Resurrection Of The Body

 "I believe in... the resurrection of the body..."

What does it mean that a person is saved? Often people think of that purely as my soul being saved. Someday I will go to heaven and float around with the angels on the clouds or something like that. The whole thing is sort of ethereal, disconnected from physical reality, and the body ceases to matter. But the way the Bible speaks about salvation is we are saved holistically, which means we are saved not just spiritually but as whole people, our bodies, and our spirits, which make up a living soul.

One way to think of humanity is as we stand in a unique place. On the one hand, in creation, we have creatures that are purely physical, animal, or plant; they are just a body, and there is no spirit involved. On the other hand, we have purely spiritual creatures: angels and demons. Mankind stands in between in a unique place. We are what Saint Augustine calls embodied spirits.

Chrysostom, writing at the end of the fourth century, concurs, "Thus when you hear that God breathed into Adams face the breath of life, understand that just as He brought forth bodiless powers, i.e., angels, so also He was pleased that the body of man created out of dust should have a rational soul who could make use of the bodily members." Therefore, we dare not separate body and spirit, for we have to begin to think of ourselves holistically as living souls with both body and spirit.

-Pr. David Kind