Feature
Glorious Flesh
How Dorothy Sayers Taught Me the Meaning of the Resurrection
Having grown up as a Christian, I would always have said I believed in the resurrection of the body. However, the doctrine of resurrection functioned as a kind of footnote in my thinking, while my primary concern was focused on the immortality of the soul. Without giving it much thought, I simply assumed that the doctrine of resurrection was a shorthand way of referring to the salvation of the soul. Even though I had read the Gospel accounts of Christ's resurrection many times, and even though I had read Paul's lengthy discussion of bodily resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, I still unthinkingly assumed that the resurrection of believers would be non-physical.
It wasn't until my wife urged me to listen to a recorded lecture by Edith Schaeffer that I experienced what is often called a "paradigm shift." In this lecture Mrs. Schaeffer showed from Scripture what might seem obvious by definition but was for me a new revelation: the resurrection of the body will be experienced bodily. She explained that in heaven we will have physical bodies, though of course the body will be transformed through being delivered of corruption. I still remember walking among the English hedgerows as I listened to the lecture and thinking, "Wow!"
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Robin Phillips has a Master’s in Historical Theology from King’s College London and a Master’s in Library Science through the University of Oklahoma. He is the blog and media managing editor for the Fellowship of St. James and a regular contributor to Touchstone and Salvo. He has worked as a ghost-writer, in addition to writing for a variety of publications, including the Colson Center, World Magazine, and The Symbolic World. Phillips is the author of Gratitude in Life's Trenches (Ancient Faith, 2020), and Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation (Ancient Faith, 2023). He operates a blog at www.robinmarkphillips.com.
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