Possessing a body is foundational to human experience and expression. We know of no other means to exist in this world.

It is for this reason that we are creeped out by ghosts (spirits without bodies) and zombies (bodies without souls). These dead-yet-undead creatures are shocking to us because they disrupt the natural integrity of body and soul. Without this integrity they appear to us as half-formed, not-quite-human, and disturbingly unnatural.

Zombies are perhaps more grotesque to our sensibilities than ghosts since they lack the qualities that once made them human, and simply exist as a rotting shell of their former selves. One cannot imagine a greater nightmare than to be doomed to eternal existence as a reanimated corpse - a zombie.

For many modern people, this is exactly what comes to mind when they initially consider the idea of bodily resurrection. They are, quite understandly, revolted at the prospect.

But resurrection from a biblical perspective is not simply about the resuscitation of a corpse. It is not a continuation of our present temporal existence - coming back to a life identical to our present life. Resurrection is a complete transformation of the body into a new and glorious state of being and experience.

Signposts Pointing into a Fog

But how is this possible? This is the question that concerned the Corinthian community. Paul addresses this question in 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, not by giving straightforward answers, but by stimulating the religious imagination to consider the mystery of new creation. In this passage, Paul does not explain as much as he provokes. He does not offer a template of the future as much as he offers "a set of signposts pointing into a fog."[1] Paul understands that, at best, we "see through a glass darkly."

Paul offers signposts, not because he possesses clear and definite answers concerning the resurrection body, but because he is confident of one thing: Someone has come out of the fog to meet us! And that someone is the resurrected Christ, who promises to raise us from the dead that we might share in his glorious inheritance of a renewed and restored creation.

Cultural Skepticism about Bodily Resurrection

Like the Corinthians, we live in a culture that is skeptical about bodily resurrection. Some Christians share in our culture's aversion to the idea that the body could be reanimated after death. After all, they assume, the body is simply a prison for our immortal soul.

Along with the Corinthians, we tend to embrace hellenistic assumptions which are in opposition to the ancient Hebrew tradition. When we assume that spirituality is about transcending corporeality rather than embracing, redeeming, and renewing corporeality, we have departed from the Hebrew tradition and embraced Greek philosophy. This is common in popular spirituality, which often sets the spiritual over against the material, reducing matter to ultimate insignificance and raising the immaterial to ultimate significance. With this dualism in place, popular spirituality then seeks to transcend, rather than embrace and redeem, the body.

In one sense, this is understandable from a human perspective. Clearly, our flesh decays. This is obvious for all to see. It is subject to disease, disability, and deformity. From the moment we enter this world, we are in the process of dying. This leads us to believe that if our "true self" is to survive death, it must be contained in an immaterial aspect of our being - an immortal soul - and not in our temporal, perishing flesh.

Don't Forget the Good News

But this is to forget the good news of Christ's incarnation and resurrection - two saving acts of God that forever change our view of humanity. In the incarnation, God forever unites Godself with our humanity in Jesus - "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." Through the resurrection, God reverses death and redeems humanity.

The promise of the gospel is that we, through the grace of Christ revealed in his life, death, and resurrection, will be redeemed and transformed. This necessarily includes our bodies. God is the creator of human bodies. God loves and cares for them. They are not prisons to be escaped, shells to be discarded. Instead, they are essential to who we are. There is nothing more foundational to human experience and expression than possessing a body. We know of no other manner of existence.

In Paul's defense of the resurrection body, his strategy is "to make the resurrection of the dead seem appealing rather than appalling to the Corinthians."[2] He seeks to prove to the Corinthians that "they, not he, are the ones guilty of crude literalism."[3] They have forgotten that resurrection necessarily involves the transformation of our humanity. Our new embodied existence is not a continuation of our present temporal existence. It is not simply a matter of resuscitated corpses - undead zombies - eternally walking this earth. This would admittedly be a nightmare from which death would be a welcome escape!

In order to develop his understanding of the resurrection body, Paul offers analogies from creation and reflections on Christ's resurrection body, in whose likeness we will be transformed.

Paul's big idea is simple: God's power is beyond our comprehension! God is able, therefore, to redeem all creation, including the human body. God has already demonstrated this in the resurrection of Christ. What God has begun in Christ, God will complete for and in us. The ultimate goal of salvation is the restoration and renewal of all creation, including our humanity. And the ultimate renewal of our humanity is to be conformed into the image of Christ, which is not limited to attitudes, actions, or virtues, but has to do with sharing in Christ's resurrection glory.

What Kind of Body?

Nature demonstrates that God is able to create various kinds of bodies. Everything has a body and there are distinctive kinds of bodies. Each body is appropriately suited to its condition and environment. God has made "animals for earth, fish for rivers and the sea, birds for the sky, planets or flaming gases for space, stars of different magnitudes for different places within the galaxy and the universe."[4] And the "glory" differs from one body to the next. 

The world is filled with different kinds of bodies created by God to match their distinctive condition and environment. Why then should we deem it incredible for God to create one more - a resurrected human body? After all, the tremendous variety of bodies in God's present creation reveals the numerous possibilities open to God. And we have by no means seen the full expression of God's creative potential!

Paul likens our present experience to that of a "seed." When we die, the seed of our body is planted in the earth. In the resurrection, the seed becomes something new and different. The fruit does not look like the seed from whose death it grew.

This seed-to-plant analogy allows Paul to maintain an important tension: "what one plants is and is not what grows."[5] "The analogy of the seed enables Paul to walk a fine line, asserting both the radical transformation of the body in its resurrected state and yet its organic continuity with the mortal body that preceded it."[6] We are transformed, and yet, we are transformed. Our bodies are the means by which both the change and continuity are affirmed. "This sort of body is entirely outside our present experience... but it is nonetheless a body."[7] The prototype is the resurrected Jesus, in whose likeness we will be raised.

With this in mind, Paul offers a series of contrasts: "What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:42-44).

Sown perishable, raised imperishable. Our bodies are transient, prone to decay and corruption. The resurrection body is imperishable. This imperishability involves the reversal of decay. It speaks of increasing vitality and strength. "It is the recovery of the 'youth' of the new resurrection vitality and life. For in Hebrew life is a process; in both Greek and Hebrew living water is running water, which constantly replaces what flows past or is used with the ever new."[8]

Sown in dishonor, raised in glory. Our dishonor is that we corruptible through sin. Our ultimate corruption is death. In the Hebrew tradition, a dead body was "unclean." This dishonor is removed as we, in the words of Daniel 12:2-3 "shine like the stars." "The last tatters and shreds of sin are no longer present to cloud the sun."[9] We are tranformed by grace into "a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror that reflects back to God perfectly (though of course, on a smaller scale) God's own boundless power and delight and goodness.[10]

Sown in weakness, raised in power. Beset by many weaknesses due to our sin and frailty, we are raised by the Spirit in the power of God.

Paul's point is clear. Resurrection involves an essential transformation of the human body to new heights of glory and to a new level of existence. Resurrection is not more of the same stretching on forever. Our bodies are transformed into the likeness of Christ's glorified humanity, not simply resuscitated to their former weak state. Whereas once our bodies were corruptible, transient, heading for death, they now are permeated and transformed by the divine glory into a suitable habitat of God's Spirit. None of the destructive forces - sin, decay, disease, or death itself - will have any power over the new body. Then we will experience the fulfillment of God's greatest promise:

See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away. ...
Behold, I am making all things new. (Revelation 20:3-5)

In the Image of Christ

We, who have born the image of sinful humanity in Adam, will be transformed into Christ's image. The contrast between Adam and Christ is not that between physical and nonphysical.[11]

The Greek word pneumatikos [translated in the NRSV as "spiritual body"] does not mean "composed of nonmaterial spirit." Paul uses the adjective in this epistle to denote that which reflects or instances the presence, power, and transforming activity of the Holy Spirit. The raised body is characterized by the uninterrupted, transforming power of the Holy Spirit of God. It stands in contrast with the ordinary human body that has been open to the influence of the Holy Spirit, but in partial ways, still marred by human failure, fallibility, and self-interest.[12]

The resurrection body is a body completely animated by the Holy Spirit. It is spiritual, not because it is somehow made out of spirit and vapors, but in that it is the Spirit that is the power or energy that animates it. The emphasis is not on what the body is composed of, but on what animates it. In this sense, it is like a steam train. The train is not composed of steam, but is driven by steam.

The important point to note is that there remains a corporeality to our experience. "The contrast ... is not between what we call physical and what we call nonphysical but between corruptible physicality on the one hand, and incorruptible physicality on the other."[13] C. S. Lewis in the classic book, The Great Divorce, envisages the resurrection body as more solid, more real, and more substantial than our present bodies. Our present existence, because of its corruptibility and transience, though corporeal, is a mere "shadow"; resurrection glory is the "substance."

The Promise of New Creation

Paul concludes this section by promising that "we will bear the image of the man of heaven," that is, Christ Jesus. At heart, belief in our own resurrection naturally flows from belief in Christ's resurrection. Because he lives, we will also live. "As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ" (1 Corinthians 15:22).

The ultimate goal of redemption is that we might "be conformed to the image of the Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family" (Romans 8:29). This is not limited to our virtues, attitudes, or actions. It includes our complete transformation in bearing the likeness of the resurrected Christ in his incorruptible physicality.

With this hope that is formed by our faith, we live in the tension that exists between our present experience and our future destiny. The apostle John stated this tension well: "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is" (1 John 3:2).

The Spirit that now indwells us will one day "give life to our mortal bodies" (Romans 8:11). Though we groan inwardly, we wait for "the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8:23). Though we currently live in this present evil age, "our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation so that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself"  (Philippians 3:21).

How is this possible? Through God's resurrection power that has already been demonstrated in Christ Jesus, and will one day be experienced by all. This is the power to undo death, decay, and disease - every enemy that undermines human flourishing. The greatest power in the world is not death; it is God. And God has the power to restore all things to glory.

Does this sound too good to be true? Remember, just because we can't conceive it does not mean it's not true. Indeed, this may be the very reason to believe it is truly divine. We do, after all, believe in a God beyond comprehension, with power beyond belief, and love beyond measure. Resurrection sounds just like something this kind of God might do!

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,
may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know
what is the hope to which he has called you,
what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints,
and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe,
according to the working of his great power.
God put this power to work in Christ
when he raised him from the dead
and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all rule and authority and power and dominion,
and above every name that is named,
not only in this age
but also in the age to come. (Ephesians 1:17-21)

© Richard J. Vincent, 2008