Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [347]
Tertullian is the first significant Church Father writing in Latin.72 Although Justin and Irenaeus founded the patristic apologetic tradition, it was Tertullian who wrote a treatise directly discussing the resurrection of the flesh. Like Tatian, Tertullian wrote out of the Stoic philosophical tradition. Like Tatian, Tertullian’s resurrection is a re-creation of body and soul with a reassembling of the physical parts, instead of a process of spiritual, dynamic development, as in Paul. Following the Stoics, Tertullian thought that even the soul has a material reality, being made up of very fine matter.
Tertullian wrote On the Resurrection of the Flesh at the beginning of the third century. His opponents were Gnostics and probably Valentinians. He criticized his opponents’ notion that one receives gnōsis at baptism and hence can consider oneself resurrected and saved as well. Those who deny that the flesh is raised are also refusing to recognize that Christ lived in the flesh and that he was raised in the flesh (Res., 2). Following Daniel 7:13, many fathers suggested that Christ had been taken bodily into heaven. Tertullian is cognizant of the conflict that this raises in Scripture. Paul’s statement that “flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God” in 1 Corinthians means for Tertullian not only that the spirit is necessary for humans to enter the kingdom (Res., 50) but also that death will end because corruption cannot enter heaven (Res., 51).
Needless to say, this is a tendentious interpretation of Paul. Tertullian compensates by describing the process of the self’s perception through faith. He even envisions a flesh infused with spirit that is free of every malady, thus re-importing Paul’s pneumatology. Tertullian was evidently aware of Rabbinic Midrash on this point and used it effectively to make his point. As does the Midrash, Tertullian argues that when the children of Israel wandered for forty years in the desert, neither their shoes nor their clothes wore out, neither their hair nor their fingernails grew.73 This Jewish trope is used by Tertullian to demonstrate resurrection: If God could sustain the children of Israel in the desert miraculously, he can certainly preserve the body of the faithful for its future resurrection. So the saved rise with every infirmity, malady, and bodily handicap removed.
The resurrection body will contain all the same organs that we have but they may not all be used. We will have no need for organs of digestion or sex.74 For flesh and spirit are as a bridegroom and a bride:
And so the flesh shall rise again, wholly in every man, in its own identity, in its absolute integrity. Wherever it may be, it is in safe keeping in God’s presence, through that most faithful “Mediator between God and man [the man] Jesus Christ, who shall reconcile both God to man, and man to God; the spirit to the flesh and the flesh to the spirit. Both natures has He already united in His own self; He has fitted them together as bride and bridegroom in the reciprocal bond of wedded life. Now, if any should insist on making the soul the bride, then the flesh will follow the soul as her dowry. The soul shall never be an outcast, to be led home by the bridegroom bare and naked. She has her dower, her outfit, her fortune in the flesh, which shall accompany her with the love and fidelity of a foster sister. But suppose the flesh to be the bride, then in Christ Jesus she has in the contract of His blood received His spirit as her spouse. Now, what you take to be her extinction, you may be sure is only her temporary retirement. It is not the soul only which withdraws from view. The flesh, too, has her departures for a while-in waters, in fires, in birds, in beasts; she may seem to be dissolved into these but she is only poured into them, as into vessels. And should the vessels themselves afterwards fail to hold her, escaping from even these, and returning to her mother