The Corinthians’ difficulty with the resurrection grew naturally out of Greek philosophical thought. The Greeks basically had a great difference between mind and matter in the sense that everything that was of the spirit or the mind was good, and everything that was of matter was evil. They would have said that the problem is not that we are sinful human beings—including our minds and our spirits, which is what the Bible teaches. Rather, they believed that the problem is that we have bodies, which are the cause of our evil desires and bad behavior. These bodies tend to drag us down, while there is something within us, the mind and the spirit, that aspires to go upward to God.
Well, certainly, if that is what you believe the spiritual problem is, the way to be saved was to escape the body. In this life you cannot do that except by philosophy. So salvation became a mental thing. It became something that happened by the way in which you thought. The Stoics in particular said that regardless of what happens to you, no matter how you suffer, you simply have to rise above it. You have to say, “Well, what’s important to me is the mind and the spirit. And even if I’m in chains, even if I’m suffering, even if very horrible things happen to me physically, this really doesn’t tie me down because salvation is what I think and not what I experience in a physical way.”
As you can well understand, it followed from this that you could not have anything like the incarnation, in which God the Son became man, taking upon Himself a human body. To a Greek that would be the equivalent of saying that God became sinful. This particular kind of philosophy introduced one of the first heresies into the church which said that Jesus was not really a human being, but only appeared to be. It was believed that the divine Spirit of Christ came upon a human being, and, according to some teaching, left Him just before the crucifixion.
The other heresy had to do with the resurrection because if salvation is basically escaping from the body, why would you ever want a resurrection? In this way of thinking, to have a resurrection is to simply bring our sinful bodies with us into heaven. If the goal is to get rid of one’s body, you obviously do not want to get it back again later. As a result, when the Christians came preaching the resurrection of the body, there was that natural tendency for Greek people to disagree with it.
In the first half of this chapter, Paul has answered that in terms of history. Paul wants to teach about the factual nature of the resurrection and its importance. He has done this by explaining that the resurrection is in the nature of the Gospel. It is not something that somebody thought up, something that the apostles invented. Whether you like it or not, whether it fits your philosophy or not, Jesus came, died, and rose again. You can dismiss it all. You can say it did not happen. But if you are honest and are willing to investigate and then accept the testimony of the eyewitnesses and, by the grace of God, come within the framework of the Christian worldview, you have to acknowledge that this happened. And then, regardless of what your cultural background is, your old way of thinking has to change because it has to be conformed eventually to the reality of the facts of the resurrection. Paul addresses these things in the first half of this chapter.
