III.
The Eesurkection of our Body.
1. Jesus rose in the body. His was no mere immortality of the soul ; He claimed the body as part of Himself. In the body He ascended ; in the body, now glorified, He lives and rules ; in the body He will appear again, the second time, unto salvation. Not only, however, has He Himself risen in the body, but His resurrection is set forth as the pledge of ours. The hope of the believer is not simply that his soul shall live hereafter, but he looks for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body. The body of his humiliation shall yet be changed into the image of Christ's glorious body.
^[ It may be difficult for us to reconcile St. Paul's description of the spiritual body, but it is plain that he himself did not recognize any difficulty. He universally takes the actual body of the Lord as the very ground of his Eesurrection doctrine. It is out of its reality and identity that he draws all his moral and practical teaching. He can never speak or think of the Eesurrec- tion without showing that he has the actual body before his eyes. So, in the text the Eesurrection' of Jesus is the proof and the pledge that what happened to the Lord will happen to us. And what is that ? The raising of the body. If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead dwell in us, then He that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead is bound to quicken, too, our mortal bodies.1
2. In the bodily resurrection of our Lord — an organic part of the reconciling work of Christ — we have the earnest of the bodily as well as the spiritual redemption of all that are in Him. For it must not be forgotten that the work of Christ is a work of reconciliation in more than one sense. Of course, primarily, it is the reconciliation between the individual sinner and the holy God
1 H. Scott-Holland.
426 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
against whom he has offended; then it is also the potential harmonization of the schism which sin has wrought in man's nature, so that man comes into unison with himself; and to crown all, the cross is also the potential reconciliation of the entire cosmos, including, of course, man's physical being, which has been disordered by sin. It is the plan of God to sum up all things in Christ, and through His cross.
T[ Souls may fly off, perhaps, as the hymns tell us, to distant worlds, to unknown spheres. We may think anything we like about such winged creatures ; they have nothing to do with us. But the spirits of those we have loved and cared for, the spirits who have held converse with ours, cannot be changed into birds or butterflies. They must be still human, the more they have entered into converse with the Divine. And why must we force ourselves into the conception of them as without bodies ? Is it because they have dropped that which was corrupt and dead, because this has been given " earth to earth, dust to dust " ? Was it this dead thing which we saw and heard and handled ? Was it this from which sweet words came forth ? That which is mortal is gone ; is any life gone ? Is not mortality opposed to life ? l
i. The Body.
1. It is a correct instinct which leads men to speak of the salvation of " the soul." The same instinct asserts itself when we speak of the immortality of the soul, but of the resurrection of the body. What is the human body? Differentially, it is the complement of organs through which an individual human spirit works. Whether it is necessarily made of matter is another question. In certain conditions, we would speak of the body of a shadow or of a reflection. The Bible says little of disembodied spirits as such. It represents the human person in the life after death as a soul, a self, a spirit with whatever organism is requisite for maintaining personal identity. It never speaks of the resurrection of "the flesh" or of the materials of which our present bodies are composed, but it emphasizes the resurrection of the body. " If the Spirit of him that awakened Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that awakened Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you " (Eom. viii. 11).
1 F. D. Maurice, Life, ii. 623.
ROMANS viii. ii 427
2. The body is as really a part of man's personality as the soul is. It is not, as philosophy is apt to teach us, a mere vesture or accident, or, still worse, temporary prison-house, of the soul; it is part of ourselves. Not, indeed, in the sense that the soul can- not survive the body, or subsist in some fashion without it, but in the sense that man was not created incorporeal spirit. His soul was made and meant to inhabit the body, and was never intended to subsist apart from it. Hence death, in the true Biblical point of view, is not something natural to man, but can only be regarded as something violent, wraiatural, the rupture or separation of parts of man's being that were never meant to be disjoined. The soul, in virtue of its spiritual, personal nature, survives the body ; but, in separation from the body, it is, as many things in Scripture (e.g. its doctrine of Sheol) show, in a mutilated, imperfect, weakened condition. This view is not only important in itself as giving its due share of honour to the body, and harmonizing with the close relations between soul and body on which modern psychology lays increasing stress ; but it will be found to shed much light on other doctrines of Scripture — for instance, on death, on immortality, on resurrection, on the full scope of Christ's redemption.