510 RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
within the grave while the other is declared to liave risen ? Is the emptiness of tiie grave in Joseph's garden essential to belief in Christ's tran- sition into the pneumatical estate ? Since it is impossible for us to determine the precise relation between these two conditions of tlie bodily life, we must be prepared for the possibility of the co- existence of tlie psychical and the pneumatical body. Would it therefore follow that the emptiness of the grave in Joseph's garden is indifferent to Christian thought? No, not in the very least. We must surely here distinguish between the Resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of mankind. It was clearly necessary for evidential purposes that the risen Lord should reappear within a terrestrial environment, and that for the same reason His grave should be vacated. Belief in the reality of His Resurrection in presence of the corpse was to that age absolutely impossible.
Max Miiller expressed j'ears ago a regret that the Jews buried and did not burn their dead. For in that case, he thought, the Christian idea of the Resurrection would have remained far more spiritual. And the question has been quite recently asked, What kind of Resurrection would your gospel ha\e ex- hibited if the body of Jesus had been cremated ? Max Miiller's regret is more than justified by the deeply materialistic con- ceptions which have heavily burdened the Christian mind. But it has no weight whatever in view of the teaching of St. Paul. The suggested cremation of the bod3' of Jesus would not in the slightest degree have affected the Pauline conception- of the pneumatical body. Nor would it have removed the necessity for visible and tangible manifestations under terrestrial conditions. Christ must in any case have reappeared with features and form as of old, whether His body had been buried or burned. The scars must have reappeared upon it. The facts of dissolution of ordinary human bodies have not altered the ordinary belief in their physical reappearance in the Resurrection. The dis- integration of the body and its return to dust, the cremation of the martyrs, did not prevent mediaeval discussions whether one who died in childhood would appear full-grown in the future life. The Maccabees, at any rate, knew nothing of the Resurrec- tion of Christ, but that did not prevent their holding the grossest ideas of a resurrection state. ' As for cremation. Christian rever- ence shrinks from discussing the cremation of our Lord's sacred body,' says Dr. Liddon ; ' but cremation, had it taken place, couid ha\ e made no difference except in the sphere of imagina- tion' (Liddon, Easter Sermons, i. 111).
If the account given by Sir Oliver Lodge, in the Uihhert Journal (Jan. 1906), of Christianity and science may be viewed as representative of modern thought, it would seem clear that contemporary thought ought not to have much difficulty in accepting the Pauline doctrine of the resurrection body. The question is, What is the relation between the spiritual person- ality and the material side of human existence? 'It is plain,' he says, ' that for our present mode of apprehending the universe a material vehicle is essential' (p. 318). The only evidence of the existence of spiritual activity is the manifesta- tion of that activity through matter. We are manifested to each other through the medium of the senses. ' Now,' argues the writer, ' this dependence of the spiritual on a vehicle for manifestation is not likelj' to be a purely temporary condition : it is probably a sign or sample of something which has an eternal significance, a representation of some permanent truth ' (p. 319). ' 'To suppose that our experience of the necessary and funda- mental connexion between the two things — the something which we know as mind and the something which is now represented by matter — has no countei-part or enlargement in the actual scheme of the universe, as it really exists, is needlessly to postu- late confusion and instrumental deception ' (p. 319). Conse- quently the conclusion is that, 'though it by no means follovvs that mind is dependent on matter as we know it, it will prob- ably be still by means of something akin to matter — something which can act as a vehicle and represent it in the same sort of way that matter represents it now — that it will hereafter be manifested ' (p. 320). Now, certainly this statement of the relation of mind to matter, of personality to the vehicle of self- manifestation, is one which St. Paul would find no reason to dispute. As the writer himself recognizes, ' This probability or possibility ma.y be regarded as one form of statement of an orthodox Christian doctrine ' (p. 320). Such advances of modern thought towards the Pauline conception are as hopeful as they are significant. ' What is wanted,' he adds, ' to make definite our thoughts of the persistent existence of what we call our immortal part, is simply the persistent power of manifesting it- self to friends, i.e. to ]iersons with whom we are in sympathy, by means as plain and substantial in that order of existence as the body was here ' (p. 322). ' We may surmise that any inmiortal part must have the power of constructing for itself a suitable vehicle of nianifestafion, which is the essential meaning of the term "body"' (p. 323).