Friday, March 17, 2023

Separate? Nope!

The Pauline language for human reality in the interval between our death and the consummation of all things derives from his sense of our participation in and union with Christ. Prepositions are theologically strong words for Paul. The human being cannot be divided from Christ because we are in him; when we die we are therefore with him. Nowhere in his letters does Paul explain how this can be so, that is, what part of the human being it is that can exist with Christ without its transformed body, how God relates to this part without a body, how this requires us to think differently about time, and so on. What Paul does express quite clearly, however, is the belief that Cod’s act of love in raising Christ from the dead defies the power of death to separate us from him in any way.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 101

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