teach it are “your dead men shall live; together with my dead body shall they arise” (Isaiah 26:19); “my flesh also shall rest in hope” (Psalms 16:9); “many that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake” (Daniel 12:2). The parable of a spiritual resurrection implies a bodily resurrection (Ezekiel 37:1-14). The majority of commentators find the resurrection in Job 19:23-27. The translation of Elijah and the reappearance of Samuel at Endor favor the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The careful sepulcher of the body by Abraham and the Old Testament saints proves the expectation of the resurrection (Genesis 49:29). The Apocrypha teaches the resurrection (2Ma 7:9; 2Ma 7:23). (See supplement 7.3.2.) Scriptural Teaching on the Resurrection The principal points in the scriptural representation are the following.
Christ suddenly and unexpectedly descends from heaven accompanied by angels and reproduces the bodies of all the dead (Matthew 25:3-32; John 5:28-29; Acts 24:15; 1 Thessalonians 4:16). The generation living upon earth at the time of the resurrection will instantaneously be reembodied (1 Thessalonians 4:17 compared with 1 Corinthians 15:51). In Westminster Confession 32.2 it is said that “such as are found alive shall not die, but be changed.” The meaning is that they will not die gradually like men generally, not that they will altogether escape the penalty of death. All in Adam must die. Says Augustine (City of God 20.20), “Neither do we suppose that in the case of these saints, the sentence earth you are and unto earth shall you return is null, though their bodies do not on dying fall to the earth, but both die and rise again at once, while caught up into the air. For not even the saints shall be quickened to immortality unless they first die, however briefly.” The body thus reproduced is a “spiritual body,” for both the good and the evil (1 Corinthians 15:44; 1 Corinthians 15:53). By sōma pneumatikon3[Note: 3. σῶμα πνευματικόν] is meant a spiritlike body, that is, a body adapted to the future spiritual world. It is antithetic to the sōma psychikon4[Note: 4. σῶμα ψυχικόν] or the “flesh and blood” spoken of in 1 Corinthians 15:15, by which is meant the present earthly body suited to the present sensuous world. The body is not converted into spirit: “It is one thing for a body to become spiritual with respect to its qualities, by reason of its clarity, agility, subtlety, and so forth. But it is another thing to become spirit or to be changed into the nature of spirit”5[Note: 5. Aliud est corpus fieri spirituale quoad qualitates ratione claritatis, agilitatis, subtilitatis, et similium; aliud vero fieri spiritum, seu mutari in naturam spiritus.] (Turretin 13.19.19). In denominating the present body psychikon6[Note: 6. ψυχικόν = natural] and the future body pneumatikon,7[Note: 7. πνευματικόν = spiritual] St. Paul distinguishes between psychē8[Note: 8. ψυχή = soul] and pneuma9[Note: 9. πνεῦμα = spirit] in the same way that he does in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12. The latter denotes the higher side of the human soul (the “rational soul”) and the former its lower side (the “animal soul”). Usually, the two are not distinguished in this way by either St. Paul or the other New Testament writers since they constitute one soul (psychē)10[Note: 0 10. ψυχή] in distinction from the body (sōma)11[Note: 1 11. σῶμα] and are sometimes designated in their unity by pneuma12[Note: 2 12. πνεῦμα] and sometimes by psychē.13[Note: 3 13. ψυχή] Commonly, the sacred writers speak of man as constituted as “body and soul” or “body and spirit”-but not “body, soul, and spirit.” But in 1 Corinthians 15:44; 1 Thessalonians 5:23; and Hebrews 4:12 St. Paul requires the distinction between the “animal” and the “rational” soul for the purposes of his discussion and accordingly makes it14[Note: 4 14. WS: The trichometry inHebrews 4:12is one of the coincidences with Paul’s usage in his undoubted epistles which go to prove that he is the author, directly or indirectly, of Hebrews.] (Shedd on Romans 8:10). (See supplement 7.3.3.) The sōma psychikon15[Note: 5 15. σῶμα ψυχικόν] or “natural” body is marked by the qualities of the psychē16[Note: 6 16. ψυχή] or “animal” soul, namely, by physical appetites and passions, such as hunger, thirst, and sexual appetite. These are founded in “flesh and blood” or that material substance of which the present human body is composed. The resurrection or “spiritual” body, on the other hand, will be marked by the qualities of the pneuma17[Note: 7 17. πνεῦμα] or “rational soul.” It will not be composed of flesh and blood, but of a substance which is more like pneuma18[Note: 8 18. πνεῦμα] than like psychē,19[Note: 9 19. ψυχή] more like the rational than the animal soul. That the resurrection body of both the good and the evil will have the common characteristic of being destitute of fleshly appetites and passions and will be a “spiritual” in distinction from a “natural” body is proved by the following: “They neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God” (Matthew 22:30); “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50); “they hunger no more, neither thirst any more” (Revelation 7:16). But while alike in this particular, the spiritual body of the redeemed differs in several important respects from the spiritual body of the lost: “Some shall awake to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2); “all that are in the graves shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:28-29). (a) The spiritual body of the redeemed is a “celestial” body (1 Corinthians 15:40); that of the lost is not. (b) It is a “glorified” body (1 Corinthians 15:43; Php 3:21); that of the lost is not. (c) It is a “resplendent” body (“the righteous shall shine forth as the sun”; Matthew 13:43); that of the lost is not. The difference between the blessed and the miserable resurrection is also marked by exanastasis20[Note: 0 20. ἐξανάστασις = resurrection] instead of anastasis21[Note: 1 21. ἀνάστασις = resurrection] (Php 3:11), by the phrase tēs ek nekrōn22[Note: 2 22. τῆς ἐκ νεκρῶν = from the dead] (Luke 20:35), and by the assertion that there is an order in the resurrection from the dead: “Every man in his own order, they that are Christ’s at his coming” (1 Corinthians 15:23; Cudworth, Intellectual System 3.315 [ed. Tegg]). (See supplement 7.3.4.) The spiritual body is not wholly a new creation ex nihilo, as the Manicheans asserted, but is the old body transformed: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:44; 1 Corinthians 15:53). When Christ raised Lazarus in Bethany, the body raised was identical as to the very particles. It was not a spiritual body, because there was no transformation. It had been sown a natural body, and it was raised a natural body. This resurrected body of Lazarus will require to be changed before it can be the spiritual body of the final resurrection. The resurrection body is an identical body. An identical body is one that is recognized by the person himself and by others. No more than this is required in order to bodily identity. A living man recognizes his present body as the same body that he had ten years ago; yet the material particles are not the same identically: “We shall rise again with the same bodies we have now as to the substance, but the quality will be different” (Calvin 3.25.8); “the dead shall be raised up with the self-same bodies and none other, although with different qualities” (Westminster Confession 33.2). In saying that the substance is the same but the quality is different, Calvin does not mean that all the qualities will be different. This would be incompatible with sameness of substance. But some of the qualities are changed. Calvin explains his statement in the following words: “Just as the very body of Christ which had been offered as a sacrifice was raised again, but with such new and superior qualities as though it had been altogether different.” Certain qualities of the “natural” body will still belong to the “spiritual,” such as extension, figure, etc. The difference will be in the secondary, rather than in the primary properties of the natural body. That the spiritual body is recognized is proved by Luke 9:30-33 : Moses and Elijah were recognized by Christ and pointed out to the disciples; “you shall see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God” (Luke 13:28; John 14:3; John 20:16-17; John 20:20); Christ prepares a place for his people and receives them individually: “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23); “Jacob was gathered unto his people” (Genesis 49:33); “Abraham died and was gathered to his people” (25:8). (See supplement 7.3.5.) That the spiritual body does not consist of the very same particles of matter with the natural body, no more, no less, and no different, is proved by St. Paul’s illustration in 1 Corinthians 15:35-40 : “You sow not that body that shall be; but God gives it a body as it has pleased him. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial.” The ten or more grains of wheat that are produced by germination and growth from the single grain sown are not composed of exactly the same atoms of matter that constituted the seed kernel. There are many more atoms in them, which have been collected from the soil and the atmosphere. And yet there is the perpetuity, in each of these ten or more new grains, of something that existed in the single seed grain. The vegetable life in this latter has passed into the former and become the constructive principle in each of the ten or more grains. When Paul says that “that which you sow is not quickened except it die,” he does not mean the death of everything in the seed kernel. Should the germ in the kernel die, there would be no quickening and no new individual grains. That which dies is the integument or covering of the germ. This dies and rots; but some part even of this reappears in the new grains of wheat. The growing plant is nourished by the decaying integument, similarly as the ovum is nourished by the yolk. Yet the particles of the decaying integument do not make up the total sum of the particles in the new grain. Still other particles have to be gathered by the transmitted vital principle from the soil and atmosphere in order to make out the whole amount required for the new individuals.
It should be carefully observed that St. Paul does not mean that the resurrection of the body is the same in every particular with the reproduction of grain by germination. It is only an illustration and not an explanation. In the case of germination, one grain becomes ten or twenty grains. But in the case of resurrection, one body becomes only one body. The transformation in the first instance is of one individual into many individuals; in the latter instance of one individual into one individual. The special point in the illustration is that the transformation in the instance of the seed grain does not entirely destroy the old substance; so that there is some sameness of substance between the old and the new. But the sameness between the spiritual body and the natural body is much closer than that between the ten grains of new wheat and the one grain from which they were produced. It is evident that the apostle intended by the illustration to teach that while the resurrection of the body is a supernatural and creative act, it is not such in the sense of originating all the materials from nothing. The resurrection body is founded upon and constructed out of the previously existing earthly body.
Employing St. Paul’s threefold distinction in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, man is a synthesis of pneuma,23[Note: 3 23. πνεῦμα]psychē,24[Note: 4 24. ψυχή] and sōma.25[Note: 5 25. σῶμα] The brute is a synthesis of only psychē26[Note: 6 26. ψυχή] and sōma.27[Note: 7 27. σῶμα] Man is composed of a rational soul, an animal soul, and a body; the brute is composed of an animal soul and a body. An animal soul has intelligence in its lower forms, but not reason or the power of intuitive perception in mathematics, morals, and religion. The difference between the rational soul and the animal soul is marked in Genesis 2:7; Genesis 1:20-21; Genesis 1:24. In the first passage, a living soul (nepeš ḥayyâ)28[Note: 8 28. ðÆôÆùÑ çÇéÌÈä] is attributed to Adam, but it is inbreathed by God. In the latter passages, a living soul is attributed to the lower animals, but it is merely created, not inbreathed by God. The death of an animal is the death of both the body and the incomplex animal soul, not the separation of the latter from the former and the continued life of the latter. The death of a man is the separation of the complex rational-animal soul from the body or the departure of the pneuma-psychē29[Note: 9 29. πνεῦμα/ψυχή] from the sōma,30[Note: 0 30. σῶμα] the continued conscious existence of the former and the decomposition of the latter. The substance of the sōma31[Note: 1 31. σῶμα] is mortal and dissolves and “returns to dust as it was.” The substance of the pneuma-psychē32[Note: 2 32. πνεῦμα/ψυχή] is immortal and is not changed in the least by being separated from the sōma.33[Note: 3 33. σῶμα] In this pneuma-psychē34[Note: 4 34. πνεῦμα/ψυχή] or rational soul is the nucleus or, to use St. Paul’s illustration from the grain of wheat, the germ of the resurrection body. The psychē,35[Note: 5 35. ψυχή] which is united with the pneuma36[Note: 6 36. πνεῦμα] and constitutes one indivisible principle with it, is the inner reality of the body or the sōma,37[Note: 7 37. σῶμα] standing for and representing it in the interval between death and the resurrection.38[Note: 8 38. WS: Howe (Vanity of Man) denominates the soul “the statique individuating principle” of the body.] Though the sōma39[Note: 9 39. σῶμα] is scattered to the four winds and like Wycliffe’s ashes cast into the Avon and floated into the Severn and finally into the sea, yet the psychē40[Note: 0 40. ψυχή] -the organic and constructing principle of the sōma41[Note: 1 41. σῶμα] -is still united with the pneuma.42[Note: 2 42. πνεῦμα] And in the instance of the believer, the pneuma-psychē43[Note: 3 43. πνεῦμα/ψυχή] is united with Christ; so that thus it may be said (Westminster Larger Catechism 86) that the believer’s “body is still united to Christ” between death and the resurrection, although the material particles that composed it are “scattered at the grave’s mouth, as when one cuts and cleaves wood upon the earth” (Psalms 141:7). Says Poor (in Lange’s Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15:35-40; cf. a similar statement in Hodge, Theology 3.779): The rational soul, the pneuma-psychē,44[Note: 4 44. πνεῦμα/ψυχή] is the true substance of the body: that which stands under the outward visibility of a corporeal form and imparts to it its reality. If this be so, it is easy to see that when by death the materials of our present bodily structure are all dissolved and scattered abroad, this vital organic principle, through the supernatural agency of God at the sounding of the last trump, may gather to itself and assimilate new materials of a different nature from “flesh and blood” and build up a spiritual body suited to the new condition of things. In the instance of the unbeliever, the pneuma-psychē45[Note: 5 45. πνεῦμα/ψυχή] is not united to Christ by faith, and therefore it is not said that his “body is still united to Christ” between death and the resurrection. The rational soul of the unbeliever is preserved for “the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:29) by the omnipotence of God in the exercise of his providence merely, not of his redeeming grace.46[Note: 6 46. WS: In1 Corinthians 2:14fallen man is denominated anthrōpos psychikos (ἀνθρώπος ψυχικός = soulish [i.e., natural] man) because he is ruled by the animal rather than the rational soul. In saying that “that was not first which was spiritual, but that which is natural” (15:46), the order as it now exists after apostasy, and not the original order, is given. Sin is prior to salvation and is presupposed by redemption. But by creation, man is first “spiritual” and holy and afterward becomes “natural,” and sinful.] (See supplement 7.3.6.) S U P P L E M E N T S
7.3.1 (see p. 867). Howe (Blessedness of the Righteous, chap. 9) notices the fact that Pythagoras, Plato, and the Neoplatonists not only held the soul to be of a different substance from the body and capable of existing and acting without it, but also “that we are borne down by the body to the earth and are continually recalled by it from the contemplation of higher things and that the body must therefore be relinquished as much as possible even here and altogether in another life, that free and unencumbered we may discern truth and love goodness.” He then proceeds to argue in support of the diversity of nature between soul and body and the independence of the former, as follows: “If it be possible enough to form an unexceptionable notion of a spiritual being distinct and separable from any corporeal substance (which the learned Dr. More has sufficiently demonstrated in his treatise on the immortality of the soul) with its proper attributes and powers peculiar to itself, what can reasonably withhold me from asserting that, being separated from the body, it may as well operate alone (I mean exert such operations as are proper to such a spiritual being) as exist alone? What we find it here, in fact, in its present state, acting only with dependence on a body, will no more infer that it can act no otherwise, than its present existence in a body will that it can never exist out of it; neither of which inferences amounts to more than the trifling exploded argument a non esse ad non posse,47[Note: 7 47. from “not to be” to “not to be able” (i.e., to argue from nonexistence in fact to the impossibility of existence in principle)] that because a thing is not it cannot be, and would make as good sense as to say, such an one walks in his clothes, therefore out of them he cannot move a foot. Yea, and the very use itself which the soul now makes of corporeal organs and instruments plainly evidences that it does exert some action of its own wherein they assist it not. For it supposes an operation upon them antecedent to any operation by them. Nothing [material] can be my instrument which is not first the subject of my [mental] action; as when I use a pen I act upon it in order to my action by it; that is, I impress a motion upon it, in order whereunto I use not the pen or any other such material instrument; and though I cannot produce the designed effect, that is, leave such characters so and so figured, without it, my hand can yet, without it, perform its own action, proper to itself, and produce many nobler effects. When therefore the soul makes use of a bodily organ, its action upon it must needs at last be without the ministry of any organ, unless you multiply to it body upon body ad infinitum. And if possibly it perform not some meaner and grosser pieces of drudgery when out of the body, wherein it made use of its help and service when in the body, that is no more a disparagement or diminution than it is to the magistrate that law and decency permit him not to apprehend or execute a malefactor with his own hand. It may yet perform those operations which are proper to itself, that is, such as are more noble and excellent and immediately conducive to its own felicity. Which sort of actions, as cognitation and dilection [thinking and loving], though because being done in the body there is conjunct with them an agitation of the spirits in the brain and heart [in modern phrase, a molecular motion of their particles], it yet seems to me more reasonable that as to these agitations the spirits [molecular motions] are rather subjects than instruments; that the whole essence of these mental acts of thinking and loving is antecedent to the motion of the bodily spirits [molecular motion]; [this is illustrated by the priority of the mental feeling of shame to the bodily flush that accompanies it: the felling is antecedent to the blush or molecular motion and causes it; not the blush antecedent to the felling and its cause]; and that this bodily motion is certainly but only incidentally consequent upon the thinking and loving merely by reason of the present but soluble union the soul has with the body. The purity and refinedness of these bodily spirits [molecular motions] does only remove what would hinder such mental acts as thinking and loving, rather than contribute positively thereunto. And so little is the alliance between a thought and any bodily or material thing, even those very finest spirits themselves, that I dare say that whoever sets himself closely and strictly to consider and debate the matter with his own faculties will find it much more easily apprehensible how the acts of intellection and volition may be performed without these corporeal spirits than by them.
“As therefore the doctrine of the soul’s activity out of its earthly body has favor and friendship enough from philosophers, so I doubt not but that upon the most strict and ready disquisition it would be as much befriended by philosophy itself. In the meantime it deserves to be considered with some regret that this doctrine should find the generality of learned pagans more forward advocates than some learned and worthy advocates of the Christian faith, which is only imputable to the undue measure and excess of an otherwise just zeal in these latter for the resurrection of the body, so far transporting them that they became willing to let go one truth that they might hold another the faster and to ransom this at the too dear and unnecessary expense of the former, accounting they could never make sure enough the resurrection of the body without making the soul’s dependence on it so absolute and necessary that it should be able to do nothing but sleep in the meanwhile. Whereas it seems a great deal more inconceivable how such a being as the soul is, once quit of the entanglements and encumbrances of the body, should sleep at all, than how it should act without the body.” In a similar manner Baxter (Dying Thoughts) argues for the independence of the soul upon matter: “Why should my want of formal conceptions of the future state of separated souls and my strangeness to the manner of their subsistence and operations induce me to doubt of those general points which are evident and beyond all rational doubting? That souls are substances and not annihilated and essentially the same when they forsake the body as before, I doubt not. Otherwise, neither the Christian’s resurrection nor the Pythagorean’s transmigration were a possible thing. For if the soul cease to be, it cannot pass into another body nor can it reenter into this. If God raise this body, then it must be by another soul. For the same soul to be annihilated and yet to begin again to be is a contradiction; for the second beginning would be by creation, which makes a new soul and not the same that was before. It is the invisible things that are excellent, active, operative, and permanent. The visible things are of themselves but lifeless dross. It is the unseen part of plants and flowers which cause all their growth and beauty, their fruit and sweetness. Passive matter is but moved up and down by the invisible active powers, as chessmen are moved from place to place by the gamester’s hands. What a loathsome corpse were the world without the invisible spirits and natures that animate, actuate, or move it. To doubt of the being or continuation of the most excellent, spiritual parts of creation, when we live in a world that is actuated by them and where everything demonstrates them, as their effects, is more foolish than to doubt of the being of those gross materials which we see.” In support of the independence of the soul of the body, Plato in Phaedo 64-65 remarks that “the philosopher is entirely concerned with the soul and not with the body, and would like, as far as he can, be quit of the body and turn to the soul.” And this for the reason that “thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these bodily things trouble her-neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any pleasure-when she has as little as possible to do with the body and has no bodily sense or feeling but is aspiring after true being. The philosopher despises the body; his soul runs away from the body and desires to be alone and by herself.” The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is even more deeply entrenched in the human constitution than that of the divine existence, for it is sometimes held when the latter is overlooked or even speculatively denied. The belief in the continued existence of their ancestors is found in the most degraded tribes and exerts more influence upon them than their belief in their fetishes. The worship of ancestors has a more prominent place in Confucianism than the worship of the deity. When the idea of God has become extremely dim in the savage, he still confidently believes that the souls of his ancestors are existing and wandering in another life. Such is the position of this truth in natural religion. And it is woven through and through the fabric of revealed religion. “Life and immortality are brought into sunlight by the gospel (phōtisantos zōēn kai aphtharsian dia tou euangeliou)”48[Note: 8 48. φωτίσαντος ζωὴν καὶ ἀφθαρσίαν διὰ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου] (2 Timothy 1:10). But irrepressible and universal as it is, the doctrine of man’s immortality is an astonishing one and difficult to entertain. For it means that every frail finite man is to be as long-enduring as the infinite and eternal God; that there will no more be an end to the existence of the man who died today than there will be of the deity who made him. God is denominated “the ancient of days.” But every immortal spirit that ever dwelled in a human body will also be an “ancient of days.” The little infant consigned to the grave yesterday will one day be millions and billions of years old, will one day have an antiquity with which the vastness of the geological ages is nothing. For this is what immortality means and involves. We find it difficult to entertain the idea of an earthly life like that of Adam and Seth continuing for nearly a thousand years-a period longer than from Romulus to Augustus Caesar, than from Constantine to Charlemagne, than from Alfred to Victoria. But what is this in comparison with endless duration? The entire six thousand years of human history, which seem so long to the historical student and are crowded with an immensity of incident, are only a mote in the sunbeam, a drop in the ocean, compared with the biography of an immortal. Yes, man must exist. He has no option. Necessity is laid upon him. He cannot extinguish himself. He cannot cease to be.
7.3.2 (see p. 869). Job 19:25-27 refers to the resurrection of the body in the Septuagint, Vulgate, Targum (partly), Clemens Romanus, Origen, Cyril Jerusalem, Ephraem, Epiphanius, Jerome, Augustine, Schoolmen, Luther’s version, English version, Reformed creeds, Cocceius, Schultens, Michaelis, Rosenmüller, Pearson, Owen, J. P. Smith, Lee, Wordsworth (see “Job” in Lange’s Commentary 19.460-65). Eichhorn, Knapp, Hoffman, and Noyes explain mĕbbĕśārî49[Note: 9 49. îÀáÌÀùÒÈøÄé] as “from out of my flesh” or “in my flesh”; Conant explains “without my flesh.”
7.3.3 (see p. 870). Augustine (Faith and Creed 10) adopts dichometry50[Note: 0 50. See glossary 1.] in the constitution of man: “There are three things of which man consists, namely, spirit, soul, and body; which again are spoken of as two, because frequently the soul is named along with the spirit; for a certain rational part of the same, of which beasts are destitute, is called spirit: the principal part in us is the spirit; next, the life whereby we are united with the body is called the soul; finally, the body itself, as it is visible, is the last part in us.”
7.3.4 (see p. 870). Augustine (Enchiridion 91-93) thus distinguishes between the resurrection body of the redeemed and the lost: “The bodies of the saints shall rise again free from every defect and blemish, as from all corruption, weight, and impediment. For their ease of movement shall be as complete as their happiness. Whence their bodies have been called spiritual, though undoubtedly they shall be bodies and not spirits. For just as now the body is called animate, though it is a body and not a soul [anima], so then the body shall be called spiritual, though it shall be a body and not a spirit (1 Corinthians 15:44). Hence, as far as regards the corruption which now weighs down the soul and the vices which urge ‘the flesh to lust against the spirit,’ it shall not then be flesh, but body; for these are bodies which are called celestial. Wherefore it is said, ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’; and as if in explanation of this: ‘Neither does corruption inherit incorruption.’ What the apostle first called ‘flesh and blood’ he afterward calls ‘corruption’; and what he first called ‘the kingdom of God’ he afterward calls ‘incorruption.’ But as far as regards the substance, even then it shall be flesh. For even after the resurrection the body of Christ was called flesh (Luke 24:39). The apostle, however, says: ‘It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body’; because so perfect shall then be the harmony between flesh and spirit, the spirit keeping alive the subjugated flesh without any need of nourishment, that no part of our nature shall be in discord with another; but as we shall be free from enemies without, so we shall not have ourselves for enemies within.
“But as for those who, out of the mass of perdition caused by the first man’s sin, are not redeemed through the one mediator between God and man, they too shall rise again, each with his own body, but only to be punished with the devil and his angels. Now, whether they shall rise again with all their diseases and deformities of body, bringing with them the diseased and deformed limbs which they had here, it would be labor lost to inquire. For we need not weary ourselves in speculating about their appearance, which is a matter of uncertainty, when their eternal damnation is a matter of certainty. Nor need we inquire in what sense their body shall be incorruptible, if it be susceptible of pain; or in what sense corruptible, if it be free from the possibility of death. For there is no true life except where there is happiness in life, and no true incorruption except where health is unbroken by any pain. When, however, the unhappy are not permitted to die, then, if I may so say, death itself dies not; and where pain without intermission afflicts the soul and never comes to an end, corruption itself is not ended. This is called in Holy Scripture ‘the second death’ (Revelation 2:11). And neither the first death, which takes place when the soul is compelled to leave the body, nor the second death, which takes places when the soul is not permitted to leave the suffering body, would have been inflicted on man had no one sinned. And, of course, the mildest punishment of all will fall upon those who have added no actual transgressions to the original sin they brought with them; and as for the rest, who have added such actual transgressions, the punishment of each will be the more tolerable in the next world, according as his iniquity has been less in this world.”
7.3.5 (see p. 871). In order to personal identity there must be a rational soul. The animal, because it has only an animal soul destitute of reason, cannot have the consciousness of personality and personal identity. A man or angel is conscious that his soul is the same entity today that it was yesterday or ten years ago. Sameness of mental substance in every particular is requisite in order to personal identity. The very same identical soul, with identically the same properties, without loss or alteration of any of them that exist in old age existed in infancy and childhood. Again, in order to the personal identity of a man there must be a material body, because man as a person is a union of soul and body. Though the soul is the principal part of a man, it is not the whole of him. Hence in the intermediate or disembodied state, though the most important part of the person exists, yet a perfectly complete person is lacking. This is the reason for the resurrection of the body. The body, however, does not require to be so strictly the same in every particular as the soul does. Some of its properties may be different; but none of the properties of the soul may be. There is only one kind of mental substance, but there is more than one kind of material substance. Consequently, the body can be changed from a “natural” to a “spiritual” body and still be recognized as the same body. The body of “flesh and blood” of this life may become the “spiritual body” of the next life and in union with the rational soul constitute the same person. This spiritual body can have form, limbs, lineaments, and all the appearance of a human body and yet not all of the very same particles, no more, no less, and no different, go to the making of it. All those properties which in this life required food for their support, for example, may be exchanged for properties that do not require it. On the side, therefore, of the body, there is not so strict an identity of substance and properties as there is on the side of the soul. The recognition of one disembodied spirit by another is more difficult of explanation than the recognition of one embodied spirit by another. Dives and Lazarus were both of them destitute of bodies, yet they knew one another. How does the human spirit recognize and know itself? Not by means of the body which it inhabits, but directly. A man is not assisted in knowing himself by calling to mind the features of his own face and the characteristics of his own body. His knowledge of himself is independent of these latter, being the immediate consciousness of himself, that is, of his spirit. Similarly, his knowledge of the mind or spirit of another man is not the result of his sensuous perception of the man’s bodily form and features, but of his mental and spiritual traits; and the knowledge of these does not depend upon the knowledge of the physical traits. He is not helped to the knowledge that another person is learned or benevolent because he is tall or short in stature.
7.3.6 (see p. 873). Hodge (Theology 3.775-79), remarks upon bodily identity as follows: “In the church it has often been assumed that sameness of substance is essential to the identity between our present and future bodies. This idea has been pressed sometimes to the utmost extreme. Augustine seems to have thought that all the matter which at any period entered into the organism of our present bodies would in some way be restored in the resurrection. Thomas Aquinas was more moderate. He taught that only those particles which entered into the composition of the body at death would enter into the composition of the resurrection body. Others assume that it is not necessary to the identity contended for that all the particles of the body at death should be included in the resurrection body. It is enough that the new body should be formed exclusively out of particles belonging to the present body. But as the body after the resurrection is to be refined and ethereal, a tenth, a hundredth, or a ten-thousandth portion of these particles would suffice.
“Identity in living organisms is higher and more inscrutable than in works of art. The acorn and the oak are the same; but in what sense? Not in substance, not in form. The infant and the man are the same through all the stages of life-boyhood, manhood, and old age; the substance of the body, however, is in a state of perpetual change. It is said this change is complete every seven years. Hence if a man live to be seventy years old, the substance of the body, during this period, has been entirely changed ten times. Here, then, is an identity independent of sameness of substance. Our future bodies, therefore, may be the same as those we now have, although not a particle that was in the one should be in the other. It may readily be admitted by those who adhere to the generally received doctrine that man consists of soul and body (and not of spirit, soul, and body); that the soul, besides its rational, voluntary, and moral faculties, has in it what may be called a principle of animal life. That is, that it has not only faculties that fit it for the higher exercises of a rational creature capable of fellowship with God, but also faculties which fit it for living in organic union with a material body. It may also be admitted that the soul, in this aspect, is the animating principle of the body, that by which all its functions are carried on. And it may further be admitted that the soul, in this aspect, is that which gives identity to the human body through all the changes of substance to which it is here subjected. And, finally, it may be admitted, such being the case, that the body which the soul is to have at the resurrection is as really and truly identical with that which it had on earth as the body of the man of mature life is the same which he had when he was an infant. All this may pass for what it is worth. What stands sure is what the Bible teaches: that our heavenly bodies are in some high, true, and real sense to be of the same nature as those which we now have. There are two negative statements in the Bible on this subject which imply a great deal. One is that in the resurrection men ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God.’ The other is that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.’ Three things are implied in these passages: (1) that the bodies of men must be specially suited to the state of existence in which they are to live and act; (2) that our present bodies, consisting as they do of flesh and blood, are not adapted to our future state of being; and (3) that everything in the organization of our bodies designed to meet our present necessities will cease with the life that now is. If blood be no longer our life, we shall have no need of organs of respiration and nutrition. The following particulars, however, may be inferred with more or less confidence from what the Bible has revealed on this subject: (1) that our bodies after the resurrection will retain the human form; (2) that the future body will be a glorified likeness of what it was on earth; and (3) that we shall not only recognize our friends in heaven, but also know, without introduction, prophets, apostles, confessors, and martyrs of whom we have heard while here on earth.”
Perowne (Immortality, lect. 4) argues that bodily identity consists wholly in the sameness of the organizing principle: “We maintain that the same body which has been laid in the grave may be raised at the last day, even though not one single material particle which went to constitute the one body shall be found in the other. For what is it that is necessary to the identity of the body? The identity of the body does not depend on the identity of the material particles of which it is composed. These are in a state of perpetual flux. The body of our childhood is not the body of our youth, nor the body of our youth that of our manhood, nor the body of our manhood that of our old age. Every particle is changed, and yet it is the same body; the person to whom it belongs still continues the same person. If you insist upon it that every particle of matter of which my body is built must be brought together to form my new resurrection body, then I ask, What body during this present life is my true body? Is it the body of my childhood or of my youth or of my old age? The body in which I die is no more truly mine than the body with which I came into the world. Both are mine, both are in some sense the same body, and yet they have not a single material particle in common. What possible reason is there then for contending that the body which is laid in the grave must be brought together again, particle for particle, at the resurrection, when it is no more essentially a part of myself than my body at any other stage of my existence? The only thing of which we need to be assured is that the principle of identity which governs the formation of the body in this life shall govern its formation at the resurrection. In the ever flowing torrent of our life, as wave after wave passes through our bodily frame, bringing with it growth and variety in the structure, there is some principle or law or specific form, call it what you will, which remains ever the same. The organism is essentially one, despite the changes of size, of form, of inward constitution. This holds true in every region of nature where there is life: of the acorn which becomes an oak, of the worm which changes to a chrysalis and then to a butterfly. Is it not the same with man? Is not the human embryo the same individual when it becomes child, youth, old man? And yet does there remain in the oak, in the butterfly, in the man, a single one of the ponderable molecules which existed in the germ, the egg, the embryo? And still, we repeat, it is the same vegetable, the same insect, the same man.
“What then is this thing which remains ever the same in the vegetable in all its developments, in the insect in all its metamorphoses, in the human body in every phase of its existence? What is this which never perishes, is never destroyed in all the changes and fluctuations of the material organism? It escapes all our investigations; we see it only in its manifestations in the phenomena of life. But that it is a reality all observation goes to show; and if through all the changes of the body during this life this principle continues in all its force, why may it not survive the shock of death? Why may not this ‘specific form,’ as Gregory of Nyssa terms it, remain united to the soul, as he conjectured and as other thinkers like Leibnitz have supposed, after its separation from the body and thus become at length the [providential] agent in the resurrection, by reconstituting, though in a new and transfigured condition, the body which was dissolved at death? Why may not the same body which was sown in corruption be raised in incorruption, and that which was sown a natural body be raised a spiritual body? There is, at least, nothing improbable in such a supposition; there is everything in the analogies of nature to confirm it; and when revelation is silent we may be thankful for such glimpses of probability as come to us in aid of our faith.”
Respecting the nature of the resurrection body, Augustine (Letter 95.7-8 to Paulinus, a.d. 408) thus remarks: “As to the resurrection of the body and the future offices of its members in the incorruptible and immortal state, it is to be held most firmly as a true doctrine of Holy Scripture that these visible and earthly bodies which are now called ‘natural’ (animalia; 1 Corinthians 15:44) shall, in the resurrection of the just, be spiritual bodies. At the same time I do not know how the quality of a spiritual body can be comprehended and described by us, seeing that it lies beyond the range of our experience. There shall be, assuredly, in such bodies no corruption, and therefore they shall not require the perishable nourishment which is now necessary; yet though unnecessary, it will not be impossible for them at their pleasure to take and consume food; otherwise it would not have been taken by our Lord after his resurrection, who has given us such an example of the resurrection of the body that the apostle argues from it, ‘If the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised.’ But he, when he appeared to his disciples, having all his members and using them according to their functions, also pointed out to them the places where his wounds had been, respecting which I have always supposed that they were the scars and not the wounds themselves and that they were there not of necessity but according to his free exercise of power. He gave at that time the clearest evidence of the ease with which he exercised this power, both by showing himself in ‘another form’ to the two disciples and by his appearing not as a spirit, but in his true body, although the doors were shut (Mark 16:12; Mark 16:14; Luke 24:15-43; John 20:14-29).” Again (Letter 148.16 to Fortunatianus, a.d. 413) he says: “As to the spiritual body which we shall have in the resurrection, how great a change for the better it is to undergo-whether it shall then become pure spirit, so that the whole man shall then be a spirit, or shall (as I rather think, but yet do not confidently maintain) become a spiritual body in such a way as to be called spiritual because of a certain wonderful facility in its movements, but at the same time to retain its material substance, which cannot live and feel by itself but only through the spirit which uses it, as our present body is animated and used by the soul inhabiting it; and whether, if the properties of the body then immortal and incorruptible shall remain unchanged, it shall then in some degree aid the spirit to see visible, that is, material things, as at present we are unable to see anything of this kind except through the eyes of the body; or whether our spirit shall then be able to know material things directly without the instrumentality of the body (for God himself does not know these things through bodily senses)-on these and many other things that perplex us, I confess that I have not yet read anything which I regard as sufficiently settled to deserve to be taught to men.”