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THE RESURRECTION

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 24, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 46.

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THE RESURRECTION.

By William G. T. Shedd

THE doctrine of the resurrection of the body was from the first a cardinal and striking tenet of Christianity. The resurrection of Christ made it such. Perhaps no article of the new religion made greater impression, at first view, upon the pagan. When the philosophers of Athens heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, and others said, "We will hear thee again of this matter." Acts 17 : 32.
The early fathers maintained the doctrine of the resurrection of the body with great earnestness and unanimity against the objections of the skeptics, of whom Celsus was acute and scoffing in his attack. Most of them believed in the resurrection of the very same material body. Justin Martyr, according to Hagenbach, teaches that cripples will rise cripples, but that at the instant of resurrection, if believers, will be made physically perfect. In his tract on the resurrection he argues that the miracles of Christ wrought upon the body prove the fact of its resurrection. "The same power that would say, Arise, take up thy bed and walk, could say to the dead body, Come forth. If on earth Christ healed the sickness of the flesh, and made the body whole, much more will he do this in the resurrection, so that the flesh will rise perfect and entire."
The patristic view of the resurrection passed into the Middle Ages with little modification excepting that, in connection with the materialism of the Roman Christianity, it became naturally more materialistic. The poetry of Dante and the painting of Angelo powerfully exhibit it. In the Protestant system a real body, and one that preserves the personal identity, is affirmed, but the materialism of the Papal, and to some extent of the Patristic Church, is avoided by a more careful attention to St. Paul's distinction between the natural and the spiritual body.
Respecting the probability of a resurrection of the body, it may be remarked that it is no more strange that the human body should exist a second time than that it has existed the first time. That a full-formed human body should be produced from a microscopic cell is as difficult to believe, upon the face of it, as that a spiritual resurrection body should be produced out of the natural earthly body. The marvels of embryology are, a priori, as incredible as those of the resurrection. The difference between the body that is laid in the grave and the body that is raised from the grave is not so great as the difference between the minute embryonic ovum and the "human form divine," represented by the Antinous or the Apollo Belvedere. If the generation of the body were, up to this time, as rare an event as the resurrection of the body, it might be denied with equal plausibility. The question of St. Paul in Acts 26 : 8 applies here: "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?" The omnipotence that originated the body can of course reoriginate it.