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One of the worst Twitter experiences I ever had happened in the summer of 2019 when I accidentally wandered into an online argument about the resurrection. While I never actually said what I thought about the resurrection (but defended the range of views held by diverse Christians), some mean tweeters assumed that I don’t believe in the “bodily resurrection” of Jesus. Things spun out of control, to the point of the discourse earning a hashtag and a “gate” suffix. People trolled me, blocked me, lied about me, and cancelled me. To this day, I occasionally see tweets about how I’m a heretic for not believing in the resurrection. Honestly, the whole business reminds me how much I actually hate social media — the place where complex and nuanced ideas go to die.
This Sunday has me remembering that awful episode because of the assigned lectionary text — on the resurrection:
Someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, "The first man, Adam, became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.
What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50)
I’m not entirely sure that the Twitter-orthodoxy police will find much comfort in these words from Paul. The passage opens with a tweet-worthy question: "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?"
The church at Corinth was split into factions arguing about bodies and the resurrection. And, in order to resolve the argument, Paul presented a complex and nuanced theological solution.
One faction appeared to be fairly well-educated and comfortable with their social standing in the Roman Empire. The other seemed to be lower class (more typical of people who were early followers of Jesus). These groups had different understandings of bodies — and what might happen to bodies after death. And those views weren’t quite what modern folks like us might think.
Although they were divided, they shared the same starting point: “body” and “spirit” weren’t two separate things. They weren’t arguing over “material” and “non-material” bodies. We typically think of “bodies” as material entities, “flesh and blood,” in contrast to “spirit,” those things that are non-material and non-physical. In the ancient world, however, concepts like “natural” and “supernatural” didn’t exist. Indeed, bodies were bodies. Ghosts and spirits were also bodies; sun, moon, and stars were bodies; nations and social groups were bodies. Things we consider as “spiritual” were corporeal. Spirits had bodies. There were many sorts of bodies, and those bodies existed in hierarchies of status.
So the dividing issue in Corinth wasn’t material versus non-material bodies. Every body was material. It wasn’t about a physical resurrection or a spiritual, metaphorical one (“body” was rarely a metaphor in the ancient world). The Corinthians were divided on what kind of bodily resurrection there would be: one of “flesh and blood” or one of something else?
The higher status Corinthians would most likely have been influenced by particular Roman ideas of bodily hierarchy. Some forms of body, like rational and masculine bodies, were preferable to other bodies, such as earthy and feminine bodies. This distinction often led educated Romans to disparage bodies that were considered “lesser” in form.
Lower status Corinthians didn’t particularly approve of this body-hierarchy, mostly because they were on the receiving end of it. If you were a slave, it was because your flesh-body marked for that social status. Indeed, the bodies of the poor were considered less-than. There existed superior aristocratic bodies; there were marginalized peasant bodies. In effect, your body determined your place in the body politic. That was just the way it was.
Not surprisingly, middle and upper-class Christians were satisfied with this arrangement. Blessed with “superior” bodies, they were marked for “higher” pursuits such as public service, patronage, philanthropy, and philosophy — all callings where “flesh and blood” often proved distracting and even vulgar.
They would have had a difficult time with “bodily resurrection” as they would have interpreted that phrase to mean the resuscitation of corpses. Thus, resurrection was distasteful because it involved mean stuff — and they probably leaned toward something “purer” like the immortality of the soul instead.
The poorer group would have felt constrained by their bodies, and many early converts certainly believed that Jesus would set them free from bodily bondage. It is likely they would view the resurrection as a kind of divine magic trick, seeing Jesus a bit like other mythic figures in the ancient world who rose from the dead and offered some sort of miraculous bodily healing to supplicants. In this way, resurrection might magically relieve their immediate suffering, but it didn’t really change anything.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul did two things. First, he insisted that the resurrection is necessary to faith in Christ — a proclamation disconcerting to the cultured Corinthians — and that bodies were central to understanding the work of salvation.
Second, he insisted that resurrected bodies were far more than “flesh and blood” (sarx in Greek) but were something of a different order (soma in Greek) — a concept that would have been, what one author says, “unrecognizable to many, less educated Christians.” Resurrection will transform ALL bodies (as Jesus has already been transformed) into the same stuff. In the process, resurrection undoes the body-hierarchy of this world that enslaves and oppresses the poor. (Because everyone will have the same body! No more bodily hierarchy!) The resurrection isn’t a magic trick for the solace of a few. It signals a new order of body-reality for the cosmos. Turns out, the resurrection is political. Spirit-soma people will make up a new spirit-soma community, unified and harmonious.
New Testament scholar Dale Martin wrote that Paul “insists on the future resurrection of the body, thereby denying the lowly status attributed to the body by Greco-Roman elite culture. At the same time he admits that the resurrected body will have to be thoroughly reconstituted so as to be able to rise from the earth to a new luminous home in the heavens.” Martin claims that this move makes Paul innovative and even radical. Paul subverts conventional ideas of bodies in Roman society as he upends philosophical prejudices held by cultural elites and by separating Jesus from the entertaining folk tales that kept the Christian underclasses in their place.
Paul challenged the hierarchical status of bodies held by the upper class by insisting on a resurrection. He challenged the narrow conception of fleshly bodies held by lower status Christians by insisting on something called a pneuma-soma, a “spirit-body” (again: this is a real body — neither mere flesh nor a disembodied entity). By correcting both factions, and by crafting new theological ground, Paul established the possibility of a unified Christian community on the basis of shared embodiment — one not roiled by divisive arguments derived largely from conflicts of social status. This new body — the Body of Christ — was the alternative to the Imperial Body of Rome. In this way, resurrection makes possible the Kingdom of God.
That, my friends, is what I trust regarding resurrection: There is a bodily resurrection AND bodies are far different and far more than we suppose. Both “resurrection” and “body” challenges our presuppositions about being embodied. However much it stretches the theological imagination, this pneuma-body is the revolutionary body of the cosmic order — the Body called the Kingdom of God.
And it is pretty much Paul’s theology of resurrection.
Of course, this doesn’t fit in a tweet. If may be too much even for a Sunday musing! So, when it comes to theological arguments on social media, I think I’ll stick to today’s other assigned reading, a text from Luke’s Gospel: “Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’” #LoveGate
A side note:
In the first century, there was very little agreement as to the exact nature of “bodily resurrection.” Not only did Paul outright criticize the idea of a “flesh and blood” resurrection in this passage, but his own conversion happened when a vision — a spirit Christ-body? — appeared to him. Descriptions of the post-resurrection Jesus vary significantly in the four gospels themselves. It wasn’t until the second century that Christian writers made a bigger deal over “flesh and blood” resurrected bodies in opposition to their new Gnostic theological rivals.
The most important book on this subject and that informs this post is Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). I highly recommend it.
INSPIRATION
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
— Denise Levertov
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts . . .
Practice resurrection.
— Wendell Berry
LENT AT THE COTTAGE
Ash Wednesday is March 2.
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For everybody on the planet with a computer: The Cottage and Homebrewed Christianity team up for a 6-week Lenten class on Jesus De/Constructed (same title as above) — on Thursday nights from March 3 through April 7, live lectures, open Q&A, a pop-up learning community, a special SURPRISE podcast with guests from Westar on Jesus scholarship, and recordings available for later viewing.
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A revolutionary body of the cosmic order sounds a lot like Divine cosmic memory. We are created in the image of God. As we focus with intention upon this image, I am convinced that this is what it means to work out our own salvation. In other words, our biggest problem is forgetting who we are, and resurrection is remembering and re-uniting with our true given nature.
Physics tells us that nothing is ever created or changed. Physics is also changing our view of how the universe was and is being created. Science is catching up with what what the Jewish faith knew exerientilly from the time of Genesis, Jesus, Paul, Hildegard, Julian, Buber and on. Our lives are a process and spirit and body are not dualistic but. Resurrection transforms us into different beings in the universe but still in God the creative energy.