I continue The Resurrection of the Son of God in Chapter 7, pp. 312-74. This chapter carefully walks through the two resurrection-focused passages in the Corinthian books (1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 4:7-5:10). In the last chapter, we flew over the Corinthian lake. Now we are going swimming in a couple of spots.
1 Cor. 15 (pp. 312-61)
Wright notes that the background for 1 Cor. 15 leans heavily on Genesis 1-3 (p. 313). Resurrection is creation renewed, so Paul uses the first creation as a model and structure for his description of the renewed creation. It is not just the references to the first Adam, but even Paul’s use of words: seed, flesh, beasts, birds, fish, heavenly bodies, earthly bodies, sun, moon, stars (15:37-41). You can hear echoes of God’s command for each to produce “after their kind” (Ge. 1:25) in Paul’s statement in 15:38, “But God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own.” Renewed creation has continuity with old creation. And Paul uses what we see in creation now to illustrate renewed creation then. A seed doesn’t look anything like the tree that it will produce (15:37-38). If that is what occurs now with seed to tree, the Corinthians shouldn’t think God is limited because they cannot imagine it!
To suggest, as many do in New Testament scholarship, that Paul is not arguing for a bodily resurrection, is to fail to understand Paul. A spiritual-only resurrection is no resurrection from a Jewish point of view. Paul’s arguments based on the original creation break down if taken on a non-physical level. It sort of begs the question, if we really aren’t going to have a body there, then why does my body matter here? Paul counters this firmly within the Jewish creation story, eschatological expectations, and what God has done in the Messiah. The story of humanity that started (and went horribly wrong) with Adam has now been redeemed and renewed in Jesus. God doesn’t ‘fix’ humanity by taking away the body, but by recreating it through His New Man. Jesus is both the model and means of new creation. In other words, we were shaped by the first Adam, now we are to be shaped by the second ‘Adam’ and His resurrection.
2 Cor. 4:7-5:10 (pp. 361-70)
In 2 Corinthians, the resurrection is that which encourages (comforts) us. Recall that the Corinthians were quite enamored with the glamorous, the gifted (and the gifts), and the glorious. Paul’s ministry doesn’t look like much to them. Thus, much of 2 Corinthians is Paul defending the lack of ‘glory’ in his ministry. He makes this contrast with Moses explicit in chapter 3 and then in 4:7ff attaches this to the resurrection. The ‘treasure in earthenware vessels’ is another way of saying: the outstanding wine that comes out of a plain vessel is not due to the vessel (4:7). It must come from somewhere else. God’s creation of new life from the ‘dying’ of Paul must come from God, not from Paul (4:8-12). The resurrection provides the encouragement for that daily ‘dying’—I can ‘die’ today because of the hope of the resurrection, guaranteed by the Spirit (5:5). The Spirit is both the power of God in us and the pledge of God to us. The Spirit enables us to have small tastes of new life while guaranteeing the final resurrection. But again, the strange twist is that this new life is experienced by dying. We follow the model of Jesus life (4:14). By dying, we live. God inverts our values because our values are ‘Adamic’, poisoned by sin. But this dying is not morbid. It isn’t sadistic. It is entirely based in and looks forward to the resurrection, with Jesus as the model, and the Spirit as the guarantee.
We really must press into the imagery that Paul uses in 5:1-5. These terms—building, dwelling, clothing—should, especially with Moses in the context, remind us of… the tabernacle and priests! Indeed, our current ‘tent’, a tabernacle, looks forward one day to being built into a ‘real’ building, the temple. A dwelling from heaven is not a disembodied existence—it would break Paul’s analogy of unclothed/naked, but rather, an immortal body. Like going from a tabernacle to a magnificent Solomonic temple. God has promised to turn our little tabernacles into great temples. We are priests sacrificing in our tabernacles—living in these ‘temporary’ quarters—knowing one day we will have a permanent dwelling from Him.
The first chapters of RSG have provided the second-temple context to read Paul appropriately. Wright sums up resurrection in Paul’s writings by noting two things (p. 372): first, the resurrection expectation has now been divided into two, the (already) resurrection of the Messiah and the (future) resurrection of His people. Second, the resurrection is not the reanimation of the existing body, but a renewal and recreation of the body. It’s like going from a seed to a tree. We cannot imagine what God has planned for our new bodies. We have been granted glimpses of it in Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. It has continuity with our present bodies—God seems to have kept the ‘shape’. But we must not let our imaginations limit God (let the New Testament scholar understand).
In the next chapter, we will finish up resurrection in Paul, discussing when Jesus appeared to Paul.