The resurrection of the body

The hope for the whole person

The Bible's hope is not that the soul will escape the prison of the body, but that the whole person will live again. Daniel foresaw that "many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake" (Daniel 12:2), and Jesus said that all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out, to the resurrection of life or to the resurrection of judgment (John 5:28-29). The New Testament word, anastasis (ἀνάστασις), means a standing up again.

The ground of this hope is the resurrection of Christ.

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

1 Corinthians 15:20

The risen Jesus told his frightened disciples, "Touch Me and see — for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have" (Luke 24:39). As the firstfruits, so the harvest: the God who raised Jesus "will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit" (Romans 8:11).

What kind of body? Paul answers with a seed: "What is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable" (1 Corinthians 15:42). Wesley lingers on the word sown: "A beautiful word; committed, as seed, to the ground." Wesley As the wheat is one with the seed yet far more than it, the resurrection body is continuous with this one, yet transformed. Paul calls it "a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:44), which many interpreters take to mean not a body made of spirit but a body wholly alive with the Holy Spirit. Those still alive when Christ comes "will be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:52).

What the church confesses

The resurrection of the body was a stumbling block from the start. When the Athenians heard Paul speak of it, "some began to mock him" (Acts 17:32), and some in Corinth said "there is no resurrection of the dead" (1 Corinthians 15:12). Against Gnostic teachers who despised matter and the body, Irenaeus insisted that the flesh God made will be saved and raised Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5. The Apostles' Creed confesses "the resurrection of the body" Apostles' Creed, and the Westminster Confession stresses that it is the same body that is raised:

all the dead shall be raised up with the self-same bodies, and none other, although with different qualities, which shall be united again to their souls forever.

Westminster Confession 32.2

Where Christians differ

Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches confess the resurrection of the body together, following the creeds. The church has not defined in detail how the risen body is the same as this one. In the third century Origen stressed that the risen body is spiritual and speculated about its form, and some later Fathers criticised him for weakening the reality of the body. In modern times some have reinterpreted the resurrection as the soul's immortality or as a symbol, but the historic churches have kept the creeds' confession.

Among evangelicals there is a difference over the order of the resurrection. Premillennialists, reading Revelation 20, place a thousand years between the first resurrection of the righteous and the raising of the rest of the dead. Amillennialists and postmillennialists expect one general resurrection of the righteous and the wicked together at Christ's return. All agree that the last judgment follows. For more, see the lesson Resurrection, judgment and the new creation.