1 Corinthians 15:41

41. Glory Visible splendour. The splendours of the luminaries differ in intensity, magnitude, and colour. Against the doctrine of a resurrection it is argued that our bodies are now in a continual process of change; so that, even here, our very material sameness is not a literal, but a successional and historical one. Yet, we reply, this molecular succession is, in fact, now most carefully maintained unbroken; so that the historical continuity and sameness can be traced and sworn to. The murderer of twenty years ago, in spite of all organic changes, is hung to-day. This man at seventy is husband of the wife he married at twenty-five, and heir of the patrimony he inherited in infancy. But we never in life drop our whole body to-day, pass a bodiless period, and then take a whole new body. Nor then would the new body be the same as the old. In order to be the same body next year, the reconstructor must go back and take up the material of the old body into the new. And so in the resurrection, the reorganizer must go back and take up the body that died; otherwise, the successional historical identity which exists in our present life, and which is quoted as a precedent, is wholly abolished.

Dr. Poor theorizes that the “plastic principle” may, at the resurrection, “assimilate new materials of a wholly different kind” from those in our present bodies. What demand for such a supposition? For, 1. There is not known to science, or demanded by reason, any other “plastic principle” than an omnipresent divine power, working under forms of law and finite causations. As Paul says, God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, yet in accordance with the laws of resurrection. 2. When the undressed soul appears before God on the morning of the resurrection, it is by divine power that from somewhere in the wide universe, the particles should gather in accretion upon the soul, to form its body. Now why is it not quite as easy for divine power to order the coming of that set of particles which formed the old body as any other? What demand from science, reason, or Scripture for any new materials? Nay, that divine power may establish such affinity between the soul and the particles of the old organism that it may attract them to itself by a process as truly natural as that by which a magnet draws a mass of iron filings to itself.

Otherwise there is no resurrection, but a new creation and a substitution. The real debate is not between “two theories of the resurrection,” but between the resurrection and something else that is not a resurrection. An anastasis (resurrection) of the dead is an uprising of the body from its fallen position in death, and, normally, the grave. That is the very meaning of the word. And it is that which down-fell which must uprise, and not something else. Or, if it is called in the New Testament an egersis, it is an upraising. What is it that is upraised unless the previous body, the body that fell, and that now lies a prostrate corpse? There must be no legerdemain about it; no slipping in a supposititious body; no substitution; no new creation “out of new materials of a wholly different kind.” If either of those things takes place, it is no resurrection at all, and the doctrine of the resurrection is wholly denied.

This realistic identity is absolutely required by Scripture. Daniel tells us (Daniel 12:2) that they “that sleep in the dust of the earth,” which can be no other than the buried corpses, “shall awake.” Our Lord, almost quoting Daniel’s words, says that it is “they that are in the graves,” which can again mean only the entombed corpses, that “shall come forth.” John 5:28-29. Wherever death is called a sleep it is the body (certainly not the soul) that is conceived to sleep, and the resurrection is the awakening of that same body. Our Lord’s resurrection the pattern and model for all was of his same body from the tomb. In his transfiguration, by which he was assimilated to the resurrection body of Moses and Elijah, that self-same body rose into the resurrection state, and then subsided into its ordinary conditions; unchanged in material throughout. In the change of 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 it is this same mortal body; and the change is simply its putting on immortality.

If by divine law there may be a fixed affinity between the soul and its last investiture, that law can secure that the same material shall never be organic in two bodies at death; just as a secret law secures the equality in number of the two sexes.

This modern unscriptural pseudo-resurrection is a Gnostical one. It has “an ignorance of God,” doubting his power to raise the same body. It has the Gnostic abhorrence of matter, demanding “new materials of a wholly different kind,” known as matter now. But it does not deny a future life, like the errorists whom Paul corrects; and so does not shake the foundations of Christianity.

Meyer quotes from Tertullian the following notes as a caution to over-brilliant commentators, 1 Corinthians 15:40: One flesh of men, that is, servants of God; another of beasts, that is, the heathen; another of birds, that is, the martyrs; another of fish, to whom belongs the water of baptism! Also, 1 Corinthians 15:41.

There is one glory of the sun Christ; of the moon The Church; of the stars The seed of Abraham.