One of the great debates in Christian eschatology has been the kind of body we are to receive in the resurrection. While it is said, in one fashion or another, to be the same body which is raised that we had in our life, it is also said to be transformed – as St Paul puts it, we shall have a “spiritual body”: “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” (1Corinthians 15:42). What that means has been constantly debated by theologians since the foundations of the Christian faith. The Church allows for a multitude of solutions, however it has made it clear that this must not be used to view the eschaton as a rejection of this-worldly being, as if the physical world will be abandoned for some heavenly, other-worldly realm with no connection to this world – this was the error of the Gnostics, and one of the first errors the Church officially anathematized.
Related to this is the debate on the relationship between gender and the resurrection body. Is gender an accident which will be removed in the eschaton, or is there something essential about gender? Both answers have been given by patristic authors; Origen, and many who followed his ideas, believed that we will have genderless bodies in the resurrection. In part this was because Jesus said that in heaven we will be like the angels.[1] They also cited St Paul who famously said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Others, following St Jerome, believed that a denial of gender in the resurrection removes too much of our personal identity, an identity which is related to, though not reduced to, our bodily form. He and others like him also had Scriptural authorities they would use such as this in Job, which predicts a restoration of our flesh so that in our flesh we shall see God: ”For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! (Job (RSV) 19)” (Job 19:25-7).[2]
In both positions there is good to be had. Those who deny gender in the resurrection certainly can use this to criticize abusive gender discrimination. However, it can also be abused because it starts to lead us into a dangerous position about this-worldly affairs, leading to a gnostic rejection of the world and its forms as being fundamentally unreal and so unworthy of being saved. Those who affirm gender distinction therefore provide a firm foundation for an incarnational theology which understands salvation as being involved with the world and not apart from it. However, it certainly allows for an abusive understanding of gender, to make the proper essential distinction and turn it into a think of value and worth.[3]
How exactly should we view this question? With my incarnational view, I believe that there is something essential to our bodies and how it represents ourselves, that gender is also a distinct quality of the person which cannot be denied in the resurrection. However, this must be used not to separate the genders, and to make one or the other “superior of worth.” Passages in Scripture like Galatians 3:28 must be seen as a value statement, not an anthropological statement about the nature of the body in the resurrection. We cannot ignore the inherent goodness of the order of creation, and the way in which we exist in creation itself, an existence which is not genderless. But we must be careful and not assume too much about our current understanding of gender; we must not think we now know the full meaning and value of gender – this, to be sure, can be said to be the problem of those who tried to reify social roles as they understood them in their society and put them into the heavenly realm. If their closed-views led to abuses in the past, new assumptions, with incomplete and imperfect social models, can only result in new abuses in the future.
Footnotes
[1] “And Jesus said to them, ‘The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him’” (Luke 20:34 – 38).
[2] The LXX reading is quite different and yet also gives further credence to the resurrectional interpretation of this verse: “For I know He is everlasting, He who is about to set me free on the earth, and to raise up my skin that endures these things; for these have been accomplished for me by the Lord; which I myself am conscious of, and my eyes have beheld, and not those of another, all has been accomplished for me in my bosom.” (Job 19:25-7, Orthodox Study Bible, edited not to be in verse form).
[3] This is how many scholars view the Origenist controversy in the 4th century, and see St Jerome as building up a position which reified social positions of men and women in 4th century society; thus his affirmation of gender was also an affirmation of the social structure of his time. “Elizabeth Clark, who has written brilliantly about the Origenist controversy of the 390s, has argued that attention moved fairly quickly away from the doctrine of the resurrection and toward over-procreation, sexuality and sexual difference. Building on the ideas of Peter Brown, she suggests that Jerome, Theophilus of Alexandria, and other anti-Origenists wanted to defend a kind of gender and class essentialism – that is, to elevate to the courts of heaven the differences between male and female, married and chaste, leader and follower, that were naturally found on earth and, in certain ways, enhanced within the monastic movement,”Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 90. I think this might be an exaggeration of Jerome, but I think there is an aspect of truth in this argument, and it is one which we must be weary of as we try to understand gender and its significance to the human person.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In