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IV. THE RESURRECTION.

While the Scriptures describe the impartation of new life to the soul in regeneration as a spiritual resurrection, they also declare that, at the second coming of Christ, there shall be a resurrection of the body, and a reunion of the body to the soul from which, during the intermediate state, it has been separated. Both the just and the unjust shall have part in the resurrection. To the just, it shall be a resurrection unto life; and the body shall be a body like Christ's a body fitted for the uses of the sanctified spirit. To the unjust, it shall be a resurrection unto condemnation; and analogy would seem to indicate that, here also, the outward form will fitly represent the inward state of the soul-being corrupt and deformed as is the soul which inhabits it. Those who are living at Christ's coming shall receive spiritual bodies without passing through death. As the body after corruption and dissolution, so the outward world after destruction by fire, shall be rehabilitated and fitted for the abode of the saints.

Passages describing a spiritual resurrection are: John 5: 24-27, especially 25-"The hour cometh and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live"; Rom. 6:4, 5" as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with him by the likeness of his death, we shall be also by the likeness of his resurrection"; Eph. 2: 1, 5, 6" And you did he quicken, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins. . . . . even when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us together with Christ. . . . . . and raised us up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus"; 5: 14-"Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee." Phil. 3: 10" that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection"; Col. 2: 12, 13" having been buried with him in baptism, wherein ye were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, you. I say, did he quicken together with him"; cf. Is. 26: 19" Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead"; Ez. 371-14the valley of dry bones: "I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, 0 my people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel."

Passages describing a literal and physical resurrection are: Job 14: 12-15-"So man lieth down and riseth not: Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, Nor be raised out of their sleep. Oh that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol. That thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, That thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my warfare would I wait, till my release should come. Thou shouldest call, and I would answer thee: thou wouldest have a desire to the work of thine hands"; John 5: 28, 29" the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done ill, unto the resurrection of judgment."

Acts 24: 15" having hope toward God..... that there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust "; 1 Cor. 15: 13, 17, 22, 43, 51, 52"if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised.... and if Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. . . . . as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. . . . it is sown in corruption: it is raised in incorruption . . . . We all shall not sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible"; Phil. 3: 21-"who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself"; 1 Thess. 4: 14-16-"For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord, shall in no wise precede them that are fallen asleep. 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."

2 Pet. 37, 10, 13-"the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved against the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. . . . . But the day of the Lord will come as a thief; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up. But, according to his promise, we look for 13-"And the sea gave up the dead which

new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness"; Rev. 20: were in it; and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them"; 21: 1, 5-" And I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more..... And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new."

The smooth face of death with the lost youth restored, and the pure white glow of the marble statue with all passion gone and the lofty and heroic only visible, are indications of what is to be. Art, in its representations alike of the human form, and of an ideal earth and society in landscape and poem, is prophetic of the future-it suggests the glorious possibilities of the resurrection-morning. Nicoll, Life of Christ: "The river runs through the lake and pursues its way beyond. So the life of faith passes through death and is only purified thereby. As to the body, all that is worth saving will be saved. Other resurrections [such as that of Lazarus] were resurrections to the old conditions of earthly life; the resurrection of Christ was the revelation of a new life." A. J. Gordon: "Here then is where the lines of Christ's ministry terminate - in sanctification, the perfection of the spirit's holiness; and in resurrection, the perfection of the body's health."

Upon the subject of the resurrection, our positive information is derived wholly from the word of God. Further discussion of it may be most naturally arranged in a series of answers to objections. The objections commonly urged against the doctrine, as above propounded, may be reduced to two:

1. The exegetical objection,— that it rests upon a literalizing of metaphorical language, and has no sufficient support in Scripture. To this we

answer:

(a) That, though the phrase "resurrection of the body" does not occur in the New Testament, the passages which describe the event indicate a physical, as distinguished from a spiritual, change (John 5: 28; Phil. 3 : 21; 1 Thess. 4: 13-17). The phrase "spiritual body" (1 Cor. 15: 44) is a contradiction in terms, if it be understood as signifying 'a body which is simple spirit.' It can only be interpreted as meaning a material organism, perfectly adapted to be the outward expression and vehicle of the purified soul. The purely spiritual interpretation is, moreover, expressly excluded by the apostolic denial that "the resurrection is past already" (2 Tim. 2 : 18), and by the fact that there is a resurrection of the unjust, as well as of the just (Acts 24: 15).

John 5: 28-"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 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 of the unjust.”

(b) That the redemption of Christ is declared to include the body as well as the soul (Rom. 8:23; 1 Cor. 6:13-20). The indwelling of the Holy Ghost has put such honor upon the frail mortal tenement which he has made his temple, that God will not permit even this wholly to perish (Rom. 8 : 11 — διὰ τὸ ἐνοικοῦν αὐτοῦ πνεῦμα ἐν ὑμῖν, i. e., because of his indwelling Spirit, God will raise up the mortal body). It is this belief which forms the basis of Christian care for the dead (Phil. 3: 21; cf. Mat. 22 : 32 ). 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 naught 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 to the Lord is one spirit.. Or know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost 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 also quicken 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 dià Toù évOLKOŪVTOS AUTOù vеúμатоs. Tregelles,

Tisch., 7th ed., and Meyer, have dɩà rò èvoikoùv avтoù пveûμa, and this reading we regard as, on the whole, the best supported. Phil. 3: 21-" will 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."

Christ's proof of the resurrection in Mat. 22: 32" God is not the God of the dead, but of the living "— has for its basis this very assumption that soul and body belong normally together, and that since they are temporally separated in the case of the saints who live with God, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise again. The idealistic philosophy of thirty years ago led to a contempt of the body; the recent materialism has done at least this service, that it has reasserted the claims of the body to be a proper part of man.

(c) That the nature of Christ's resurrection, as literal and physical, determines the nature of the resurrection in the case of believers (Luke 24: 39; John 20:27). As, in the case of Christ, the same body that was laid in the tomb was raised again, although possessed of new and surprising powers, so the Scriptures intimate, not simply that the saints shall have bodies, but that these bodies shall be in some proper sense an outgrowth or transformation of the very bodies that slept in the dust (Dan. 12 : 2 ; 1 Cor. 15: 53, 54). The denial of the resurrection of the body, in the case of believers, leads naturally to a denial of the reality of Christ's resurrection 1 Cor. 15: 13).

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 see 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.

(d) That the accompanying events, as the second coming and the judgment, since they are themselves literal, imply that the resurrection is also literal.

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.

2.

The scientific objection.-This is threefold:

(a) That a resurrection of the particles which compose the body at death is impossible, since they enter into new combinations, and not unfrequently become parts of other bodies which the doctrine holds to be raised at the same time.

We reply that the Scripture not only does not compel us to hold, but it distinctly denies, that all the particles which exist in the body at death are present in the resurrection-body (1 Cor. 15: 37 — oẻ tò owμa tò yevnoóμevov; 50). The Scripture seems only to indicate a certain physical connection between the new and the old, although the nature of this connection is not revealed. So long as this physical connection is maintained, it is not necessary to suppose that even a germ or particle that belonged to the old body exists in the new.

1 Cor. 15: 37--"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." The view of the resurrection held a century ago was exposed to the objection mentioned above. Pollock'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 had 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 is scattered wide, Far as its 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. 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 is 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 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."

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 North River is the same to-day that it was when Hendrick Hudson first discovered it; yet not a particle of its current, nor a particle 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."

(b) That a resurrection-body, having such a remote physical connection with the present body, cannot be recognized by the inhabiting soul or by other witnessing spirits as the same with that which was laid in the grave.

To this we reply that bodily identity does not consist in absolute sameness of particles during the whole history of the body, but in the organizing force, which, even in the flux and displacement of physical particles, makes the old the basis of the new, and binds both together in the unity of a single consciousness. In our recognition of friends, moreover, we are not wholly dependent, even in this world, upon our perception of bodily form; and we have reason to believe that in the future state there may be methods of communication far more direct and intuitive than those with which we are familiar here.

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 prove the possibility of communication between two minds without physical intermediaries.

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

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