Your Spirit-Powered Resurrection Body

Christian doctrine teaches that, at the end of time, God will physically raise up human beings. But what will "the resurrection of the body" be like? Anglican bishop N.T. Wright, one of the world's premier New Testament scholars, spoke with Beliefnet recently about the subject--and about his series of accessible Bible commentaries, "Mark for Everyone," "Luke for Everyone," and more.

In your books, you speak of bodily resurrection, not just Jesus' but regular Christians'. You say "God will make a new type of material not subject to death out of the old material."

You get this issue raised explicitly in 1 Corinthians [read chapter 15], a bit in 2 Corinthians, and indeed in Romans 8. It is fascinating to me that most contemporary Christians find this idea strange and new, since it is so front and center--in Paul particularly. It shows that in post-Enlightenment reading of the New Testament a significant strand of material has just been screened right out.

A lot of scholars seem to look at the Pauline phrase which in Greek is "pneumatic" body and in English is "spiritual" body, and they seem to think the resurrection won't be physical at all.

The word "spiritual" in 1 Corinthians 15 comes from the Greek "pneuma." But the word is pneumatikos. Greek adjectives that end in -kos do not describe the substance out of which something is made. They describe the force that is animating the thing in question. It's the difference between saying on the one hand, "Is this a wooden ship or a steel ship?" and saying on the other hand, "Is this a nuclear-powered ship or a steam-powered ship?" And the sort of adjective it is of the latter type, it's a spirit-powered body.

But it's still a ship.

Exactly! But it's still a body. And generations of readers have been misled-particularly by the RSV and the NRSV-into thinking that the distinction Paul is making is between a physical body, in the sense of something you can actually get a grip on, and a spiritual body, in the platonic sense of something you couldn't get a grip on.

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