[OBW]

Ohio,

I think that the point that Paul made was that Christ, who was life-giving, was now in a spiritual body. While he had used the example of Christ to give some kind of idea about the nature of this body, the point was not to transfer every aspect of Christ to us in our resurrection but to point to the features described in the accounts of his appearance over the few weeks between the resurrection and ascension that related to the body, not to everything else about Christ. Surely there was more than just the body of resurrection present because it made God in the person of Jesus Christ visible and tangible. So the fact that Paul makes any reference to the nature of God is not to be presumed as a statement about us when the discussion is about bodies, not divine attributes.

Consider other places where Paul talks about Christ. Does he simply talk coldly about some specific thing? No, he tends to be rather superlative. So here, he has managed to seem almost clinical for a bit, then reminds them of one of the superlatives about Christ as he continues to tell us about this body that he has reason to believe is like the one we will receive.

Besides, it is not the body that is life-giving. It is the person who inhabits it. Since neither you nor I are live-giving (in the manner that Christ is), then our resurrected body will not be housing such a person.

But, as in all aspects of discussion about what is to be in the next life, at the end times, etc., it is what it is. Too much consideration about that was never the point. Instead, it seems that Paul is trying to terminate a bunch of arguing about what the resurrected body might be like. And the only thing he had to provide was Jesus as an example. The goal wasn't to provide teaching about the body in resurrection but to end the debate so they could get back to the more important aspects of the Christian life. At some level, that is what the whole letter is about — ending disputes over teachers, what is acceptable sin to ignore, how to behave at the Lord's table, the distribution of gifts, the three-ring circus that their meetings became, and now both the certainty of and the nature of the body in resurrection.

And so the point was not to provide some certainty about the nature of our body in resurrection but to suggest that we have an example, therefore we can stop bickering about it and move on beyond it. Just like the goal of stopping the argument over teachers wasn't to settle the argument in favor of one over the other but to show that it was not relevant or useful. It seems that this was the theme of so much of the book, yet we still want to milk a single verse for special attribute for ourselves. Seems very Corinthian.