[74] The point is continually emphasized that there is only one spirit. In English translations the double printed form, Spirit and spirit, disguises the real meaning, ‘if there is any common sharing of the spirit’ Philipp. ii 1.
[75] ‘You may, one and all, become sharers in the very nature of God’ 2 Peter i 4.
[76] ἐσκοτίσθη ἡ ἀσύνετος αὐτῶν καρδία Rom. i 21.
[77] ‘our mortal bodies cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor will what is perishable inherit what is imperishable’ 1 Cor. xv 50; ‘if we have known Christ as a man (κατὰ σάρκα), yet now we do so no longer’ 2 Cor. v 16. The Pauline doctrine of the spiritual resurrection, in spite of its place in the sacred canon, has never been recognised by popular Christianity, but it has found notable defenders in Origen in ancient times, and in Bishop Westcott recently. ‘No one of [Origen’s] opinions was more vehemently assailed than his teaching on the Resurrection. Even his early and later apologists were perplexed in their defence of him. Yet there is no point on which his insight was more conspicuous. By keeping strictly to the Apostolic language he anticipated results which we have hardly yet secured. He saw that it is the “spirit” which moulds the frame through which it is manifested; that the body is the same, not by any material continuity, but by the permanence of that which gives the law, the ratio as he calls it, of its constitution (Frag. de res. ii 1, p. 34). Our opponents say now that this idea is a late refinement of doctrine, forced upon us by the exigencies of controversy. The answer is that no exigencies of controversy brought Origen to his conclusion. It was, in his judgment, the clear teaching of St Paul’ Westcott, Religious Thought in the West, p. 244.
[78] ‘my earnest desire being to depart and to be with Christ’ Philipp. i 23.
[79] ‘We shall be with the Lord for ever’ 1 Thess. iv 17. So another Paulist writer: ‘we see them eager for a better land, that is to say, a heavenly one. For this reason God has now prepared a city for them’ Heb. xi 16.
[80] The term used is κόκκος ‘grain’ in 1 Cor. xv 37, but σπέρμα ‘seed’ ib. 38. The Stoic term σπερματικὸς λόγος is found in Justin Martyr Apol. ii 8 and 13.
[81] 1 Cor. xv 16, 17.
[82] ‘while we are at home in the body we are banished from the Lord; for we are living a life of faith, and not one of sight’ 2 Cor. v 6; ‘we by our baptism were buried with him in death, in order that we should also live an entirely new life’ Rom. vi 4; ‘surrender your very selves to God as living men who have risen from the dead’ ib. 13.
[83] ‘He is not the God of dead, but of living men’ Matt. xxii 32.