The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

person "to God." Man has the primary natural life, in which he lives in
both soul and body, to man and God, in the sphere of nature. Man has the
provisional, intermediate, and supernatural life, in which he lives no more
to man, but "lives to God" in both soul and body in the sphere of the
supernatural. Man has the ultimate eternal life, the resurrection life, which
is the natural life of heaven, in which he lives to God and man. Then is he a
spiritual body--an incorporate spirit. Both natures in the highest perfection
are forever in superorganic union. Matt. xxii. 32, Luke xx. 38: "God is not
a God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto Him," (in Him, Arab.;
with Him, AEthiop.) This is to show, not that the soul is immortal, but that
the "dead are raised," 37. Marcion, who acknowledged only the Gospel of
Luke, rejected this whole passage. He held to the immortality of the soul,
but rejected Christ's teaching of the immortality of man. The covenant
God is the God of the whole person. If God is the God of Abraham, he is
the God of the whole Abraham; and the whole Abraham, body and soul,
lives. But as to the body he is dead to man; nevertheless, as to the body, he
still lives to God. Body and soul are to God a living inseparable, linked
even after death in the sphere of the supernatural--the sphere which is to
God. Between death and the resurrection., the body and soul remain one
person in the mind and in the hand of God.
The soul of the dead Christ was separated from His body, so far as
every natural and organic bond is concerned; but His body, through the
three days, remained still in personal unity with the divine nature, with
which the soul also was united personally; and both, being held
inseparably to the one person, were in it held to each other still as parts of
one person. So that the body of Christ truly "crucified, dead, and buried,"
still lived to God; and the personal union of the human nature, body and
soul, and of the divine nature, was unbroken. In virtue of the mediatorial
covenant, by which all who die in Adam are made alive in Christ (1 Cor.
xv. 22), the personal relation of the bodies and souls of all the dead
remains unbroken to God. But pre-eminently in the case of those who are
in "mystic union" with God--a union which involves