NOTES for Co1 15:12-19

Continuing the discussion of the Resurrection, Paul connects the general resurrection at the end of time with the resurrection of the Savior Himself. He says: how can you claim that there will be no resurrection from the dead when before your eyes you have a clear example proving the opposite - the resurrection of the Savior Himself (vv. 12-16)?

At first glance, such doubts in a Christian setting may seem completely impossible. But if we suppose that there were many recent converts to Christ from paganism in the Corinthian church, the situation becomes more understandable. In the pagan world, ideas about the immortality of the soul were much more widespread than ideas about resurrection. In Paul's time most religious pagans believed in life after death, but the afterlife was no longer associated for them with the world of shadows, where all go regardless of how they lived on earth, but with the immortality of the soul, in which the person is preserved fully or almost fully, so that after death the soul can experience delight or suffering depending on what kind of life its owner led in the world of the living.

Meanwhile, the Bible says little or almost nothing about this kind of afterlife, or about the immortality of the soul, focusing all attention on Judgment and on the general resurrection at the end of time. But the apostle does not draw his readers' attention to this divergence. He speaks of something else: to abandon the traditional Jewish ideas of Judgment and the general resurrection, replacing them with some pagan teaching about the immortality of the soul, means also abandoning the Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior (v. 17). If the immortality of the soul alone is enough, if the pagans are right, then the world will forever remain as it is, and those seeking a better life and higher justice will receive what they long for in their turn, after death. Then there is no Kingdom, and no need for one. But that is no longer Christianity. Jesus came into the world to give those who seek the Kingdom its full reality, not some after-death bliss that becomes an eternal refuge for a soul fleeing the world. And if there is no living in the Kingdom and no seeking it, then there is no point in following Christ. He will give those who follow Him nothing that could make them happy within the limits of our untransformed world lying in evil (vv. 18-19). He can give the faithful only the Kingdom. And only in all its fullness. And not someday after death, but here and now.

People guessed from the earliest times that physical death is by no means the end of a person's existence. Some ideas about the afterlife already existed among people in the Paleolithic era. But when it comes to Christianity, the matter is not the afterlife, but something qualitatively different: resurrection. It might seem that the difference is small. But it only seems so at first glance. In fact, every idea of an afterlife, of postmortem existence whether of a shade or of a soul, presupposes that after physical death a person no longer lives a full life.

From the most ancient idea of the world of shadows, the kingdom of the dead, where all are equal and where there is only a semblance of life, to teachings about recompense after death, about a good and bad afterlife, characteristic of civilizations such as the Egyptian or Greek, the spiritual and historical distance is very great. But even the ideas of the immortality of the soul characteristic of Greek philosophy did not presuppose a full life after death: only the soul remained of the person, only thought and self-awareness, while everything else remained on earth with the body left behind at the moment of death.

Of course, this is not the world of shadows, where consciousness barely glimmers and where there is no place for thought or memory, but still one cannot speak here of life even in that very relative fullness characteristic of a fallen person in a fallen world. For Greek philosophers, however, many of whom after Plato considered the body only a prison of the soul, such incompleteness was preferable to life in the body.

The Bible from the very beginning orients a person not so much toward existence after death as toward the complete overcoming of death. This is not surprising: none of the authors of the biblical books looks at the body as a prison of the soul. For them the fullness of life presupposes life in the body.

But to recent pagans who had turned to Christ, such a view evidently seemed strange. They may have imagined the Kingdom as some dwelling place of pious souls, something like the medieval Orthodox or Catholic paradise. Paul does not tire of reminding them that the Kingdom is not paradise, not Elysium, and not the fields of Osiris. The Kingdom is new life in all its fullness, spiritual and bodily, in the same fullness in which the fullness of the life of the risen Christ was revealed to the faithful.

For Paul, Christ's resurrection from the dead is the cornerstone of Christianity as a whole. Indeed, Christianity in every age has been founded precisely on faith in the resurrection of every person from the dead, and on the belief that this process began with the Savior's resurrection. And the point is not merely that without life after death, a person's earthly life proves largely meaningless.

In ancient times, belief in the immortality of the soul and in recompense after death was characteristic of the Egyptians, to some extent of the Greeks, and of certain other peoples. But the Bible speaks of something else. It is not saying that some part of the human person, however important, is preserved after death and that this allows a person to go on living, remembering and remaining conscious of themselves. The Bible speaks of something greater: it speaks of resurrection, of the whole person returning to life—and to a full life, not the partial and limited life that the soul alone would inevitably have. For all its importance, the soul is only a part of the human person, not the entire person.

But for human resurrection to become possible, the world had to change. Death and the evil that gave rise to it had to be driven out of the world they entered after the Fall. The world had to become God's Kingdom once again, as it had been on the first day of creation: on that first day there was neither darkness nor evil in the world; it was entirely permeated by the light of God's presence, which made it the Kingdom of the living and utterly real God. This is exactly how God wants to see the world, and He will accept nothing less. According to His design, the human person must become an inhabitant of this world and attain in it a fullness of life that is unimaginable today.

Christ's resurrection from the dead became the center of this process. Human salvation consists in joining the universal resurrection; otherwise, a person will have to forget about the Kingdom. The apostle understands all this perfectly and never tires of reminding others, for to remain outside what is happening means losing everything. Christianity itself then loses all meaning, turning into a religion, a doctrine—in short, into something that cannot by itself bring anyone into the life of the Kingdom. And to live on talk about a Kingdom toward which one is not journeying truly means being the most pitiable of all people.

The Apostle Paul warns us against a very serious danger: confusing different things. He says that when the Corinthians gather, “it is not the Lord's supper that you eat.” How, then, should it be eaten? What is wrong in the Corinthian community, and what does it have to do with us? It is perfectly clear that today, however much one might wish to, it is impossible to come to church for a meal: the Eucharist in its present form cannot serve as breakfast or lunch. Does that mean that everything is all right with us? I am afraid not. The problem is that a person comes to church not to meet God. What takes the place of that meeting is no longer so important. Today it is usually human fellowship. We feel our loneliness acutely, and in church we have the opportunity to spend time with people while expecting understanding, since people in church are indeed usually more kindly disposed than those in the street or on the subway. And so we come to socialize, to talk, to pass the time... The Church becomes a social club for us. And that is not eating the Lord's supper.