Spirit and Soul in the Act of Resurrection

VII.

THE RESURRECTION AND CONSUMMATION.

Erimus idem qui nunc, nec alii post, Dei quidem cultores apud Deum semper, superinduti substantia propria aternitatis; profani vero et qui non integri ad Deum in poena seque jugis ignis, habentes ex ipsa natura ejus divinam scilicet subministrationem incorruptibilitatis.

Tebtulliakus (Apologeticus).

SPIRIT AND SOUL IN THE ACT OF RESURRECTION.

Sec. I.

The creation of man began with the formation of his body: for the design of the creative wisdom contemplated a twofold being, which should unite in itself spirit and nature in combination, and should in itself peaceably harmonize the spirit-world with the material-world. Sin frustrated the effectuation of this exalted destination of mau, but redemption made it once again possible: it is now completed by death, in the way of a new-creative miracle. If death were not an actual disembodiment of man, but a loosening, as of the spiritual nature of his soul, so also of the true nature of his corporeity concealed here below,—of an inner body, which is further organized out of the atoms of the higher world of light, in a manner conformable to his progressive development,¹—it could not be comprehended for what purpose the miracle of the resurrection was still needed; for the death itself of those who die in the Lord would then be their resurrection. But Scripture looks upon the death as an unclothing of man from that element of his personality which makes him the point of union of both worlds.

¹ Thus Schelling, in the beautiful discourse now first published, On the Connection of Nature with the Spirit- World, Works, Div. i. vol. ix.; and thus also Fichte, in his work upon the Idea of Personality, and elsewhere. "Death is a necessary event in the development of life,—the complete separation of the internal body from its copy woven out of the elements, and even in this world constantly changing and transforming itself;" comp. Bohner, Naturforschung und Kulturkben (1858), p. 222: "Bodily death is an accelerated process of life, in which absolutely nothing is lost; but spirit and body only unfold themselves according to their further destination." In his philosophia secunda, however, Schelling teaches in the future life an intermediate state of mere being and of extinguished capability requiring a resurrection, and thus teaches a state of restraint like a sleep of the soul. See Works, Div. ii. vol. iv. 210.

The corporeity of souls that have passed over into the other world is only a phenomenal one, not a material, and therefore no actual one. That which is effected in man by Christ's word and sacrament, comes also in this phenomenal corporeity to provisional manifestation; but their actual bodies lie in the dust of the grave in hope : for they have received here below the tincture of immortality, by virtue of which they cannot abide in death; and this tincture of their immortality is at the same time the power of the glorification of the world.

Therefore the separated souls long for reunion with their bodies; nevertheless, they are unable to complete the reanimation of these latter. It is a creative act of God the Father, completed through the Son, and brought about by the Holy Ghost, whereby they receive back their bodies. This act of new creation is different in manifold ways from the creative act of the primeval beginning. There, when the body was formed, the personifying spirit who was to endow it with soul was not yet present: here the self-conscious spirit is already at hand; and the creative restoration of that body—with which it has already lived through a history conscious to its memory, —is an act of God, which does not come to it unforeseen, but is longed for by it, is guaranteed to it, and, as in this state, so in the world to come also, is prepared for it. This is the psychological point of view under which the transaction of the resurrection falls. It is asked, How is the self-conscious spirit related to this act of restoration? Does the beginning of a new bodily life resemble the embryonic commencement of the old one, so far as the self-conscious spirit is pressed back into unconsciousness; and attaining from this once more into full and waking consciousness, does it find itself within the created and restored body?

No express answer to this question is given us in the Holy Scripture. On the contrary, it says, without reconciling the two passages, just as definitely that the separated souls are partly in heaven and partly in Hades, as that all the dead shall arise from their graves. It is confessed what mistakes have been made by the adoption of one of these two facts, and shutting one's eyes to the other. Either it was thought that the souls were even to the resurrection day in a state of sleep with their corrupting bodies, or "resurrection" was explained as a designation used only figuratively and by way of accommodation.

We let both facts stand, even although we should be unable to reconcile them. Nevertheless, the informations of the Scripture upon the resurrection of the dead are so copious, that even psychologic consideration finds a point of junction in order to sketch for itself a picture of the mysterious procedure conformed to revelation.¹

The restoration of the human body results when God the triune "supplies to the soul from the then glorified world of nature materials for the new formation of its body, similar to those of which its earthly body was formed, and with which, when the soul impresses upon them the form of its inner spiritual body, its spiritual nature may attain to full manifestation even in the external body."⁸ The assertion anima corpus suum creat (thus formulated by Erigena), which we have already rejected in respect of the primitive beginning and the propagation of man, we must here also reject. The soul is neither the creative principle of the body, nor the plastic and organizing principle of its materiality. None the less on that account is it true, that the formation of our bodies in the womb is not completed without the co-operation of the soul; and when it is added thereto, that death, although it severs the living union of the soul and the body, yet, as we have shown in the concluding paragraph of

¹ Even J. P. Lange (Bihlisch-theologiscJie Erorterungen in Sludien und Krit. 1836) and Kling (the same, 1839, p. 512) attempt this; but the former in a manner that reminds one of Origen—too boldly picturing; the latter in a way which touches the truth of the resurrection as a going forth from the grave, and otherwise wholly incapable of being carried into effect even ideally. On the other hand, among the fathers of the church is hardly found a disposition thereto, not even in Tertullian's work, de resurrectione carnis, although this outweighs all which had previously been written upon resurrection.

² Thus Schbberlein, Jahrbb. 1861, p. 77. Our own previous idea did not sufficiently observe the sameness of the future body with the present. The question, whether the glorification of the earth will precede or follow the resurrection, we leave unanswered; but in any case, the materiality of the resurrection body is essentially of a similar nature with the materiality of the glorified earth (as also v. Rudloff, p. 421, supposes), and essentially identical with the materiality of the body that has become subject to corruption (as we maintain with Schoberlein, Stud. u. Krit. 1860, p. 164, against v. Rudloff).

the foregoing division, does not destroy the real relation of the soul to its corrupting and perishing body, it becomes more than probable that this real relation, enhanced to attractive power, is drawn into the creative restoration of the body. Thus Thomas Aquinas and Dante conceive; and, in fact, assumption and glorification in pure passivity of the soul are not perhaps conceivable.¹ Nevertheless, the transaction is a mystery, and moreover an uncompleted mystery, and the completion is when many creative potencies interact within it; but even then it is an absolutely creative mystery, and not successive, but momentary.2

The creative act of restoration, and the yearning, joyous eagerness of the soul for its body to be again received from death—these are two acts that meet one another, and coincide in one lightning-like moment (comp. 1 Cor. xv. 52 with 1 Thess. iv. 16). The reunion results in waking consciousness of the soul, but in a condition of pleasurable awe, in which all reflecting will and thought are merged; and the formation of the body which the soul finds in the moment of reunion as already prepared, is a secret withdrawn from its testimony and its knowledge. Even the transformation of the bodies of the living occurs so rapidly, that it withdraws itself from all observation, and no subsequent reflection is able to fathom the secret.

The resurrection body is not, as was the body of the first created man, psychical, with the destination that it should become pneumatical; but it is immediately pneumatical, because the spirit which, by means of the soul, seizes possession of it, finds itself in the position of perfection (Heb. xii. 23). The soul, besides, gives to that which in design is formed upon it, in the measure of the immaterial shadow which is left to it, its perfected individual stamp; for everything which it has here

¹ See Goschel, Der Mensch diesseits und jenseits, p. 46.

² Gregory of Nyssa, in his Dialogue with Macrina (Opp. ed. Paris, iii. 212-216), goes too far when he compares the soul, in respect of the dissolved elements of its body, to an artist who knows how to unmix the colours of a picture blended together and dispersed, and to combine them into the same picture, or to a potter who can easily find the broken pieces of several vessels from the rude mass of clay among which they are mixed; or when he says that all the elements of the body run together, lik I many strings in the soul, and therefore ftix rjf ^kx^i Ivixftti can be again drawn together and combined. What is so said of the soul, is only true of God, and of it as co-operating.

below collected to itself as a treasure, as Macarius (Horn. v. 8) says, will then become manifest and openly plain outwardly in the body. That shadow of the spirits of perfected righteous men was already a type of the glorification which is now bodily perfected in them when they have again attained their bodies,¹ which cannot abide in death after the Holy Ghost has made them His habitation (1 Cor. vi. 19; Rom. viii. 11⁸); and Christ's body and blood have become for them the tincture of everlasting life (<f>dpfiaKov adavaaia<;). It is obvious that the sacramental gifts do not remain with the corpses. They become absorbed by the full possession and full enjoyment of Christ, into which the separated soul enters. That the Lord gives to these, in their state of intermediate corporeity, to enjoy the vision and the embrace of His gracious glorified humanity, is a fact related to the sacramental gifts, in the same way that the perfect actual performance is to the earnest that guarantees it. It is, however, the effect of the sacramental gifts, that bodies do not corrupt without an expectation of the restoration of their nature.

The human body formed by the hand of God, since it has become materialistic, is as an overcrusted mystery. It is wholly inconceivable that this mystery is not one day to become revealed to the joy of all beings. The resurrection will place it

¹ "The adjustment of the identity of the rising body with the body of this state," says Nitzsch, System, sec. 217, obs. 2, "will have to be sought for in the same corporeity in which the soul that is being severed remains; and which, according to the constitution of the cosmical sphere to which it now first of all in every case pertains, and according to the impulses of its own internal formation, is changed for it even to that point at which it attains the final condition." Martensen (sec. 276, obs.) even calls this preparatory process a "concealed natural development" (i.e. development of the soul's nature that is not to be thought of as purely out of nature). On Kling, who describes this oddly, we have already spoken. The view of these inquirers (including also Julius Miiller, Siinde, ii. 416) of the intermediate corporeity is a different one from ours. To us this is an absolutely immaterial—purely psychical—phenomenon. A substantial (not merely typical) preparation Of the resurrection body on behalf of the soul is to us inconceivable.

* Not only internal but external reasons (see Beiche, Comm. criticus, i. 54, 67) declare here for the reading lid To itoixov» wtv/ix it ifiin,—lid of the objective moving cause, according to 2 Cor. v. 5 and other places. The reading lid row, H.t.a., is contrary to the doctrinal scheme of the apostle.

in the clearest light. But as yet we are not in a position to make to ourselves a clear conception of the pneumatic bodies of those who are risen again. If we attempt it,—as, for example, Origen did, who attributed to the risen, aw/xa alOepiov re Koj, a<f>cupoei&es rf» ay^yMTi, — our powerlessness and limitation prove themselves here, if anywhere at all. They will become of like form with the glorified body of the second Adam (Phil, iii. 21). They will be as the body of the first Adam prior to the establishment of the sexual distinction (Div. II. Sec. V. VI.); but more glorious than this, because they will have attained the glory which the psychical body of the first Adam ought to have attained, but forfeited by the fall.¹ They will also be actual human bodies, essentially even in respect of form, identical with those of this present state, and yet in quality infinitely different from them. The perfected realization of the human

¹ Tertullian (de resurr. c. 60-62) maintains the continuance of a!l human members, notwithstanding the cessation of the sexual and other functions, el hodie, says he, with respect to fasting and chastity, vacare tntestinis el pudendis Ucebit. In order to weaken the proof from Luke xx. 36, he says, that as angels appearing in human form (e.g. Gen. xviii.) maintained their angelic nature, so also men in the angelic form of the future life may maintain their bodily nature: Non magia solemnibus carnis obnoxii sub angelico indumento quam angeli tunc solemnibus spiritus sub humano. Just so Jerome, allying himself to Tertullian, makes use of Luke xx. 85 for the purpose: Ubi dicitur; non nubent neque nubentur, sexuum diversitas demonstratur (in the Epitaphium Paulse). In an altogether similar way, Hahn, Neutest. Theol. i. 268, and Kurtz, Bibel und Astronomie, iv. sec. 18 (ed. 4), express themselves; and just so decides Besser, who on 1 Cor. vi. 13 (Bibelst. viii.) remarks, " Stomach and intestines, in their special character of belly, serve the maintenance of this natural life. Although, therefore, the spiritual resurrection body shall have All Essential Pakts of the natural body in a new manner (xv. 44), it will still be without the necessity of the belly. For the belly changes the nourishing part of the food into blood, and prepares that which is not nourishing to be again rejected. In the kingdom of glory, on the other hand, we shall so eat and drink (Matt. xxvi. 29), that the flesh and blood, glorified into spiritual life, shall be pervaded with living food, as the atmosphere is impregnated with sunbeams for the purpose of becoming transparent and warm." The direction of Mihla is here limited, as it is by Keil (see above, p. 102, obs. 1), to the organs that serve for digestion. And certainly thus say we also: an absolute abolition of the sexual distinctions would not be different from an abolition of personal identity. But its continuance does not necessarily imply a continuance of that bodily external manifestation of it which was its characteristic in this life.

body as such, the mystery of its organism, become manifest—the heavenly antitype of its earthly type. Their identity with the bodies of this present state is not founded in similarity of material; for even now in this state this identity is comprehended in an unceasing origination and passing away.¹ But, moreover, it is not merely in likeness of form (etSo?), with entire distinction of substance;² for such a merely formal identity as of mould gives no satisfaction to the idea of the resurrection, and militates against the character of the grain of wheat which befits the corrupting corpse (1 Cor. xv. 42—44). The true identity lies in the mean, between the former grossly material, and the latter merely formal, identity. Within the world once created, no single atom is ever annihilated. The elementary materials whereof the now corrupted body was composed, are therefore still in existence; and the Omniscient knows where they are, and the Omnipotent can collect them together again. But, in the meanwhile, together with the world of nature in which they are laid up, they have undergone the process of fire, out of which heaven and earth issue in brighter glorification. From this glorified world, He who at first formed the body of man of the earth of Eden, brings together again the elementary materials of our bodies, in similar purpose of the powers per

¹ See Julius Miiller in Studien und Kritiken, 1835, p. 777. "Resurrection of the flesh " is nevertheless a justifiable expression, and one that has become necessary in the face of the Origenistic doctrine of resurrection. It cannot indeed be justified from Job xix. 26, where is only expressed the hope of a future fleshless, therefore spiritual, vision of God, but perhaps from John vi. It is certainly not Pauline: see, upon the Pauline distinction between aip% and auftx, Tijssen, Pauli Anthropologia (Groningen, 1847), and especially Holsten, the meaning of the word SAPS (1855), pp. 1-6. The idea of flesh has, in the view of Paul, the essential characteristic of earthly material nature. The resurrection body is auftx, not aufix T« >reepxi;. The substance, of which it is a living articulation, is not oxp%; but that the essential characteristic of that which is earthly material in "flesh and blood" is no absolutely inalienable one, is shown by the holy communion, to which Irenseus expressly points.

¹ The Origenistic view, Xoyof Ti; (ainpfiXtixof) iyxtirxi T£ oufixn, x$\ o5 firi (panpofiinv iyflpfrxi To' aufix it xQixpaix (c. Cels. V. 23). See Thomasius, Origen, p. 255. -Eneas of Gaza (ed. Boissonade, pp. 65-67) cites the parable: If a statue of Achilles, made of brass, and grown old, were shattered, and an artist were to make a golden one of a like form, that would be the same Achilles (iQiun af» xpvawf i -rxhxi xxKxohf'A^mah!?, 'AxA^iif fitrroi).

vading them, and similar mingling of their essential elements, so far as this purpose and this mingling are the conditions of the individuality of each person remaining to him after sin, with its precedents and results, has been deducted; and the soul, with that form of body brought together again, takes possession of it, as a queen takes possession of her throne, and pervades it with its heavenly light, and makes it a transparent manifestation of the soul's spiritual nature, uniting itself therewith as the object of the soul's longing into a compact self-completion of its personality. The natural constitution of man had from the beginning this design, that corporeity might be elevated into the sphere of the spirit, and become a manifestation of the spirit. This purpose was withal its problem, and this problem is not solved. When the discord of the spirit and the soul shall have already ceased with the victorious irruption through death into life, the discord of the spirit and flesh which at death resulted in absolute ruin of both shall be abrogated also. Man is now, in the unity of his three constituent elements, spiritual. The synthesis which distinguishes man from the pure spirit is again established, but the dualism is compensated and balanced. In the spirit is reflected the Godhead, and in the soul the spirit, and in the body the spiritual soul. Man is now a microcosm in the position of glorification. For as God the triune fills the new world with the sevenfold doxa, so the human spirits created after the image of the Godhead fill with their souls which portray the divine doxa, their bodies that have become awnara

Of the bodies of the ungodly this indeed cannot be said. The bodies of these also shall arise. But this cannot possibly be as spiritual. For they have not sought to attain the redemption as a renewing of the godlike actuality of their spirit. Their spirit is powerlessly imprisoned in the turba which has laid hold of the powers of the soul. They are psychical and fleshly, and therefore their bodies will be so also. Scripture

¹ The divinely-formative process which herewith is completed, is otherwise apprehended by fibhme and Baader: Soul (~ Father), Idea (•*> Son)i Spirit (•» Holy Spirit), spiritual body (~ eternal divine corporeity) Thm also my Elberfeld critic: "Soul does not correspond to doxa; dom is corporeity." Just so also v. Rudloff and Schoberlein. Let the reader test these views and ours by the Scripture!

does not expressly assert this, as it nowhere designedly declares itself in general upon the resurrection to judgment.—that nightside of the general resurrection; but that without a spiritual internal nature there cannot be a spiritual external nature, is self-evident.

It is the call to judgment penetrating through heaven and Hades, in consequence of which even the souls of the ungodly hasten to their bodies, which arise by God's creative mighty operation contemporary with the call. It occurs with that awful fear (Heb. x. 27), which even in this world shook their carnally secure peace; perhaps also not without that vain hope that is comparable to the wish of the demons (Matt. viii. 31), that they might find in their bodies a covering for the disgraceful nakedness of their souls, and a shield from God's anger. The assumption of a participation of souls in the restoration of their bodies is here, moreover, in the resurrection of the ungodly, even more inevitable. For the human body is established again, in order that man may come to stand before God's judgment in the totality, and indeed in the true physico-ethical nature of his spirit-embodied personality. The resurrection is not yet the judgment itself, but only the preparation for it. Therefore also the reconstitution of the bodies of the ungodly is no purely judicial act of God. But if it be not this, it must be supposed that the souls of the ungodly partake in the reconstitution of their bodies, so far as they express in those bodies, rising by God's might and power, the alienation from God of their individuality. In the bodies of the righteous, God sets aside everything which is the consequence of sin; and in the bodies of the ungodly, He sets aside everything which could delusively conceal their internal sinfulness; but that which is sinful itself, as well in its internal nature as in its external manifestation, is the operation of souls concurring in the act of reconstitution.

To this operation of souls, the finally decisive judgment adds the judicial operation of God. As well turba as doxa of those who have risen, there attain their final climax, their eternally valid seal.¹ For not until the blissful spiritually

¹ Julius Muller places the ascension of Christ in a similar relation to His resurrection, when he assumes a process from within outwards between both facts,—a process in which the Spirit of Christ progressively pervaded

embodied vision of God is perfected the doxa of the righteous, when the doxa of the Triune is stamped upon them who behold it (1 John iii. 2, comp. John xvii. 24); and only in hell—where wrath and love are not mingled as in the present world, but wrath, or what is the same thing, darkness and fire, reign exclusively—is perfected the turba of the ungodly, in that the wrathful fire of hell (whereof elementary fire is only a remote created type) sets on fire its natural wheel of life (Jas. iii. 6).¹ Beyond the acts of God which close the history of salvation which are recorded in Apoc. xx. 11-xxi. 1, the present world, mingled of wrath and love—this world of Paidagogia to Christ —is for ever put aside. There subsist only still the kingdom of exclusive love infinitely exalted above the present world, and the region of exclusive wrath lying at an infinite depth below the present world, and therefore strikingly designated by Baader as sub-material, sub-local, and sub-temporal. A state such as the present—into which the soul can return, in order, after many changes, to attain finally again into the blissful, bright region of love—exists no more. The metempsychosis is a Jie.

His corporeity, and imparted itself thereto ( Christian Doctrine of Sin, transl.; Clark, For. Theol. Libr. vol. ii. p. 328); a not improbable view, in which, however, this is not acceptable, that the body of the Risen One was still aufix Xoikon, and did not become oufix imivfixtix.oi/, except as a result of this development. Better isKeerl, Schopfungsgeschichte, p. 785. His body, which originally was paradisaical, is glorified with His entrance into the heavenly sanctuary, into the heavenly nature.

¹ Karsten, in his work upon the last things, teaches that the ungodly only arise in order to be unclothed, in the judgment of the world, of their body that has been raised by the power of redemption, and then to continue to exist as disembodied spirits; but Scripture says nothing to favour this view.