I Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

I Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

³⁵ But someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?"  ³⁶ Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. ³⁷ And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. ³⁸ But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. … ⁴² So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. ⁴³ It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. ⁴⁴ It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. ⁴⁵ Thus it is written, "The first man, Adam, became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶ But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. ⁴⁷ The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. ⁴⁸ As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹ Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. ⁵⁰ What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

The theme of verses 35-38, 42-50 is the nature of the resurrection body. The ancient creeds of the church affirm that we believe in the resurrection of the body. Verses 22 and 52 may suggest a future resurrection at the return of Christ. Some believed Jesus must return soon to fulfill messianic expectation. Paul does not express belief in a future messianic rule. Rather, he believes Christ is ruling now, as he says in verse 25. He seems to believe resurrection bodies are invisible and therefore can be taking place now. In any case, few things could depart from human experience and reason than this affirmation. Bodies decay, die, and rot away. Bodies may die by disease, at human hand, or by nature. Thus, this affirmation of faith is ridiculous to the point of absurdity if we follow human experience and reason. Only an act of God could persuade us in another direction.[1] For this reason, this article of faith has come under attack from the beginning. We see the skepticism in this chapter of I Corinthians.

            I am going to write a bit about death. I write this as a warning. We seem to live in a death-denying culture. Americans tend to emphasize youth and beauty, and spend huge amounts of money in attempts to reverse or mask the aging process. People do not just buy moisturizer — they purchase “age-defying” moisturizer. When we take sick people to hospitals, we expect health care professionals to perform heroic measures, even when patients are very old. Death typically occurs in hospitals or nursing homes these days, far from the center of family life. It was not always so. Death used to be more part of our lives, whether with numerous deaths in childbirth, infancy or early childhood, or simply because we did not live as long as we do today. When death happened, an intimate affair occurred in the home surrounded by family and friends. I have been in hospital rooms where the family knew the end was near. It was also a very intimate affair for us all. Life is precious. We ought to use technology to ward off the end as much as we can. Such efforts are part of genuine respect for life. Yet, all we can do is delay an end that will come for us all. Yes, death is the enemy. This enemy has superior forces than we will ever have. It will win. In a way you cannot win, we do not want a general who will lead us to the point of total annihilation, as did Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that one can win and how to surrender when one cannot. He understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.[2] When it does happen, we do not even like to say that a person died. We euphemistically say they “passed away” or have “gone to a better place.” Literary types quote Shakespeare and say that a person has “shuffled off this mortal coil.” We seem uncomfortable enough with death that in movies, people die, but the dead continue to hang around with living people as ghosts. They have difficulty communicating with their loved ones. Their loved ones have difficulty hearing what the dead are saying. I confess that some of my favorite movies are like this, the movie Ghost with Patrick Swayze being one of them.

            In verses 35-38, Paul now offers analogies. ³⁵ However, someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?"  What form will the resurrection take place? Is our bodily resurrection possible? Will it be the same or different body? What power will do this? The question is an attempt to refute the idea by making it absurd to believe it. ³⁶ Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. Paul answers the first question. Their own experience says that dissolution and continuity are compatible. How this happens is a mystery, but the fact is something no one can deny. In other words, he exhorts them to let go of such limited understanding and accept the fact that all creatures die. In short, physical beings do not and will not endure forever; and even though bodily death claims us all, it is not the end. Death is a natural and necessary step on the path toward eternal life with God. ³⁷ Further, as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. Paul now answers the second question. Someone strips the body of its usual clothing before burial.  Paul offers the analogy of the grain of corn, an image that seems to Davies[3] to be a common rabbinic image. ³⁸ However, God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. This is the point. Neither seed nor sower, but God will provide the proper body. When God establishes the new creation, those who dwell in it will have dissimilar bodies than their present ones.

Verses 42-49 are a scriptural and theological description. Verses 42-44 contain a set of antitheses that might tempt some toward a non-Jewish background. Yet, such is far from the case. Davies[4] notes that one should not draw a too hasty assumption that when Paul writes of a spiritual body he means an immaterial one. ⁴² So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. The answer to the second question in verse 35 becomes explicit. For Paul, resurrection is not the reanimation of dead flesh. Resurrection is rather the creation of a brand new spiritual body. The risen body is glorious, while the corpse is far from this. The spirit will no longer be hampered, but be free. Significantly, the idea of rising from the dead to a new and eternal life has its roots in Jewish eschatological hope. For passages like this, we have the idea of the resurrection of the just as a transition to eternal life. It was clearly not a return to earthly life. After death, our souls do not leave our bodies and fly around like ghosts. No, our physical bodies die, and then God raises us with spiritual bodies. After the very real deaths of our physical bodies, we receive the very real life of our spiritual bodies. The focus upon the pneumatic quality of resurrection life reminds us that the Spirit is the creator of all life. The point is that a new body replaces the old one. There is a continuous succession of resurrection. “Sowing in dishonor,” suggests death is not honorable but an enemy.  The corpse is subject to nature while the raised body is subject to the spirit. Behind this discussion is the awareness that among some Greeks and Romans there was a notion of immortal spirit life and contempt for things physical. A bodily resurrection to these "believers" would be unseemly and even beneath God's power, for God was supremely spiritual. Paul does not deny a spiritual incorruptibility that replaces a bodily mortality. Yet again, to Paul this immortality of the soul is an insufficient explanation of the mystery and power of the Gospel. The triumph of the resurrection is a transformation of the body, not an escape from it. There is no spirit/body dualism in Paul's thinking about the resurrection. ⁴³ We sow in dishonor; God raises it in glory. We sow in weakness; God raises it in power. ⁴⁴ It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. His argument resonates with a similar one that C. S. Lewis once proffered, namely, that our present dissatisfaction adumbrates that God has made us for another world.[5] The theological interest in this passage centers in verses 45-49, in which Paul is making a clear contrast between the first Adam and the second Adam. I want to explore this notion a bit with the reader, to see what it is that Paul wants to help the Corinthians understand, and then, how it might help us as well. ⁴⁵ Thus it is written, "The first man, Adam, became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Paul alludes to Genesis 2: 7. One of the issues in this passage is whether the contrast between soul/spirit is entirely negative. I think most scholars would agree that the “psychical” is not sinful, but it is open to corruption. However, as I will show, others would find more debatable the idea that the reference to the Fall in this passage is a link to the wisdom tradition within Jewish thought, thereby stressing the earthly and corruptible part of humanity. Most scholars would agree what separates Paul from his opponents at Corinth at this point is that he looks at the heavenly and spiritual as still coming, while his opponents think they are in possession.[6] In any case, John D. G. Dunn[7] makes the point that what Paul has done is merge the life-giving Spirit and exalted Christ in his thinking. As Paul does in other of his writings, where he can write of either the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of Christ, he has done so here. This life-giving Spirit is the power of God recognized by the consciousness of oneness with Christ and in Christ by the impress of the character of Christ that it begins to bring about in the life of the believer. In another sense, Spirit and Christ remain distinct. He puts the paradox in this way: if the exalted Christ is to the believer as life-giving Spirit, he is to God as firstborn Son. For him, this indeterminate intermediate role of the exalted Christ between humanity and God as Son and between God and humanity as Spirit that we find the uncomfortable dynamic that was an important factor in pushing Christian thought in a Trinitarian direction. ⁴⁶ Nevertheless, it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. Adam was only capable of attaining to perfection. Holiness could be the result of the free offering of oneself. In some ways this observation, which states the obvious concerning our taken-for-granted reality, perhaps indicates that Paul is not so subtly addressing those who may be presumptuously claiming that they have already experienced the resurrection, thus avoiding the valley of the shadow of death to borrow the poetry of Psalm 23. Paul rejects such an assertion as incongruent with both Scripture and nature itself. ⁴⁷ The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. Paul now refers to the second coming. Christ is the “man from heaven,” of course. When Philo used a similar term, it referred to the teaching of Plato, a mythical and primal state or the ideal. For Paul, the background is the Son of Man as found in Enoch. He used the concept to refer the last time.[8] ⁴⁸ As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹ Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. All who remain in Adam return to dust. In Christ, however, God will glorify them. The point is the correspondence between two essentially different Adam/Anthropoi, a spiritual and heavenly being from a soulish and earthly being. One is macrocosmic, upper and first in the heavenly hierarchy, while the other is microcosmic, lower and second. Paul establishes a new sequence, polemically affirming that nevertheless the psychic, not the pneumatic, is first, and only then does the pneumatic come. I say “polemically,” because he must maintain the early Church teaching of eschatology as centered in the renewal of creation in Christ that is yet to come. [9] ⁵⁰ What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Here is the main proposition of this passage. Death is an essential part of eternal life with God. This knowledge helps us to accept death as a part of God’s care for us, in this life and the next. If we let go of fear, we can get more out of life. In light of Paul’s main proposition, what is his view of our physical life on Earth? He undoubtedly recognizes the futility of any attempt to cling to an earthly life, since death comes to all. Consequently, he calls on Corinthian believers to embrace an alternative vision that shapes their understanding of the present life in anticipation of their future life. Death is a fact of life, of course. Yet, this fact may well be a vocation or calling each of us must fulfill. It may be a sacred or holy call. When the summons comes, we can be angry, bitter, or terrified. However, if we see it as a call from God, we can prepare ourselves for the difficulties it presents.[10]

            For me, the theological issues raised in this passage are intriguing. I will begin with them. I will conclude with a few devotional reflections.

One approach to this material is to focus on the first and second Adam as part of the Gnostic redeemer myth. Bultmann[11]  is the most well known proponent of this position. He thinks that behind the allusion to the fall of creation is Gnostic myth. In the case of this passage, he thinks the passage derives the plight of humanity derived from Adam from the inborn quality of Adam, who, without any reference to his fall, is “soul” and not “spirit.” Adam is non-spiritual and earthy. He has no possibility of perceiving the will of God because he is the “unspiritual” person who has no perception of the Spirit, as Paul says in I Corinthians 2:4. Adam is doomed to death by his origin in dust. Consequently, Adam must have been sinful by nature. What Bultmann finds interesting is that Paul follows closely Genesis 2:7 in describing Adam as a living soul, denoting a living being. However, for him, Paul smuggles in a foreign idea when he contrasts living soul with life-giving spirit. The contrast is between psychic and pneumatic humanity, between human of soul and humanity of spirit, designates two differences classes. “Soul” becomes natural, earthly vitality in contrast to the divinely given capacity for eternal life. In this sense, it has the meaning of second rate, limited, and transitory. For him, one can explain this contrast only by reference to Gnostic anthropology. For him, this passage, along with other references to Adam in the writings of Paul, make it clear that Gnostic myth had already influenced his teaching. Yet, he admits that identifying Gnostic thinking as the background would be easier if Paul used “fleshly” here rather than “soul.” I hope that the rest of this discussion will show that it might be better to interpret Paul differently than the way Bultmann suggests.

I mention Bultmann here because it illustrates the difficulty of any study that has a historical piece to it. Our understanding of history changes, especially if we have refined our knowledge and information of it. This can occur in particular with ancient studies. In the case of Bultmann, who was as a fine a New Testament scholar as one can become, further research into Gnostic studies has shown that, according to Dunn,[12] his formulation of the myth is an abstraction from sources later than the New Testament. As of today, we have no texts that indicate that a gnostic redeemer myth was already current at the time of Paul. To the contrary, the textual evidence is that it was a second century development that owes its influence from Christian sources. In other words, the extent to which current Gnostic literature has New Testament language, it seems as if the New Testament is influencing Gnostic thought in certain directions.

One way to consider what Bultmann is saying here is to contrast it with another way of thinking about the notion of a spiritual body. In considering the notion of a spiritual body, Paul seems to differ from the Gnostic, for whom myth simply renders the service of kindling recollection of a reality already alive within. In contrast, for Paul, the resurrection begins his reflections on the notion of a spiritual body. Paul begins with the ideas of the Corinthians. However, he refutes them by understanding the spiritual body, not as something the believer already has that outlasts death, but as something that God will yet give in the general resurrection. He writes of the life-giving spirit as the creative act of the risen Lord. Paul is not thinking of a pneumatic body concealed under the earthly body. In fact, he is rejecting this view in verse 46. Paul is contending against a belief that regards the spiritual body as original, as proper to humanity as such, so that God does not have to give it to humanity in the resurrection. They know of a spiritual body in a Gnostic sense, and thus not in the sense that Paul teaches it. If Christ, like Adam, shapes the humanity belonging to him, then it is natural for the Corinthians to conclude that God has already raised all who belong to Christ. In contrast, for Paul, they receive resurrection only in the One who will one day make them this. Paul does not presuppose, as a modern person might, that the substance of the developing plant is already present in the seed so that there is only a change of form. The point is that the spiritual body of either Christ or the believer, then, is not one that consists of spirit, but rather one that the spirit controls, and therefore he thinks of a creative power rather than a substance. Paul has no interest in a metaphysical substance that unites redeemer and redeemed. Rather, his interest is in the fact that the action of God in Christ is determinative for believers. What we see in this passage is that life after death is for Paul dependent on the resurrection of the body, since non-bodily life is quite inconceivable for him. This means the resurrection is entirely an act of God. An inner part of humanity is not a heavenly life already in human possession, so that one no longer refers human beings to the creative act of God. [13]

I hope this will open us to another approach, one that I favor, namely, to focus upon the Jewish background for the notion of a first and second Adam. W. D. Davies[14]  has a thorough discussion of the background of the notion of the first and second Adam. I will limit my comments to the influence his discussion has on this passage. How was Paul to express the deliverance and power that had come to him through Christ? He came to view the Christian dispensation as a new creation, terminology familiar to him out of his Jewish tradition. Within Judaism, this development led to increased speculation concerning the Genesis 2-3, and in particular, the significance of the fall of Adam.

As Davies describes it, Rabbinic Judaism went the direction of glorifying Adam. Jewish literature speculated concerning what life was like for Adam before the fall, often picturing it as glorious, in order to make the fall of Adam even more dramatic. The Book of Jubilees 3:28-29, the Apocalypse of Baruch, and 4 Ezra all include such references. The fall would have cosmological significance. The reason for this is that God created the world for humanity. When Adam sinned, the whole creation participated in the corruption. Of course, for us as modern readers, such a notion is far more difficult, given the expanse of the universe. In any case, if the fall had cosmic implications, the age of the Messiah must undo the consequences of the fall. Clearly, once Paul was convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, his mind would assign to the risen and exalted Lord the cosmic functions Judaism had come to expect of the Messiah. The Christian dispensation, as a new creation, must redress the balance of the old. The Christian conception of redemption is the counterpart of the Jewish conception of creation. With this being the case, the transition to the thought of Christ as a second Adam was almost inevitable. In this passage, Paul explicitly calls Jesus the second Adam, the counterpart of the Adam that Genesis 1-2 describes. Davies concludes, rightly I think, that Paul is the origin in the early church of this image. He did so, based upon the pre-Pauline thought of the Christian dispensation as a new creation. For Davies, Jewish preoccupation with the problem of sin and its relation to Adam is enough to account for the growth of traditions about Adam.

In contrast, Davies says, the influence of Plato modified the thought of Hellenistic circles. Philo (Leg. Alleg. I.31) distinguished between a heavenly man created in Genesis 1 and an earthly human being formed in Genesis 2. The Heavenly, created in the image of God, has not part in corruptible earthly substance. God made the earthly human being out of matter or “dust.”[15] The earth-born man had noble endowments of both mind and body. He was beautiful and good. He surmises the beauty of the body from the nature of God, who would select the best parts of creation that fit the being of what God created.

            Davies thinks two developments occurred within Judaism. One was the glorification of Adam before the fall in Rabbinic Judaism. The other was the development within Hellenistic Judaism between a heavenly and earthly Adam. He clearly thinks that this is the intellectual soil for the Pauline teaching in this regard, and most likely the ideas he must combat in Corinth. They would be familiar with the ideas of Philo. He thinks it unlikely that Paul read Philo.

            Davies applies these thoughts to I Corinthians 15 by saying that the chapter claims that Paul has to fight a battle on two fronts. He fights against a Hellenistic denial of all resurrection of the dead in the interests of a mistaken spirituality. He must also argue against a crass materialism as to the method of the resurrection that one often finds in Rabbinic Judaism. He must assert the reality and centrality of the resurrection against those who claimed that the soul could exist without a body. He must also re-interpret the resurrection in such a way as to show that it was not the flesh and blood that was to be raised, but a body new in kind, a “spiritual body.” I must note that Paul appears to have some acquaintance with the ideas of Philo. Paul could use the terminology of Philo if it served his missionary purpose. Yet, the danger is that such accommodation might go too far. In contrast to Philo, Paul teaches in this chapter that Jesus is indeed the man from heaven, but that he is not a mere idea and incorporeal, he appeared in history. Significantly, Paul identifies the heavenly with Jesus, who came well after the first Adam. For Paul, the heavenly man has introduced the other realm into this time and space. For Paul, the particular is not a scandal. For Paul, the use of the second Adam image appears to be polemical. As Paul continues to develop his thought, just as Adam symbolized the unity of humanity, so Christ as the second Adam symbolized the re-constitution and re-unification of humanity, which is not the intent and purpose of God in dealing with humanity.

The separation of the first and last Adam by so many years shows the separation of the natural and spiritual body. The image of Adam, the physical body, God will transform into the image of Christ, a spiritual body. As long as Christians are in their earthly bodies, they are like Adam. In their resurrected bodies, they will be like Christ. For Paul, Christ and Spirit are a unity, even as we see here, where Christ is a life giving spirit. Barth[16] thinks the point is that Christ is the first and true Adam, of which the first Adam is only a type.

            Wolfhart Pannenberg[17] has placed this theological issue into a context that I think is quite helpful. With Paul, the God of redemption revealed in Christ is the same as the creator of the world. The saving work of God is an expression of divine faithfulness to the creating work of God. Such a salvation history has the aim of human fulfillment in Christ. In that case, the sending of the “last Adam” has an intentional connection to the first Adam. We receive a hint of this emphasis in the letter of Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians (20). He told the Ephesians that he was declaring to them the divine plan of salvation, which aims at the new man, Jesus Christ, “which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying, but [which causes] that we should live forever in Jesus Christ.” The one who primarily developed this thought in the early church was Irenaeus (Adv. Haer, especially 3-5). One passage in particular is interesting. In 3.23, Irenaeus points out that God created Adam to live. We participate in that divine intent. Therefore, if God left us alone, our disobedience would defeat the intent of God. The serpent in the Garden of Eden and human disobedience would have conquered God. The will of the serpent would prevail over the will of God. However, Christ as the new Adam came to fulfill the original intent of God in creating humanity in the first place.[18] Irenaeus goes on to argue that Adam himself must be saved, as if to make sure that the intent of God toward Adam not be thwarted by an evil forces. The intent is to restore the image of God in humanity. He goes on to argue (5.16.2) of the significance of the coming of the Logos. The Logos becomes a human being in such a way that humanity becomes precious to the Father by making clear that God had created humanity in the image of God.[19] Interestingly, Irenaeus refers to verses 48 and 49 to support the following argument in 5.9.3. Flesh without Spirit is dead. It does not have life and cannot possess the kingdom of God. However, where the Spirit is we find a living human being preserved by God. Spirit possesses flesh and it conforms to the Logos. The Lord fashioned the earthly, but the heavenly is the Spirit. Irenaeus then encourages turning away from our former time of living without the Spirit to walk now in newness of life in the Spirit. We participate in the Spirit through faith and in the way we live.[20] What Irenaeus has done is integrate the covenant history of God with Israel into his picture of human history as a whole. Based upon the passage we are now considering, Irenaeus links the Old Testament statements about the creation of Adam to the statements by Paul about Jesus Christ as the last and definitive Adam. What we have here is more of a sequence, first the Adam who is a living soul of Genesis 2:7, and then the spiritual man of I Corinthians 15:46. For him, nature had to come first, then the mortal and corruptible had to be overcome. Humanity had to become according to the image and likeness of God, having first attained to the knowledge of good and evil. We are all to receive life in the spiritual Adam as we all died in the psychic Adam. For Irenaeus, the basis of the perfecting of humanity is already present in the Incarnation, a thought that takes us beyond what Paul says here, but is consistent with bringing the Gospel of John into one's picture. In 5.15.5, he puts it in a rather graphic way. Adam hid himself from the Lord because of his disobedience. The Lord came in the evening and called for him. In the last time, the same Word of God came to call humanity, reminding humanity of its sin, living as if trying to hide from the Lord. In these last times, the Lord is searching out the posterity of Adam and has visited them.[21]

            Reflections like these relate to the concept of humanity generally. In fact, Christian theology must make such connections, or else it will lose the interrelation of creation and redemption.[22] This passage suggests that the divine will finds it fulfillment as we allow the Spirit to draw us into the image of Christ.[23]

            For some theologians, of course, such apocalyptic notions are no longer tenable. Further, in sharp contrast to Paul, the Christ-centered nature of these reflections is off-putting. Their approach is to abandon what Paul says while also finding something suggestive and redeeming in it that would be congenial to modern psychology and physical science. What they want to do, I think, is to find the germ of a general idea that is humanitarian, thereby liberating Christianity from what they think of as the scandal of the focus upon the particularity of Christ.

            Peter C. Hodgson[24] wants to provide a way out of the absurdity by building upon a suggestive insight from Karl Rahner. For Rahner, the individual lives in an open relation to the world, so open, in fact, that the world is an extension of one’s own body. His application of this thought is that in death, the human self becomes one with the cosmos, rather than without a cosmos. In this way, he thinks, we can understand the contrast Paul makes between the spiritual body and physical body. God preserves self-identity by participation in a community or a spiritual realm of being. One does not lose the self. Rather, God takes the self into a higher unity or structure, where the self finds an identity that founds itself outside itself. Thus, by surrendering its limited bodily structure in death, the self becomes open towards the universe and, in a way unknown to us, becomes a co-determining factor of the universe through the influence of character developed in personal life upon other beings that are spiritual and corporal.[25] The point Rahner is making is that collectively, individuals share responsibility in the way the world is. Each individual adds something unique to it, in death as in life. The dead continue to have their influence upon the living. Hodgson finds this view attractive because he wants to avoid the notion that resurrection means coming back to this life or the continuation in any way of individual physical existence. For him, then, resurrection means that the preservation of one’s identity occurs in a new communal, corporate embodiment that is spiritual in character. For him, the “spiritual body” is a spiritual community created by the Spirit. Individual destiny and universal destiny come together here.

            What Gordon D. Kaufman[26] offers is that Paul rejects in this passage the notion that resurrection is resuscitation of a dead physical body. He thinks that the Greek text makes the sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual in this passage even stronger than it comes across in English. What Paul does is invent the paradoxical notion of a spiritual body to denote this new state. For him, it means that we get a clue as to what the resurrected body meant for Paul, and therefore, his view of the resurrected body of Jesus. It was a transformed body, in contrast to flesh and blood. Jesus was alive again, but in some nonphysical mode of being. Paul wants to affirm personal continuity while denying physical continuity. For him, we can say little more than that.

            Both Hodgson and Kaufman are willing to abandon the apocalyptic context out of which the first century Christians interpreted the appearances and the empty tomb. They replace this notion with an interpretation of the resurrection as the rise of the self into the ethical community of humanity (Hodgson) or the “spiritual body” of the Christian community, focused in love and forgiveness (Kaufman). Clearly, for them, the continuing credibility of the Christian faith for modern people requires abandoning both the traditional notion of the resurrection of Jesus, and therefore, the traditional Christian hope for the world.            

            I do not draw a conclusion here for the reader; for I think that each preacher and teacher within the church will need to make a decision here. Is there continuing validity to the apocalyptic message of the gospel Paul reached? If so, Pannenberg provides a way to present intelligibly the largely orthodox view to a modern world. If no, both Hodgson and Kaufman provide a way of setting aside such notions and allow modern psychology and science to determine how the Christian reads such material. Both positions have some rationality to them. My question for Kaufman and Hodgson is to ask why one would want to stay in the church with such beliefs. The beliefs of the church become a weight on the truth they seek, rather than a help toward truth.

            I conclude with just a few devotional reflections.

I find it quite natural for human beings to ponder what happens to us after death. We are creatures who wonder about so many things. Human life is about the journey, of course, and not the destination. My hope is that at my end I will be able to say it has been a wonderful trip. Most of us want to live our lives in such a way that we can greet its end with peace and trust. We do not need to ponder much the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell. We cannot fathom much about what “life” will be like after death. As Paul put it, we see through a glass darkly. As he also put it, love will outlast everything. We walk by faith and not by sight. Yet, we can have the confidence that the one who has been with us throughout life will be with us in the end. When evening comes, and for us, the world becomes silent. For us, the fever of life is over. For us, the work is done. Trusting in the mercy of God, we will find safe lodging, rest, and peace.[27]

One vision of eternal life comes from the epic poem Paradiso, by the Italian writer Dante Alighieri. This poem is the third and final section of his Divine Comedy, which begins with a journey through Hell and Purgatory and ends in Paradise. Salvation becomes achieving unity with God. Unity with the one who made us is the goal of all our striving on earth. We reach this goal when we have let go of everything that separates us from God and from each other. That is the kingdom of God, the place Dante called Paradiso, where faithful people live in the light of love, eternally close to God and to each other. There we achieve unity with God, we yield our egos to the will of God, and we let go of everything that separates us from God and from each other. We do not move closer to Paradise by pretending that our lives will not end, or that we will transition into ghosts. Instead, we prepare for it by talking about life, death and resurrection, and focusing on unity with God and with each other.[28]

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[1] There is nothing that is more at variance with human reason than this article of faith. For who but God alone could persuade us that bodies, which are now liable to corruption, will, after having rotted away, or after they have been consumed by fire, or torn in pieces by wild beasts, will not merely be restored entire, but in a greatly better condition. Do not all our apprehensions of things straightway reject this as a thing fabulous, nay, most absurd? –John Calvin

[2] ¯Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Holt, 2014), 187.

[3] Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 305-306)

[4] Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 308)

[5] C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 10)

[6] Eduard Schweizer (TDNT, Volume 9, p. 662-663)

[7] Dunn (Christology in the Making, p. 148-149)

[8] Traub (TDNT, Volume 5, p. 528-529)

[9] Colpe (TDNT, Volume 8, p. 471-472)

[10] —R.C. Sproul, Surprised by Suffering (Tyndale, 1994).

[11] Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, Volume 1, p. 166-167, 174, 204, 249, 251)

[12] Dunn (Christology in the Making, p. 99)

[13] Eduard Schweizer (TDNT, Volume 6, p. 420-421, Volume 7, 1060, 1062, 1072-1073)

[14] Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 36-57)

[15] There are two kinds of human beings. The one is a heavenly Man, the other earthly. The Heavenly Man being in the image of God has no part in corruptible substance, or in any earthly substance, whatever; but the earthly man was made of germinal matter which the writer calls 'dust.' For this reason he does not say that the heavenly man was created but that he was stamped with the image of God, whereas the earthly man is a creature and not the offspring of the Creator.

[16] Barth (Church Dogmatics, IV.1, 513 [60.3])

[17] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p.297-301)

[18] He is worth hearing out on this.

For if man, who had been created by God that he might live, after losing life, through being injured by the serpent that had corrupted him, should not any more return to life, but should be utterly [and for ever] abandoned to death, God would [in that case] have been conquered, and the wickedness of the serpent would have prevailed over the will of God. But inasmuch as God is invincible and long-suffering, He did indeed show Himself to be long-suffering …

[19] And then, again, this Word was manifested when the Word of God was made man, assimilating Himself to man, and man to Himself, so that by means of his resemblance to the Son, man might become precious to the Father. For in times long past, it was said that man was created after the image of God, but it was not [actually] shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, after whose image man was created, Wherefore also he did easily lose the similitude.

[20] The flesh, therefore, when destitute of the Spirit of God, is dead, not having life, and cannot possess the kingdom of God: [it is as] irrational blood, like water poured out upon the ground. And therefore he says, “As is the earthy, such are they that are earthy.” But where the Spirit of the Father is, there is a living man; [there is] the rational blood preserved by God for the avenging [of those that shed it]; [there is] the flesh possessed by the Spirit, forgetful indeed of what belongs to it, and adopting the quality of the Spirit, being made conformable to the Word of God. And on this account he (the apostle) declares, “As we have borne the image of him who is of the earth, we shall also bear the image of Him who is from heaven.” What, therefore, is the earthly? That which was fashioned. And what is the heavenly? The Spirit. As therefore he says, when we were destitute of the celestial Spirit, we walked in former times in the oldness of the flesh, not obeying God; so now let us, receiving the Spirit, walk in newness of life, obeying God. Inasmuch, therefore, as without the Spirit of God we cannot be saved, the apostle exhorts us through faith and chaste conversation to preserve the Spirit of God, lest, having become non-participators of the Divine Spirit, we lose the kingdom of heaven; and he exclaims, that flesh in itself, and blood, cannot possess the kingdom of God.

[21] Wherefore also the Scripture, pointing out what should come to pass, says, that when Adam had hid himself because of his disobedience, the Lord came to him at eventide, called him forth, and said, “Where art thou?” That means that in the last times the very same Word of God came to call man, reminding him of his doings, living in which he had been hidden from the Lord. For just as at that time God spake to Adam at eventide, searching him out; so in the last times, by means of the same voice, searching out his posterity, He has visited them.

[22] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p. 208)

[23] Pannenberg (ibid., Volume 3, p.. 522)

[24] Hodgson (Winds of the Spirit, p. 273-274)

[25] Rahner, Theology of Death (p. 22) As Rahner puts it,

By surrendering its limited bodily structure in death, becomes open towards the universe and, in some way, a co-determining factor of the universe precisely in the latter’s character as the ground of the personal life of other spiritual corporal beings.

[26] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective, 417 420)

[27] Inspired by William Hudnut, former Indianapolis mayor and Presbyterian minister, shortly before his death in December 2016. hudnutcommons.org. Retrieved August 8, 2018. As Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote, “O Lord, support us all the day long, till the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done, and then in Thy great mercy, grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest and peace at the last. Amen.”

[28] Inspired by Dreher, Rod. “Paradiso, Canto I.” The American Conservative, May 3, 2014, theamericanconservative.com.