To defend the resurrection, Paul indulges in a piece of cosmology (1 Corinthians 15:35-49), which circulates around seed, body, flesh, and glory. A seed goes into the ground and a plant comes up. Each seed has a body of its own, a gift from God, and each plant too has a body. The body of the seed becomes another body in the process of producing the plant, but \u201cprocess\u201d isn\u2019t quite apocalyptic enough to catch Paul\u2019s point: The seed has to die<\/em> to produce the plant, and that death is a transfiguration from one bodily form to another (vv. 37-38).\u00a0<\/p>\n This natural death-and-resurrection images the death-and-resurrection of the human body. Sown as one bodily form \u2013 perishable, shameful, weak, soulish \u2013 it dies and is transfigured into another body \u2013 imperishable, glorious, strong, and spiritual (vv. 42-44).<\/p>\n Embedded in this discussion of bodies in terms of seeds and plants, Paul offers a brief classification of creation\u2019s creatures. The overall division is between creatures of \u201cflesh\u201d and creatures of \u201cglory\u201d (vv. 39-41). Creatures of flesh are men, beasts, birds and fish, creatures of earth. Sun, moon, stars do not consist of \u201cflesh\u201d but of glory.<\/p>\n In each class \u2013 the earthly class and the the heavenly \u2013 there is rich diversity: \u201call flesh is not the same flesh\u201d (v. 39). Working backward through the creation week, Paul identifies four types of flesh: Flesh of men (Day 6), flesh of beasts (Day 6), flesh of birds (Day 5), flesh of fish (Day 5). Earthly, fleshly bodies have their own glory, but it differs from the glory of the heavenly body. We might socialize this portrait a bit more by bringing in the list from Revelation 19:17, where kings, commanders, mighty men, knights, and the rest of humanity seem to have different sorts of \u201cflesh.\u201d The flesh of kings is not the same as the flesh of their commanders, or the flesh of slaves. In Revelation 19, that could be taken quite literally: As far as scavenging birds are concerned, the sinewy flesh of an overworked slave isn\u2019t nearly as deletable as the well-fed flesh of kings.<\/p>\n Then Paul moves to Day 4 to describe the glory of heavenly bodies, and again emphasizes the difference in glory among the sun, moon and stars. The glory of the sun is not the glory of the moon nor the glory of the stars, and even the stars differ from one another in glory.<\/p>\n Every created thing in Paul\u2019s view has some sort of bodiliness. Some have fleshly bodies, but these fleshly bodies don\u2019t have identical flesh; it may be accurate to say that Paul describes a hierarchy of flesh. Similarly, heavenly bodies are diverse in glory, and perhaps Paul means that there is a hierarchy of glory: The sun is most glorious because most bright, the moon less because less, and the stars least of all.<\/p>\n The overall point of the passage has to do with resurrection, which, within the cosmology Paul sketches, is a transfiguration from seed-body to plant-body, from flesh-body to glory-body. Or, as Paul explicitly puts it later in the passage, the first Adam is of the earth, earth; the Last Adam is of heaven, and those who are raised with and like Him will also become heavenly bodies, shining like stars in the firmament.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To defend the resurrection, Paul indulges in a piece of cosmology (1 Corinthians 15:35-49), which circulates around seed, body, flesh, and glory. A seed goes into the ground and a plant comes up. Each seed has a body of its own, a gift from God, and each plant too has a body. The body of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,704],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible-nt-1-corinthians","category-cosmology"],"yoast_head":"\n