Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [261]
This completely coheres with Paul’s notion that the fleshly way to salvation is not through observances of times and rituals, not through Jewish or gentile rituals, for that matter. Fleshly rituals are not a spiritual, transforming way to salvation. He argued that the nature of the resurrection body is different from anything we know, just as the nature of various fleshly creatures is different. Paul, in fact, left the issue of the nature of immortality in a peculiarly intermediate position. He affirmed that those who believe will have an imperishable bodily nature but he suggested that the faithful will receive it by bodily resurrection. The body of the resurrection will not be flesh and blood. It will be a body created in a sudden change, by symmorphosis. He knew from his visions that the process of transformation into a glorified, spiritual body had already begun. The process will be completed at the last trumpet.
The eschaton and destiny of all believers will be a transformation that does not necessarily do away with the body but “transforms” it to a spiritual substance. Paul made an explicit analogy with the stars, which are both spiritual and bodies at the same time. And that analogy is not merely adventitious. It links the transformation process with the passage in Daniel 12 yet again, since Daniel 12 described the wise as transformed into stars. The transformed in Christ will have, in short, the same substance as the stars, which are luminous and spiritual in nature. This was, for Paul, the very fulfillment of the end of time, as promised by Daniel 12.
In 1 Corinthians 15:45, Paul turned his attention to the relationship between transformation within the believer and the coming end. When speaking of the resurrection, Paul described a reciprocal relationship between Adam and Christ: Just as Adam brought death into the world so Christ, the second Adam, would bring resurrection.
Paul, however, was not so much talking about the man Jesus as he was talking about Christ’s exalted nature as anthropos. Since the imagery is so dependent upon the contrast between fallen and raised states, this passage may also imply a baptismal setting. It is also interesting that the alternation is conceived in bodily terms, not as a transmigration of souls.
But the image of man is also part of the process of inward transformation for Paul. A great many of his uses of anthropos (man) suggest that a transformation of “all” believers was his objective. For instance, Romans 6:6 reads: “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” Or in another, equally provocative place, Paul said: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day” (2 Cor 4:16). In both cases, the translation has obscured that the underlying Pauline word was anthropos, “human,” used to designate the internal state of transformation within us. But this is likely the very term that Paul used to designate the “Son of Man” in Daniel 7:13. Paul was, in fact, giving us a new vocabulary of inwardness, a new mysticism, built on the apocalyptic vision of the end of time.58 He connected the inward state with the outward state. The inward state is not necessarily causing the outward condition of the world, nor is the outward condition of the world causing the inward state. But both are being transformed by God’s plan.
THE RETURN TO PRIMAL INNOCENCE
Instead of leaving the body entirely behind as in the case of the Greek soul, the body of glory or pneumatic body is the natural body augmented. It becomes properly androgynous, an added spiritual nature, as it was when God created it in Genesis. It regains its divine likeness, its angelic completeness, the primal combination of maleness and femaleness that it lost at the beginning. This appears to be a consequence of attaining angelic status:
Then