Not only is Christ in His resurrection a ' firstfruit (1 Co 15-°, dirapx^)of them that have fallen asleep,' the promise and earnest of the resurrection of His followers ; He is further the dpxri (Col 1"), the ' first principle ' and potency of this resurrection. As death was grounded in Adam, so life is grounded in Christ. ' As in Adam all die [all who belong to Adam's family], so also in Christ shall all be made alive [all who belong to Christ]' (1 Co 15-2). xhe new life derived from Christ, i.e., includes the body as well as the soul in the sphere of its quicken- ing. The indwelling Spirit is a regenerative prin- ciple or power for the whole personality, physical as well as moral, leading not only to a moral resurrec- tion now but to a physical resurrection heieafter. Nay more, this physical quickening whose final fruit and issue is in the resurrection after death, is already begun here on earth, leading to a gradual inward transformation of the body (2 Co 4'^, ' renewed from day to day '). Through the indwell- ing of the Spirit, there is already going on in the believer that subjugation of matter to spirit which in its highest manifestation and outcome was exhibited in the resurrection of Christ's body, transfigured and transformed into a more glorified mode of being, and which, in its final issue in the believer, ' shall transform (Mfrao'x'JMaWtrfi) the body of our humiliation into conformity with the hody of his glory [avfifiopfpov t<^ (ruifxaTi tt}? dd^tjs auTov), according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things to himself ' (Ph 3=' ; cf. 1 Jn 32).
How dilTprpnt ft ooncoption of the future life is this from the current Greek coneeption familiar to the Coriitthiuiis, nnd pre- valent in .lewinh-Alexantlrian literature. The prosjiect hefore St. I'aul (and the apostleH) is not that of a bodileKU otjxte, tlie deliverance of the soul from its earthly 'prison house' (aotfia a-rjjua), but tile risin^f to new life of the entire personality. ' \Ve that are in the tabernacle do proan, beinp: burdened ' ;— St. Paul has just been ctnpbaui/int,' the contrast between the weariness and burden of the i>resent earthly life and the glory which awaits the Christian in the eternal future — ' for this reason (rVi rovrttt), not for that we would be unclothed (or stripped, eKSvaatrOaiX but that we would be clothed upon (eneyStitraadat), that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life ' (2 Co b*). These words are sometimes taken as ^nvinj,' expression to an intense desire on St. Paul's part that Christ should come (the Parousia t;ike place) before his death, so that he miK'ht be spared the terrifying ex- perience of bodily dissolution, and have the corruptible put on incurruption and the mortal put on immortality without that trial. 'If Christ comes first, the Apostle will receive the new body by the transformation, instead of the putting off, of the old ; be will, so to speak, put it on above the old (ewivSvaatrOai) ; be will be spared the shuddering fear of dying ; he will not know what it is to have the old tent taken down, and to be left house- less and naked' (Denney, Expositor's Bible, '2 Cor.,' p. 17ft f. ; cf. Kermedy, .S'(. J'aiU's Conci-ptiims of tfie Last Things, p. 2tS6). But it is equally true to the Apostle's thought to interpret the words simply as affirming the Christian conception of the future life as opposed to the Greek conception prevalent in Corinth — ■ this in any case is implied — ' We groan, not that we long for a disembodied existence, a condition of spiritual nakedness ; rather our longing is for the new embodied condition, the pos- session of the spiritual body.'
Some verses in 2 Co 5 (esp. v.8, * We choose rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord '^ have been held to evidence an advance on St. Paul's part, in the mterval between 1 Cor. and 2 Cor., to a more spiritual view of the Resurrection, a disembodied immortality (e.g. H. J. Holtzmann, Lehrbuch der NT Theotogie-, 2 vols., Tubingen, 1911, ii. 193; Charles, Kscha- tology, pp. 397-403). But the words do not justify such a position. St. Paul is simply asserting his confidence that the condition of the believer which is in prospect (the possession of the tji^txa 7rt'eu^ar(«6i'), which is guaranteed by the pledge of the TTi-eO^a, is infinitely preferable to his present condition of being * at home in the body ' (the o-w^a ^vxt-Kov). And tbe supposition of a change of conception on St. Paul's part in his later Epistles — in itself very unlikely when we consider the short interval between the two Corinthian Epistles — is decisively negatived by Ph 321.
The moral significance of such a doctrine cannot he overrated. It gives a new sanction to bodily consecration and temperance. Each sin against the body is no longer, as it was on the Greek con- ception, a stain on that which is itself doomed to perish, but a defilement of that which is conse- crated to an eternal life — ' Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost?' (1 Co 6'"); ' the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord ; and the Lord for the body . . . your bodies are members of Christ. . . . Glorify God therefore in your body ' (vv.'^-") ; 'let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body' (Ro 6'^). The nature of the resurrection-body of believers St. Paul sets forth in 1 Co 15^*2, where he endeavours to answer in detail the question, ' With what kind of a body (roi'w aupari) do they come?' This was the difficulty which perplexed the Corinthian Christians, and led some of them (tiv4^, v.'-) under the influences of Greek thought to deny altogether the possibility of a bodily resurrection. Like most similar present- day objections, the difficulty was based, as St. Paul shows, upon the supposition that it was the identical body laid in the grave that was raised again, that the resurrection meant a revivifying of the present material body, which, as we have seen, was the current popular Jewish idea.