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King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

1 Corinthians, Chapter 15, verses 42-44

³⁵ and manner thereof

⁴²So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption:

⁴³It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power:

⁴⁴It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

Read more:1 Corinthians, Chapter 15

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15:42 So also is the resurrection of the dead - So great is the difference between the body which fell, and that which rises. It is sown - A beautiful word; committed, as seed, to the ground. In corruption - Just ready to putrefy, and, by various degrees of corruption and decay, to return to the dust from whence it came. It is raised in incorruption - Utterly incapable of either dissolution or decay.

15:43 It is sown in dishonour - Shocking to those who loved it best, human nature in disgrace! It is raised in glory - Clothed with robes of light, fit for those whom the King of heaven delights to honour. It is sown in weakness - Deprived even of that feeble strength which it once enjoyed.It is raised in power - Endued with vigour, strength, and activity, such as we cannot now conceive.

15:44 It is sown in this world a merely animal body - Maintained by food, sleep, and air, like the bodies of brutes:but it is raised of a more refined contexture, needing none of these animal refreshments, and endued with qualities of a spiritual nature, like the angels of God.

NOTES

Speaking of resurrection, Paul is not speaking at all about the immortality of the soul or some other partial immortality. In fact, by that time there was nothing new in the idea of the immortality of the soul...

Speaking of resurrection, Paul is not speaking at all about the immortality of the soul or some other partial immortality. In fact, by that time there was nothing new in the idea of the immortality of the soul: the Egyptians spoke of it, the Greeks spoke of it, the Indians spoke of it in their own somewhat different way, and among other peoples too, even if there was no developed teaching about the immortality of the soul, there was nevertheless a certain vague idea that a person does not die entirely and completely, and that the world of shadows may not be the only possible lot of those who have left the world of the living.

But in every such idea there was always the idea of some residual existence of the person. Death was imagined as an inevitable catastrophe for man in his present state, the loss of part of the human person, in which, however, its core is preserved, so that the person loses neither memory nor self-consciousness.

This is what distinguished all ancient ideas about the immortality of the soul from earlier ideas about the world of shadows: there, in the world of shadows, a person precisely lost memory of earthly life, and self-consciousness barely smoldered in him. Ideas about an immortal personal principle were connected with the hope of the continuation of life after the death of the body, of an immortality that might be reduced but was still immortality, and a personal immortality at that, in which a person, though deprived of the body, still remains himself in the main.

Paul, however, has something greater in mind. He is speaking not about preserving something from the human person so that this remnant may live forever, but precisely about full life, life in the body, the life to which man was called from the very beginning, since God created man in the unity of spirit and nature, soul and body.

More than that: the matter is not simply the preservation of man, but also his transformation, the qualitative change of human nature under the influence of the breath of the Kingdom as the person is ever more included in its life. Here the matter is no longer the afterlife, but the fullness of life, compared with which our present existence is fit to be called pre-life. And the beginning of movement toward this fullness is connected with a person's entry into the Church and with the first experience of the Kingdom that a Christian receives at the moment of this entry.

But the beginning is not yet the end, and the Christian's path is not limited to the earthly stage alone. In fact, with regard to the Kingdom one can hardly speak of the afterlife in the pre-Christian sense of the word, since it includes the life and path of the Christian as a whole, at all its stages, both the present one and all subsequent ones. This single life is what the apostle has in mind when he speaks of the natural, or "soulish," body and the spiritual body. The fullness of life, natural and spiritual, not the immortality of the soul, is what awaits us at the end of the path. The path of which the apostle does not tire of reminding the addressees of his letter.

Continuing the discussion of the general resurrection, Paul, as if arguing with some unknown opponent...

Continuing the discussion of the general resurrection, Paul, as if arguing with some unknown opponent, places special emphasis on the fact that resurrection is impossible without a qualitative change in human nature, which in biblical language is called transfiguration. Apparently, many of the recent converts to Christ from paganism still viewed resurrection in a pagan way, and they had a quite reasonable question: would resurrection be something unnatural, a kind of backward movement, as if, for example, a river suddenly flowed back toward its source instead of toward its mouth (v. 35)?

Answering this question, the apostle points out that death is not the end of the path and the beginning of degradation, but only one stage of the spiritual movement that ends in the complete transfiguration of a person who follows Christ and has joined himself to the life of the Kingdom (vv. 36-38). The whole world created by God has to do with what is called "glory," by which the Bible means the presence of God, though each creature has its own measure of this "glory" (vv. 39-41). Everything can be transfigured and will be transfigured at the end of time, and the measure of glory will determine the place and quality of each creature of God in the new, transfigured world. But for the human person there is a special path in the Kingdom. Human transfiguration presupposes passing through death and overcoming it (vv. 42-44).

The human path in this respect is like the earthly path of the Savior Himself, who also passed through death so that the Kingdom could enter our still untransfigured world. Speaking of a "natural body," the apostle evidently means the untransfigured human nature damaged by sin, which lives mainly a natural, creaturely life that pushes the life of the spirit into the background. But this human condition is temporary, for from the beginning God created the human person in order to give him the Kingdom in all its fullness. The fall delayed and slowed the resolution of this task, but did not cancel it, and a person's earthly path has meaning only when it is directed toward the Kingdom and ends in it (vv. 45-49). And the transfiguration of human nature is a necessary stage of this path, for nature, including human nature, in its present state is not suited for the Kingdom and will not enter it (v. 50). The Kingdom is not some special Christian form of postmortem existence, as some Christians in Corinth probably thought, but the fullness of life opened to a person at the end of the path after transfiguration and renewal. It is a life accessible to everyone already in this transfiguring, though not yet fully transfigured, world.

Speaking about the resurrection of the deaths, Paul underlines that it is not about momentary event, but about process, in which is implied the entire humanity from the very moment of the coming to the world of the Savior. Indeed, Matthew mentions in his Gospel that the first people resuscitated were seen in Jerusalem the day of the crucifixion. And if before about the resurrection was...

Speaking about the resurrection of the deaths, Paul underlines that it is not about momentary event, but about process, in which is implied the entire humanity from the very moment of the coming to the world of the Savior. Indeed, Matthew mentions in his Gospel that the first people resuscitated were seen in Jerusalem the day of the crucifixion. And if before about the resurrection was spoken, as about something awaiting humanity in the future, Paul speaks about it as about a spiritual process which in progress. It is not by chance that he speaks about the sowing, which took place at his time: in fact, the Kingdom also began to transform the world in his time, immediately after the Pentecost. But the results of this process will be seen by all only when it will end. The essence and the sense of this process are described by the apostle, as the change of the quality of the human nature from the not transformed into the transformed. It is in particular in this sense that he speaks of the "natural" body and the "spiritual" body.

Probably, under the "natural" Paul has in mind in this case not what we could think, bearing in mind the semantic connotations of the Greek corresponding word, but what implies its Jewish equivalent: the vital force, thanks to which man does not die, does not go to the world of darkness, but remains in the world of the living. Such vital force, no matter with what it is associated in various books of the Old Testament, remains at the beginning purely natural, such as is it moreover also any natural life. As we see, speaking about the "natural body", the apostle has in mind the natural life of man in all its fullness and in all the demonstrations, physical, quite as natural. This life "is sowed" by the witnesses of the Kingdom, bringing it to the world.

The image of sowing is completely convenient here: because Jesus Himself, speaking also about the Kingdom, had repeatedly resorted to the image of the sower and the seed, meaning this entry of the Kingdom into the world, which is impossible without the active participation for this process of its inhabitants: because it is in particular they, who become these witnesses, without whom one can’t speak of any expand of the borders of the Kingdom in our transforming world, but not yet transformed. And as long as the world is not yet transformed till the end, we can speak only about natural life with all its limitations so expressively described by the apostle.

The witnesses of the Kingdom are also transformed in the same way as all other people, with this only difference that, having become a part of the Kingdom already now, they are involved in the process, which for the others, being again out of it, is still to come. When the transformation of the world will end, in the day of the return of the Savior, will also end their transformation, and then their new nature which became a part of the Kingdom revealed till the end, will become obviously and clearly visible for all.

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