1 Corinthians 15:44

44. Natural body… spiritual body The word natural, to the English reader, entirely breaks the thread of the apostle’s thought. If we assume a difference between soul and spirit, and coin the word soulical as the antithesis of spiritual, we present his exact idea, and the connexion with the word soul, 1 Corinthians 15:45, will be immediately made. The Greek word ψυχη , psyche soul or life when used as antithetical to πνευμα , pneuma spirit signifies that animating, formative, and thinking soul or anima which belongs to the animal, and which man, as animal, shares as his lower nature, with the animals. Its range is within the limits of the five senses, within which limits it is able to think and to reason. Such is the power of the highest animals. Overlying this, is the spirit which man shares with higher natures, by which thought transcends the range of the senses, and man thinks of immensity, eternity, infinity, immortality, the beautiful, the holy, and God. Whether soul and spirit exist in man as two entities distinct from each other, we need not here discuss; yet it is certain that man’s mind possesses both these two classes or sets of thoughts. The lower faculties may exist without the higher; for they do so exist in brutes. The brute has also a higher set of faculties overlying those of the oyster. But it is all-important to note that it is by man’s spiritual faculties that he rises into a supernal region, and shows affinities with celestial natures.

When St. Paul says it is sown a soulical body, as in the two preceding cases (1 Corinthians 15:42-43) of the sown, he does not refer to the dead or dying body, but to the body as mortal in life, and sown in death. It is a soulical body while living, and is buried as the vacated frame of a soulical body.

The body dies because the animal soul either fuses into surrounding nature, or is borne by the spirit into the spirit region.

There is The anti-resurrectionists of the Corinthian Church seem never to have understood this striking assertion. A soulical body… a spiritual body But as the soulical body is not all pure soul, so the spiritual body is not pure spirit. For a pure spirit is not a body at all. As the soulical body is soul-pervaded body, so the spiritual body is spirit-pervaded body. But while the soul pervades and gives sensitive life to body alone, the spirit pervades both soul and body, and gives supernal life to both; forming the unit of body, soul, and spirit.

Scholars agree that the true reading here is, If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. By the body’s becoming a “spiritual body” we understand that it will be so subtilized, so adjusted to the pure spirit, and so subjected in every part and particle to the volition and power of the spirit, that while the spirit becomes, so to speak, more substantiated, the personal unit of the two natures possesses all the capabilities that our thought usually attributes to the pure spirit. By volition it passes with lightning rapidity through measureless distances. It clairvoyantly sees, at volition, through a finite immensity. By volition it transforms itself to any shape, and invests itself with a countless variety of properties and phenomenal presentations. It can become as the dark, rolling cloud, the flashing lightning, the solid rock. And yet it will have a normal figure and face which will at once be the true expression of its essential nature, (far more truly than human physiognomy now manifests the character,) and will reveal to the intuition of the fellow-celestials the particular personality, and perhaps the entire past history, of the individual. When asked, Will the glorified bodies have teeth? we reply, If they please; and eat with them, too, as the angels did who visited Abraham. If asked, Will they have hair? we reply, Yes, if they please. And when asked, Where will they get their clothes? we answer, Just where the “two angels” who stood before the apostles at Christ’s ascension, procured their “shining raiment.” it is perfectly clear, we think, that varying phenomenal form and properties are more or less at the command both of the pure spirit and of the unit of spirit and spiritual body. See note on Luke 24:39.