Natural vs. Spiritual

"It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”

1 Corinthians 15.44

I'd like to quickly dig a bit further into the ideas I presented briefly in a blogpost of mine of just a few days back.

I have found, among Christians, that there tends to be widespread misunderstanding and a general lack of the ability to describe what the Scriptures mean by "spirit" and "spiritual".  I think this is primarily because we've come unhitched from the Hebraic/Biblical meaning through compromises with pagan culture in our Christian thought and language.  

One place this is prevalent is concerning the resurrection of the body.  Most seem to have a belief that when the apostle Paul speaks about the resurrection as being raised a "spiritual body" he means "ghost form" or ethereal "body" because we quite instinctively insert our modern American definition of "spirit".

Of course -- we christians tell each other -- we'll be happy, sinless ghosts, but well, ya know...we'll be ghosts, er...bodies.  Right??  

Ah, yes, won't... that...be...nice...yip, yip, yippee.

Thankfully, that ain't it though.  Yes, we will receive a body, but not a fallen one.  In other words, we will have a physical, spiritual body on the new Earth (not Heaven!).  

To further clarify this idea, I've included below an excerpt by N.T. Wright from his excellent book Surprised by Hope, where he explains how the original audience at Corinth would have much more likely understood Paul and his verse 44 of 1st Corinthians quote above.

Brothers and sisters, ya got to get this deep down in yer bones though because it colors all things "spiritual".

"He speaks of two sorts of body, the present one and the future one. He uses two key adjectives to describe these two bodies. Unfortunately, many translations get him radically wrong at this point, leading to the widespread supposition that for Paul the new body would be a spiritual body in the sense of a nonmaterial body, a body that in Jesus’ case wouldn’t have left an empty tomb behind it. . . . The contrast he is making is not between what we would mean by a present physical body and what we would mean by a future spiritual one, but between a present body animated by the normal human soul and a future body animated by God’s spirit. . . . Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble post-mortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death. . . .

The first word, psychikos, does not in any case mean anything like “physical” in our sense. For Greek speakers of Paul’s day, the psyche, from which the word derives, means the soul, not the body.

But the deeper, underlying point is that adjectives of this type, Greek adjectives ending in -ikos, describe not the material out of which things are made but the power or energy that animates them. It is the different between asking, on the one hand, ‘Is this a wooden ship or an iron ship?’ (the material from which it is made) and asking, on the other, ‘Is this a steamship or a sailing ship?’ (the energy that powers it). Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psyche (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God’s pneuma, God’s breath of new life, the energizing power of God’s new creation.  

This is why, in a further phrase that became controversial as early as the mid-second century, Paul declares that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s Kingdom.’ He doesn’t mean that physicality will be abolished. ‘Flesh and blood’ is a technical term for that which is corruptible, transient, heading for death. The contrast, again, is not between what we call physical and what we call nonphysical but between corruptible physicality, on the one hand, and incorruptible physicality, on the other."