The New Testament records that Paul preached the gospel publicly to the Athenians at the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares (Mars), the god of War, to believe in the resurrection by appealing to what their own poets wrote, “For we are also His offspring.” The ancient Hellenistic and Latin peoples have been criticized for anthropomorphizing their deities. But their poetic traditions could serve to help them believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Likewise with other nations. Athens and Jerusalem can have a lot to do with each other.
Orthodoxy preaches that at the end of the eschaton every person, whether wicked or repentant, will be resurrected into an eternal life. The Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament spoke of this resurrection. Isaiah prophesied about the earth casting out the dead like a harvest of souls from the ground. Daniel prophesied about death as if it were sleep. Ezekiel prophesied, as we remind ourselves on Holy Saturday, “You, dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” He also says, “Behold I will bring upon you the breath of life … I will put my spirit into you,” which refers to the first creation in Genesis while it looks forward to the universal resurrection. Second Maccabees too is an example of the older Jewish belief in the resurrection, even though some sects around the time of Jesus, the Sadducees, doubted this doctrine. Orthodoxy teaches dogmatically that man’s “original nature” is eternal in both body and soul. There is no original sin that will last, since sin, decay and death are foreign to the body and to the soul of mankind.
There are many examples and proofs of the resurrection from the cycles of nature itself, as Clement of Rome taught, in the way it rejuvenates itself and how the passing of time recurs as if it were eternal. It should be a fundamental belief of humankind. Science and many cultures today have no issue with explaining how mercury comes together naturally, or how a seed dies to grow into a tree, or how dry and dead soil regrows itself into a forest. Night and day descend and ascend; the fruits of the earth die and grow again. Farming is full of apt images of eternity imbedded around us. Scientists have explained how atoms stay together to form chemical compounds or elements from the periodic table as if they are spontaneously attracted to each other in beautiful patterns. Ezekiel too explained how the body and the soul return, “I looked, and behold, sinews and flesh grew upon them and skin covered them.” Scientist have often doubted the existence of the soul, however, while believing that a seed continues to live after its own death. Nevertheless, the body is immortal, and the soul eternally bears the “stamp” of it; it will not be saved separately from each other, as Justin Martyr and John Chrysostom have taught. We think today that math and the laws of nature are eternal, but the gospel teaches that the body of each person will return in its own form, some transfigured by glory and grace, others by the passions that stayed with them. Gregory of Nyssa taught that every human has its own form or eidos. The body stamps onto the soul. The incarnation of Christ stamped our humanity with his divinity. And we will have an elemental body again made of “the same stuff,” Gregory taught. The cosmos will be saved with our flesh because a body needs an environment in which to live and move. How our whole nature will reunite is not a scientific question, but a question of refashioning the beauty that God has made. The sin that took away grace is removed by death. The grace that was lost is given back by the resurrection.
The Apostle Paul teaches that we cannot compare anything to this new life and world of the resurrection. But we do know that it will be filled with light and glory and fire. When Christ resurrected and the Apostles met him on the road to Emmaus, they knew him by his “voice and gestures” not so much by his earthly appearance. The recognition of each other at the resurrection requires that we experience a very similar voice and gesture of those whom we have known or have some connection to on this earth. Ephraim the Syrian teaches that children who died in the womb as well as younger children will be resurrected as adults, and these mothers and children will recognize each other, even if they had never met on earth. Age and physical appearance imply growing old, and that belongs to the corruptibility of this world. Deeds done in this life that shine in the next is an important feature of discerning who other people are in the resurrected kingdom of God, not possessions, wealth, skills, clothes or other more circumstantial things.
The resurrection of the judgment and the resurrection of life go hand in hand, and it is the reason for having the mysteries of baptism into death and confession of sins in Orthodoxy. Baptism will reunite us not only with the form of our own bodies, but with the people we knew. How we experience being in a sinless world may differ according to how we behaved and treated others while we lived. The next chapter discusses the teaching on the Last Judgment, a revelation not only of God but of humanity itself.