The Resurrection Body

The Apostle Paul devotes the longest sustained doctrinal argument in any of his letters to the question of the resurrection of the body. The whole of 1 Corinthians 15 — fifty-eight verses — works through the matter with a thoroughness that is itself a measure of how central he believed it to be. The Corinthian church had begun to drift toward a position that one strand of Greek thought found congenial: that the soul is immortal and the body is transient, that what matters is the survival of the inner self, and that bodily resurrection is a category mistake. Paul will not have it. If there is no resurrection of the dead, he writes in verse 16, then not even Christ has been raised, and your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. The resurrection of the body is not optional. It is the article on which everything else stands.

He then has to explain what kind of body. Verse 35: But someone will ask, how are the dead raised, and with what kind of body do they come? Paul answers with a series of analogies and contrasts across the next fifteen verses.

The seed in verse 37 is sown bare; what comes up is not what was sown. There is continuity — the wheat is from the wheat seed, not from a barley seed — but there is also transformation. The thing that emerges is not the thing that was buried, even though it has come from the thing that was buried. Then the four contrasts of verses 42-44. It is sown perishable, raised imperishable. Sown in dishonor, raised in glory. Sown in weakness, raised in power. Sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body.

That last contrast — natural body and spiritual body — is the one most prone to misreading. The Greek is sōma psychikon and sōma pneumatikon. The contrast is not between physical and non-physical. It is between a body animated by the natural life of the soul, psychē, and a body animated by the Spirit, pneuma. The spiritual body is not a body made of spirit instead of matter. It is a body whose principle of life is the Holy Spirit rather than the natural soul that animates ordinary mortal flesh. The continuity of substance is preserved. The animating principle is what has changed.

Augustine, in book 22 of the City of God, devoted a long and careful treatment to the resurrection body. He insisted, against every spiritualizing tendency of his age, that the resurrection body would be true flesh, with the same parts and proportions a body has now, that the wounds of martyrs might remain visible as marks of victory rather than disfigurement, that the body would not be a phantom or a memory but the very body that had been sown, returned in transformed condition. Whatever Christ was after the resurrection, Augustine wrote, we shall be like that.

Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, gives the doctrine its most precise articulation. The glorified body has four properties that distinguish it from the body of the present age while preserving its continuous identity. The four properties are impassibilitas, subtilitas, agilitas, and claritas.

Impassibilitas is impassibility. The glorified body cannot suffer, decay, or die. Subtilitas is subtlety. The glorified body has a relation to material space that is not the relation of ordinary mass — it can pass through solid matter, as the risen Christ entered the locked room where the disciples were gathered, without dissolving its own substance. Agilitas is agility. The glorified body moves with the readiness of thought, not constrained by the inertia and labor that bind ordinary motion. Claritas is clarity, or splendor — the body radiates the glory of the soul that animates it, shining with a luminosity that is not borrowed from external light but emerges from within. Aquinas grounds the four properties in Paul's four contrasts in 1 Corinthians 15.

This is what the resurrection body is. Not the present body returned unchanged. Not a ghost. The same body, sown in its present condition, raised in the four properties Aquinas names.

The engineer's instinct here is to notice what is actually being described. The properties of the glorified body are precisely the properties of mass that has entered into some kind of new relation with the constancy that belongs to light. Impassibility is the freedom from entropy. Subtlety is the freedom from the obstruction that mass usually represents to other mass. Agility is motion that approaches the limit case in which inertia ceases to be a constraint. Clarity is the body's own emission of light rather than mere reflection of it. The scholastic doctors did not have special relativity to draw on. They had Paul, the resurrection appearances, the Transfiguration, and centuries of careful theological reasoning. What they described, in the categories available to them, is what twentieth-century physics would later describe as the limit case toward which mass tends as it approaches the speed of light.

This is also exactly what the doctrine of aevum predicted. Chapter 3 of this volume traced the category — temporal existence without entropy, duration without decay — that the medievals had developed to describe the angels. The four properties of the glorified body are aevum extended to embodied humanity. The body persists through time, retains its identity, acts in space — but is no longer subject to the running-down that marks every temporal being in the unredeemed cosmos.

A caution is needed before this gets misunderstood. The glorified body's participation in the properties of light is real, but it is not the dissolution of flesh into light. The resurrection body is not light. It is flesh that has been transformed by union with the Word who is light, so that the flesh now operates in modes the unredeemed body could not. The risen Christ is still flesh — He eats broiled fish in Luke 24, He invites Thomas to touch the wounds in John 20. The four properties of Aquinas are not the abolition of embodiment. They are the transformation of embodiment into what it was always intended to be.

This is the answer to the question driving the volume from the beginning. How can a human being on the wrong side of the asymptote, bound by mass and subject to decay, be united with a Creator on the other side of every limit the structure of creation imposes? The answer is not by escape. Not by the soul abandoning the body. Not by the spirit slipping the bondage of flesh. The answer is by the transformation of the embodied image-bearer into a being whose embodiment now participates in the modes of existence that belong to light — and through light, in the modes that belong to love. Mass enters the properties of light without ceasing to be mass. Flesh enters the properties of the essence that John names as both light and love without ceasing to be flesh. The integration that the gnostic tried to escape is the integration that redemption fulfills.

And the prototype of this transformation is the body of the risen Christ. The first fruits, Paul calls it in 1 Corinthians 15:20. The disciples who encountered him on the road to Emmaus and in the upper room and on the shore of the lake were not encountering a one-off miracle that would never be repeated. They were encountering the prototype of their own future. They were looking at a human being — fully embodied, capable of being recognized and touched and sharing a meal with — and they were seeing what they themselves would become.

PART IV — Abiding