The Body Rises Again

Meanwhile the Marcionite will produce nothing of the kind. By now he is afraid to say which side has the better claim to a Christ who has not yet been revealed. Just as my Christ is still to be looked for — the Christ foretold from the beginning — so his Christ, therefore, has no existence at all, since he was never announced from the beginning. Ours is the better faith: it believes in a Christ still to come, where the heretic’s faith has no Christ at all to believe in. [a]

Now, on the resurrection of the dead. Let us first ask how some people denied it in those days. No doubt in the same way it is denied now, since the resurrection of the flesh has never lacked men to deny it. Plenty of learned men claim a divine nature for the soul and are confident it will never die, and even the common crowd worships the dead, on the bold assumption that their souls live on. Our bodies, though, plainly perish — at once, by fire or by the wild beasts, or else, however carefully they are kept, by sheer length of time. So when the apostle refutes people who deny the resurrection of the flesh, what he defends against them is precisely the thing they deny: the resurrection of the body. There is the whole answer, in a nutshell. Everything else is beside the point.

And on this very point — what is called the resurrection of the dead — the exact force of the words has to be defended. The word dead says simply this: something that has lost the soul by which it used to live. Now the thing that loses life, and by losing it becomes dead, is the body. So the word dead fits the body and nothing else. And since resurrection happens to what is dead, and dead is a word that applies only to a body, the body is the only thing that has a resurrection belonging to it. In the same way, the word resurrection — rising again — covers only what has fallen down. You can say that something rises when it never fell but was always lying there. But you can only say that something rises again if it fell; it is because it fell that its getting up is called rising again. The syllable re- always means a second time.

We say, then, that the body falls to the ground in death — as the facts themselves show, and in accordance with the law of God. For it was to the body that it was said, Dust you are, and to dust you will return. So what came out of the ground will go back to the ground. What returns to the ground is what falls; and what falls is what rises again.

“Since death came by a man, the resurrection came by a man too.” Here, in the word man — who is made of bodily substance, as I have shown again and again — the body of Christ is set before me. And if we are all made alive in Christ in the same way that we die in Adam, then it must follow that we are made alive in Christ as bodily substance, since it was as bodily substance that we died in Adam. The likeness is not complete unless our being made alive in Christ agrees, in the very same substance, with our being put to death in Adam.

But at this point the apostle has slipped in a remark about Christ, and since it bears on the argument in hand it must not be passed over. For the resurrection of the body will be all the better proved the more successfully I show that Christ belongs to the God who is believed to have provided for this resurrection of the flesh in his own ordering of things.

When he says, “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet,” we can see straight off from that statement that he is speaking of a God who takes vengeance — that is, of the God who made this promise to Christ: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. The Lord will send out the rod of your strength from Zion, and he will rule together with you in the middle of your enemies. I have to lay claim to the Scriptures the Jews are trying to take away from us, and to show that they support my case. Now they say this psalm was sung in honor of Hezekiah, because “he sat at the right hand of the temple,” and God turned back and drove off his enemies. And so, they argue, those other words — “from the womb, before the morning star, I have begotten you” — apply to Hezekiah, and to Hezekiah’s birth.

We, for our part, have published Gospels — and for the credit they carry we are in some debt even to those men, who have already lent so great a work a measure of confirmation. Our Gospels declare that the Lord was born at night, so that it should indeed be “before the morning star.” That is clear from the star above all; from the word of the angel, who announced to the shepherds in the night that Christ had been born at that very moment; and from the place of the birth, since it is toward nightfall that travelers reach the inn. Perhaps, too, there was a hidden meaning in his being born at night, seeing that he was to be the light of the truth among the dark shadows of ignorance.

Nor, again, would God have said “I have begotten you” to anyone but his true Son. He does say of the whole people, “I have begotten children” — but he did not add “from the womb.” Why would he add that phrase so pointlessly, as though anyone could doubt that a person is born from a womb, unless the Holy Spirit wanted the words to be understood, with particular care, of Christ? “I have begotten you from the womb” — that is, from a womb only, without a man’s seed, charging it to flesh that he should come out of a womb.

What the psalm adds next — “You are a priest forever” — belongs to Christ himself. Hezekiah was no priest; and even if he had been one, he would not have been a priest forever. “After the order,” God says, “of Melchizedek.” What had Hezekiah to do with Melchizedek, the priest of God Most High — and an uncircumcised man at that — who blessed the circumcised Abraham after receiving the tenth from him? To Christ, though, “the order of Melchizedek” fits perfectly, for Christ is the true and lawful high priest of God. He is the chief priest of an uncircumcised priesthood, appointed even then for the nations, who were to receive him more fully — although at his last coming he will also accept and bless the circumcision, Abraham’s own race, which is to acknowledge him by and by.

Then there is another psalm as well, which opens like this: “Give your judgments, God, to the king” — that is, to the Christ who was to come as king — “and your righteousness to the king’s son” — that is, to Christ’s people, since those who are born again in him are his sons. But it will be said here that the psalm refers to Solomon. Well then: will not the parts of it that fit Christ and no one else be enough to teach us that all the rest of it belongs to Christ too, and not to Solomon? “He will come down,” it says, “like rain on a fleece, and like showers falling on the earth” — which describes his coming down from heaven into flesh as gentle and unnoticed. Solomon, if he came down at all, did not come down like a shower, because he did not come down from heaven.

But let me put plainer points to you. “He will have dominion,” says the psalmist, “from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.” That was given to Christ alone, while Solomon reigned over the middling kingdom of Judah and no more. “Yes, all kings will bow down before him.” Whom will they all worship in that way, if not Christ? “All nations will serve him.” To whom will they all pay homage, if not Christ? “His name will last forever.” Whose name has that kind of permanence but Christ’s? “His name will remain longer than the sun” — for the Word of God, who is Christ, will outlast the sun. “And in him all nations will be blessed.” In Solomon no nation was blessed; in Christ every nation is.

And what if the psalm proves him to be God as well? “They will call him blessed.” On what ground? “Because blessed is the Lord God of Israel, who alone does wonderful things. Blessed too is his glorious name, and the whole earth will be filled with his glory.” Solomon, on the contrary — and I make bold to say it — lost even the glory he had from God, seduced by his love of women as far as idolatry.

And so the line that stands about the middle of this psalm, “His enemies will lick the dust” — having been, of course, in the apostle’s phrase, “put under his feet” — serves the exact purpose I had in view when I brought the psalm in and pressed my reading of it: to demonstrate both the glory of his kingdom and the subjection of his enemies, carried out according to the Creator’s own plans, and so to arrive at this conclusion — that no one but he can be believed to be the Christ of the Creator.