1. “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” It is an arresting fact that this part of our creed receives the first clear expression on the lips of Daniel, or rather of the anonymous writer who speaks through him (Dan_12:2-3). The belief of the ancient Hebrews, like that of the ancient Greeks, was that the human spirit after death descended into the under-world-Sheol or Hades-the house prepared for the shades of all men, good and bad, great and small, where they entered upon a half-conscious, joyless existence, not to be called life, and where their communion with God was for ever at an end. The transcending of this gloomy conception, and the growth of the belief of an eternal life with God, were due less to the reasonings of the intellect than to the intuitions of the heart. It was ultimately incredible that God should fail and forsake those whom He loved.
2. Though the doctrine of an individual immortality emerged in Job and the Psalms, it failed to establish itself permanently in the religious expectations of Israel. Not to a future of individual bliss, even though in the Divine Presence, but to a resurrection to a new life as members of the holy people and citizens of the Messianic Kingdom, did the righteous aspire. The individual thus looked forward to his highest consummation in the life of the righteous community.
The first practical effect of this new doctrine was the awakening and fostering of the martyr spirit. Had the writer of Job lived in the Apocalyptic era, he would have had a new and satisfying solution of the problem of suffering. The belief in the resurrection made men strong to endure and faithful unto death. One of the brother martyrs of the Second Book of Maccabees struck a new note, which has been resounding all down the ages, when he said, “It is good to die at the hands of men and look for the hopes which are given by God, that we shall be raised up again by him” (Dan_7:14).
The heart sinks and withers beneath the thought that the form so dear to it, so expressive of the light and beautiful soul, should be, must be, the slave of corruption. But this, at least, is a consoling consequence. If the whole man has had to pay the penalty of sin, the body in its dissolution, the soul in its disembodiment, Reason herself demands, what Revelation asserts, that the whole man should share the victory-the body by a splendid reconstruction, the soul by restoration to its ancient home. God's promise of man's entire beatitude is a pledge that this article of the Christian creed is true. The Church does not trouble herself with any details about particles of matter; about its mysterious onward march in bodies she has nothing to say; but she does assert continuous identity, and she has on her side two important teachers-the affections and yearnings of the human heart; and, which is more to the point, Divine Rev_1:1-20 [Note: W. J. Knox Little, The Mystery of the Passion, 165.]
To Hegel, mere externality-the mere more or less of matter-was a thing of no importance. To him, Spirit, Thought, was everything; and the external universe was interesting only in so far as, in the laws which govern it, it exhibited thought. As bearing on Stirling's view of the question of immortality, the following brief extract from the Secret of Hegel is quoted here:-
“Absurd that you should be continued? Why so? On the contrary, it is no more absurd that you should be continued than that you are. That you are is the guarantee of your necessity. God is a concrete Spirit-not an abstract unit-why should not the death of the body be the birth of Spirit?-and why should not you continue united to the universal Spirit then, even as you are so united here, in Natural form, now?”2 [Note: James Hutchison Stirling: His Life and Work, 323.]
