The Flesh Already in Heaven

“But flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” We are perfectly aware that this too is written. But although our opponents put it in the front line of the battle, we have deliberately held the objection back until now, so that our last assault may knock it over once every question that props it up has been cleared out of the way. Even so, they will have to make themselves recall the arguments we have already made, so that the occasion which first prompted this sentence can help our judgment in working out what it means. [a]

The apostle, as I take it, had set out for the Corinthians the details of their church order, and had then summed up the substance of his own good news and of their belief in a statement of the Lord’s death and resurrection, so as to draw from it the rule of our hope and the ground it rests on. And so he adds this:

“Now if Christ is preached as risen from the dead, how is it that some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either; and if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is empty and your faith is empty too. What is more, we are found to be false witnesses of God, because we have testified about God that he raised up Christ—whom he did not raise up, if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless, because you are still in your sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.”

Now what is the point he so plainly works hard to have us believe all through this passage? The resurrection of the dead—the thing that was being denied. And he certainly wanted it believed on the strength of the example he brought forward: the Lord’s resurrection. Certainly. Then tell me: is an example taken from unlike circumstances, or from like ones? From like ones, obviously. Then how did Christ rise again—in the flesh, or not? Since you are told that he “died according to the Scriptures” and that “he was buried according to the Scriptures,” and neither could be true in anything but the flesh, you will grant as well that it was in the flesh that he was raised from the dead. The very same body that fell in death and lay in the tomb is the body that rose again. It was not so much Christ in the flesh as the flesh in Christ. So if we are to rise again after the example of Christ, who rose in the flesh, we plainly will not be rising after that example unless we too rise in the flesh.

“For,” he says, “since by a man came death, by a man came also the resurrection of the dead.” He says it partly to keep the two originators apart—Adam of death, Christ of resurrection—and partly to make the resurrection work on the same substance the death worked on, by setting the two originators side by side under the one title, man. For if “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive,” then their being made alive in Christ has to be in the flesh, since it is in the flesh that their death in Adam arises. “But each in his own order”—because of course it will also be each in his own body. The order will be assigned to men one by one, according to what each has deserved. And since what a man deserves has to be credited to his body, it must follow that the order too is arranged with respect to bodies, so that it can match what they deserve.

Then again—“some are even baptized for the dead.” Let us see whether there is a good reason for it. It is certain that the people who took the practice up did so on an assumption: that a baptism performed in someone else’s place would benefit another person’s flesh, with the resurrection in view. Unless the resurrection were a bodily one, no pledge of it could be secured by a bodily baptism of that kind. “Why then are they baptized for the dead,” he asks, unless the bodies rise again that are being baptized in this way? For it is not the soul that is made holy by the washing; the soul’s holiness comes from the “answer.”

“And why,” he asks, “do we stand in danger every hour?”—through the flesh, obviously. “I die daily”—that is, beyond question, in the perils of the body, in which he even “fought with wild animals at Ephesus.” Those were the animals that put him in such peril and trouble in Asia, which he mentions in his second letter to this same church at Corinth: “For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the trouble that came on us in Asia—that we were weighed down beyond measure, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life.” If I am not mistaken, he lists all these things because he is unwilling to have his struggles in the body taken for useless, and so wants to work an unshakable belief in the resurrection of the flesh. For a struggle endured in a body has to be reckoned useless if no resurrection is in prospect for that body.

“But someone will say: How are the dead raised? And with what body do they come?” At this point he is discussing the qualities of bodies—whether it is the very same bodies that men will take up again, or different ones. That question has to be treated as a later one. For the moment it is enough for us, in passing, that the resurrection is settled as a bodily one even by this: that the inquiry raised is about the quality of bodies.

We come now to the very heart of the whole question. What are the substances, and of what nature are they, that the apostle has cut out of the inheritance of the kingdom of God? What he has already said gives us our clue here too. He says: “The first man is from the earth, made of dust”—that is, made out of clay: Adam—“the second man is from heaven”—that is, the Word of God, which is Christ. Yet for all that “from heaven,” he is man in no other way than by being himself flesh and soul, exactly as a human being is, exactly as Adam was. Indeed, a little earlier he is called “the second Adam,” taking the sameness of the name from his sharing in the same substance—since not even Adam was flesh from human seed, and in that too Christ is like him. [h]

“As is the man made of dust, such also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly man, such also are those who are heavenly.” Does he mean “such” in substance? Or first in their training, and afterwards in the standing and worth that the training was meant to win? Not in substance, at any rate, will the earthy and the heavenly ever be separated, since the apostle has designated them once for all as men. For even if Christ were the only truly heavenly being—more than heavenly, in fact—he is still man, put together out of body and soul; and in no respect is he cut off from the quality of earthiness, because of that condition of his which makes him a sharer in both substances. In the same way, those who after him are heavenly are understood to have this heavenly quality said of them not from what they are now but from the glory they are to have. For in a sentence just before, which is what started this distinction about difference of dignity, it was shown that there is “one glory of heavenly bodies and another of earthly ones,” and “one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs from another star in glory”—though not in substance.

Then, having laid down in this way the difference in that worth or standing which is to be aimed at now and enjoyed only at the last, the apostle adds an appeal: that here we should follow Christ’s example in our training, and there reach his eminence in glory. “As we have borne the image of the man made of dust, let us also bear the image of the heavenly man.” We have indeed borne the image of the man made of dust—by our share in his transgression, by our share in his death, by our banishment from Paradise. Now although the image of Adam is borne by us in the flesh, we are not urged to put off the flesh. If it is not the flesh, then it is the way of life; and so we may then bear the image of the heavenly man in ourselves—no longer the image of God, and no longer the image of a being whose place is in heaven, but along the lines of Christ, by living here in holiness, righteousness, and truth.

He is so wholly bent on the training of conduct all through this passage that he tells us we ought to bear the image of Christ in this flesh of ours, and in this stretch of time given to instruction and discipline. For when he says “let us bear” as a command, he fits his words to the present life, in which a man exists in no substance but flesh and soul. And if it is another substance, the heavenly one, that this faith of ours looks forward to, still the promise is made to the very substance that is given the order to work hard to earn its reward.

So then: he makes the image of the man made of dust and the image of the heavenly man both consist in conduct—the one to be renounced, the other to be pursued—and then he consistently adds, “For this I say” (on account, that is, of what he has already said, since the word “for” ties what follows to what went before) “that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” He means flesh and blood in no other sense than the “image of the man made of dust” he has been speaking of. And since that image is reckoned to consist in “the old way of life,” and the old way of life does not receive the kingdom of God, therefore flesh and blood, by not receiving the kingdom of God, are reduced to the life of that old way. Of course, the apostle has never once put a substance in place of a man’s works, so he cannot be doing it here. And since he has said of men who are still alive in the flesh that they “are not in the flesh,” meaning that they are not living in the works of the flesh, you ought not to pull down the flesh’s form or its substance, but only the works done in that substance, which are what cut us off from the kingdom of God.

It is after setting out these ruinous works to the Galatians that he says he is warning them in advance, just as he had “told them before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God”—and precisely because they had not borne the image of the heavenly man as they had borne the image of the man made of dust; so that, on account of their old way of life, they were to be reckoned as nothing but flesh and blood. But suppose the apostle had thrown out the sentence abruptly, that flesh and blood must be shut out of the kingdom of God, with no advance notice at all of what he meant. Would it not still have been our duty to take these two substances as the old self handed over to mere flesh and blood—in other words, to eating and drinking? One mark of that life would be speaking against belief in the resurrection: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” And when the apostle dropped this in as an aside, what he was censuring in flesh and blood was their enjoyment of eating and drinking.

Setting aside, however, every interpretation of this kind, which lays the charge against the works of flesh and blood, let me be allowed to claim these very substances for the resurrection, taken in no other than their plain natural sense. For it is not the resurrection that is denied to flesh and blood outright, but the kingdom of God, which is something that comes to them with the resurrection—since there is also a resurrection for judgment. And in fact there is a confirmation of the general resurrection of the flesh whenever one particular kind of resurrection is made an exception. Now when it is clearly stated what condition the resurrection does not lead to, it is understood what condition it does lead to. And so, since it is on account of what men have deserved that a difference is made in their resurrection—by their conduct in the flesh, not by the substance of it—it is plain even from this that flesh and blood are shut out of the kingdom of God in respect of their sin, not of their substance; and that in respect of their natural form they will still rise again for the judgment, precisely because they do not rise for the kingdom. [q]

Again I will say it: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” And the apostle says it justly, of them taken alone and by themselves, in order to show that the Spirit is still needed to fit them for the kingdom. For it is “the Spirit that gives life” for the kingdom of God; “the flesh is of no use at all.” There is, however, something else that can be of use toward it: the Spirit, and, through the Spirit, the works of the Spirit as well. Flesh and blood, then, must in every case rise again, all alike, in their own proper quality. But those who are granted entry into the kingdom of God will have to put on the power of an incorruptible and immortal life, since without it, and before they are able to obtain it, they cannot get into the kingdom of God. With good reason, therefore, flesh and blood by themselves, as we have already said, fail to obtain the kingdom of God. But since “this corruptible” (that is, the flesh) “must put on incorruption, and this mortal” (that is, the blood) “must put on immortality,” by the change that is to follow the resurrection, it will happen for the best of reasons that flesh and blood, after that change and that swallowing up, will become able to inherit the kingdom of God—but not without the resurrection.

Some will have it that the phrase “flesh and blood” means Judaism, because of its rite of circumcision—Judaism being itself far enough removed from the kingdom of God, since it counts as the old, former way of life, and since the apostle uses the phrase with this meaning in another passage too. When it pleased God to reveal his Son to him, so that he might announce him among the Gentiles, he “did not immediately consult with flesh and blood,” as he writes to the Galatians—meaning by the phrase circumcision, that is to say, Judaism.

There is one argument we have kept back for the end, and it will now stand as a plea for everyone—and for the apostle himself, who would otherwise have to be charged with reckless carelessness. For it is claimed that he shut out from the kingdom of God, and indeed from the court of heaven itself, all flesh and blood of any kind, and did it abruptly, blindfold (as they put it), with no distinctions and no conditions. But Jesus is still sitting there at the Father’s right hand: man, yet God; the last Adam, yet the Word who was first of all; flesh and blood, yet purer than ours. And he “will come down in the same way as he went up into heaven,” the same in substance and the same in form, just as the angels said—so much so that he will even be recognized by the men who pierced him. [u]

He is named “the mediator between God and man,” and he keeps in his own person the deposit of the flesh that has been handed to him by both parties: the pledge and the security of its complete wholeness. For just as “he has given us the down payment of the Spirit,” so he has taken from us the down payment of the flesh, and has carried it with him into heaven as a guarantee of that whole and entire condition which is one day to be given back to it. So do not be troubled about anything, flesh and blood: in Christ you have won both heaven and the kingdom of God. Or if they say that you are not in Christ, then let them also say that Christ is not in heaven, since they have denied heaven to you.

In the same way he says, “neither shall corruption inherit incorruption.” He does not say it so that you should take flesh and blood to be corruption; they are rather what corruption works on—I mean through death, since death does not so much corrupt our flesh and blood as actually eat them up. But since he had plainly said that the works of flesh and blood could not obtain the kingdom of God, he piled the point higher by depriving corruption itself of any inheritance of incorruption—corruption, that is, meaning death, which profits so handsomely by the works of flesh and blood.

A little further on he describes what amounts to the death of death itself. “Death,” he says, “is swallowed up in victory. Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory? The sting of death is sin”—there is the corruption—“and the strength of sin is the law”—that other law, no doubt, which he described as being “in his members, fighting against the law of his mind,” meaning, of course, the actual power of sinning against his own will. Now in an earlier passage of this same letter to the Corinthians he says that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” This, then, is the way in which corruption will not inherit incorruption: in other words, death will not go on. And when and how will it stop? In that “moment, that twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, when the dead will rise incorruptible.” And who are these, if not the ones who were corruptible before—that is, our bodies; in other words, our flesh and blood? And we undergo the change. But in what condition, if not the one we shall be found in? “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.” What is this mortal thing but the flesh? What is this corruptible thing but the blood?

And so that you may not suppose the apostle means anything else—so careful is he to teach you, and so plainly is he applying his statement to the flesh in earnest—when he says “this corruptible” and “this mortal,” he speaks the words while touching the very skin of his own body. He certainly could not have used those phrases except of something that could be touched and seen. The expression points to a bodily demonstration. Besides, a corruptible body is one thing and corruption is another; a mortal body is one thing and mortality is another. What suffers is one thing; what makes it suffer is another. And therefore the things that are liable to corruption and mortality—flesh and blood—must also be capable of incorruption and immortality.