What did Paul mean when he wrote about a “spiritual body” in his description of life after the resurrection? There are few familiar Bible phrases that have been so badly mishandled as has this one on different occasions.
A very fashionable approach to the subject today, often by those who should certainly know better, is to put considerable emphasis on the word “spiritual” and quietly ignore the word “body.” Next they give “spiritual” a strong slant in the direction of “ghostly”, and before you know it they have proved (so they think) that white is black — that a spiritual body is really a spirit without a body!
It would be almost impossible to get farther from the apostle’s meaning than this. His argument in I Corinthians 15 must be almost completely ignored if one is to read such a meaning into his words. He begins that well-known chapter with a strong emphasis (over emphasis would be the correct word if the subject were not so important) on the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The dead body came to life again! Readers will recall similar emphasis in the gospel accounts of what happened on the first day of the week.
The apostle’s next point, several times repeated, is this: Jesus was the firstfruits of the resurrection, or as we would say in our modern language, the prototype of Christian immortality: “Christ the first-fruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at His coming . . . If we have borne the image of the earthy (Adam), we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” (Christ).
The antithesis just mentioned is one which is repeated in a variety of ways as though teaching a class of children, because Paul evidently thinks a man very foolish (verse 36) who finds it necessary to ask about the resurrection body. ” . . . It is sown in corruption (dishonor, weakness, a natural body), it is raised in in-corruption . . . , glory . . . , a spiritual body.” The first phrase describes this life with all of its disabilities, the second describes the resurrection life.
The thoughtful reader will readily perceive that if Christ is the firstfruits of the resurrection, then the “spiritual body” is that which Christ Himself possessed after His resurrection. And what was that? A disembodied soul ? God forbid! “Handle me”, He said, “and see that it is I myself. A spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.” This “spiritual” body was material enough, although it possessed strange and marvelous powers known to no man in the days of this human weakness.
The risen Jesus could vanish from the sight of wondering disciples. He could appear suddenly in their midst when they were in a locked upper room. And yet He could, and did eat and drink with them in their presence. In various places the Bible describes the coming and going of angels in precisely this way. And it was Jesus Himself who tied the two ideas together: “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.” This exaltation to “the divine nature” (Peter’s phrase) does not take place at death, but is reserved until a precise time in the Almighty’s program — the coming of Jesus Christ.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet talked vaguely and uncertainly about “shuffling off this mortal coil”, but Paul wrote with knowledge and assurance of a future day when “this corruptible must put on in-corruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One