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You Can't Keep a Justified Man Down ~ Christianity Today interview with N.T. Wright
The Resurrection of the Son of God is a book that I am going through thoroughly now. I had read sections before in my research for "Grave" Heresy: Hyperpreterism and the Response of the Church and found it's dagger into the heart of hyperpreterism (which itself is a vampiric assault upon the heart of Christian faith) to be quite useful and edifying. Now since the time of my blog entries, I have had some inquiries regarding Wright's personal theology and have read some information from James White's blog dated 4/12/06 commenting on this article. If that article is accurate, and Wright is claiming that one can reject the bodily resurrection of Christ and still be considered a Christian - he is in that area, royally and utterly screwed up. I have no issue with saying that and still supporting his historical research - the personal theology he draws out of it or out of thin air is not particularly relevant to the information I am citing. James White pegged it, "In any case, I think an ancient writer saw it much more clearly than Wright does: "and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain" (1 Cor. 15:14)." Before I had heard of this, I had already expressed some reservations about some statement of Wright, specifically he would not forthrightly say "Isaiah" when referring to the human author of the Biblical book bearing that name, but rather said "the author of Isaiah" as if there were some doubt it was Isaiah, despite the fact that Jesus unequivocably affirmed that it was. Second, there are statements that seem to indicate that he entertains the concept that Biblical writers changed their views which undercuts not only an inerrantist view, but even a meaningfully "inspired" view at all.
I had been told that Wright sometimes rights in this fashion and communicates in this matter in order to be able to better reach unbelievers or liberals. Ironically, and as I have experienced, an otherwise conservative person who denies the physical resurrection of believers, will not give Wright's historical research a chance because of these glaring compromises. That is sad (not for the person who wants to maintain the integrity of the Bible, sad that compromise is once again proven to be simplistic). I think Wright is enormously important and relevant in his historical research. However I would be remiss not to point out the fly in the ointment.
Here is a simple diddy in the introductory pages (page 30):
...despite those who have tried to keep them apart, very early Christianity should itself properly be seen as a sub-branch of first-century Judaism. Studying these two closely related movement is the place to start. These are the initial targets at which the historical arrows are to be aimed.
The point of this obvious suggestion is its negative corollary. Many studies of the resurrection have begun by examining the accounts of the Easter experiences in Paul and the gospels, subjecting those accounts to detailed traditio-historical analysis. This puts the cart before the horse. Such analysis is always speculative; until we know what resurrection meant [DDW - egad, it actually meant something!!!!] in that world, we are unlikely to get it right. This is not just a matter of seeing the big picture ahead of the little details, though that is important too; it is about knowing what we are talking about before we begin to talk about it.
Preach it brother. I will be adding this to my resurrection quotes page. Now most1 hyperpreterists will counter with a yawn that they do not deny all this..... when it comes to Jesus.... but they do pull the switcheroo when it comes to US, despite that the two are both conceptually, philosophically, and most importantly Biblically related. Resurrection cannot mean one thing when it comes to Jesus and something else when it comes to us. The world in which this appeared does not allow us that possibility.
1There are some hyperpreterists who are more consistent than their fellows in recognizing the correlation between Christ's resurrection and ours and thus deny the physical resurrection of Christ.
The Resurrection of the Son of God pages 83-84
Within second-century Christianity, as we shall see in chapter 11, a few writers used the language of 'resurrection' to denote, not what the entire ancient world, both pagan and Jewish, had meant by it up to that point, that is, some kind of return to a bodily and this-worldly life, but rather something which was well known as a concept but for which this language had never before been used, namely, a state of blissful disembodied immortality. They thus took a key term in Judaism and Christianity, which referred to something hardly anyone believe in [in the pagan world which was the majority - DDW], and used it denote something a great many people believed in. 'Resurrection' (anastasis and its cognates) was not in use elsewhere in the ancient world as a description of non-bodily life after death. It did not denote the passage of the soul into the life beyond or below or even the migration of the soul into a different body. Those within the second-century Christian world who used 'resurrection' in this way were, therefore, innovating, describing something that Plato and others believed in but using language which Plato and others used for something they did not believe in. The point for the moment is this: such usage is only explicable as a subsequent mutation from within an earlier Christianity that asserted resurrection in the normal sense (return to bodily life). It was a variation that attempted to retain Christian language about Jesus, and about the future destiny of Christians, while filling it with non-Christian, and for that matter, non-Jewish, content. If this mutation had been the norm, and belief in bodily resurrection the odd variant, why would anyone have invented the latter? And would not Celsus have pointed all this out?
Emphasis in bold mine.
Yep.
Yes, I am continuing (albeit very slowly as this isn't fast-paced action genre reading material) through N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God. And he added another log to the bonfire roasting hyperpreterist mythology - the very strong physical resurrection language of the LXX which is, as he said, the air into which the NT writers breathed their own words about resurrection with the terminology being absolutely infused with that meaning.
Page 147
But the resurrection was not simply a doctrine of the Pharisees and their putative successors, the rabbis. All the evidence suggests that, with the few exceptions noted already, it was widely believed by most Jews around the turn of the common era.
Acts 24:15 - Then Paul... answered: "... I have hope in God, which they themselves [The Pharisees] also accept, that there will be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust.
The "resurrection" that Paul accepted was the "resurrection" that the Pharisees accepted and of what that was, i.e. physical and bodily and out of the graves, there is NO doubt.
Page 148
No second-Temple reader would have doubted that this [Hosea 6:2 and several other OT passages] referred to bodily resurrection.
Page 150
The evidence of the Septuagint, then, is worth pondering, especially when we consider what, granted certain regular scholarly assumptions, we might have tought we were going to find. After all, here is a Hebrew text being translated into Greek - in Egypt most likely. We might have expected that every reference to resurrection would have been flattened out into something more Platonic (as happened, for instance between 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees). We might have expected that the translators would have introduced suggestions of either the Ben-Sirach point of view (forget about a life after death, concentrate on getting this one straight) or that of Philo (strive to attain diembodied bliss hereafter). They do not. All the indications are that those who translated the Septuagint, and those who read it thereafter (i.e. most Jews, in both Palestine and the Diaspora), would have understood the key Old Testament passages in terms of a more definite 'resurrection' sense than the Hebrew would necessarily warrant, and might very likely have heard overtones of 'resurrection' in many places where the Hebrew would not have suggested it.
This is all highly interesting in light of the fact that the NT writers very often favoured the LXX over other readings.
Okay when I started going cover to cover through N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God I already knew it (to borrow a phrase from a very colourful anti-preterist rant I found) decimated the unmitigated twaddle of hyperpreterism but it goes over and beyond what I expected. The book is an utter gem. I am somewhat abashed that when I first started it I was somewhat critical in that it does start very very very slow. But don't be fooled, while the first section may be a yawner, it gets good.... and boy does it get good.
I have been posting tidbits here rather than just simply keeping my own personal notes for future reference. I will continue to do so until I am done.
Page 146
Judaism was never a religion of speculation or private devotion only. It was rooted in daily, weekly and annual observances and worship. At the heart of worship, open to all Jews whether or not they could get to the Temple with any regularity, was the life of prayer. And the central prayers, in the first century as in the twenty-first, were and are the Shema Israel ('Hear, O Israel...') and the Tefillah, the 'prayer' of all prayers, also know as the Shemoneh Esre or 'Eighteen Benedictions'.
The second of these Benedictions is quite explicit: Israel's god is the Lord who gives life to the dead:
You are might, humbling the proud; strong, judging the ruthless; you live for evermore, and raise the dead; you make the wind to return and the dew to fall; you nourish the living, and bring the dead to life; you bring forth salvation for us in the blinking of an eye. Blessed are you, O Lord, who bring the dead to life.
That prayer CANNOT be wrenched from it Pharisaic mooring. Those words meant something specific, and that something is irreconcilable with hyperpreterist mythology. It is fascinating that the "blinking of an eye" is tied here to resurrection - I hear echoes of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 - that wondrous passage of our future hope, without which we are still dead in our sins.
I have decided that I will consolidate all these blog postings when I am done with The Resurrection of the Son of God by NT Wright into one document to have a ready reference for those who want my notes of cool contra-Hymeanean quotes.
Josephus a Pharisee, and an eyewitness that is VERY important to preterists (and hyperpreterists) such that it would be quite hypocritical to dismiss his testimony on resurrection beliefs of the time:
Pages 175-176
The statements of Josephus (c. AD 37-100) on the resurrection have frequently been discussed.... We begin with passage in which Josephus, so far as we can tells, intends to express his own beliefs.... In the early days of the Jewish revolt against Rome, Josephus, as a young army commander, found himself involved in the fall of Jotapata. Those with him urge him to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. He, however, argues vehemently that suicide is a crime. We receive our life from the creator god, and his gifts ought not to be scorned. Sure you know, he says,
that people who depart from this life in accordance with nature's law, thus repaying what god had lent to them, when the giver wants to claim it back again, win everlasting fame. Their houses and families are secure. Their souls remain without blemish, and obedient, and receive the most holy place in heaven. From there, when the ages come round again [ek peritropes aionon, they come back again to live instead in holy bodies. But when people lay hands upon themselves in a fit of madness, the darker regions of Hades receive their souls; and god, their father, pays back their descendants for the arrogant acts of their parents.
...we have a clear two-stage personal eschatology..... First, the souls go to heave. Then they return, to live in a new kind of body, a holy one.... Josephus is here adopting a clear-cut Pharisaic position....
continuing on my catalogue of the Hymenean massacre that is N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God
pages 193-194
David Daube has catalogued the ways in which, during the two centuries spanning the turn of the eras, the Pharisees effected far-reaching changes in the methods used to execute those guilty of capital offenses. Stoning was moderated; burning was to be done by forcing burning liquid down the throat; strangling was by a particular method; all was in aid of leaving the bone structure intact. The body was important, and its most durable parts, the bones, were to be rescued from destruction. Cremation was avoided for the same reason. In the same way, secondary burial, involving the careful preserving, folding, and storage of the entire skeleton, was widely practised in the period. While this may have been partly due to actual or perceived shortage of space, there is every reason to suppose that belief in the importance of the bones for future resurrection played a significant part.
Page 195
footnote 284 - Another tradition envisages an almond-shaped bone, the tip of the coccyx, being able to resist all attempts to crush, break, burn or otherwise dispose of it, and so being available as the starting-point for the yet-to-be-formed resurrection body...
The gem of The Resurrection of the Son of God continues to shine, banishing the pernicious heresy of the denial of the future bodily resurrection.
Preterists (including heretical ones) know that the Bible helps us interpret the Bible, but we also know (though heretical ones ultimately have to reject this in favour of their heresy) that the historical and cultural context does as well. We would be fools not to learn the idioms and illustrations of the day if those same idioms and illustrations are used in the New Testament, even if they are not used in the Old Testament - with a good reason being that they sprung up in the inter-Testamental period. This is not to say that idioms are inspired - it is to say that language appears in a context, and if we are to understand the words of the NT human writers, we cannot behave as if the Bible dropped out of the sky yesterday (as many preterists writers, even heretical ones) have noted. A good non-eschatological example is Jesus' claim that where two or three are gathered together in His name, He is there in the midst of them. We learn that this exact same illustration is used in Jewish extra-Biblical teaching, but applied to the Shekinah glory of God. This helps us to understand that Jesus was making an explicit claim to the prerogatives of diety.
Now so what does this have to do with Aunt Sally dead in her grave? Well Paul also used a very common Jewish extra-Biblical illustration when speaking to the Corinthians about the resurrection - that of crops. N.T. Wright expounds:
Page 197
More significant for the reader of the New Testament is the illustration that appears [in extra-Biblical Jewish writing - DDW] quite often: the resurrection of the body is like the corn rising from the seed. This is regularly employed, as Paul does in 1 Corinthians 15, to answer the question: what sort of body will it be? Will it be the same or different? Will it come naked or clothed? A further dialog is staged, this time between Rabbi Meir (a disciple of iba, i.e. mid-second century) and Queen Cleopatra (standing here for a devout enquirer). Meir's answer is that, as the seed of wheat is sown naked but appears clothed, so the resurrection body will be all the more clothed because it was already clothed when buried. The bodies will, though, be recognizable, to the extent that (in one account) those who have suffered wounds or deformities will, to begin with, retain them in order that they can be identified. Once that is done, however, they will be healed.
Page 200-201
By the time that Christianity burst upon an unsuspecting world, both Jewish and Greek, the Jewish belief in bodily resurrection had made its way into the consciousness, not least the Greek-speaking Bible-reading consciousness, of Jews both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. When the New Testament writers spoke of resurrection, both their own and that of Jesus, this is the grid of language-use with which they must have assumed their words made sense....The conclusion we can now draw ought not to be particularly controversial, though it may seem so to many who have written about Jesus' resurrection [and our own - DDW] with scant attention to the complete context - despite the fact that it provides the setting within which the early disciples' use of the relevant language must be understand.
The New Testament cultural backdrop is screaming, are the heretical preterists listening?
Page 209
Let us be quite clear at this point: we shall see that when the early Christians said 'resurrection' they meant it in the sense it bore both in paganism (which denied it) and in Judaism (an influential part of which affirmed it). 'Resurrection' did not mean that someone possessed 'a heavenly and exalted status'; when predicated of Jesus, it did not mean his 'perceived presence in the ongoing church. Nor, if we are thinking historically, could it have meant 'the passage of the human Jesus into the power of God'. It meant bodily resurrection; and that is what the early Christians affirmed.
I am continuing in my reading of N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God. I am at the point in which he is discussing Philippians Chapter 2 and the exaltation of Christ. Interestingly he brings out Verse 15 in which the Philippian Christians are exhorted that they become blameless and harmless so that they may "shine as a light in the world." As Wright states (page 228) "this is a deliberate echo of Daniel 12:3, indicating that Paul, here as elsewhere, had thought through the present life and vocation of Christians in terms of the resurrection life which had already, in one sense, begun, even though it was to be completed in the bodily resurrection itself." Wright continues in footnote 45 on that same page, "we might comment in addition that the poem's central point -- that Jesus was "obedient unto death, even the death of the cross" -- places the stress on humiliation, which is the reverse to buy exaltation; but also strongly implies that death itself is to be defeated or reversed, which of course means a resurrection." - which of course meant something SPECIFIC in this ANE context.
This progressive layering of redemption working from creation to consummation is what hyperpreterism pitifully reduces. Hyperpreterists believe that they have the trump card in Daniel Chapter 12 by stating that the resurrection in that passage is noted as being a first century event. First, it is far from clear that the passage refers to the general physical resurrection at the end of time, and it is absolutely certain that if it does, it does not refer to that event solely. There are many options available to us, one of which being that it is a process that did in fact began in the first century. There are plenty of examples in the New Testament where these solutions are used for our present life, even the present life of the Christians back then who had not experienced the "resurrection" that the Hymenæan preterists claim happened in AD70 (and those poor Christians went through being resurrected and didn't even realize it!). Thus, whatever resurrection that the first century Christians were still expecting was something different and more than what they were already experiencing. Hyperpreterism offers no such hope. The Gospel is destroyed and the work of Christ is truncated.
"Romans is suffused with resurrection. Squeeze this letter at any point, and resurrection spills out; hold it up to the light, and you can see Easter sparkling all the way through." N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (page 241). Wright brings out an oft-missed resurrection passage in the opening language of the Book of Romans. In that passage it is stated that Jesus was marked out as the son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead. As in many other passages that use the phrase "resurrection of the dead," the Greek literally means "from the resurrection of the dead ones." This, once again, contrary to Hymenaean assumptions, completely parallels Jesus' resurrection with ours. As Wright stated, "this was, in embryo, 'the resurrection of the dead', of all the dead." Page 243 footnote 77 notes also that in this usage there is an allusion to the firstfruit imagery 1 Corinthians Chapter 15.
Page 253-254
This is not, then, and arbitrary reuse of 'resurrection' as a metaphor. It is dependent upon the literal use in relation both to Jesus and to the future resurrection of believers, just as the metaphorical use within Jewish texts could be combined with a literal use in relation to the eventual resurrection of the righteous, and sometimes the wicked as well. Resurrection, when it was metaphor, was usually metonymy as well; and so it was when Paul. This is not, then, as has sometimes been supposed, the start of a move away from the literal meaning, toward something which will call itself' resurrection' but which in fact belongs in a different worldview entirely, such as we find in the later gnostic writings.
Page 256
"But you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you. If the Messiah is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirits of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit who dwells in you."
There can be no question but that Paul means by this that (a) the present body, the body that will die because of its innate mortality and corruptibility, is the body that will be raised, (b) this is an exact parallel to what happened to Jesus himself, and (c) there is a causal connection between the two.
Just in general in reading Wright, he makes a very strong connection between the use of the word "justified" when it is referring to Christ to refer, a great deal of the time, in dense passages, to His resurrection. An example would be 1 Timothy 3:16. If that is indeed the case, that justification is used as a synonym for vindication and related ideas, it certainly adds a layer of to the Pauline passages speaking of our own justification. It is yet another element that shows how a Hymenæan gospel is no gospel at all. It does not have true justification.
Page 282
Who then is able to receive such teaching, such wisdom? The mature (teleioi, 2.6); the 'spiritual' to (pneumatikoi, 2.13). This leads Paul to the fundamental contrast between two different types of people, a contrast which points all the way ahead to the central contrast between the two different types of 'body' in chapter 15: the 'spiritual' and the 'soulish', and pneumatikos and the psychikos. ... the distinction between psyche and pneuma, then, cannot simply be read off the surface of a lexicon of ancient Greek (still less, for that matter, in terms of what the words 'soul' and 'spirit' mean to an average reader in the modern Western world). Paul is defining his terms as he goes along, and the critical grid of definition is the eschatological one.
Page 283
But when he described someone as 'spiritual' (pneumatikos) he does not simply mean that they are more in touch with their own 'spirit' then the 'soulish' person is, but that the Spirit of the living God has opened their hearts and minds to receive, and be changed by, truth and power from the age to come.
Page 285
This continuity gives specific focus to several aspects of 1 Corinthians, leading in the end to what would otherwise be a non sequitur at the end of chapter 15: because of the future resurrection, get on with your work in the present (15.58)! Paul believes that with the resurrection of the Messiah the new world has already begun; that the Spirit comes from that future into the present, to shape, prepare and enable people in churches for that future; and the work done in the power of the Spirit in the present will therefore last into the future. This is none other than a pattern of the resurrection as we have seen articulated throughout the other letters.
DDW Note: The continuity mentioned above deals with the breaking in of the new age into the present age... The gospel-project is "(from one point of view) about building a new Temple: the long-awaited eschatological dwelling-place for the divine name among all the nations, and this project will be completed precisely through the resurrection." The chapter then closes with another contrast between the wisdom of the present age and the glories of the world to come, which already belongs to Christians because they belong to the Messiah (3.18-23).
Page 289
In particular, the argument of 6.12-20 depends on Paul's belief that what is done with the present body matters precisely because it is to be raised. The continuity between the present body and the future resurrection body is what gives weight to the present ethical imperative:
The body is not meant to for immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. God both raised the Lord, and will also raise us through his power. Do not know that your bodies are members of the Messiah? Shall I therefore take the Messiah's members and make them members of a prostitute? Certainly not! Don't you know that anyone who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body? For the Scriptures says 'the two shall become one flesh'. But the one who joins himself to the Lord becomes one spirit [with him].
Verse 14 is the key. The emphasis of the Greek, hard to bring out in English, is as crucial here as in chapter 15: the 'both... and...' joins together the resurrection of Jesus and that of believers, both of them accomplished (as usual in Paul) by the divine power (dynamis). Clearly Paul assumes that the body -- the same body which can be abused in immoral behavior -- is meant 'for the Lord'; this refers, it seems, (a) to the eventual union with the Messiah, anticipated in baptism, which will take place in the resurrection, and also (b) to the service to the Messiah which is was to take place (as in the Romans 6:12-14; 12.1-2) during the present time.
Page 301
It is important to spell out the logic of what he [Paul] is saying, because in 2 Corinthians all this is controversial. (a) He believes, as a good Pharisaic Jew, that the creator God raises the dead, in the normal sense. (b) He believes this all the more strongly because he believes that God has arty done in the case of Jesus. (c) He believes that he is living between Jesus' resurrection and his own future resurrection. (d) He therefore claims, and discovers in practice, that God's power to raise the dead is at work in the present time, one of its results of being that God can and sometimes does rescue his people from what had seemed imminent and certain death. This is inaugurated eschatology and the service of urgent pastoral need.
Page 314
Anything other than some kind of bodily resurrection, therefore, is simply unthinkable, not only at the level of meaning of individual verses and phrases but at the level of the chapter's argument as a whole. 'Resurrection' does not refer to some part or aspect of the human being not dying but instead going on into a continuing life in a new mode; it refers to something that does die and it is then given a new life. This distinction, so often ignored and both popular and scholarly treatments of the topic, and of this chapter, is vital.
The overall structure and logic of the chapter thus confirms what we would have guessed from the direction in which the rest of the letter points: that this is intended by Paul is a long argument in favor of the future bodily resurrection.... There was, in any case, no indication in Judaism either before or after Paul that 'resurrection' could mean anything other than 'bodily'; if Paul was going to argue for something so oxymoronic as a 'non--bodily resurrection' he would have done better not to structure his argument such a way as to give the appearance of articulating a Pharisaic, indeed biblical, worldview in which the goodness of the present creation is reaffirmed in the age to come. Since that is the kind of argument he has composed, at the conclusion of a letter which constantly points this way, no question should remain. When Paul said 'resurrection', he meant 'bodily resurrection'.
Page 316
The aim of chapter 15 is the answer challenge of verse 12: some of the Corinthian Christians had been saying that there was no resurrection of the dead. This must mean that they were denying a future bodily resurrection, and the strong probability is that they were doing so on the standard pagan grounds, as set out in chapter 2, that everyone knew dead people didn't and couldn't come back to bodily life. Even if they believed, like the two teachers mentioned in 2 Timothy 2.17-18, that 'the resurrection' as a whole had already occurred, in other words, that 'the resurrection' referred to some kind of spiritual experience or events, they would still be denying that there would be a future bodily resurrection. (The proto-gnostic belief as was shown up are ready as what it really was and is, namely, a form of paganism rather than of Judaism.)
Page 330
I regard it as highly probable that this [the denial of the resurrection of the dead by some of the Corinthians) refers, not to people who believe that 'the resurrection' has already in some sense happened to all the righteous, but the people who, on the normal grounds comment to pagan antiquity and post-Enlightenment modernity, deny that any such a thing can happen. What is in mind here, clearly, is the future resurrection of God's people, not the past resurrection of Jesus. Paul shows in verses 13-15 that denying the future resurrection entails denying that of Jesus, and that this in turn falsifies the gospel proclamation itself.
Page 331
You may be allowed to eat meat offered to idols, but you cannot deny the future bodily resurrection and claim that denial as an allowable Christian option.
Pages 332 through 333
Paul simply does not rate a prospect of future disembodied bliss and anywhere on the scale of worthwhile goals; he would not classify non-bodily survival of death as 'salvation', presumably since it would mean that one was not rescued, 'saved', from death itself, the you reversible corruption and destruction of the good, god-given human body. To remain dead, even 'asleep in the Messiah', without the prospect of resurrection, would therefore mean that one had 'perished'. For there to be no resurrection would mean that Christian life and faith, including suffering, would be 'for this life only'.
...Paul is trying to teach the Corinthians to think eschatologically, within the Jewish categories of 'apocalyptic' -- not of an 'imminent expectation' of the end of the world, but of the way in which the future has are ready burst into the present, so that the present time is characterized by a mixture of fulfillment in expectation, of 'now' and 'not yet', pointing towards a future in which what happened at the first Easter will be implemented fully and the true God will be all in all.
Paul never loses sight of the main question he is addressing, and nor should we. He is arguing for the certainty of the future bodily resurrection of all the Messiah's people.
Page 336
The heart and centre of it all, then, is the defeat of death in the future, raised on the proleptic defeat inflicted in the resurrection of Jesus himself; or, to put it another way, it is the final completion of the 'age to come', which was inaugurated, in the midst of the 'a present evil age', through the Messiah's death and resurrection.
*****
Wright brings out a very interesting point in Old Testament quote that appears in 1 Corinthians 15 that is, Isaiah 22:13 in which Israel, refusing to repent, went on focusing solely on this alive stating "let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Paul references this allusion in this passage. But if one goes to the context of Isaiah 22, it is one of being been forgiven of sins and of the judgment of God. As Wright states (page 339), "Paul, having already warned that if the resurrection is not true 'you are still in your in sins' (verse 18), seems to refer to this whole sequence of thought, as we see in the sharp warning and exhortation that immediately follow."
Some interesting notes come out of Wright's observation of Paul's teaching on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. First he notes,, something that I have never personally noticed before, and that is that Paul is writing a "recreation" story paralleling the elements of Genesis 1 through 2. Heavenly lights are noted, animals are noted plants are noted, and the first Adam is noted. In the recreation, it is the second Adam that will be the center. In so doing, Paul stresses both continuity and discontinuity with the president body. However, as Wright has noted (page 341) what Paul says about the future resurrection of believers and the nature of their bodies is what he believes about the resurrection of Jesus and the nature of His resurrection body. In this section of Chapter 15 emphasizing discontinuity, the seed illustration, the 'nakedness' of a mere seed (which is Paul's theme in 2 Corinthians 5:3-4) is parallel to the nakedness of the first humans in Genesis, and in both instances, God will clothe them, "as a work of grace."
We have now reached the part of the discussion where Wright deals with the terminology which has caused so much needless modern confusion, and is at the heart and soul of some of those who hold the hyperpreterist heresy, that being Paul's contrast between the soma psychikon (natural or soulish body) and the soma pneumatikon (the spiritual body.)
Pages 349 through 350
We have, in fact, already met the key terms, in contexts where it should be quite clear what Paul means -- and does not mean -- by them. The two sorts of 'body', the present corruptible one and the future non-corruptible one, are, respectively, psychikon and pneumatikon; the first word is derived from the psyche, frequently translated 'soul', and the second from pneuma, normally translated 'spirit'. In 1 Corinthians 2.14-15, the psychikos person does not receive the things of the spirits, because they are spiritually discerned, while the pneumatikos person discerns everything. There is, of course, no question there of 'physical' and 'spiritual' as appropriate translations. Nor would those words, with the connotations they normally have today, be appropriate at 3.1, where Paul declares that he could not consider the Corinthians as pneumatikoi, but merely as sarkinoi or perhaps sarkikoi. The words clearly refer to matters quite other than whether the people concerned are 'physical'; clearly they are, and the question is rather to do with whether they are indwelt, guided and made wise by the creator's Spirit, or whether they are living at the level of life common to all corruptible creation (sarkinos). So, too, when Paul discusses pneumatika in chapter 12, these 'spiritual gifts' are not 'spiritual' in the sense of 'non-physical', but involve in most cases the operation of the Spirit precisely on aspects of one's physicality, whether through gifts of inspired speech, healing or whatever.
Wright then goes on to ironically point out to that the very word that might have been most clearly used by Paul to indicate non- physicality would have been the word which allegedly in this passage is used to indicate physicality, that being psychikon. The reason for this is such term emphasizes the "soul" which (even though pagan philosophers to think the soul was made potentially up some kind of substance), would be the most equivalent to the no-material portion of a person. Specifically (Page 351) Wright says that "If anything, if a reader first-century Greek came upon a phrase containing the word psychikos, contrasted with anything else, he or she might well expect that, if there was a physical/non-physical contrast in the offing, psychikos would refer to the non-physical side, and whatever was being contrasted with it would be seen as more firmly bodily, more substantial.
Page 358
[Christian and Orthodox view of the resurrection] is indeed the defeat of death, not a compromise in which a death is allowed to have the body while some other aspect of the human being (the soul? the spirit?) goes marching on.
Page 359
[Considering everything that has gone before] Why then does he say 'flesh and blood cannot inherit God's Kingdom'? Ever since the second century (and increasingly in scholarship during the twentieth) doubters have used this clause to question whether Paul really believed in the resurrection of the body. In fact, the second half reverse 50 already explains, in Hebraic parallelism with the first half, more or less what he means, as Paul's regular use of 'flesh' would itself indicate: 'flesh and blood' is a way of referring to ordinary, corruptible, decaying human existence. It is not simply mean, as it has so often been taken to mean, 'physical humanity in the normal modern sense, but 'the present physical humanity' (as opposed to the future one), which is subject to decay and death". The referent of the phrase is not the presently dead but the presently living, who need not to be raised but to be changed...
Page 365 through 368
Did Paul change his view of the Resurrection by the time of 2nd Corinthians Chapter 5? Absolutely not. A careful reading of the passage as well as the context of the entire letter, and the fact that Romans, which clearly postulates the same physical resurrection that Paul taught in 1st Corinthians 15, was written several months after this fact, completely makes impossible this postulation. Paul in fact in 2nd Corinthians 5 refers back to 1rst Corinthians 15 with his "clear echo" of stating that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life.
...
This parallel with a chapter we have just been studying opens the way to a true understanding of the contrast in 5.1-4 between the present body and the future one. This corruptible, mortal body, he emphasized in 1st Corinthians 15.53-4, must 'on' (endusasthai) incorruption, immortality. Here he says that we who were in the present body are longing to 'put on over-the-top' (ependusasthai) the new body, the new 'dwelling' (5.2, 4). In the analogy in 1st Corinthians 15.37, he spoke of this seed as being 'naked' when planted, but given a new body by God; so here (5.3) he speaks of the longing of present human beings not to be found 'naked', but to be more fully clothed.
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Why then does Paul speak of the new body as being 'in the heavens'? Does this not mean that he thinks of Christians simply 'going to Heaven' after their death? No. This is one of the passages which have supplied later tradition with the materials for an unwarranted platonizing of Christian hope. As Philippians 3.20-21, and indeed 1st Corinthians 14.37-9, the temptation of the tradition has been to drive a steamroller through what Paul actually says, clearing his careful words out of the way to make room for a different worldview in which the aim of Christian faith is 'go to heaven when you die'. The tradition has always found it difficult to incorporate 'resurrection', in any Jewish or early Christian sense, into that scenario, which is perhaps why orthodox Christianity has found it hard to respond to the attacks of secular modernity at this point. 'Heaven' for Paul, here as elsewhere, is not so much where people go after they die -- he remains remarkably silent on that, with the possible exception of Colossians 3.3-4 -- but the place where the divinely intended future for the world is kept safely in store, against the day when, like new props being brought out from the wings and onto stage, it will come to birth in the renewed world, 'on earth as in heaven'. If I assure war my guests that there is champagne for them in the fridge I'm not suggesting that we all need to get into the fridge if we are to have the party. The future body, the non-corruptible (and hence 'eternal') 'house', is at present 'in the heavens' as opposed to 'on earth' (epigeios) (5.1); but it will not stay there. For us to put on top of our present 'house' (clothes, bodies, houses, temples and tents; why mix two metaphors if four or five will do?) will require that it be bought from heaven (5.2). This is a key passage not only for understanding Paul but for grasping similar language elsewhere in the New Testament.
Page 477
... the early Christians envisioned a body which was still robustly physical but also significantly different from the present one. If anything -- since the main difference they seem to have envisaged is that the new body will not be corruptible -- we might say not that it will be less physical, as though it was some kind of ghost or apparition, but more. 'Not unclothed, but more fully clothed.' As historians we may have difficulty imagining such a thing. But, equally as historians, we should not hold back from affirming that which is what the early Christians were talking about. They were not talking about a non-bodily, 'spiritual' survival. Had they wanted to do so, they had plenty of other language available to them, as indeed we do today. We should not project unto others the limitations of our own imagination.
Page 477
... the early Christians envisioned a body which was still robustly physical but also significantly different from the present one. If anything -- since the main difference they seem to have envisaged is that the new body will not be corruptible -- we might say not that it will be less physical, as though it was some kind of ghost or apparition, but more. 'Not unclothed, but more fully clothed.' As historians we may have difficulty imagining such a thing. But, equally as historians, we should not hold back from affirming that which is what the early Christians were talking about. They were not talking about a non-bodily, 'spiritual' survival. Had they wanted to do so, they had plenty of other language available to them, as indeed we do today. We should not project unto others the limitations of our own imagination.
Page 694
... the meaning of 'resurrection', both in the Jewish and non-Jewish world of late anatiquity, was never that the person concerned had simply 'gone to heaven', or been 'exalted' in some way which did not involve a new bodily life. Plenty of disembodied postmortem states were postulated, and there was a rich variety of terminology for denoting them, which did not include 'resurrection'. 'Resurrection' meant embodiment; that was equally so for the pagans, who denied it, as it was for the Jews, at least of whom hoped for it.
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