Not Even a Hair

But he also teaches us that the one to be feared is the one “who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell” — that is, the Lord alone — and not “those who kill the body but cannot hurt the soul,” meaning every human power there is. So here we have both things acknowledged at once: the soul’s immortality by nature, since men cannot kill it, and the body’s mortality, since it can be killed. And from that we learn that the resurrection of the dead is a resurrection of the flesh; for unless the flesh were raised again, there would be no way for it to be “killed in hell.” [a]

Since somebody may raise a quibble here about what “the body” — or “the flesh” — means, let me say at once that by the human body I understand nothing but that fabric of flesh which, whatever the material it is built and shaped out of, is seen and handled, and sometimes killed, by men. In the same way I would not admit that anything makes up the body of a wall except mortar and stone and brick. If anyone wants to smuggle into our argument some body of a fine and hidden sort, he has to show me, uncover, and prove that this body of his is the very one that human violence killed — and then I will grant that this is the body our Scripture is talking about.

And if somebody throws the body — the bodily nature of the soul — in my teeth, that is only an idle dodge. Both substances are set out side by side in this saying, which declares that “body and soul” are destroyed in hell, so a distinction is obviously being made between the two. We are left, then, to understand the body as the thing we can touch, that is, the flesh. That same flesh may be destroyed in hell, because it did not “rather fear” being destroyed by God; or it may be restored to eternal life, because it chose to be killed by human hands instead.

And if anyone forces the sense, so as to make the destroying of soul and flesh in hell a final wiping out of the two substances rather than a punishment of them — as though they were to be used up and not penalized — let him remember that the fire of hell is eternal, announced in so many words as a penalty without end. Then let him admit that this is exactly what makes that never-ending “killing” more to be feared than a merely human murder, which is over and done with. He will come out at the conclusion that the substances must last forever, since the “killing” that punishes them lasts forever. And since the body, after the resurrection, has to be killed by God in hell along with the soul, that one fact tells us enough about both the things that lie ahead of it: the resurrection of the flesh, and its eternal “killing.”

Otherwise it would be perfectly absurd: the flesh raised up and marked out for “the killing in hell” in order to be finished off, when it could have suffered that wiping out more directly by never being raised at all. A fine paradox — that a substance has to be fitted out with life again in order to receive the wiping out that has in fact already happened to it!

But Christ, while confirming us in this same hope, adds the example of the sparrows — how not one of them “falls to the ground apart from the will of God.” He says this so that you will believe that the flesh which has been committed to the ground is able to rise again in the same way, by the will of the same God. The sparrows are not granted this; yet “we are worth more than many sparrows,” and worth more for this very reason, that when we have fallen we rise again.

Last of all he states that “even the hairs of our head are all numbered,” and in stating it he is of course promising that they are safe. If they were going to be lost, what would be the use of taking such careful count of them? Surely the only use lies in this: “that of all the Father has given me I should lose none” — not so much as a hair, and no more an eye or a tooth. And in any case, where is that “weeping and grinding of teeth” to come from, if not from eyes and teeth? — at the very time when the body is being killed in hell and thrown out into that outer darkness which is the punishment that fits the eyes. The man who is not dressed at the wedding feast in the clothing of good works will have to be “tied hand and foot” — raised in his body, obviously. And then the reclining at table in the kingdom of God, and the sitting on Christ’s thrones, and the standing at the last at his right hand and his left, and the eating from the tree of life: what are all these but the surest proofs that a body is appointed and destined for it?

Now let us see whether the Lord did not give our teaching still greater strength when he broke down the Sadducees’ clever quibble. Their whole aim, I take it, was to do away with the resurrection altogether, for the Sadducees in fact allowed no salvation either for the soul or for the flesh. So they took the strongest case they could find for damaging the credibility of the resurrection, and built the question they raised upon it. Their plausible inquiry was about the flesh: whether or not it would be subject to marriage after the resurrection. And they supposed a woman who had married seven brothers, so that it should be a real puzzle which of them she was to be given back to. [f]

Keep steadily in view what the question meant and what the answer meant, and the whole discussion settles itself. The Sadducees were denying the resurrection; the Lord was affirming it. In affirming it he charged them with two things: with not knowing the Scriptures — the Scriptures, of course, that had declared the resurrection — and with not believing in the power of God, which is certainly equal to raising the dead. And then he went straight on to say, “Now, that the dead are raised,” saying it without any hesitation and affirming the very thing that was being denied — the resurrection of the dead, before him who is “the God of the living.” From all this it plainly follows that he affirmed this truth in exactly the sense in which they were denying it: that it was, in fact, the resurrection of both the natures a human being is made of.

Nor does it follow, as they would like it to, that because Christ denied that people would marry, he therefore proved that they would not rise again. On the contrary, he called them “the children of the resurrection,” as having in a certain sense to undergo a birth by means of the resurrection; and after that they marry no more, but in their risen life are “equal to the angels” — not marrying, because they are not to die, but destined to pass into the angelic state by putting on the clothing of incorruption, though with a change in the substance that is brought back to life. Besides, no question could even be raised about whether we are to marry or to die again unless it threw into doubt the restoring of the one substance that has a particular connection with both death and marriage — that is, the flesh. So here you have the Lord affirming, against the Jewish heretics, the very thing that is now meeting a denial from the Christian Sadducees: the resurrection of the whole human being.

He does say, it is true, that “the flesh is of no use.” But here, as before, the meaning has to be governed by the subject he is speaking about. His hearers thought what he said was harsh and unbearable, supposing that he had really and literally told them to eat his flesh. So, meaning to set out the state of salvation as a spiritual thing, he began from the principle “It is the spirit that gives life,” and then added, “the flesh is of no use” — of no use, that is, for giving life. He goes on to explain what he wants us to understand by spirit: “The words I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” He had said the same thing earlier: “Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” [j]

So, having made his word the thing that gives life, because that word is spirit and life, he gave his flesh the same name too — because the Word had also become flesh. We are therefore to hunger for him in order to have life, and to devour him with the ear, chew him over with the understanding, and digest him by faith. Just before the passage in hand, he had called his flesh “the bread which comes down from heaven,” pressing on his hearers again and again, under the picture of food they could not do without, the memory of their forefathers, who had preferred the bread and meat of Egypt to God’s call.

Then, turning his subject to what was going on in their minds, because he saw that they were about to scatter away from him, he says, “The flesh is of no use.” Now what is there in that to destroy the resurrection of the flesh? As though there could not perfectly well be something which, while it “is of no use” itself, is still capable of having use done to it by something else. The spirit “is of use,” for it imparts life. The flesh is of no use, for it is subject to death. So he has actually put the two statements in the way that favors what we believe: by showing what is of use and what is not, he has thrown light on the thing that receives the use as well as on the one that gives it.

So here, in the passage in hand, we have the Spirit giving life to the flesh that death has beaten down. “The hour is coming,” he says, “when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” Now what is “the dead” but the flesh? And what is “the voice of God” but the Word? And what is the Word but the Spirit — who has every right to raise the flesh he once became himself, and to raise it out of the death he himself suffered and out of the grave he himself once entered?

Then again, when he says, “Do not be surprised at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in the graves will hear the voice of the Son of God and will come out — those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” — after words like that, nobody will be able to make “the dead who are in the graves” mean anything but bodies of flesh, since graves themselves are nothing but the resting place of corpses. It is beyond dispute that even those who share in “the old man” — sinful men, that is, men who are dead through not knowing God, whom our heretics of course insist so foolishly on making the meaning of the word “graves” — are here plainly spoken of as having to come out of their graves for judgment. But how are graves to come out of graves?

After the Lord’s words, what are we to make of the point of his actions, when he raises dead people from their biers and their graves? What did he do it for? If it was only to put his power on show, or to do someone the temporary kindness of giving him his life back, then it was really no great thing for him to raise men up only to die over again. But if, as was in fact the case, it was rather to put people’s belief in a future resurrection into safe keeping, then it follows from the particular shape of his own examples that the resurrection in question will be a bodily one. [q]

I can never allow anyone to say that the resurrection to come, being meant for the soul only, was given these advance illustrations in a raising of the flesh simply because there would have been no way of showing the resurrection of an invisible soul except by bringing a visible substance back to life. People who suppose God is only able to do what fits inside their own thoughts know very little about him. And in any case they cannot help knowing perfectly well what he has always been able to do, if they will only get acquainted with the writings of John. For the man who set before our eyes the souls of the martyrs, still without their bodies, resting under the altar, was certainly capable of displaying them before our eyes rising without a body of flesh.

For my own part, though, I prefer to hold that it is impossible for God to practice a deception — the only thing he could ever be weak in is contrivance. Otherwise we should have to fear that he had given advance proofs of a thing in a form inconsistent with the way he actually means to bring it about; and worse, we should have to fear that, not being strong enough to show us a sample of resurrection without the flesh, he would be feebler still and unable to display, when the time comes, the full carrying out of that sample in the very same substance of flesh. No example, after all, is greater than the thing it is a sample of. Yet greater it would be, if souls together with their body were raised as the evidence for a resurrection of theirs without the body — so that the whole salvation of a human being, soul and body, became the guarantee of only half of him, the soul. The rule in all examples is the other way around: what would be reckoned the lesser thing — I mean a resurrection of the soul only — should be the foretaste of the flesh rising too, when its own time comes.

And so, by our reckoning of the truth, those examples of dead people raised by the Lord really were a proof of the resurrection of the flesh as well as of the soul — a proof, in fact, that this gift was to be refused to neither substance. Taken simply as examples, though, they carried all the less weight — less, that is, than what Christ will show at the last — because they were not raised for glory and immortality, but only for another death.

The Acts of the Apostles bear witness to the resurrection as well. Among the Jews, at any rate, the apostles had nothing else to do than to unseal the Old Testament and to set the seal on the New, and above all to preach God in Christ. So they brought in nothing new about the resurrection, except to announce it to the glory of Christ. In every other respect it had already been received in a plain and intelligent faith, with no question raised about what sort of resurrection it was to be, and with no opponents to face except the Sadducees. It was that much easier to deny the resurrection outright than to understand it in some foreign sense. [s]

You find Paul making his confession of faith before the chief priests, under the protection of the commanding officer, among Sadducees and Pharisees: “Men and brothers,” he says, “I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee; it is about the hope and resurrection of the dead that I am being called to account by you.” He means the nation’s own hope, of course — so that in the position he was then in, looking like a man who had broken the law, he should not be thought to come anywhere near the Sadducees’ opinion on the most important article of the faith, the resurrection. That belief in the resurrection which he was unwilling to look like weakening, he actually confirmed in the judgment of the Pharisees, since he threw out the views of the Sadducees, who denied it.

In the same way, before Agrippa too, he says that he was putting forward “nothing other than what the prophets had announced.” So he was maintaining exactly the kind of resurrection the prophets had foretold. He mentions as well what is written by Moses about the resurrection of the dead; and in mentioning it he must have known that it would be a rising in the body, since a reckoning will have to be made there for the blood of a man. He declared it, then, to be of just the sort the Pharisees had admitted, and just the sort the Lord had himself maintained, and just the sort the Sadducees refused to believe — a refusal that carried them, in fact, into a flat rejection of the whole truth.

Nor had the Athenians, earlier on, understood Paul to be announcing any other resurrection. They had jeered at his announcement; and they would have allowed themselves no such jeering if they had heard nothing from him but the restoring of the soul, for they would have taken that as the perfectly ordinary expectation of their own native philosophy. But when the preaching of the resurrection, which they had not heard before, stirred up the nations by its sheer novelty, and a not unnatural disbelief in so extraordinary a matter began to worry the plain faith with a great deal of argument, then the apostle took care in nearly every one of his letters to strengthen people’s belief in this Christian hope: pointing out that there is such a hope; that it had not been realized yet; that it would be in the body, which was the point people especially wanted settled; and, on a further doubtful question, that it would not be in a body of a different kind from ours.