Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Against the Calumnies with Which Unbelievers Throw Ridicule Upon the Christian Faith in the Resurrection of the Flesh.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter 12.—Against the Calumnies
with Which Unbelievers Throw Ridicule Upon the Christian Faith in
the Resurrection of the Flesh.
But their way is to feign a
scrupulous anxiety in investigating this question, and to cast
ridicule on our faith in the resurrection of the body, by asking,
Whether abortions shall rise? And as the Lord says, “Verily I
say unto you, not a hair of your head shall perish,”1628
shall all
bodies have an equal stature and strength, or shall there be
differences in size? For if there is to be equality, where shall
those abortions, supposing that they rise again, get that bulk
which they had not here? Or if they shall not rise because they
were not born but cast out, they raise the same question about
children who have died in childhood, asking us whence they get the
stature which we see they had not here; for we will not say that
those who have been not only born, but born again, shall not rise
again. Then, further, they ask of what size these equal bodies
shall be. For if all shall be as tall and large as were the
tallest and largest in this world, they ask us how it is that not
only children but many full-grown persons
shall receive what they
here did not possess, if each one is to receive what he had here.
And if the saying of the apostle, that we are all to come to the
“measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,”1629
or that
other saying, “Whom He predestinated to be conformed to the image
of His Son,”1630
is to be
understood to mean that the stature and size of Christ’s body
shall be the measure of the bodies of all those who shall be in His
kingdom, then, say they, the size and height of many must be
diminished; and if so much of the bodily frame itself be lost, what
becomes of the saying, “Not a hair of your head shall
perish?” Besides, it might be asked regarding the hair itself,
whether all that the barber has cut off shall be restored? And if
it is to be restored, who would not shrink from such deformity?
For as the same restoration will be made of what has been pared off
the nails, much will be replaced on the body which a regard for its
appearance had cut off. And where, then, will be its beauty,
which assuredly ought to be much greater in that immortal condition
than it could be in this corruptible state? On the other hand, if
such things are not restored to the body, they must perish; how,
then, they say, shall not a hair of the head perish? In like
manner they reason about fatness and leanness; for if all are to be
equal, then certainly there shall not be some fat, others lean.
Some, therefore, shall gain, others lose something. Consequently
there will not be a simple restoration of what formerly existed,
but, on the one hand, an addition of what had no existence, and, on
the other, a loss of what did before exist.
The difficulties, too, about the
corruption and dissolution of dead bodies,—that one is turned
into dust, while another evaporates into the air; that some are
devoured by beasts, some by fire, while some perish by shipwreck or
by drowning in one shape or other, so that their bodies decay into
liquid, these difficulties give them immoderate alarm, and they
believe that all those dissolved elements cannot be gathered again
and reconstructed into a body. They also make eager use of all
the deformities and blemishes which either accident or birth has
produced, and accordingly, with horror and derision, cite monstrous
births, and ask if every deformity will be preserved in the
resurrection. For if we say that no such thing shall be
reproduced in the body of a man, they suppose that they confute us
by citing the marks of the wounds which we assert were found in the
risen body of the Lord Christ. But of all these, the most
difficult question is, into whose body that flesh shall return
which has been eaten and assimilated by another man constrained by
hunger to use it so; for it has been converted into the flesh of
the man who used it as his nutriment, and it filled up those losses
of flesh which famine had produced. For the sake, then, of
ridiculing the resurrection, they ask, Shall this return to the man
whose flesh it first was, or to him whose flesh it afterwards
became? And thus, too, they seek to give promise to the human
soul of alternations of true misery and false happiness, in
accordance with Plato’s theory; or, in accordance with
Porphyry’s, that, after many transmigrations into different
bodies, it ends its miseries, and never more returns to them, not,
however, by obtaining an immortal body, but by escaping from every
kind of body. E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
