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Immortality as conceived by the Bible proceeds, not from the intrinsic power of what is in itself indestructible, but from being drawn into the dialogue with the Creator; that is why it must be called awakening. Because the Creator intends, not just the soul, but the man physically existing in the midst of history and gives him immortality, it must be called “awakening of the dead” = “of men”.
pronouncements about the resurrection: their essential content is not the conception of a restoration of bodies to souls after a long interval; their aim is to tell men that they, they themselves, live on; not by virtue of their own power, but because they are known and loved by God in such a way that they can no longer perish.
In contrast to the dualistic conception of immortality expressed in the Greek body-soul schema, the biblical formula of immortality through awakening means to convey a collective and dialogic conception of immortality: the essential part of man, the person, remains; that which has ripened in the course of this earthly existence of corporeal spirituality and spiritualized corporeality goes on existing in a different fashion. It goes on existing because it lives in God’s memory. And because it is the man himself who will live, not an isolated soul, the element of human fellowship is also part of
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Let us start from verse 50, which seems to me to be a sort of key to the whole: “I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” It seems to me that the sentence occupies much the same position in this text as verse 63 occupies in the eucharistic chapter 6 of St. John’s Gospel: for these two seemingly widely separated texts are much more closely related than is apparent at first sight.
St. John, it says, just after the real presence of the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist has been sharply emphasized: “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.” In both the Johannine and the Pauline texts, it is a question of developing the Christian realism of “the flesh”.
But both passages also contain a sharp counterpoint that emphasizes Christian realism as realism beyond the physical world, realism of the Holy Spirit, as opposed to a purely worldly, quasi-physical realism.
Here English cannot fully convey the enigmatic character of the biblical Greek. In Greek the word soma means something like “body”, but at the same time it also means “the self”. And this soma can be sarx, that is, “body” in the earthly, historical, and thus chemical, physical, sense; but it can also be “breath”—according to the dictionary, it would then have to be translated “spirit”; in reality this means that the self, which now appears in a body that can be conceived in chemico-physical terms, can, again, appear definitively in the guise of a transphysical reality.
In Paul’s language “body” and “spirit” are not opposites; the opposites are called “physical body” and “spiritual body”. We do not need to try here to pursue the complicated historical and philosophical problems posed by this. One thing at any rate may be fairly clear: both John (6:63) and Paul (1 Cor 15:50) state with all possible emphasis that the “resurrec...
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To recapitulate, Paul teaches, not the resurrection of physical bodies, but the resurrection of persons, and this not in the return of the “fleshly body”, that is, the biological structure, an idea he expressly describes as impossible (“the perishable cannot become imperishable”), but in the different form of the life of the resurrection, as shown in the risen Lord.
