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| Our Bodies, However Mutilated Before or After Death, Shall Recover Their Perfect Integrity in the Resurrection. Illustration of the Enfranchised Slave.
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Chapter LVII.—Our
Bodies, However Mutilated Before or After Death, Shall Recover Their
Perfect Integrity in the Resurrection. Illustration of the Enfranchised
Slave.
We now come to the most usual cavil of unbelief.
If, they say, it be actually the selfsame substance which is recalled
to life with all its form, and lineaments, and quality, then why
not with all its other characteristics? Then the blind, and the
lame, and the palsied, and whoever else may have passed away with any
conspicuous mark, will return again with the same. What now is the
fact, although you in the greatness of your conceit7720
thus disdain to accept from God so vast a
grace? Does it not happen that, when you now admit the salvation of
only the soul, you ascribe it to men at the cost of half their nature?
What is the good of believing in the resurrection, unless your faith
embraces the whole of it? If the flesh is to be repaired after its
dissolution, much more will it be restored after some violent injury.
Greater cases prescribe rules for lesser ones. Is not the amputation or
the crushing of a limb the death of that limb? Now, if the death
of the whole person is rescinded by its resurrection, what must we say
of the death of a part of him? If we are changed for glory, how
much more for integrity!7721
| 7721 Or the recovery of our
entire person. | Any loss sustained
by our bodies is an accident to them, but their entirety is their
natural property. In this condition we are born. Even if we become
injured in the womb, this is loss suffered by what is already a human
being. Natural condition7722
is prior to injury.
As life is bestowed by God, so is it restored by Him. As we are when we
receive it, so are we when we recover it. To nature, not to injury, are
we restored; to our state by birth, not to our condition by accident,
do we rise again. If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead.
For what dead man is entire, although he dies entire? Who is without
hurt, that is without life? What body is uninjured, when it is dead,
when it is cold, when it is ghastly, when it is stiff, when it is a
corpse? When is a man more infirm, than when he is entirely infirm?
When more palsied, than when quite motionless? Thus, for a dead man to
be raised again, amounts to nothing short of his being restored to his
entire condition,—lest he, forsooth, be still dead in that part
in which he has not risen again. God is quite able to re-make what He
once made. This power and this unstinted grace of His He has already
sufficiently guaranteed in Christ; and has displayed Himself to us (in
Him) not only as the restorer of the flesh, but as the repairer of its
breaches. And so the apostle says: “The dead shall be
raised incorruptible” (or unimpaired).7723
But how so, unless they become entire, who have wasted away either in
the loss of their health, or in the long decrepitude of the grave? For
when he propounds the two clauses, that “this corruptible must
put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on
immortality,”7724
he does not repeat
the same statement, but sets forth a distinction. For, by assigning
immortality to the repeating of death, and incorruption
to the repairing of the wasted body, he has fitted one to the raising
and the other to the retrieval of the body. I suppose, moreover,
that he promises to the Thessalonians the integrity of the whole
substance of man.7725
So that for the
great future there need be no fear of blemished or defective
bodies. Integrity, whether the result of preservation or
restoration, will be able to lose nothing more, after the time that it
has given back to it whatever it had lost. Now, when you contend that
the flesh will still have to undergo the same sufferings, if the same
flesh be said to have to rise again, you rashly set up nature against
her Lord, and impiously contrast her law against His
grace; as if it were not permitted the Lord God both to change nature,
and to preserve her, without subjection to a law. How is it, then, that
we read, “With men these things are impossible, but with God all
things are possible;”7726
and again,
“God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the
wise?”7727
Let me ask you, if
you were to manumit your slave (seeing that the same flesh and soul
will remain to him, which once were exposed to the whip, and the
fetter, and the stripes), will it therefore be fit for him to undergo
the same old sufferings? I trow not. He is instead thereof
honoured with the grace of the white robe, and the favour of the gold
ring, and the name and tribe as well as table of his patron. Give,
then, the same prerogative to God, by virtue of such a change, of
reforming our condition, not our nature, by taking away from it all
sufferings, and surrounding it with safeguards of protection. Thus our
flesh shall remain even after the resurrection—so far indeed
susceptible of suffering, as it is the flesh, and the same flesh too;
but at the same time impassible, inasmuch as it has been liberated by
the Lord for the very end and purpose of being no longer capable of
enduring suffering.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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