What is the nature of the resurrection body?

Question 10176.

What kind of resurrection body will believers receive? Paul was asked a version of that question by the Corinthians in a slightly sneering tone, and rather than dismissing it he gave us the fullest chapter on the subject in the Bible.

The answer he gives is neither a ghost nor a repaired version of what we have now. It is a real body, recognisably ours, transformed by the power of God and fitted for a world that does not decay.

Paul’s four contrasts

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul sets the present body against the resurrection body in four pairs. What is sown is perishable and what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour and raised in glory. It is sown in weakness and raised in power. It is sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:42).

Notice that the same thing is sown and raised. Paul is not describing a replacement but a transformation, which is why he reaches for the picture of seed and plant. A wheat seed and a wheat stalk are continuous and yet nobody would mistake one for the other, and the resurrection body stands in that relation to the body we have now.

The word translated spiritual is pneumatikos, and it does not mean made of spirit. Paul uses the same adjective for spiritual people, who are certainly physical. It means animated and governed by the Spirit rather than by the natural life we now possess.

The body of Jesus as our model

The best information we have about the resurrection body comes from watching the risen Jesus over forty days. He could be seen, heard and touched. He ate broiled fish in front of the disciples to prove he was not a ghost. He invited Thomas to put a finger in the wounds, which means the marks of the cross survived the resurrection.

He was also recognisable, though not always instantly, and he could appear in a locked room and vanish from a table at Emmaus. So the resurrection body is physical without being limited in the ways we are limited, which is exactly what we should expect of a body suited to a renewed creation.

Paul makes the connection explicit. Jesus will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him to subject all things to himself (Philippians 3:21). Our future is not guesswork. It is a pattern already walking about in the accounts of the Gospels, and my article on what the resurrection body of Jesus tells us about ours goes further into it.

Will we recognise each other?

Yes. The disciples recognised Jesus, Moses and Elijah were identified on the mount of transfiguration without introduction, and Paul expects the Thessalonians to be reunited with the believers they have buried. A resurrection body that left you anonymous would make nonsense of the comfort Scripture attaches to it.

Personal identity is not erased by glorification. You will be yourself, without the accumulated damage. The scars of Jesus suggest that even our history is not simply deleted, though in his case the marks are trophies rather than injuries, and there is a hint there about how our own stories may be carried into the new creation.

Questions about age and appearance are not answered in Scripture, and the various guesses of the church fathers about everyone rising at thirty three are guesses. What we are told is that we shall be like him, which is quite enough to be going on with. I take the reunion itself up in whether we will recognise people in heaven.

What the resurrection body will not have

Paul says flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. That is not a denial of physicality. It is his way of saying that the present arrangement, with its dependence on blood, food, decay and death, belongs to this age.

There will be no illness, no ageing, no failing memory, no chronic pain and no death. For a believer living with a long term condition that promise is not abstract theology. It is the specific undoing of the specific thing that has stolen so much, and it is worth saying plainly at a hospital bedside.

Nor will there be sin in the resurrection body. The war Paul describes in Romans 7 ends at the resurrection, and the believer becomes wholly what grace has been making him. That, for me, is the most attractive feature of the whole prospect, more than the absence of pain.

Continuity when the body is destroyed

People often ask what happens when a body is burnt, lost at sea, or long since returned to dust. The question assumes God needs the original material, and Scripture never suggests he does. The God who made Adam from dust is not inconvenienced by a shortage of raw material.

Paul’s seed analogy handles this directly. What you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, and God gives it a body as he has chosen. The continuity is guaranteed by God’s knowledge and power rather than by molecular preservation, which is just as well, since our atoms are exchanged many times over during an ordinary life.

The martyrs settle the matter historically. The church has always believed that those burnt at the stake will rise, and it has never regarded their ashes as a theological problem. My article on cremation and the resurrection takes that question up in its own right.

A body for a real world

If the final state were a disembodied heaven, a resurrection body would be pointless. The reason we are given bodies is that we are going to a place: a new earth, with a city, a river, trees and nations walking in the light of it. Bodies are for worlds, and God is preparing both.

That suggests our eternity involves activity rather than a permanent worship service in the sense people imagine. Scripture speaks of reigning, of serving, of eating and drinking at a table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Those all require a body that can do things, and it turns out we are getting one.

I find that thought does more for my hope than any amount of harp imagery. The believer’s future is not less real than the present. It is considerably more so, and the resurrection body is the instrument of it.

Why the doctrine matters now

Paul draws a practical conclusion from the whole chapter, and it is not what most people expect. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.

The resurrection body is his argument for getting on with the work. If the body is going to be raised, then what you do in the body matters, and the Christian faith has never been able to treat physical life as a temporary embarrassment. That is why the church has built hospitals rather than simply holding seminars.

It also dignifies the bodies we have now, with all their present frailty. A body destined for resurrection is not a shell to be despised. It is the first draft of something God intends to keep.

What Scripture does not tell us

Honesty requires a list of things we are not told. We do not know what the resurrection body will look like in terms of age or appearance. We do not know whether it will require food or simply enjoy it, though Jesus ate and the marriage supper suggests a table. We do not know how it moves.

Christians have speculated freely on all of these, and some of the speculation is enjoyable. Augustine wondered about height and Aquinas about hair. None of it is revelation, and a teacher who presents his guesses with the same confidence as the text has stopped teaching the Bible.

What we are given is sufficient rather than exhaustive. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. Like him is the summary of everything we need.

So I would rather a believer knew four certainties than forty theories. The resurrection body is real, it is ours, it is glorious, and it is permanent. Everything else can wait until we can ask in person.

So, now what?

If you are unwell, ageing, or watching your capacities shrink, this doctrine is for you and not for a seminar room. The body you are struggling with is a seed, and Paul’s whole point is that seeds are not judged by how they look in the ground.

And if you are fit and busy, let the same truth shape how you spend yourself. Your labour in the Lord is not in vain because your body has a future. What would you attempt this year if you really believed you were going to be raised?

For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

1 Corinthians 15:52-53, ESV