NOTES for Co1 15:13-14

For Paul, Christ's resurrection from the dead is the cornerstone of all Christianity. In fact, Christianity in every age has been founded precisely on faith in the resurrection from the dead of every person, and also on the fact that this process was begun by the Savior's resurrection. The issue is not only that, if there is no life after death, human earthly life becomes largely meaningless.

Faith in the immortality of the soul and in recompense after death was characteristic in antiquity of the Egyptians, partly of the Greeks, and of some other peoples. But the Bible speaks of something else. Here the question is not that some part of the human personality, even the most important part, is preserved after death and that because of this a person continues to live, remembering and recognizing himself.

The Bible speaks of more; it speaks of resurrection, of the return to life of the whole person, and to full life, not to a partial and limited life such as the life of the soul alone would inevitably be. For important as the soul is, it is only part of the human personality, not the whole personality. But for a person's resurrection to become possible, the world had to change. Death and the evil that gave birth to it had to be driven out of the world into which they entered after the fall.

The world had once again to become the Kingdom of God, as it already was on the first day of creation: for then, on the first day, there was neither darkness nor evil in the world; it was wholly pierced by the light of God's presence, which made it the Kingdom of the living and utterly real God. And God wants to see the world exactly like this; He will not accept less. And the human person, according to His plan, must become an inhabitant of this world, receiving in it a fullness of life unimaginable today.

And the center of this process was Christ's resurrection from the dead. Human salvation consists in being included in the universal resurrection; otherwise one will have to forget the Kingdom. The apostle understands all this perfectly and never tires of reminding others: to remain outside what is happening means to lose everything. Then Christianity too loses all meaning, turning into a religion, a teaching, in short, into something that by itself cannot make a person a participant in the life of the Kingdom. And to live by talk about a Kingdom toward which one is not going truly means being the most pitiable of all people.