Professor Joseph Ratzinger ends his Introduction to Christianity on the Apostles’ Creed with a discussion of the resurrected body.  We have still not reached the end of our questions. If this is the position, is there really such a thing as a resurrected body, or can the whole thing be reduced to a mere symbol for the immortality of the person? This is the problem that still awaits us. It is no new problem; even 'Paul was bombarded with questions of this sort by the Corinthians, as we can see from the fifteenth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians, where the Apostle tries to provide an answer, so far as such a thing is at all possible on this point, which lies beyond the limits of our imagination and those of the world accessible to us. Many of the images employed by Paul have become alien to us: but his answer as a whole is still the noblest, boldest, and most convincing one ever formulated to this question.

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Let us start from verse 50, which seems to me to be a sort of key to the whole: "I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." It seems to me that the sentence occupies much the same position in this text as verse 63 occupies in the eucharistic chapter 6 of St. John's Gospel: for these two seemingly widely separated texts are much more closely related than is apparent at first sight. There, in St. John, it says, just after the real presence of the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist has been sharply emphasized: "It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail." In both the Johannine and the Pauline texts, it is a question of developing the Christian realism of "the flesh". In John, the realism of the sacraments, that is, the realism of Jesus' Resurrection and of his "flesh" that comes to us from it, is emphasized; in Paul it is a question of the realism of the resurrection of the "flesh", of the resurrection of Christians and of the salvation achieved for us in it. But both passages also contain a sharp counterpoint that emphasizes Christian realism as realism beyond the physical world, realism of the Holy Spirit, as opposed to a purely worldly, quasi-physical realism.

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Here Professor Ratzinger puts together two seemingly unrelated Bible verses and shows that they make the same point.  St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, tells us the negative truth -- that we are not to look for eternal life from our physical bodies.  In the Gospel of St. John, Jesus tells us that life comes from the spirit, not the flesh.  Those who think that the only thing which is real is the physical world are wrong.  St. Paul tells us that our real resurrection will not be of our physical, biological, earthly, mortal bodies.'   In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus tells that He is really present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, but not in a physical, biological way.  As Professor Ratzinger says, the reality of our resurrected bodies and the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist both come from the Holy Spirit. 

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Professor Ratzinger explains this further.  Here English cannot fully convey the enigmatic character of the biblical Greek. In Greek the word soma means something like "body", but at the same time it also means "the self", And this soma can be sarx, that is, "body" in the earthly, ' historical, and thus chemical, physical, sense; but it can also 'be "breath"---according to the dictionary, it would then have to be translated "spirit"; in reality this means that the self,  which now appears in a body that can be conceived in chemico-physical terms, can, again, appear definitively in the guise of a transphysical reality. In Paul's language "body" and “Spirit" are not opposites; the opposites are called "physical body" and "spiritual body". We do not need to try here to pursue the complicated historical and philosophical problems posed by this. One thing at any rate may be fairly clear: both John (6:63) and Paul (I Cor. 15:50) state with all possible emphasis that the "resurrection of the flesh", the "resurrection of the body”, is 'not a "resurrection of physical bodies". Thus, from the point of view of modern thought, the Pauline sketch is far less naive than later theological erudition with its subtle ways of construing how there can be eternal physical bodies. To recapitulate, Paul teaches, not the resurrection of physical bodies, but the resurrection of persons, and this not in the return of the "fleshly body”, that is, the biological structure, an idea he expressly describes as impossible ("the perishable cannot become imperishable"), but in the different form of the life of the resurrection, as shown in the risen Lord.   Thus, we can see that the “spiritual body” is not just a pie in the sky creation of human imagination or hope.   The resurrection of Jesus Christ shows us that it is a concrete reality which was seen and touched by witnesses.

Has, then, the resurrection no relation at all to matter? And does this make the "Last Day" completely pointless in comparison with the life that always comes from the call of the Lord? Basically, we have already answered this last question in our reflections on the second corning of Christ. If the cosmos is history and if matter represents a moment in the history of spirit, then there is no such thing as an eternal, neutral combination of matter and spirit; rather, there is a final "complexity" in which the world finds its omega and unity. In that case, there is a final connection between matter and spirit in which the destiny of man and of the world is consummated, even if it is impossible for us today to define the nature of this connection. In that case, there is such a thing as a "Last Day", on which the destiny of the individual man becomes full because the destiny of mankind is fulfilled. In our physical world, matter and spirit are joined to give us the world we live in and observe even though we do not know how this happens.  At the “Last Day” this joining will be different from now, but God has not told us how this will happen.

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The goal of the Christian is not private bliss but the whole. He believes in Christ, and for that reason he believes in the future of the world, not just in his own future. He knows that this future is more than he himself can create. He-knows that there is a meaning he is quite incapable of destroying. Is he therefore to sit quietly with his hands in his lap? On the contrary; because he knows there is such a thing as meaning, he can and must cheerfully and intrepidly do the work of history, even though from his little segment of it he will have the feeling that it is a labor of Sisyphus and that the stone of human destiny is rolled anew, generation after generation, up the hill only to roll down again once more and nullity all previous efforts. Whoever believes knows that things move “forward", not in a circle. Whoever believes knows that history is not like Penelope's tapestry, which was always being woven anew only to be undone again. Even the Christian may be assailed by the nightmares,' induced by the fear of fruitlessness, out of which the pre-Christian world created these moving images of the anxiety that all human activity is vain. But his nightmare is pierced by the saving, transforming voice of reality: "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (] n 16:33). The new world, with the description of which, in the image of the final Jerusalem, the Bible ends, is no Utopia but certainty, which we advance to meet in faith. A salvation of the world does exist---that is the confidence that supports the Christian and that still makes it rewarding even today to be a Christian. The “otherworldly” orientation of Christianity does not make us idle or unconcerned about the world.  Rather, we know that everything we do counts for eternity. This is why we can never stop growing in the Christian life and into union with the Lord.  --Jim Nugent, CFP