What Exactly is Christ's Risen Body?

What is the resurrection if "flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom?"

In scripture’s longest— indeed the Bible’s only— meditation on the doctrine of the resurrection, the apostle Paul asserts with an inflexible alacrity, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.”

Paul’s argument is so thoroughly resolute and bracingly clear it begs the question if any have ever read him given the manner in which, on the one hand, believers make bodily resurrection an essential of orthodoxy and, on the other hand, skeptics balk at the whimsy of the amino acids of Pilate’s victim rekindling into Mary’s boy. Paul, who was himself encountered by the Risen Jesus, is quite clear. The news of Easter is not that the crucified corpse of Jesus came back alive; therefore, the promise of Resurrection for us is not simply the hope that our dry bones will live again.

Paul puts the mystery of resurrection in terms of the distinction between perishability and imperishability:

“And I say this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. Look, I tell you a mystery: Not all of us shall fall asleep, but all of us shall be changed, In an instant, in a glance of an eye, at the final trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable thing must clothe itself in imperishability, and this mortal thing must clothe itself in immortality. And, when this perishable thing shall clothe itself in imperishability and this mortal thing clothe itself in immortality, then will the saying that has been written come to pass: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

— 1 Corinthians 15.50-54

The contrast is between a soma psychikon (a body ensouled) and a soma pneumatikon (a body that is of a spirited nature, made to live entirely by pneuma, ie, deathless spirit). It’s a contrast, as the epistle makes clear, between an earthly origin and a heavenly one. Resurrection is neither resuscitation nor reanimation of the material body one has in the fallen world. It is not, in fact, analogous to the raising of Lazarus or to Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones. It is instead a radically different kind of life.

The resurrection body will be an altogether different kind of body. Christ’s resurrected body, therefore, is already an altogether different kind of body. Our bodies are not the prototype of a future model to come.

The hope of the resurrection body is not like a the difference between an iPhone SE and an iPhone 14 ProMax, even maximally imagined.

Christ’s risen body is the first fruit of a new and future creatio ex nihilo. We get the resurrection dogma wrong exactly to the degree we take our fallen soma psychikon as the definitional starting point.

Better then to ask a more fundamental question:

What is a body?