THE REDEMPTION OF THE BODY AND THE IMPORTANCE OF CORPORALITY.

"We look for the resurrection of the dead,

and the life of the world to come."

So end the Nicene Creed. The Apostles’ Creed end with these words: "the resurrection of the body and life everlasting". Christian tradition has always discouraged any dissociation of body and person. Indeed, traditional teaching stresses the wholeness of the person. In First Corinthians St. Paul insists that Jesus’ act of rising from the dead is real and "of the body":

…Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried, and he was raised to life on the third day…that he appeared first to Cephas and secondly to the Twelve. Next he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at same time…"

(1Cor 15, v. 3-8 ).

Christ resurrected is the pattern of the new creation: "… and he will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his own glorious body" (Phil. 3, 21). The new creation will arise from the old; it is not a second totally new creation out of nothing but the redeemed transformation of the old. The Resurrection, then, is the raising up of the whole person into eternal life. Our self can never be separated from "bodiliness". Indeed, from the life ties of personal/ bodily relationships within the natural world.

The matter and form of the person are never separated. The form or "soul" could be defined in the words of John Polkinghorne as "the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing pattern in which the matter of our bodies any time is organized".

Polkinghorne further likens the soul to "software" running bon the "hardware" of the body. The "story" of each embodied person be realized only within the universal resurrection, at the end of natural history. Here the meaning of each individual identity will be realized in relationship with the whole of creation when Christ will be all in all. As we read in the letter to the Colossians:

As he is the Beginning, He was first to be born from the dead, so that he should be first in every way; because God wanted all perfection to be found in him and all things to be reconciled through him and for him, when he made peace by his death on the cross. (v. 18-20).