Chapter XIII

We converse every day tvith -wonders and miracles no less admirable than many of those foints of faith which a naturalist will not believe. For the footprints of Onmifotence and Wisdom are iti everything we see and hear: only here is the blindness of mankind that he looks not diligently into things of ordinary occurrencey but passeth them over as of course.

—Lord Hale.

The resurrection of the body — of the same body which we put in the grave — is the corner stone of the whole Christian system. Against this doctrine the rudest assaults of unbelief have been aimed. Philosophy has held the doctrine up to scorn and contempt, as being unreasonable and impossible. The first departure from the Christian faith was the denial of the resurrection. No one doctrine of Christ’s system tests the genuineness and solidity of faith as a belief in this cardinal fact. Satan generally makes the first break in faith at this point. A giving way at this point destroys the foundations. Richard Watson, whose “Theological Institutes” have been the training school of Methodist preachers for nearly a hundred years, deals with the resurrection of the body after a masterly way, with the strength of a philosopher, the simplicity and directness of a child’s faith, unswerving loyalty to God’s truth. He says:

In this intermediate but felicitous and glorious state the disembodied spirits of the righteous will remain in joy and felicity with Christ until the general judgment, when another display of the gracious effects of our redemption by Christ will appear in the glorious resurrection of their bodies to an immortal life, thus distinguishing them from the wicked, whose resurrection will be to “shame and everlasting contempt,” or to what may be emphatically termed an immortal death.

On this subject, no point of discussion of any importance arises among those who admit the truth of Scripture, except as to the way in which the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is to be understood; whether a resurrection of the substance of the body be meant, or of some mmute and indestructible part of it. The latter theory has been adopted for the sake of avoiding certain supposed difficulties. It cannot, however, fail to strike every impartial reader of the New Testament that the doctrine of the resurrection is there taught without any nice distinctions. It is always exhibited as a miraculous work, and represents the same body which is laid in the grave as the subject of this change from death to life by the power of Christ. Thus, our Lord was raised in the same body in which he died, and his resurrection is constantly held forth as the model of ours; and the apostle Paul expressly says, “Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body.” The only passage of Scripture which appears to favor the notion of the rising of the immortal body from some indestructible germ is i Corinthians XV. 35: “But some men will say. How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die; and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.” If, however, it had been the intention of the apostle, holding this view of the case, to meet objections to the doctrine of the resurrection, grounded upon the difficulties of conceiving how the same body, in the popular sense, could be raised up in substance, we might have expected him to correct this misapprehension, by declaring that this was not the Christian doctrine, but that some small parts of the body only, bearing as little proportion to the whole as the germ of a seed to the plant, would be preserved, and be unfolded into the perfected body at the resurrection. Instead of this, he goes on immediately to remind the objector of the differences which exist between material bodies as they now exist: between the plant and the bare or naked grain; between one plant and another; between the flesh of men, of beasts, of fishes, and of birds; between celestial and terrestrial bodies; and between the lesser and greater celestial luminaries themselves. Still farther he proceeds to state the difference, not between the germ of the body to be raised and the body given at the resurrection, but between the body itself, understood popularly, which dies, and the body which shall be raised. “It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption,” which would not be true of the supposed incorruptible and imperishable germ of this hypothesis; and can be affirmed only of the body itself, considered in substance, and in its present state corruptible. Further, the question put by the objector, “How are the dead raised up?” does not rcr fer to the modus agendi of the resurrection, or the process or manner in which the thing is to be effected, as the advocates of the germ hypothesis appear to assume. This is manifest from the answer of the apostle, who goes on immediately to state, not in what manner the resurrection is to be effected, but what shall be the state or condition of the resurrection body, which is no answer at all to the question, if it be taken in that sense.

The first of the two questions in the passage referred to relates to the possibility of the resurrection, ‘*How are the dead raised up?” the second to the kind of body which they are to take, supposing the fact to be allowed. Both questions, however, imply a denial of the fact, or, at least, express a strong doubt concerning it. It is thus that ‘’hoii,” in the first question is taken in many passages where it is connected with a verb; and the second question only expresses the general negation or doubt more partcularly by implying that the objector couid not conceive of any kind of body being restored to man which would not be an evil and imperfection to him. For the very reason why some of the Christians of that age denied or strongly doubted the resurrection of the body, explaining it figuratively and saying that it was past already, was, that they were influenced to this by the notion of their philosophical schools, that the body was the prison of the soul, and that the greatest deHverance men could experience was to be eternally freed from their connection with matter. Hence the early philosophizing sects in the Christian Church, the Gnostics, Marcionites, etc., denied the resurrection on the same ground a.b the philosophers, and thought it opposed to that perfection which they hoped to enjoy in another world. Such persons appear to have been in the Church of Corinth as early as the time of St. Paul, for that in this chapter he answers the objections not of pagans but of professing Christians appears from verse 12: “How say some among you, that there is no resurrection of the dead?” The objection, therefore, in the minds of these persons to the doctrine of the resurrection did not lie against the doctrine of the raising up of the substance of the same body; so that, provided this notion could be dispensed with, they were prepared to admit that a new material body might spring from its germ, as a plant from seed. They stumbled at the doctrine in every form, because it involved the circumstance of the reunion of the spirit with matter, which they thought an evil. When, therefore, the objector asks, “How are the dead raised up?” he is to be understood not as inquiring as to the process, but as to the possibility. The doubt may, indeed, be taken as an implied negation of the possibility of the resurrection with reference to God; and then the apostle, by referring to the springing up of the grain of corn when dissolved and putrified, may be understood to show that the event was not inconceivable by referring to God’s omnipotence, as shown in his daily providence, which, a priori, would appear as marvelous and incredible. But it is much more probable that the impossibility implied in this question refers not to the power of God, which every Christian in the Church of Corinth must be supposed to have been taught to conceive of as almighty, and therefore adequate to the production of this effect; but as relating to the contrariety which was assumed to exist between the doctrine of the reunion of the soul with the body, and those hopes of a higher condition in a future life, which both reason and revelation taught them to form. The second question, “With what body do they come?” like the former, is a question not of inquiry but of denial, or at least of strong doubt, importing that no idea could be entertained by the objector of any material body being made the residence of a disenthralled spirit which could comport with those notions of deliverance from the bondage of corruption by death which the philosophy of the age had taught and which Christianity itself did not discountenance. The questions, though different, come, therefore, nearly to the same import; and this explains why the apostle chiefly dwells upon the answer to the

latter only, by which, in fact, he replies to both. The grain cast into the earth even dies and is corrupted, and that which is sown is not ‘the body which shall be,” in form and quality, but “naked grain;” yet into the plant, in its perfect form, is the same matter transformed. So the flesh of beasts, birds, fishes, and man is the same matter, though exhibiting different quahties. So, also, bodies celestial are of the same matter as “bodies terrestrial;” and the more splendid luminaries of the heavens are, in substance, the same as those of inferior glory. It is thus that the apostle reaches his conclusion, and shows that the doctrine of our reunion with the body implies in it no imperfection — nothing contrary to the hopes of liberation ‘’from the burden of this flesh” — because of the high and glorified qualities which God is able to give to matter; of which the superior purity, splendor, and energy of some material things in this world, in comparison with others, is a visible demonstration. For after he has given these instances, he adds: “So is the resurrection of the dead; it is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural [an animal] body, it is raised a spiritual body,” so called, “as being accommodated to a spirit, and far excelling ’ all that is required for the transaction of earthly and terrene affairs;” and so intent is the apostle on dissipating all those gross representations of the resurrection of the body which the objectors had assumed as the ground of their opposition, and which they had probably in their disputations placed under the strongest views, that he guards the true Christian doctrine on this point in the most explicit manner, “Now, this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit incorruption;” and, therefore, let no man henceforward affirm or assume it in his argument that we teach any such doctrine. This also he strengthens by showing that, as to the saints who are alive at the second coming of Christ, they also shall be in like manner “changed,” and that ‘’this corruptible,” as to them also, “shall put on incorruption.”

Thus, in the argument, the apostle confines himself wholly to the possibility of the resurrection of the body in a refined and glorified state: but omits all reference to the mode in which the thing will be effected as being out of the line of the objector’s questions and in itself above human thought and wholly miraculous. It is, however, clear that when he speaks of the body as the subject of this wondrous “change” he speaks of it popularly as the same body in substance, whatever changes in its qualities or figure may be impressed upon it. Great general changes it will experience, as from corruption to incorruption, from mortality to immortality; great changes of a particular kind will also take place, as its being freed from deformities and defects, and the accidental varieties produced by climate, ailments, labor, and hereditary diseases. It is also laid down by our Lord that ‘’in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but be like to the angels of God;” and this also implies a certain change of structure; and we may gather from the declaration of the apostle that, though “the stomach” is now adapted ‘’to meats and meats to the stomach, God will destroy both it and them;” that the animal appetite for food will be removed, and the organ now adapted to that appetite have no place in the renewed frame. But great as these changes are, the human form will be retained in its perfection, after the model of our Lord’s ‘’glorious body,” and the substance of the matter of which it is composed will not thereby be affected. That the same body which was laid in the grave shall arise out of it, is the manifest doctrine of the Scriptures.