On Wednesday evenings I am leading a Bible study of Paul’s Corinthian letters. Recently we have been in I Corinthians chapter 15 and have been discussing the resurrection of the dead, the subject of the entire chapter. It is tempting to pull a few hopeful verses from this chapter for use in funeral services and move on just taking resurrection as a given in the Christian faith. But the Corinthians’ struggle to understand the meaning of resurrection as something very different from the immortality of the soul is very much a problem for us today.
The idea of the immortality of the soul was a very familiar idea to the Corinthians. It came to them as a basic part of Greek understanding of the world which taught that the soul and the body were separate things. The soul was good and immortal while the body was temporary and inadequate. On death the the soul was freed from the weak and temporal body to continue it’s immortal journey in the realm of the spirits. Understood correctly, it was best to accept death as a welcomed deliverance of the soul from its mortal prison. The Corinthians equated the immortality of the soul with the Gospel’s promise of the resurrection of the dead. All this sounds quite familiar to us as western society is heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Greeks.
There were, and are, however, serious incompatibilities between the Gospel and Greek philosophy that are particularly stark when it comes to the difference between immortality and resurrection. In Christian understanding death is not a part of God’s plan but has been imposed into our experience as a result of sin. Death is an enemy to be defeated. God’s plan is to deliver us from the influence of sin and its ultimate expression, death. When Jesus died His soul was not freed from an unimportant body. Rather he was experiencing in an act of love and sacrifice all the terrible destruction that our sins have imposed upon God’s plan. The resurrection of Jesus inaugerated the power of God’s plan in defeating death.
Another area that needs to be informed by the concept of the resurrection of the dead is respect for the body. While an immortal soul is delivered from bodily imprisonment in Greek thinking, the Biblical revelation teaches us that we are wonderfully made and that every part of us is loved by God and should be loved by us. We are not a soul trapped in a worthless body. We are a treasured creation that God has made, “a little lower than the angels … crowned with glory.” God’s redemptive plan includes all that we are, body, mind, soul, emotions, everything. The resurrection of the dead teaches what while our physical bodies are temporal and will “return to dust,” what lies beyond is a perfected extension of what God has already started, the redemption of our whole selves including the embodiment of all that we are.
Paul taught the Corinthians that the resurrection of the dead was a divine plan that expresses important aspects of God’s loving redemption revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. I think we need to pay attention, too.
Quiet Faith 