Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [346]
His strongest argument is: Resurrection is, moreover and most important, the will of God:
We have put our confidence in an infallible security, that will of our Creator, according to which he made man of an immortal soul and a body and endowed him with intelligence and an innate law to safeguard and protect the things which he gave that are suitable for intelligent beings with a rational life. We full well know that he would not have formed such an animal and adorned him with all that contributes to permanence if he did not want this creature to be permanent. The creator of our universe made man that he might participate in rational life and, after contemplating God’s majesty and universal contemplation, in accordance with the divine will and the nature alloted to him. The reason then for man’s creation guarantees his eternal survival, and his survival guarantees his resurrection, without which he could not survive as man. (Res. 15.2-4)69
For Athenagoras, resurrection is the guarantee that we are what we seem to be-namely, human beings. To be perfected as humanity, we have to retain our bodily humanity; resurrection for him is the guarantee of that bodily perfection as humans. Death is but a temporary state for the faithful, a state in which their identity is temporarily dispersed. To survive forever merely as disembodied souls would be to survive at the expense of the essence of our humanity. The human being cannot be said to survive if the body has decomposed. It is not human survival unless the same body, newly perfected, is restored to the same soul (ch. 25).
The same seems to be true of Tatian, from what little we have of his writings. All that remains of Tatian’s writings is some fragments and his Oration for the Greeks, which serves a quite similar purpose to Athenagoras’ writings. But he argues quite differently to the same conclusions. Tatian, however, does not write systematically on this subject nor does he posit, as Athenagoras does, that we have an immortal soul. He seems to start from Biblical or Stoic rather than Platonic assumptions, believing that we come into existence out of nothing, with the creation of the body, explicitly saying that the soul is not in itself immortal. The soul is dissolved upon death, and so therefore the resurrection is a process of reconstituting both body and soul, as Athenagoras thought as well. Tatian rests with the confidence that no matter what happens to our bodies after death, God will restore the faithful to embodied existence, thus giving the lie to Irenaeus’ contention that Tatian denied bodily resurrection.70 What is striking about these writers is their attention not only to bodily resurrection but to fleshly resurrection.
TERTULLIAN
Tertullian continues the tradition, making fleshly resurrection yet more explicit:
If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead. For what dead man is entire…. What body is uninjured, when it is dead? … 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 has been liberated by the Lord. (Res. 8)71
As Caroline Bynum reminds us, by the end of the second century the resurrection of the body had become a major topic of controversy among Christians, as well as for the pagan critics of Christianity. The body, and the fleshly body at that, was what guaranteed the Christians that they personally would be resurrected in the end-time. The opposition claimed that resurrection was not something to be desired because it was impure and not logically the continuation of the thinking mind. In some way then, the battle was not just about resurrection but about what kind of persons we essentially are.