To speak honestly, I must add that, even if I found St. Paul had
committed himself repeatedly to any theory of a material or
semi-material Resurrection, consonant with the feelings of his times, I
should not have felt bound to place a belief in a materialistic detail
of this kind upon the same high and authoritative level as the belief in
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or any other general and
spiritual article of faith. But I find no such materialism in St. Paul.
He appears to me to say consistently, 1st, that Christ’s Resurrection
was a type of (“the first fruits of”) the Resurrection of mankind; 2nd,
that in contrast to the first man Adam, the earthy, who became a living
soul, the last Adam, the heavenly, became a “life-giving spirit;” 3rd,
that, as we have borne the image of the earthy, so we shall also bear
the image of the heavenly; 4th, that the “body” of the faithful after
death will be “spiritual,” just as the Church of God is “a _spiritual_
house,” and the sacrifices of the saints are “_spiritual_ sacrifices.”
There is no more ground for thinking that St. Paul supposed that we
should hereafter have spiritual hands, or be spiritual bipeds, than for
thinking that he supposed the sacrifices of the Church to be spiritual
sheep, or the temple of the Church to be composed of celestial stones.
After our Resurrection, we are still to be conscious of God’s past love,
still to rejoice in His present and never-ending love, still to be
capable of glorifying and serving God, of loving as well as of being
loved—this St. Paul’s theory of the “spiritual body” certainly implies;
and it need not imply more. And what our Resurrection will be, that
Christ’s Resurrection was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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