Nothing in the plan of Redemption as set forth in the Scripture is in any way incidental to it: nothing. It is all of a piece and stands wholly essential in all its elements. Yet, an established fact is as sacred as a revealed truth.
It may be asked, Why all this concern about the meaning and nature of time? Does it really matter? After all, we are not going to worry about time in heaven anyway!
True. The only trouble is that although Scripture reveals that we shall pass immediately into the Lord's presence when we die, we evidently do so without our bodies. The resurrection of the body is a still distant event belonging to the end times. Paul himself, who expected to be present with the Lord at once, is nevertheless still without his body.
Unless we say that the body doesn't really matter in heaven, we have to imagine this interval of disembodied "nakedness" as a period of something less than a totally fulfilling condition of existence. This would seem an odd situation in which to be, in the presence of the gloriously embodied Lord.
If we say that embodiment makes no difference, that we can be completely whole in this "naked" condition, then the great emphasis placed on the resurrection of the body in Scripture seems rather meaningless. If we can be perfectly identifiable without our bodies, both subjectively to ourselves and objectively to others, why bother about bodily resurrection? It seems redundant.
Now, man was not created to be pure spirit, such as angels are, but incarnated spirit. We and our bodies belong together and the thought of death, in so far as it disrupts this union, is normally an abhorrent one. We have a longing for a real new heaven and a real new earth, and such a setting seems to require some kind of appropriately real bodily existence. The thing we long for is freedom from present ills, not freedom from present objects.
What was God's purpose in making man MAN rather than angel - i.e., in making him an embodied spirit not just an ethereal one? What role does the body actually play in establishing our personal identity and to what extent does the spirit depend upon the body to function effectively within the framework of the physical world in which we live? What precisely is the relationship between spirit and body (from the biblical perspective) and, alternatively, mind and brain (from the neurophysiological perspective)? It is a fascinating subject, and the evidence suggests that the separation of the two components of the human constitution effectively "extinguishes" the individual, thus demonstrating the need for the resurrection of the body.
When, therefore, the spirit deserts the body in death, how can it function while it awaits the new body that is promised at the end? Perhaps there is no waiting? The answer to this question is the subject matter of the rest of the volume, and hinges upon what has been said in Part I.
We therefore need to examine two things: (1) the vital relationship between spirit and body, a union which appears to characterize the true personhood of man (for otherwise why the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ?), and (2) whether there is a form of "interval" between death and resurrection that would not have the effect of extinguishing conscious personal identity even for a moment.
Part II addresses the first: Part III addresses the second.
To be "absent from the body" is to be "present with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5:8). This is the clearest of truths in the mind of Paul, and one of the most comforting assurances for the child of God. Death for the Christian is not so much an exit out of life as it is an entry into the Lord's presence in a very personal sense.
Yet it presents a problem that has never really been resolved satisfactorily. The problem arises from the fact that Scripture seems to place the resurrection of the body not at the time of our departure from this life but much later: indeed, not until the Lord's return. There appears to be an interval between these two events. For those who, like Adam, Abel, Shem, Abraham, and other Old Testament saints, have already been in the Lord's presence for thousands of years, this period of waiting for the resurrection of the body would seem to be long indeed. In fact, it is apparent that for the great majority of those who have died in Christ throughout human history the interval between the two events must be very extended. What precisely is their "constitution" during this long intermediate period? Are they only "half-persons" meanwhile? What would be the nature of a half-person? Or doesn't the body really matter? Do we actually need it at all?
So the problem is, In what form does the disembodied spirit present itself when robbed of the vehicle by which it has expressed its character and established its personal identity throughout the whole of life? Does it exist as a mere ghost, a shadow of its former self? Is it in any sense a real entity, fully conscious and wholly representative of a human person while it thus awaits reunion with its body? If it is an entire and real entity, why does it still need reunion with its body?
Suppose we respond to this by saying, "No, we don't really need the body any more. We can be perfectly happy and content as a mere ghost of our former selves. As a disembodied spirit we can be fully conscious and well able to identify ourselves to others, and clearly recognizable to all who knew us as we were in this life." Then, this being so, why do we wait for some addendum that will make little if any difference to us when we finally acquire it? Why should we even now "groan within ourselves," awaiting the "redemption of our body" (Rom. 8:23) if, when that redemption is accomplished, it really makes so little (if any) difference innumerable departed Saints having already managed without a body for thousands of years? As Martin Luther said, "It would take a foolish soul to desire its body when it is already in heaven." (Ref. 1)
In what way will the recovery of a body enhance our joy in the Lord and our sense of fulfillment as individuals if, for so long a time, a child of God can manage perfectly well without it? How will this final step in the plan of redemption of the whole man, enhance the wonder and delight we shall already be experiencing in the presence of the Lord Jesus? Why does Paul place so much emphasis upon, and go into such specific detail about, the resurrection of the body (and not just any body but our own body) as he does in 1 Corinthians 15:35-53. Why does he insist that if there is no resurrection of the body "we are of all men most miserable" (1 Cor. 15:13, 19) - despite the fact that we apparently enter into the unalloyed joy of our Lord without it?
In contrast with this emphasis on the resurrection of the body, the Greek philosophers were so impressed with the vitality of the human spirit and the limitations imposed by the body which served only to imprison it, that they saw the death of the body as a great liberation. The idea of being rejoined to it made no sense whatever. Indeed, the Gnostics at one point in the early development of Christian thought argued that the body was so great a hindrance to spiritual aspirations that it was a positive evil. They even denied that the Lord Himself could ever really have been "made flesh" because this would have been a defilement of his spirit. His flesh was therefore only a "seeming" flesh, and his sufferings and death on the cross could not possibly have been any more than apparent only. He did not really have a body at all! Towards the end of the first century A.D. John had to combat this heresy vigorously as is indicated by his remarks in 1 John 4:1-3. It was this misapprehension that almost destroyed the Church from within. Jesus did come "in the flesh," John assures his readers: his death on Calvary was terribly real. He really was born of Mary's body (Gal. 4:4).
Evidently a great deal hinges upon embodiment. We are not wholly human if we are merely disembodied spirits. We were designed for embodiment. It is no accident that we are born and grow and develop within a personal body that becomes an essential part of our conscious being. I may identify myself to someone else by my voice when I make a phone call. But I can only do so because I have the organs and the capacity for speech - both of which are functions of the body: the first of my tongue, and the latter of my brain. Part of my own self-awareness arises from my body, i.e., from hearing my own voice, and from seeing and feeling my own members.
It sounds as though we ought to be able to identify ourselves in the guise of a pure disembodied spirit but a little reflection soon reveals that if anyone should return from the dead and seek to identify himself to us with absolute certainty, that person could never succeed convincingly except by assuming at least a semblance of his own bodily form again - even if only momentarily. At the very least he or she must be heard by my ear or seen by my eye. The Lord acceded to Thomas' request for confirmation, even to confirmation by the sense of touch. A ghost could not "prove" his identity by some ethereal representation that floated in space. We would never be persuaded that we had not merely created the vision in our own mind, something that might well have been a hallucination.
Clearly, to avoid this very possibility, the only One who has with absolute certainty returned to identify Himself as alive indeed, did so bodily. The Lord Jesus said, "Handle me and see, a ghost hath not flesh and bone as ye see me have"! (Luke 24:39). He was no ghost, He was the One whom they had learned to love and to worship - in very Person. To establish his identity with certainty, He depended upon a resurrected body, not a mere ghostly intangible shapeless voiceless essence.
We have self-conscious identity and it is so real, so "undoubtable" as Descartes said (and as Augustine had said, long anticipating Descartes), (Ref. 2) that we assume this inner consciousness of our own existence is independent of the body altogether. We imagine we can lay the body aside and carry on as usual. "John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave but his soul goes marching on." It all seems so obvious. But is it true? Paul preached the resurrection of the body to the Greeks, and they were incredulous (Acts 17:32). To them it seemed absurd. Who wants re-embodiment? Why not set the spirit free to roam without hindrance in the Elysian fields of a purely spiritual world? Although Paul risked losing his audience, he stuck faithfully to his thesis: an essential part of the Christian hope is that we shall recover our own body. We are to have a truly corporeal existence in heaven: not in the old body (praise the Lord!) but in a real body nevertheless - indeed, in a body that will be identifiably our own.
The soul is wedded to its body, and dissolution of this bond is abhorrent to any man or woman in normal health. And though we do not want to be imprisoned in this present body which is so defiled, we do not wish to go naked and bodiless either (2 Cor. 5:1-5).
Now, while angels make their presence known to us and communicate with us by an assumed bodily form of some sort, they can certainly exist as pure spirits without embodiment because that is what they are by design. They were so created; their nature is so constituted that they can be fully conscious in a purely ethereal state. They are so made that they are not in need of organs of speech in order to be "heard," or eyes to see with and to be "seen" and thus identified by their fellows, or a bodily shape in order to establish their position in space and therefore their "reality." But man is not an angel and was never designed to exist as one. Man is an incarnated spirit, an embodied soul. Angels are never even spoken of as souls. It was by a deliberate act of God that we have a body through which to give expression to our spirits. He that hath wrought us for this very thing is God (2 Cor. 5 :5).
Our identity is therefore as much the result of the possession of a body as it is the possession of a spirit. We have never known any other kind of total identity. We cannot make ourselves known to one another except through the agency of touch or sight or sound - bodily things, all of them. Angels by their very nature are exempt from the circumscriptions of space and time such as we experience, but man seems to be designed for such circumscription. Even in the world to come the "new heaven" has also a "new earth." (Ref. 3) Were this not the case, the emphasis upon, and the promise of, bodily resurrection would be unaccountable. Man knows deeply within his being that his body matters dearly to him even in his self-image as a human person. Although he groans in it as it begins to fail with age, no man in normal health ever yet truly "hated" his own body (Eph. 5:29). He may pretend that he does sometimes: but it is not embodiment per se that he hates, only embodiment in such a poor vehicle of self-expression. The aspirations of his spirit are so often defeated by the counter-demands of his body (Matt. 26 :41). Paul longed to be freed from his body because it opposed his spiritual yearnings (Rom. 7:18-24); not because embodiment was a "mistake" as it were, but because the effects of the Fall had ruined it. Unlike the Greeks, Paul did not want to be unclothed - disembodied: he longed to exchange it for a new one.
The classical Greek and the later Gnostic attitude towards embodiment as a curse was the result of a "vain philosophy" (Col. 2 :8) that did not reflect the promise of bodily resurrection so clearly intimated in the Old Testament, and so unequivocally spelled out in the New. Such a divine promise is sufficient evidence that a body is necessary for our proper identity as individuals even in the world to come.
Can one really imagine how a disembodied human ghostly presence would communicate with other disembodied human ghostly presences? What would such a community of human ghosts be like? Is this the prospect of our new "citizenship" (Phil. 3:20, margin) in heaven? Is this what we desire more earnestly than the fellowship of the saints that we now experience in the flesh, despite all its disappointments? Yet Paul assures us that we should desire it rather: and indeed we do desire this future prospect more than the present painful reality.
No doubt demons and angels do communicate with each other by some other means than those we have learned to use, some unearthly form of telepathy. We don't really know. Demons certainly seek embodiment in order to give expression to their evil nature and they appear to be largely impotent without it. They speak only through man's tongue, and possibly make use of man's brain in order to exercise their will upon the physical world through man's hands. But they were not and are not creatures of God's design but of Satan, and their unnatural desires seem to result from their unnatural origin. (Ref. 4) Angels were never intended to be embodied as a way of life, but some of them sought embodiment in a way that was a departure from the design of God (Jude 6) and in due time they were punished for presuming to desert their proper estate. By a kind of poetic justice, the "imprisonment" they sought by embodiment was rewarded by a spiritual imprisonment they had not sought, in a place called Tartarus (1 Peter 2:4).
So we cannot appeal to the hosts of angels as examples of the reality of a purely spiritual existence that is personal yet without need for embodiment. They do seem to have personal "identity," since even "opinion" among them is divided (Dan. 10:21) and they are distinguished individually by personal names (Dan. 10:13 and Luke 1:19). Yet they are clearly pure spirit, each one a separate creation. They were created this way, not generated by multiplication of a single seed, as man is. (Ref. 5) They do not propagate and evidently were never designed for dependence upon a body. They only assume some kind of body in order to communicate with man upon occasion (cf. Gen. 19:15, 16).
For this reason and in demonstration of the fact that a human being is an embodied spirit, the Lord Jesus, even in his resurrection appearances, still presented Himself to his disciples for identification as an embodied spirit not a disembodied ghost.
In the resurrection scenes, the disciples met with and conversed with the Lord in the most natural way imaginable walking with Him, sharing meals with Him, talking with Him, doing many of the things that we do with one another as real people, and above all "renewing acquaintance" by clearly establishing physical reality. To doubting Thomas He had done so, and Thomas joyfully identified Him with the words, "my Lord and my God"! (John 20:28). The important point is that this intercommunication was always done through a very real embodiment although the Lord's body was a transformed one as to its potential. Jesus deliberately set out to demonstrate unequivocally that He was not a ghost but an embodied human being.
For Mary, the Lord's identity was established by the sound of his voice (John 20:16), the inflection, the timbre, by the very way He spoke her name. She heard HIS voice, not merely a voice. Thomas was assured of the Lord's identity because he was invited (and able) to handle Him and see for himself. It was identifiably HIS body that he was able to touch, a body so manifestly real that it is doubtful if he even needed to verify it by actual contact. It was visibly a three dimensional body. The eye quickly distinguishes the real thing in three dimensions from a mere two dimensional visual image such as is projected on a screen. The free-standing quality of his real presence must have been undeniable. The disciples as a group were absolutely convinced when He asked for food and ate it before their very eyes assuring them thereby that even though He could appear and disappear at will and could pass easily through walls or bolted doors, He was by no means a ghost as they must at first have supposed Him to be (Luke 24:39).
It is true that his body was a glorified body, but it was a body nevertheless: and it had (and has) all the capabilities that our bodies have and far more. Moreover, it was his body that guaranteed unequivocally the reality of his continuing manhood on the other side of the grave! "The Lord is risen indeed! Allelujah!" They had not seen a pure Spirit. They had seen the Man Christ Jesus.
Some of the details of the resurrection scenes contain little bits of information that reinforce this fact in extraordinary ways. Evidently the Lord had a body that was in a real sense physically congruous even with this world. John 21:3-11 contains the beautiful story of a second all night fishing excursion by Peter and his immediate companions which had netted them absolutely nothing! The first occasion had been remarkably similar. We have this previous record in Luke 5:4-9.
They had, in this first instance, lent their boat to the Lord as a pulpit, and He in turn seemed desirous to repay them. When He told them to cast off and to let down the nets (plural) Peter responded by saying, "Master, we have toiled all the night and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net" (singular). (Ref. 6) The result was such a draught of fishes that the net broke (v.6) and they almost lost their ship by reason of the overload! Perhaps if Peter had let down his nets (plural) as instructed, the load could have been hauled ashore and neither would the net have been broken nor the ship been in danger of sinking.
And now once again, they had toiled all night but still they had caught nothing (John 21:5). It seems that as they approached the shore empty-handed, they were hailed by a "stranger" asking if they had caught anything: they could only answer very simply, No.
Then the stranger called back, "Cast the net (singular) on the right side of the ship and ye shall find." And they obeyed, literally, casting one net overboard exactly as instructed. Did this somehow ring a bell in Peter's mind as he obeyed the command without question?
At any rate, they now found their net so filled with fish that they simply could not draw it in! And John was the first to realize who the stranger was. He whispered to Peter, "It is the Lord"! And when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he at once "girt his fisherman's coat about him and cast himself into the sea." That was impetuous Peter!
When they drew the net into shore they found that although it was filled with great fishes (a mighty catch indeed - one hundred and fifty-three of them) "for all there were so many, yet was not the net (singular) broken."
They came up out of the water and what did they find? They found the Lord tending a fire of coals with fish already being prepared for their anticipated coming! As Abraham, the Lord's "friend" (James 2:23), had once entertained Him (Gen. 18), now the risen Lord reversed the situation and entertained his "friends" (John 15:15).
Surely no ghost from the other world ever entered so completely into the life of this world as did the risen Lord during those forty wonderful days. How did He obtain these fishes, and how did He collect the wood and build a fire which He then somehow "lighted," placing the fish into position that they might be properly cooked? The simplest answer is that He had a body of some sort, sufficiently real to the task of handling things which is miracle enough. (Ref. 7) And must we not assume He had even prepared the fish by cleaning them first? What questions must have been in the disciples' minds as they picnicked there around the campfire. Here was no ghost of his former self, but identifiably the same wholly caring and foreseeing and sufficient Person who was indeed their Lord and their God. How they must have studied his actions!
When, at the end of the forty days of unparalleled fellowship, He ascended up into heaven, He ascended up bodily. And as they watched Him go, the angel who stood by assured them that He would return in exactly the same real and recognizable form and, indeed, at the very same spot (Zech. 14:4). It was as though to reinforce the fact that, in leaving them, He was in no sense about to be transformed into some other kind of being. "This same Jesus" (and Jesus was his name as to his humanity) "shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven" (Acts 1:10,11). He had not gradually faded away like a ghost:
He had departed as a person, and as the same Person He would return. No wonder they went back to Jerusalem "with great joy" (Luke 24:52)!
There is, then, a real world on the other side of Jordan, to which He has now gone for a season and from which He will yet return again. He went as our forerunner - a real human person, spirit and body reunited. His humanness is clearly bound to his incarnation, and that humanness was designed to last not for a mere thirty-three years, but for ever. He has become what He had not been, yet without ceasing to he what He was before. He has become Man without ceasing to be God: and so will He always remain - two natures in one Person, deity embodied as Man, without confusion and without separation.
In his famous letter to Flavia, dated June 13, 449 A.D., we find Leo the Great (Bishop of Rome from 440 to 461) speaking of the two natures of the Lord Jesus:
Each nature performs its proper functions in communion with the other; the divine Word performs what pertains to the Word, the human flesh what pertains to the flesh. The one resplendent with miracles, the other submits to insults. The Word withdraws not from his equality with the Father's glory; the flesh does not desert the nature of our kind. And so it does not belong to the same nature to say 'I and the Father are one' (John 10:30), and 'The Father is greater than I.' (John 14:28).
And thus Leo reconciled a seeming contradiction. How wonderful! Man and God, human and divine: for ever to remain what He was divine: but for ever to remain what He has now become - human. A human being in heaven, an embodied spirit: truly a Mediator between man and God the bridge between spirit and matter.
How can we be sure that He will henceforth remain a human Person? In the Prayer Book of the Church of England formulated by Bishop Cranmer under instructions from Edward VI are the following words to which the common people subscribed at Evensong by reciting as a kind of credal "response." Part of this response is reproduced here in the old English spelling of the original:
Perfecte God and perfecte man: of a resonable soule,
and humayne fleshe subsisting.Equall to the father as touchyng his Godhead:
and inferior to the father as touchyng his manhoode.
Here, then, is the secret of his two apparently contradictory relationships to the Father: equal in terms of his deity, inferior in terms of his manhood - equal as to his spiritual being, inferior as to his embodiment. In the final act of biblical drama He, as to his manhood, will become subject to the Father in order that God may ultimately be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28). He will retain his manhood by retaining his embodiment. It can hardly be doubted that we too shall remain human by recovering ours.
He promised his disciples that if He lived, they should live also - not as some ghostly shadows of their former selves in a world of ghosts, but as real people in a real world. And in due time He said He would return and would then receive them unto Himself to share his glory (John 14:3), to be like Him as to his body (Phil. 3:21) and to partake of his divine spiritual nature (2 Pet. 1:4). Our spirits will be made perfect and rejoined to our own bodies made glorious like His!
What an amazing prospect. This will be heaven indeed!
It is apparent, therefore, that we shall identify ourselves and be recognized for whom we are by the same means by which He deliberately established His identity . . . . not merely by displaying his own unique personality, but by the possession of a palpable body that allowed Him to speak in a familiar voice, to do characteristic things (cf. Luke 24:30, 31), and to demonstrate unmistakably that his body was verifiably his own. Surely this is to be the pattern of our future also.
It thus seems clear from Scripture that we have a positive answer to the basic question: Is the possession of a body really essential for achievement of human identity in heaven? The answer is, Yes, indeed it is! It mattered for Him, and it must therefore matter for us - since we are to be conformed to his image and become like Him. For three days and three nights He ceased to be man, but with the resurrection of his human body He re-assumed his human identity, an identity which He will henceforth retain for ever because He will remain for ever embodied. No person is a whole person as a disembodied spirit: for man, the union of spirit and body is fundamental to the establishment of personal identity.
Let us now turn to an examination of the experimental evidence bearing on the constitution of man. Much new data has in recent years begun to emerge from the researches of the neurophysiologists into the relationship between soul and body - or as they would put it more precisely, between MIND and BRAIN. How do spirit and body interact? How does our mind command our body so effectively and with such immediacy? In what way are they really interdependent? Is man truly constituted of two elements, one spiritual and one physical, each with an independent origin? Or is he, as we have been told in recent years by the strict behaviourists, merely an electrochemical machine which, upon the dissolution of the body in death, simply disintegrates as though it had never been? Can a soul exist without a body? We assume it can, of course. But what do we really know? Does the experimental evidence suggest anything - one way or the other?
References:
1. Luther, Martin: quoted by Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, Phila., Fortress Press, tr. Robert C. Schultz, 1975, p.417
2. Augustine's words were:
"Without any delusive representation of images and phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not afraid of the arguments of the Academicians who say, 'What if you are deceived?' For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived, and if I am deceived, by this same token, I am." [City of God, 11.26].
Descartes, someone thousand years later, reduced this to the axiom, Cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."
3. Over a century ago, James Gall observed: "Christianity is the only religion that indicates the dignity of the material universe, by connecting it with man's future existence in the resurrection from the dead. All heathen religions deal not only in worlds of ghosts but in ghosts of worlds." [Primeval Man Unveiled, London, Adams, 1871, p. 99.]
4. The Book of Jubilees (4:15, 22 and 5:1) speaks of sexual intercourse between the angels and the daughters of men, and ascribes the origin of evil to the demons who were descendants of these sinful unions. The Book of Ba'uch (66:11-15) reflects the same view. In The Testament of Reuben (5:6) the off-spring of this union were giants. When the Flood wiped them out, they were disembodied and their evil spirits went about in search of re-embodiment. The fallen angels themselves, who had sired these unnatural spirits were put in chains, but their offspring are apparently still free to roam the earth.
5. As Thomas Aquinas was acute enough to perceive, each angel, being an individual creation, is a species in itself. [See H. O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, London, Macmillan, 1911, Vol. 11, p.458].
6. The textual justification for the use of the singular here is extensive. It is to be found in very many MSS from the fifth to the ninth centuries. This was enough to satisfy the scholars who gave us the King James Version. It is a pity that so many modern translations have opted for the plural. The effect is to make Peter's response appear as one of strict obedience, which makes the breaking of the net a strange situation. The parallel in John's Gospel ceases to show how important obedience is when it tells us that, despite the huge catch, "yet was not the net broken"! (John 21:11).
7. Perhaps it would therefore be quite proper to suppose that the same Lord in a pre-incarnate incarnation similarly assumed bodily form when He stooped down and fashioned Adam's body before breathing life into it. Was this, therefore, how He fashioned it in his own image, in a body like that which He assumed in order to manipulate the materials of the earth and to breathe into Adam's nostrils the breath of life by a process akin to artificial respiration?
Corrections, April 26, 1997.