Resurrection Of Body

In this paper I will show how the belief in the resurrection of the body was present in the Early Church, and that the Church Fathers conceived of the resurrected body as being healed of all its disabilities yet bearing some continuity with the self. (In this paper I will show the Church Fathers, based upon their understanding of Greco-Roman culture and philosophy along with their reading of Scripture, understood the resurrection of the dead to involve the healing/cleansing of all bodily disability.) The Christian Creed finds its fulfillment in the proclamation of the resurrection of the dead to life everlasting. Just as Christ is risen from the dead, we believe that we too will be raised to new life in Christ by the work of the Most Holy Trinity. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, asks, "What kind of body will [the faithful] come back [with]?" He answers that, "if there is a natural body, there is a spiritual one," which, "will bear the image of the heavenly one." Candida R. Moss, a professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, in her essay, "Heavenly Healing: Eschatological Cleansing and the Resurrection of the Dead in the Early Church," further develops St. Paul 's question in relation to whether disabilities are retained in the resurrected body, and argues that the Church Fathers described the perfected resurrected body as being healed and cleansed.

Instead they understood divine justice to be enacted on the level or families or nations in a historical not eschatological setting. In the Jewish understanding no true life was possible without the body, therefore the existence of the soul without a body in Sheol was a mere shadow compared to real life. Pre-exilic prophecy begin to emphasize the worth and responsibility of the individual and also a change in Israel’s understanding of covenant from merely temporal success to an eschatological hope. This shift in consciousness can be seen in the Isaian Apocalypse where the origins of the concept bodily resurrection can be traced, in which the prophet Isaiah proclaims that the, "dead shall live, their corpses shall rise." According to theologian Joanne E. McWilliam Dewart, in her book, "Death and Resurrection," Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones uses a dramatic, "physical re-constitution of the dead," to indicate hope in an "eschatological re-establishment" of Israel. Although both of these passages in their original context are not about the resurrection of the dead, they do foreshadow the doctrine and leave a deep imprint on both the Jewish and Christian vision of the resurrection. In the Maccabean revolt is found an unequivocal expression of belief in the resurrection of the body. Those martyred express belief that God will raise them up to eternal life, they hope in the restoration of their bodies after having been maimed. Prior to the messianic era the Pharisees taught the resurrection of the body, while the Sadducees did not. It was in this milieu of diverse beliefs regarding the resurrection of the body that Christ was