You are on page 1of 5

Resurrectio n and Life

Body and Spirit

And the resurrection of the body


The line above comes from the last part of the 3rd article of the Apostles Creed, the oldest creed that Christendom still uses to confess its faith. Yet saying that we believe the resurrection of the body leaves us with many questions: Why do we believe in a bodily resurrection? What does body mean in the case of the resurrection? And so on

Read I Corinthians 15:12-13 What does Paul use as his major reason for believing in the resurrection [of the body]?

Hebrew Concepts of Body and Being


Resurrection is not an exclusively Christian idea. Throughout the Old Testament and even in modern day Hebrew and Jewish perceptions of the afterlife, you find a bodily resurrection. Part of this is a philosophical issue. While Hebrews understood the idea of spirit before most any other culture did, they never divorced spirit (ruach) from body (actually, body itself is almost never used except for a dead one usually its just body parts). They were two parts of one larger concept, the soul (nephesh), which consisted of the whole living being. When spirit is divorced from body, the Hebrew understanding is that the body is not living. In other words, without a spirit, you

dont have a body, you have a corpse; and if you dont have a body but a spirit, you have a spiritual corpse. The dualistic understanding of spirit + body comes from Greek culture, which would add mind to the mix. Mathematically, for a Greek person spirit + body + mind = being. But for a Hebrew person, it was much more like multiplication: body x spirit = being. Read Daniel 12:2-3, Ezekiel 37:1-12, and Isaiah 26:19 What are some of the clues to the Hebrew understanding of body and spirit?

Judeo-Greek Understandings of Body and Resurrection


When Paul goes to the Areopagus, many of the Greek philosophers there spurn his talk because it is about the resurrection of the dead, which they regard as a silly concept. (Acts 17:32). They regarded it as silly because in the Greek understanding, your being was mind + spirit + body = being, and the body part of that equation was transitory and temporary at best and evil at worst. So when Paul, writing in Greek, is trying to get across the Christian understanding of the resurrection, its worthwhile to see how he is talking about it. soma the word for a living healthy body this is the word that Paul uses when talking about the bodies of resurrected believers and Christs own body. sarx the word for flesh or body divorced from spirit and/or mind this is the word that Paul uses negatively for things like the sinful flesh anastasis the word for resurrection which in Greek literature only means a bodily reanimation. Interestingly, most occurrences of anastasis in Greek literature also have the resurrected person becoming immortal after their resurrection.

So if Paul is using these defined terms to get across his understanding of the resurrection, we can read his resurrection passages with a little more clarity of where hes going with them. Read I Corinthians 15:35-41 Where do you find words like body, flesh and resurrected/raised?

Spiritual bodies
Some of the discrepancies between the idea of resurrection of the body and an amorphous resurrection of the spirit without a body, comes from the end of Pauls famous chapter on Resurrection. In I Corinthians 15:42-49, we see Paul talking about the difference between a natural body and a spiritual body. If you stop reading there, you could assume that what he means is that we are to be raised as spiritual beings which you would interpret (since philosophically youre more Greek than Hebrew) as without a real body. However, if you continue reading verses 50 to 55, you find that what Paul is actually saying is that a spiritual body is not a nonbody, but a body that has put on the imperishable. Again, the math is different. In the Greek/non-body understanding, you have subtraction going on: spiritual body = imperishable spirit body. However in the Hebrew bodied understanding, you have addition if not multiplication: spiritual body = body + imperishable spirit. Read I Corinthians 15:42-55 What does this passage say about what our resurrection body will and will not be like?

Please dont throw this away. If youre not going to use it, leave it for someone else to use.

You might also like