Reply.—We cannot perceive that our reasoning is in the least degree inconsistent with the account of man’s origin given in Scripture. This account implies no doubt a peculiar operation of the invisible universe, but our reasoning compels us to look in this direction for the origin of certain occurrences. Whether the production of man has been the occasion for a peculiar interposition of the unseen it is not within our province to discuss. We can only say that we see no reason from our principles to question the view which asserts that man was made by a peculiar operation out of a pre-existent universe.
207. Objection Fifth (Theological).—The resurrection consistent with your theory could not be a resurrection of the same particles as were laid in the grave, and in this respect it would be dissimilar to that of Christ.
Reply.—A dissimilarity between the two exists under any theory, for the body of Christ did not experience corruption, while the bodies of believers in Christ are manifestly dissolved by death.
[We make the following suggestion with much hesitation.
What we have to say is founded upon an exceedingly able work by Edward White, entitled Life in Christ, which has recently been published, and from which we extract the following passage (page 263):—
‘But the Saviour was Divine. As man, identified with human nature, He died, and His death became a sin-offering; as God He could not die. As man He was made “under the law;” as God He was above the law laid on creatures.... He arose, therefore, as the Divine Conqueror of death, “God over all, blessed for evermore,” and was thus “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead.”—Rom. i. 4. He rose, not “in the likeness of sinful flesh;” not “under the law,” but in the character of the “Lord from heaven,” “our Lord and our God:”—not in the image of the “son of Adam,” but as the “Son of the Highest,” having delivered us from wrath by the death of His humanity, to endow us with immortality through the life of His Divinity. He was no longer “the man of sorrows,” but The First and The Last and The Living One; no longer crowned with thorns, and clothed in a peasant’s robe, but wearing the diadem of the Lord of the Universe, and shining with the supereminent splendours of the Godhead.’
If then Christ died as man, and was reanimated in virtue of His divinity, the analogy between Christ, who is the head, and believers, who are His body, will be complete if we suppose that each believer dies as a man, but is raised up by virtue of the divinity of Christ, and inasmuch as the Head is not present here in His glorified bodily form, so it cannot be supposed that His members should at present assume that form.
But when Christ appears again upon earth we are told that His members being raised in what is termed the first resurrection will then accompany Him.
And judging from S. Matthew (chap. xxvii. verse 52), something of this kind, but of a partial nature, took place when Christ locally appeared, after His resurrection, in Jerusalem.
In fine, the true analogy between Christ and the believer should prevent us from supposing that while Christ is absent in His glorified body believers should nevertheless assume theirs.