Changed but Not Destroyed

In proving that the flesh will rise, we prove at the same stroke that no flesh will share in that resurrection except the very flesh in question. Still, particular objections and the occasions that raise them call for a discussion of their own, even where they have already been answered well enough. So I will give a fuller account of the force and the reason of a change — a change so great that it almost invites the guess that it is some different flesh that rises, as though a change on that scale amounted to a total stop, and to the complete destruction of what the thing had been. [a]

A distinction has to be drawn, though, between a change, however great, and anything that has the character of destruction. To undergo change is one thing; to be destroyed is another. And the distinction would collapse altogether if the flesh underwent a change that amounted to destruction. Destroyed it must be by the change, unless it stays there throughout, itself, under the altered condition the resurrection will display. For exactly as it perishes if it does not rise again, so it perishes just as surely even if it does rise, supposing that in the change it is quietly withdrawn. It will fail of a future existence as completely as if it had never risen at all. And how absurd, to rise for the purpose of not existing — when it had it in its power not to rise, and so to lose its being, since its non-existence had already begun.

Things that are flatly different, as changing and destroying are, will not admit of mixture and confusion. They differ in what they do, as well: one destroys, the other changes. So, just as what is destroyed is not changed, what is changed is not destroyed. To perish is to stop altogether being what a thing once was; to be changed is to exist in another condition. And if a thing exists in another condition, it can still be itself; since it has not perished, it still has its existence. It has undergone a change, not a destruction. A thing can be changed through and through and remain the same thing. A man is the same way. He can be entirely himself in substance even in this present life and still go through all sorts of changes — in habits, in bulk, in health, in circumstances, in rank, in age; in his tastes, his business, his means, his houses, his laws and customs — and lose nothing of his human nature, and not be made into another man in any way that stops him being the same man. In fact I ought hardly to say another man; I ought to say another thing.

Holy Scripture gives us instances of this kind of change. The hand of Moses is changed and becomes like a dead hand — bloodless, colorless, stiff with cold; and then, when the warmth comes back and its natural color with it, it is the same flesh and blood again. Later the face of that same Moses is changed, with a brightness the eye could not bear. But he was still Moses, even when he was not to be seen. So too Stephen had already taken on the look of an angel, though the knees that bent under the stoning were nothing but his own human knees. And the Lord, in the seclusion of the mountain, had changed his clothing for a robe of light — yet he kept the features Peter could recognize. In that same scene Moses and Elijah gave proof that the same bodily condition can go on even in glory: the one in the likeness of a flesh he had not yet got back, the other in the reality of one he had not yet laid down. It was because his mind was full of this splendid example that Paul said, “He will change our lowly body, so that it is formed like his glorious body.” But if you insist that a transfiguring, a turning of a thing into something else, amounts to wiping a substance out, then it follows that Saul, when he was “changed into another man,” passed out of his own bodily substance — and that Satan himself, when he is “transformed into an angel of light,” loses what he properly is. That is not my view. So changes and turnings and reshapings will certainly have to take place to bring the resurrection about; but the substance of the flesh will be kept safe through them.

For how absurd it is — and in truth how unjust, and on both counts how unworthy of God — that one substance should do the work and another draw the pay: that this flesh of ours should be torn apart in martyrdom and another wear the crown; or, the other way round, that this flesh of ours should wallow in filth and another take the sentence. Is it not better to give up all faith in the hope of the resurrection at once than to play games with the wisdom and the justice of God? Better that Marcion should rise again than Valentinus. [g]

For it is not to be believed that the mind, or the memory, or the conscience of the man who exists now is wiped out by his putting on that change of clothing which immortality and incorruption supply. If it were, then all the gain and fruit of the resurrection, and the settled effect of God’s judgment on both sides, soul and body alike, would certainly fall to the ground. If I do not remember that it was I who served him, how am I to give God the glory? How am I to sing him “the new song,” if I do not know that it is I who owe him the thanks? But why is the objection raised only against a change in the flesh, and not in the soul as well, which is superior to the flesh in everything? How does it come about that the very same soul which has run its whole course of life in this present flesh, which has learned the knowledge of God and put on Christ and sown the hope of salvation in this flesh, must reap its harvest in some other flesh that we know nothing about? That would be a remarkably favored flesh, to get the enjoyment of that life at so cheap a rate. And if the soul is not to be changed too, then there is no resurrection of the soul either; it will not be credited with having risen unless it has risen as something else.

We come now to the commonest quibble of unbelief. “If it really is the selfsame substance that is called back to life, with all its shape and features and quality, then why not with all its other marks as well? The blind, the lame, the paralyzed — anyone who died carrying some conspicuous mark — will come back with the same.” But what is the truth of the matter, for all that you, in a conceit of whatever size, disdain to take so vast a gift from God’s hand? When you allow that only the soul is saved, are you not handing men a salvation that costs them half their nature? What good is it to believe in the resurrection, unless your faith takes in the whole of it? [k]

If the flesh is to be repaired after it has fallen apart, much more will it be restored after some violent injury. Greater cases set the rule for smaller ones. Is the cutting off or the crushing of a limb not the death of that limb? Well then: if the death of the whole man is cancelled by his rising, what are we to say about the death of a part of him? If we are changed for glory, how much more for wholeness. Any loss our bodies suffer is something that has happened to them; their wholeness is their own by nature. That is the condition we are born in. Even if we are injured in the womb, the loss is suffered by something that is already a human being. What a thing is by kind comes before what has been done to it. As life is given by God, so it is given back by him. What we are when we receive it, we are when we get it back. It is to nature, not to injury, that we are restored; it is to the state we were born in, not to the condition an accident left us in, that we rise again.

If God does not raise men whole, he does not raise the dead at all. For what dead man is whole, even if he died whole? Who is unhurt, once he is without life? What body is uninjured, when it is dead, when it is cold, when it is ghastly, when it is stiff, when it is a corpse? When is a man more infirm than when he is wholly infirm? When more paralyzed than when he cannot move at all? So for a dead man to be raised comes to nothing less than his being restored to his entire condition — or else, of course, he would still be dead in the part that had not risen. God is perfectly able to remake what he once made. He has already given us guarantee enough of that power and that unstinted grace of his in Christ, where he showed himself to us not only as the restorer of the flesh but as the mender of its damage. And so the apostle says, “The dead will be raised incorruptible” — unspoiled. But how, unless they are made whole, who have wasted away either through the loss of their health or through a long decay in the grave? For when he sets out the two clauses — “this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” — he is not saying the same thing twice; he is drawing a distinction. Immortality answers death, which has to be undone; incorruption answers the body’s wasting, which has to be repaired. He has fitted the one to the raising of the body and the other to its recovery. And I take it that what he promises the Thessalonians is the wholeness of a man’s whole substance. So there is no need to fear blemished or defective bodies in that great future. Wholeness, whether it comes by being preserved or by being restored, will have nothing left to lose, once it has had given back to it everything it had lost.

Now, when you argue that the flesh will still have to go through the same sufferings if it is the same flesh that rises, you are rashly setting nature up against her Lord, and setting her law, in defiance of God, against his grace — as though the Lord God were not free both to change nature and to preserve her, without being under any law himself. How is it, then, that we read, “With men these things are impossible, but with God all things are possible”? And again, “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise”? Let me put a question to you. Suppose you set a slave of yours free. The same flesh and the same soul stay with him that were once exposed to the whip and the fetter and the lash. Does that make it fitting for him to go on suffering as he used to? I think not. Instead he is honored with the white robe, and the favor of the gold ring, and his patron’s name and tribe and a place at his table as well. Grant God the same right, then: that by a change like this he should reform our condition and not our nature, taking every kind of suffering away from it and hedging it about with protection. So our flesh will remain even after the resurrection: still capable of suffering, so far as it is flesh, and the same flesh at that; and at the same time beyond suffering, since the Lord has set it free for the very purpose of never being able to suffer again.

“Everlasting joy,” says Isaiah, “will be on their heads.” Well, nothing is everlasting until after the resurrection. “And sorrow and sighing,” he goes on, “will flee away.” The angel says the same to John: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” — from the very eyes that had wept before, and that could weep again, if God’s loving-kindness did not dry up every spring of tears. And again: “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death” — and therefore no more decay either, since incorruption chases decay off just as immortality chases off death. If sorrow and mourning and sighing and death itself come at us out of the troubles of soul and body both, how are they to be got rid of, except by their causes stopping — that is, the troubles of flesh and soul? Where will you find hard times in the presence of God? Where, an enemy’s raids in the arms of Christ? Where, the devil’s attacks in the face of the Holy Spirit — now that the devil himself and his angels are “thrown into the lake of fire”? Where is necessity now, and what people call fortune or fate? What plague is waiting for those who have been ransomed from death, once they have been pardoned forever? What anger is there for the reconciled, after grace? What weakness, after strength has been given back? What risk and danger, after their salvation? [s]

The clothes and the sandals of the children of Israel stayed unworn and fresh for forty years; and on their very persons an exact rightness of fitness and decency kept nails and hair from growing wild, so that nobody could put any excess down to indecency. The fires of Babylon did no harm to the turbans or the trousers of the three brothers, foreign as that dress was to Jews. Jonah was swallowed by the monster of the deep, in whose belly whole ships were swallowed, and after three days was thrown up again safe and sound. Enoch and Elijah, who even now have gone through no resurrection — because they have not so much as met death — are learning to the full what it is for flesh to be exempt from every humiliation, every loss, every injury, every disgrace: carried off as they have been out of this world, and for that very reason already candidates for everlasting life. What faith do these remarkable facts testify to, if not to the faith that ought to convince us that they are the proofs and the documents of our own future wholeness and complete resurrection? For, to borrow the apostle’s phrase, these things were “figures of ourselves.” They were written so that we might believe two things: that the Lord is stronger than all the laws of nature about the body, and that he shows himself the preserver of the flesh all the more plainly, in that he has preserved for it even its clothes and its shoes.

But here comes the objection. “The world to come bears the character of a different order of things, an eternal one. So the substance of this life, which is not eternal, cannot possibly hold a state with features so unlike its own.” That would be true enough, if man had been made for the coming order and not the order for man. The apostle, however, says in his letter, “Whether it is the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come — all are yours.” And there he makes us heirs of the coming world as well. [z]

Isaiah is no help to you when he says, “All flesh is grass,” and in another place, “All flesh will see the salvation of God.” What he is distinguishing is how men end up, not what they are made of. And who does not hold that the judgment of God comes down as a double sentence, of salvation and of punishment? So “all flesh is grass” — the flesh that is bound for the fire; and “all flesh will see the salvation of God” — the flesh that is appointed to everlasting life. For my own part, I am quite sure that it was in no flesh but my own that I committed adultery, and it is in no other flesh that I am struggling for self-control now. If there is a man who carries two organs of lust about on him, then by all means he is free to mow off the “grass” of the unclean flesh and keep for himself only the part that is going to see the salvation of God.

And when the same prophet sets the nations before us sometimes as “the fine dust on the scales,” and as “less than nothing, and emptiness,” and sometimes as about to hope and “trust in his name” and in the arm of the Lord, are we misled at all about the Gentile nations by the difference in what he says? Are some of them going to become believers, and others counted as dust, because of some difference in their nature? Not at all. Christ has shone out as the true light on the nations inside the boundary of the ocean, and from the sky that is over all of us. Why, it is on this very earth that the Valentinians went to school for their errors. And there will be no difference of condition, as far as body and soul go, between the nations that believe and the nations that do not. Exactly as he has made a distinction of state and not of nature among these same nations, so he has sorted out their flesh — which is one and the same substance in all of them — not by the material it is built of, but by what each has deserved.