Resurrection – analogy and reality

by George Bailey.

Another Easter season and another round of reflections on resurrection and its implications for our daily lives. I wrote about this last year here – Growing Resurrection – and this article develops some ideas already begun in that one.

I continue to encounter conversations in church life in which doubts are expressed about the resurrection of the body. People find it difficult to grasp what it could mean in the face of contemporary medical science and the widespread practice of cremation. On the other hand, a non-bodily resurrection produces doubts about our relationship with the world around us, as eternal life might somehow not include the physical stuff of life now. Tom Wright’s detailed exploration of these themes traces clearly how ‘hope for the resurrection of the body, has however been so out of tune with several of the prevailing moods of Christian thought down the years that it has become muzzled, distorted and then not even known.’[1] Proceeding here under the assumption that Wright is correct that the New Testament is clear about the resurrection of the body being central to Christian faith, and Christians need to rediscover it for the 21^st century, there is one facet of the issues which lead people to read the NT without accepting an expectation of bodily resurrection that I am particularly interested in at present – how to approach the NT analogies between natural processes and resurrection. Here are two examples:

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.’ (John 12:24)

‘But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body.’ (1 Corinthians 15: 35-38)

I have had trouble bringing these images into my conversations about the resurrection of the body in recent weeks. These verses seem to be using an analogy from nature to help the reader reflect on the meaning of resurrection – new life comes from death in the same way that plants grow from seeds. The major problem with this is that when the seed is planted, it does not die. The seed contains the potential to become a new plant, usually also containing some initial nourishment, and this potential is activated and realised when the conditions are suitable (warmth, water, light etc). Seeds are a natural process of reproduction, and not of resurrection. Is this an analogy that works so far, but then breaks down? If read it as a metaphorical image, it can contribute to the diminishment of any expectation of resurrection in a bodily, physical sense – this lends support to the notion that bodily resurrection too is only a poetic image for what would actually be a purely non-material process. It is worth noting that this is difficult to explain clearly as terminology here is ambiguous (e.g. ‘physical’, ‘material’), because the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the body includes the belief that the resurrection body will be in continuity with current experience, yet will also be transformed. It will be an immortal body, but still a body – a new transformed physicality of human persons. On this point, the verses from 1 Corinthians 15 do include the helpful notion that the eventual form of the plant is very different from that of the seed. That said, the disjunction between resurrection and reproduction remains an issue.

Jürgen Moltmann proposes that we focus here on ‘nature’s openness for analogy’.[2] Accepting that resurrection is not a natural event, and is even more than simply an interruption in the natural laws of mortal life – rather, the laws of mortality themselves are being changed – what is made clear with the NT language of reproductive images (about seeds, but also birth) is that natural mortal life however remains open for analogy from the perspective of the resurrection. It is not that natural processes are helping us to understand the resurrection, but the resurrection is helping us to see natural processes in a new perspective and with new potential. Moltmann explains:

‘Although every morning is followed by evening, every spring by winter, and every birth by death, in the light of Christ’s final resurrection it is only in these natural beginnings of life that pointers to eternal life are seen, so that they are lifted out of the cycle of eternal return of the same to which they otherwise belong.’[3]

Hence for Moltmann, the natural world is not just a ‘parable of eternal life’ but ‘is becoming God’s mode of appearance and the advance radiance of his kingdom’.[4] New life, fruitfulness and harmony in the natural world are signs of the new eternal life of God’s kingdom, which will not be detached from the natural world, but will encompass a transformed natural world, with resurrected humans as part of its ecosystem. The pursuit of new life, fruitfulness and harmony in the world around us now is therefore entailed by our hope for the resurrection of our bodies, especially in the face of opposite cycles which are leading to death, desertification and climate crisis. Christian hope for eternal life is intertwined with action for change in the current day.

---

[1] Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008,

New York: HarperOne), p141.

[2] Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (1990, SCM Press: London), p250.

[3] Ibid. p251 (his italics)

[4] Ibid. p252.