(4) The power which raised Jesus Christ from the dead was the Holy Spirit of God. One writer declares that it was through the Eternal Spirit that Jesus offered His life while on earth without spot to God, and, in saying this, he only follows St. Paul in his declaration that He was marked out as the Son of God with power by the resurrection according to a Spirit of Holiness. The Holy Spirit given to Jesus Christ without measure was the efficient cause of His resurrection from the dead. Therefore it follows from the close similarity between
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466 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
the Head and the members that their resurrection is brought about by the same Holy Spirit. "If the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwelleth in you."
(5) The next step in St. Paul's teaching is that in which his religious originality and depth of thought are seen most clearly, and, indeed, stand out before us with startling freshness. That is perhaps the reason why this doctrine of his has fallen into the background and been overlooked. Materially minded people want materialistic images which they can grasp readily, and about which they may give a logical account. But religious truths by their very nature are too august and too evasive for logic. They are of Heaven, and logic is of earth only. Now the doctrine that the resurrection means the resumption of the old body which death had corrupted is a materialistic conception. That is why it is so popular. But it is not the doctrine of St. Paul. He was far more concerned with religion than with metaphysic or theories of being. That is why all he says about the resurrec- tion moves strictly within the atmosphere of religion.
He says — and let this be weighed, marked, and learned — that he has little interest in death and resurrection from the mere standpoint of physical existence. It was not the physical death and resurrection of Christ on which he based the Christians' faith and hope, but His spiritual death and resurrection. But then you cannot limit these latter to the tragedy of Mount Calvary and that which immediately followed. Christ's death was a death to sin, and that was in process from the first. Christ's resurrection was a rising superior to sin, and that, too, took place from the first. Christ died unto sin throughout His early life, and He died finally, once and for all, when on the Cross He rose superior to the last and most bitter temptation of all. Every time that temptation came to Him — and tempta- tion came to Him continuously — He mastered it by the power of the Spirit of God, of that risen life which was hid in God His Father. Calvary and the great forty days were no new elements in His life, but its crown and its reward.
(6) From this follows the practical bearing for us of Christ's death and resurrection. When we look on Him and are touched
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by our sinfulness, and come to God, and determine to live the life of faith, we die to sin as Christ died to it ; we rise to newness of life as Christ rose to it ; we are buried with Him, and, like Him, become alive unto God. The sole difference — and it is immense — is that we have a past to undo, and He had none.
(7) Now we can see what St. Paul taught about our resurrec- tion body. It is fashioned for us by holy living. It is already in course of formation within. He that is leading the spiritual life is having prepared for him gradually a spiritual body. Then, when the "natural body" is finally cast aside, the glorious r spiritual body" will leap out, as the fitting organ of a soul .which has become predominantly spiritual, and death will be Swallowed up in life.
K The unique part of the Christian revelation is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who forms the Spiritual body, so that when the believer dies, or, more truly, awakes, he awakes after the likeness of the Lord, to co-operate with Him freely in redemptive love. I quite understand the quickening of our mortal bodies (Kom. viii. 2) to refer to this, the getting rid of that death or mortality which limits or imprisons us in this order of existence, by de- veloping and perfecting the power of the incorruptible Seed of Life which brings us into living contact and consciousness with the Life of the Universe. Then the grub body is no longer wanted ; like the husk in the seed, it has done its work in the early stages of growth, and now is put off as the butterfly puts off the chrysalis-shell, and as the materials of that body go to the churchyard to return into that which may through various modifications become part of another human earthly body.1
If Human nature, as its Creator made it, and maintains it wherever His laws are observed, is entirely harmonious. No physical error can be more profound, no moral error more danger- ous, than that involved in the monkish doctrine of the opposition of body to soul. No soul can be perfect in an imperfect body ; no body perfect without perfect soul. Every right action and true thought sets the seal of its beauty on person and face ; every wrong action and foul thought its seal of distortion; and the various aspects of humanity might be read as plainly as a printed history, were it not that the impressions are so complex that it must always in some cases (and, in the present state of our knowledge, in all cases) be impossible to decipher them com- pletely. Nevertheless, the face of a consistently just and of a