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.
15
15:39 All flesh - As if he had said, Even earthy bodies differ from earthy, and heavenly bodies from heavenly. What wonder then, if heavenly bodies differ from earthy? or the bodies which rise from those that lay in the grave?
15:40 There are also heavenly bodies - As the sun, moon, and stars; and there are earthy - as vegetables and animals. But the brightest lustre which the latter can have is widely different from that of the former.
15:41 Yea, and the heavenly bodies themselves differ from each other.
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.
15:45 The first Adam was made a living soul - God gave him such life as other animals enjoy: but the last Adam, Christ, is a quickening spirit - As he hath life in himself, so he quickeneth whom he will; giving a more refined life to their very bodies at the resurrection. Gen 2:7