Sown a Body, Raised a Body

Let us come back now to the resurrection. I have already given its defense against heretics of every sort enough attention in another book of mine, but I will not leave the teaching undefended here either, for the sake of readers who do not know that short treatise. “What,” he asks, “will they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead are not raised at all?” Never mind that practice, whatever it may have been. The February purifications, with their praying for the dead, will perhaps answer him quite as well. So do not suppose that the apostle is pointing here to some new god as the author and patron of baptism for the dead. His one reason for mentioning it was to press the resurrection of the body all the harder, since the people who were being baptized for the dead to no purpose took up the practice out of a belief in a resurrection of that kind. We have the apostle elsewhere laying it down that there is “only one baptism.” To be “baptized for the dead,” then, actually means to be baptized for the body — for, as we have shown, it is the body that becomes dead. What, then, will they do who are baptized for the body, if the body is not raised? So we are on firm ground when we say that the next question the apostle takes up has to do with the body just as much. [a]

“But someone will say, ‘How are the dead raised? With what body do they come?’” Having settled the resurrection itself, which was the thing being denied, it followed naturally that he should discuss what sort of body it would be, since nobody had any idea. On this point we have other opponents to engage. Marcion does not allow a resurrection of the flesh in any sense at all; the only thing he promises is the salvation of the soul. So the question he raises is not what sort of body it will be, but whether there is any such substance at all. Even so, he is refuted plainly enough out of what the apostle brings forward about the quality of the body, in answer to people who ask, “How are the dead raised? with what body do they come?” For in treating what sort of body it would be, the apostle announced by that very fact, in the course of the argument, that it was a body that would rise. Look at the examples he sets out. He offers “a grain of wheat, or some other grain, to which God gives a body just as it has pleased him”; he says that “to every seed belongs its own body”; and that, in consequence, “there is one kind of flesh of men, another of animals, another of birds; that there are heavenly bodies too and earthly bodies; and that the sun has one glory, the moon another, the stars another.” Does he not therefore signal a resurrection of the flesh, of the body — a thing he illustrates by samples that are fleshly and bodily? And does he not guarantee at the same time that the resurrection will be carried out by the God from whom every one of those examples comes? “So also,” he says, “is the resurrection of the dead.” How? Just as the grain, which is sown a body, comes up a body. By this sowing of the body he meant its dissolving in the ground, “because it is sown in corruption,” but is raised “to honor and power.” Now it is with us exactly as it is with the grain: the work of reviving the body will belong to the one who ordered the process by which it was taken apart. But if you remove the body from the resurrection after handing it over to the dissolving, what becomes of the difference between the two outcomes?

In the same way: “although it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Now the soul and the spirit each have a body proper to themselves, so that “the natural body” may fairly be taken to mean the soul, and “the spiritual body” the spirit. But that is no reason to suppose the apostle is saying that the soul is to become spirit at the resurrection. What he is saying is that the body will become spiritual — the body which, since it is born along with the soul and keeps its life by means of the soul, can be called soulish — because it rises through the Spirit into unending life. In short, it is not the soul but the flesh that is “sown in corruption,” when it turns to decay in the ground. So once that dissolving is over, the soul is no longer the natural body; it is the flesh, which was the natural body, that undergoes the change, since out of a natural body it is made a spiritual body — as he says a little further down, “That was not first which is spiritual.”

He had just said as much about Christ himself: “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a life-giving spirit.” Our heretic, in the excess of his folly, was unwilling to let the statement stand in that shape, and altered “last Adam” into “last Lord.” He was afraid, of course, that if he allowed the Lord to be the last — that is, the second — Adam, we would argue that Christ, being the second Adam, must belong to the God who owned the first Adam as well. But the falsification is transparent. Why is there a first Adam at all, unless there is also a second? Things are not ranked together unless they are alike one by one, and share an identity of name, or of substance, or of author. And although among things that differ individually one must be first and another last, they still have to have one author. If the author is a different one, then he himself may indeed be called the last; but the thing he introduces is a first thing, and only what is like this first in nature can be the last. And it is not like the first in nature, when it is not the work of the same author. He will be refuted in just the same way over the word “man”: “The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.” Since the first was a man, how can there be a second, unless he is a man too? Or else, if the second is “Lord,” was the first “Lord” as well? In any case it is quite enough for me that in his own Gospel he admits the Son of man to be both Christ and Man, so that he will not be able to deny him here, in the apostle’s “Adam” and “man.”

What follows will also be too much for him. The apostle says, “As is the earthy” — meaning the man — “such also are those who are earthy,” men again, of course; “and so, as is the heavenly,” meaning the Man from heaven, “such also are the men who are heavenly.” He could not possibly have set over against earthly men any heavenly beings who were not men as well. His object was to mark off their condition and their expectation more exactly by using a name that belongs to them both in common. For it is with respect to their present condition and their future expectation that he calls men earthly and heavenly, keeping the name the same for both, according as they are reckoned in Adam or in Christ when their end is taken into account. So when he urges them to keep their hope set on heaven, he says: “As we have borne the image of the earthy, let us also bear the image of the heavenly.” That language has nothing to do with any condition of resurrection life; it belongs to the rule of conduct for the present time. He says Let us bear, as a command — not We shall bear, in the sense of a promise — wanting us to walk as he himself was walking, and to put off the likeness of the earthy, that is, of the old man, in the works of the flesh.

For what are his next words? “Now this I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” He means the works of flesh and blood, which in his letter to the Galatians rob men of the kingdom of God. In other passages too he is in the habit of putting the natural condition in place of the deeds that are done in it, as when he says that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” But when will we ever be able to please God except while we are in this flesh? There is no other time, I imagine, in which a man can do any work at all. If, however, even while we are naturally living in the flesh we keep clear of the deeds of the flesh, then we shall not be in the flesh; for though we have not left the substance of the flesh behind, we are nevertheless strangers to its sin. Since, then, when the word flesh is used we are ordered to put off not the substance but the works of the flesh, it follows that in the use of that same word the kingdom of God is refused to the works of the flesh and not to its substance. What is condemned is not the thing evil is done in, but only the evil that is done in it. Administering poison is a crime; the cup it is handed over in is not guilty. So the body is the vessel of the works of the flesh, while the soul inside it mixes the poison of the wicked act. How is it, then, that the soul, which is the real author of the works of the flesh, is to reach the kingdom of God once the deeds done in the body have been paid for, while the body, which was nothing but the soul’s ministering agent, has to stay under condemnation? Is the cup to be punished and the poisoner to escape?

Not that we are claiming the kingdom of God for the flesh. All we do is assert a resurrection for its substance, as the gate through which the kingdom is entered. The resurrection is one thing and the kingdom is another. The resurrection comes first, the kingdom afterwards. So what we say is that the flesh rises again, and that once it has been changed it obtains the kingdom. “For the dead will be raised incorruptible” — even those who had been corruptible when their bodies fell into decay — “and we shall be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. For this corruptible” — and as he spoke, the apostle seems to have pointed to his own flesh — “must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality,” so that it may be made a substance fit for the kingdom of God. “For we shall be like the angels.” That will be the perfect change of our flesh — only after it has been raised. Now if, on the contrary, there is to be no flesh, how is it to put on incorruption and immortality? Having become something else by its change, it will obtain the kingdom of God — no longer the old flesh and blood, but the body God will have given it. The apostle is right, then, to declare that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” for that honor he assigns to the changed condition that follows on the resurrection.

And since what will then be accomplished is the word that was written by the Creator — “O death, where is your victory?” or your struggle — “O death, where is your sting?” — written, I say, by the Creator, since he wrote it through his prophet — the gift will belong to him, that is, the kingdom will belong to him, who spoke the word that is to be accomplished in the kingdom. And the apostle tells us that “thanks” are due for our being made able to win “the victory” over death itself to no other God than the one from whom he got the very wording of that exulting and triumphant challenge flung at the mortal enemy.