John 5:28, 29—“all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth”; Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation”; 1 Thess. 4:16, 17—“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first”; 1 Cor. 15:44—“it is sown a natural [marg.: ‘psychical’] body; it is raised a spiritual body”; 2 Tim. 2:17, 18—“HymenÆus and Philetus; men who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already, and overthrow the faith of some”; Acts 24:15—“Having hope toward God ... that there shall be a resurrection both of the just and the unjust.”

In 1 Cor. 15:44, the word ???????, translated “natural” or “psychical,” is derived from the Greek word ????, soul, just as the word p?e?at????, translated “spiritual,” is derived from the Greek word p?e?a, spirit. And as Paul could not mean to say that this earthly body is composed of soul, neither does he say that the resurrection body is composed of spirit. In other words, these adjectives “psychical” and “spiritual” do not define the material of the respective bodies, but describe those bodies in their relations and adaptations, in their powers and uses. The present body is adapted and designed for the use of the soul; the resurrection body will be adapted and designed for the use of the spirit.

2 Tim. 2:18—“saying that the resurrection is past already” = undue contempt for the body came to regard the resurrection as a purely spiritual thing (Ellicott). Dr. A. J. Gordon said that the “spiritual body” means “the body spiritualized.” E. H. Johnson: “The phrase ‘spiritual body’ describes not so much the nature of the body itself, as its relations to the spirit.” Savage, Life after Death, 80—“Resurrection does not mean the raising up of the body, and it does not mean the mere rising of the soul in the moment of death, but a rising again from the prison house of the dead, after going down at the moment of death.” D. R. Goodwin, Journ. Soc. Bib. Exegesis, 1881:84—“The spiritual body is body, and not spirit, and therefore must come under the definition of body. If it were to be mere spirit, then every man in the future state would have two spirits—the spirit that he has here and another spirit received at the resurrection.”

Rom. 8:23—“waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; 1 Cor. 6:13-20—“Meats for the belly and the belly for meats: but God shall bring to nought both it and them. But the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body: and God both raised the Lord, and will raise up us through his power.... But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.... Or know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?... glorify God therefore in your body”; Rom. 8:11—“But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you”—here the Revised Version follows Tisch., 8th ed., and Westcott and Hort's reading of d?? t?? ????????t?? a?t?? p?e?at??. Tregelles, Tisch., 7th ed., and Meyer, have d?? t? ???????? a?t?? p?e?a, and this reading we regard as, on the whole, the best supported. Phil. 3:21—“shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation.”

Dr. R. D. Hitchcock, in South Church Lectures, 338, says that “there is no Scripture declaration of the resurrection of the flesh, nor even of the resurrection of the body.”While this is literally true, it conveys a false idea. The passages just cited foretell a quickening of our mortal bodies, a raising of them up, a changing of them into the likeness of Christ's body. Dorner, Eschatology: “The New Testament is not contented with a bodiless immortality. It is opposed to a naked spiritualism, and accords completely with a deeper philosophy which discerns in the body, not merely the sheath or garment of the soul, but a side of the person belonging to his full idea, his mirror and organ, of the greatest importance for his activity and history.”

Luke 24:39—“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”; John 20:27—“Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and see my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and put it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing”; Dan. 12:2—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt”; 1 Cor. 15:53, 54—“For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory”; 13—“But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised.”

Sadducean materialism and Gnostic dualism, which last held matter to be evil, both denied the resurrection. Paul shows that to deny it is to deny that Christ rose; since, if it were impossible in the case of his followers, it must have been impossible in his own case. As believers, we are vitally connected with him; and his resurrection could not have taken place without drawing in its train the resurrection of all of us. Having denied that Christ rose, where is the proof that he is not still under the bond and curse of death? Surely then our preaching is vain. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians was written before the Gospels; and is therefore, as Hanna says, the earliest written account of the resurrection. Christ's transfiguration was a prophecy of his resurrection.

S. S. Times, March 22, 1902:161—“The resurrection of Jesus was not a mere rising again, like that of Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain. He came forth from the tomb so changed that he was not at once or easily recognized, and was possessed of such new and surprising powers that he seemed to be pure spirit, no longer subject to the conditions of his natural body. So he was the ‘first-fruits’ of the resurrection-harvest (1 Cor. 15:20). Our resurrection, in like manner, is to involve a change from a corruptible body to an incorruptible, from a psychical to a spiritual.”

Rom. 8:19-23—“For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God ... the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now ... even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”—here man's body is regarded as a part of nature, or the “creation,” and as partaking in Christ of its deliverance from the curse; Rev. 21:4, 5—“he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more.... And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new”—a declaration applicable to the body, the seat of pain and the avenue of temptation, as well as to outward nature. See Hanna, The Resurrection, 28; Fuller, Works, 3:291; Boston, Fourfold State, in Works, 8:271-289. On Olshausen's view of immortality as inseparable from body, see Aids to the Study of German Theology, 63. On resurrection of the flesh, see Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:289-317.

1 Cor. 15:37, 38—“that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be, but a bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other kind; but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him, and to each seed a body of its own.”Jerome tells us that the risen saints “habent dentes, ventrem, genitalia, et tamen nec cibis nec uxoribus indigent.” This view of the resurrection is exposed to the objection mentioned above. Pollok's Course of Time represented the day of resurrection as a day on which the limbs that had been torn asunder on earth hurtled through the air to join one another once more. The amputated arm that has been buried in China must traverse thousands of miles to meet the body of its former owner, as it rose from the place of its burial in England.

There are serious difficulties attending this view. The bodies of the dead fertilized the field of Waterloo. The wheat grown there has been ground and made into bread, and eaten by thousands of living men. Particles of one human body have become incorporated with the bodies of many others. “The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea, And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, Wide as the waters be.”Through the clouds and the rain, particles of Wycliffe's body may have entered into the water which other men have drunk from their wells and fountains. There is a propagation of disease by contagion, or the transmission of infinitesimal germs from one body to another, sometimes by infection of the living from contact with the body of a friend just dead. In these various ways, the same particle might, in the course of history, enter into the constitution of a hundred living men. How can this one particle, at the resurrection, be in a hundred places at the same time? “Like the woman who had seven husbands, the same matter may belong in succession to many bodies, for ‘they all had it’ ” (Smyth). The cannibal and his victim cannot both possess the same body at the resurrection. The Providence Journal had an article entitled: “Who ate Roger Williams?” When his remains were exhumed, it was found that one large root of an apple tree followed the spine, divided at the thighs, and turned up at the toes of Roger Williams. More than one person had eaten its apples. This root may be seen to-day in the cabinet of Brown University.

These considerations have led some, like Origen, to call the doctrine of a literal resurrection of the flesh “the foolishness of beggarly minds,” and to say that resurrection may be only “the gathering round the spirit of new materials, and the vitalizing them into a new body by the spirit's God-given power”; see Newman Smyth, Old Faiths in a New Light, 349-391; Porter, Human Intellect, 39. But this view seems as great an extreme as that from which it was a reaction. It gives up all idea of unity between the new and the old. If my body were this instant annihilated, and if then, an hour hence, God should create a second body, precisely like the present, I could not call it the same with the present body, even though it were animated by the same informing soul, and that soul had maintained an uninterrupted existence between the time of the annihilation of the first body and the creation of the second. So, if the body laid in the tomb were wholly dissipated among the elements, and God created at the end of the world a wholly new body, it would be impossible for Paul to say: “this corruptible must put on incorruption” (1 Cor. 15:53), or: “it is sown in dishonor; it it raised in glory” (verse 43). In short, there is a physical connection between the old and the new, which is intimated by Scripture, but which this theory denies.

Paul himself gives us an illustration which shows that his view was midway between the two extremes: “that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be” (1 Cor. 15:37). On the one hand, the wheat that springs up does not contain the precise particles, perhaps does not contain any particles, that were in the seed. On the other hand, there has been a continuous physical connection between the seed sown and the ripened grain at the harvest. If the seed had been annihilated, and then ripe grain created, we could [pg 1020]not speak of identity between the one and the other. But, because there has been a constant flux, the old particles pressed out by new, and these new in their turn succeeded by others that take their places, we can say: “the wheat has come up.” We bury grain in order to increase it. The resurrection-body will be the same with the body laid away in the earth, in the same sense as the living stalk of grain is identical with the seed from which it germinated. “This mortal must put on immortality”—not the immortal spirit put on an immortal body, but the mortal body put on immortality, the corruptible body put on incorruption (1 Cor. 15:53). “Ye know not the Scriptures, nor the power of God” (Mark 12:24), says our Lord; and Paul asks: “Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?” (Acts 26:8).

Or, to use another illustration nearer to the thing we desire to illustrate: My body is the same that it was ten years ago, although physiologists declare that every particle of the body is changed, not simply once in seven years, but once in a single year. Life is preserved only by the constant throwing off of dead matter and the introduction of new. There is indeed a unity of consciousness and personality, without which I should not be able to say at intervals of years: “this body is the same; this body is mine.”But a physical connection between the old and the new is necessary in addition.

The nails of the hands are renewed in less than four months, or about twenty-one times in seven years. They grow to full length, an average of seven twelfths of an inch, in from 121 to 138 days. Young people grow them more rapidly, old people more slowly. In a man of 21, it took 126 days; in a man of 67, it took 244; but the average was a third of a year. A Baptist pastor attempted to prove that he was a native of South Carolina though born in another state, upon the ground that the body he brought with him from Tennessee had exchanged its physical particles for matter taken from South Carolina. Two dentists, however, maintained that he still had the same teeth which he owned in Tennessee seven years before, there being no circulation in the enamel. Should we then say: Every particle of the body has changed, except the enamel of the teeth?

Pope's Martinus Scriblerus: “Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings which his maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk stockings.”Adeney, in Christianity and Evolution, 122, 123—“Herod's temple was treated as identical with the temple that Haggai knew, because the rebuilding was gradual, and was carried on side by side with the demolition of the several parts of the old structure.”The ocean wave travels around the world and is the same wave; but it is never in two consecutive seconds composed of the same particles of water.

The North River is the same to-day that it was when Hendrick Hudson first discovered it; yet not a particle of its current, nor the surface of the banks which that current touches now, is the same that it was then. Two things make the present river identical with the river of the past. The first is, that the same formative principle is at work,—the trend of the banks is the same, and there is the same general effect in the flow and direction of the waters drained from a large area of country. The second is, the fact that, ever since Hendrick Hudson's time, there has been a physical connection, old particles in continuous succession having been replaced by new.

So there are two things requisite to make our future bodies one with the bodies we now inhabit: first, that the same formative principle be at work in them; and secondly, that there be some sort of physical connection between the body that now is and the body that shall be. What that physical connection is, it is vain to speculate. We only teach that, though there may not be a single material particle in the new that was present in the old, there yet will be such a physical connection that it can be said: “the new has grown out of the old”; “that which was in the grave has come forth”; “this mortal has put on immortality.”

Cf. Mat. 17:3, 4—“And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elijah talking with him. And Peter answered, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, I will make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah”—here there is no mention of information given to Peter as to the names of the celestial visitants; it would seem that, in his state of exalted sensibility, he at once knew them. The recent proceedings of the English Society for Psychical Research seem to indicate the possibility of communication between two minds without physical intermediaries. Hudson, Scientific Demonstration of a Future Life, 294, 295, holds that telepathy is the means of communication in the future state.

G. S. Fullerton, Sameness and Identity, 6, 32, 67—“Heracleitus of Ephesus declared it impossible to enter the same river twice. Cratylus replied that the same river could not be entered once.... The kinds of sameness are: 1. Thing same with itself at any one instant; 2. Same pain to-day I felt yesterday = a like pain; 3. I See the same tree at different times = two or more percepts represent the same object; 4. Two plants belonging to the same class are called the same; 5. Memory gives us the same object that we formerly perceived; but the object is not the past, it is the memory-imagewhich represents it; 6. Two men perceive the same object = they have like percepts, while both percepts are only representative of the same object; 7. External thing same with its representative in consciousness, or with the substance or noumenon supposed to underlie it.”

Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 153, 255—“What is called ‘remaining the same,’ in the case of all organic beings is just this,—remaining faithful to some immanent idea, while undergoing a great variety of changes in the pursuit, as it were, of the idea.... Self-consciousness and memory are themselves processes of becoming. The mind that does not change, in the way of growth, has no claim to be called mind. One cannot be conscious of changes without also being conscious of being the very being that is changed. When he loses this consciousness, we say that ‘he has lost his mind.’ Amid changes of its ideas the ego remains permanent because it is held within limits by the power of some immanent idea.... Our bodies as such have only a formal existence. They are a stream in constant flow and are ever changing. My body is only a temporary loan from Nature, to be repaid at death.”

With regard to the meaning of the term “identity,” as applied to material things, see Porter, Human Intellect, 631—“Here the substance is called the same, by a loose analogy taken from living agents and their gradual accretion and growth.” The Euphrates is the same stream that flowed, “When high in Paradise By the four rivers the first roses blew,” even though after that time the flood, or deluge, stopped its flow and obliterated all the natural features of the landscape. So this flowing organism which we call the body may be the same, after the deluge of death has passed away.

A different and less satisfactory view is presented in Dorner's Eschatology: “Identity involves: 1. Plastic form, which for the earthly body had its moulding principle in the soul. That principle could effect nothing permanent in the intermediate state; but with the spiritual consummation of the soul, it attains the full power which can appropriate to itself the heavenly body, accompanied by a cosmical process, made like Christ. 2. Appropriation, from the world of elements, of what it needs. The elements into which everything bodily of earth is dissolved, are an essentially uniform mass, like an ocean; and it is indifferent what parts of this are assigned to each individual man. The whole world of substance, which makes the constant change of substance possible, is made over to humanity as a common possession (Acts 4:32—‘not one of them said that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common’).”

Rom. 8:23—“waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; 2 Cor. 5:4—“not for that we would be unclothed; but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life”; Phil. 3:11—“if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.” Even Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—may mean the collecting of all the powers of the body as well as soul. In this respect for the body, as a normal part of man's being, Scripture is based upon the truest philosophy. Plotinus gave thanks that he was not tied to an immortal body, and refused to have his portrait taken, because the body was too contemptible a thing to have its image perpetuated. But this is not natural, nor is it probably anything more than a whim or affectation. Eph. 5:29—“no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it.”What we desire is not the annihilation of the body, but its perfection.

Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 188—“In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the soul reunites itself to the body, with the assurance that they shall never again be separated.” McCosh, Intuitions, 213—“The essential thing about the resurrection is the development, out of the dead body, of an organ for the communion and activity of the spiritual life.” Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:226-234, has interesting remarks upon the relation of the resurrection-body to the present body. The essential difference he considers to be this, that whereas, in the present body, matter is master of the spirit, in the resurrection-body spirit will be the master of matter, needing no reparation by food, and having control of material laws. Ebrard adds striking speculations with regard to the glorified body of Christ.

A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 126—“Now the body bears the spirit, a slow chariot whose wheels are often disabled, and whose swiftest motion is but labored and tardy. Then the spirit will bear the body, carrying it as on wings of thought whithersoever it will. The Holy Ghost, by his divine inworking will, has completed in us the divine likeness, and perfected over us the divine dominion. The human body will now be in sovereign subjection to the human spirit, and the human spirit to the divine Spirit, and God will be all in all.” Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 112—“Weismann maintains that the living germ not only persists and is potentially immortal, but also that under favorable conditions it seems capable of surrounding itself with a new body. If a vital germ can do this, why not a spiritual germ?” Two martyrs were led to the stake. One was blind, the other lame. As the fires kindled, the latter exclaimed: “Courage, brother! this fire will cure us both!”

Ice, the flowing stream, the waterfall with the rainbow upon it, steam with its power to draw the railway train or to burst the boiler of the locomotive, are all the same element in varied forms, and they are all material. Wundt regards physical development, not as the cause, but as the effect, of psychical development. Aristotle defines the soul as “the prime entelechy of the living body.” Swedenborg regarded each soul here as fashioning its own spiritual body, either hideous or lovely. Spenser, A Hymne to Beautie: “For of the soul the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make.” Wordsworth, Sonnet 36, Afterthought: “Far backward, Duddon, as I cast my eyes, I see what was, and is, and will abide; Still glides the stream, and shall not cease to glide; The Form remains, the Function never dies”; The Primrose of the Rock: “Sin-blighted as we are, we too, The reasoning sons of men, From one oblivious winter called, Shall rise and breathe again, And in eternal summer lose Our three-score years and ten. To humbleness of heart descends This prescience from on high. The faith that elevates the just Before and when they die, And makes each soul a separate [pg 1023]heaven, A court for Deity.” Robert Browning, Asolando: “One who never turned his back, but marched breastforward; Never doubted clouds would break; Never dreamed, though right were worsted, Wrong would triumph; Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.” Mrs. Browning: “God keeps a niche In heaven to hold our idols, and albeit He broke them to our faces and denied That our close kisses should impair their white, I know we shall behold them raised, complete, The dust shook off, their beauty glorified.”

On the spiritual body as possibly evolved by will, see Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 386. On the nature of the resurrection-body, see Burnet, State of the Departed, chaps. 3 and 8; Cudworth, Intell. System, 3:310 sq.; Splittgerber, Tod, Fortleben and Auferstehung. On the doctrine of the Resurrection among the Egyptians, see Dr. Howard Osgood, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885; among the Jews, see GrÖbler, in Studien und Kritiken, 1879: Heft 4; DeWÜnsche, in Jahrbuch f. prot. Theol., 1880: Heft 2 and 4; Revue ThÉologique, 1881:1-17. For the view that the resurrection is wholly spiritual and takes place at death, see Willmarth, in Bap. Quar., October, 1868, and April, 1870; Ladd, in New Englander, April, 1874; Crosby, Second Advent.

On the whole subject, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 280; Herzog, Encyclop., art.; Auferstehung; Goulburn, Bampton Lectures for 1850, on the Resurrection; Cox, The Resurrection; Neander, Planting and Training, 479-487, 524-526; Naville, La Vie Éternelle, 253, 254; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 453-463; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 87-112; Unseen Universe, 33; Hovey, in Baptist Quarterly, Oct. 1867; Westcott, Revelation of the Risen Lord, and in Contemporary Review, vol. 30; R. W. Macan, Resurrection of Christ; Cremer, Beyond the Grave.