Transformation of the Body

‘We begin once more with Paul. I stressed in the previous chapter that when Paul speaks in Philippians 3 of being “citizens of heaven” he doesn’t mean that we shall retire when we have finished our work here. He says in the next line that Jesus will come from heaven in order to transform the present humble body into a glorious body like his own and that he will do this by the power through which he makes all things subject to himself. This little statement contains in a nutshell more or less all Paul’s thought on the subject. The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian’s future body and the means by which it comes about’


‘The Resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is almost unimaginable to us in it glory and power, will be the model for out own’


‘Who will be raised from the dead? All people, according to John and perhaps Paul, but for Paul at least there is a special sense of resurrection that clearly applies to those who are in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit…


Where will the resurrection take place? On the new earth, joined as it will then be to the new heaven…in this new world there will be no problem of overcrowding (as some, at the risk of bathos, have ventured to suggest). Apart from the question of whether every human will be raised or some, we need to remind ourselves that roughly half the humans who have ever lived are alive at the moment….In any case, if we take seriously the promise of new heavens and new earth, none of this is a problem. God is the creator, and his new world will be exactly what we need and want, with the love and beauty of this present world taken up and transformed’


‘All we can surmise from the picture of Jesus’s resurrection is that just as his wounds were still visible, not now as sources of pain and death but as signs of his victory, so the Christian’s risen body will bear such marks of his or her loyalty to God’s particular calling as are appropriate, not least where that has involved suffering


In particular, this new body will be immortal. That is, it will have passed beyond death not just in the temporal sense (that it happens to have gone through a particular moment and event) but also in the ontological sense of no longer being subject to sickness, injury, decay and death itself’


‘At this point we must notice that once again our language gets us into trouble. The word immortality is often used to mean “disembodied immortality,” and it is sometimes then used in a sharp contrast with resurrection. As a result, we easily forget Paul’s point about the resurrection body. It will be a body, but it will not be subject to mortality. An “immortal body” is something most people find so strange that they don’t even pause to wonder if that’s what Paul and the other early Christians were talking about. But it is.


There is a world of difference between this belief and a belief in an “immortal soul”. Platonist believe that all humans have an immortal element within them, normally referred to so “soul”…In the NT however, immortality is something that only God possesses by nature and that he then shares, as a gift of grace rather than an innate possession, with his people.


Why will we be given new bodies? According to the early Christians, the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God’s new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have out to God’s service in this present life- and perhaps to the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with out vocation- will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised to his glory. This is perhaps the most mysterious, and lest explored, aspect of the resurrection life’


‘If, as we have already seen, the biblical view of God’s future is of the renewal of the entire cosmos, there will be plenty to be done, entire new projects to undertake. In terms of the vision of original creation in Genesis 1 and 2, the garden will need to be tended once more and the animals renamed. These are only images, of course, but like all other future-orientated language they serve as true signposts to a larger reality- a reality to which most Christians give little or no thought’