Catholics, and other Christians who affirm the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed, accept as a matter of dogma that before the Last Judgment all people who have ever lived will be resurrected from the dead and reunited with their earthly bodies. Christ the King will bring order back to our broken cosmos, and His saints will rule with Him over a restored Creation forever in their glorified bodies.

I grew up in a non-creedal Protestant tradition, and while I never heard the bodily resurrection explicitly rejected, it was also never emphasized. The hymns we sang and sermons we heard seemed to suggest that our earthly bodies are a burden and that when believers die they can shed the chains of materiality and enjoy life in Heaven as pure souls.

Of course, because of the Fall, life in our physical bodies does involve hardships. But it is vitally important that Catholics and other Christians understand and affirm the bodily resurrection of the dead. There is much darkness in our world today because modern people fail to understand that the human person is not a soul trapped in a body (which is the ancient heresy of Gnosticism), but that each individual is an inseparable unity of material and immaterial being.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) devotes 17 paragraphs (Article 11, “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” 988-1004) to this topic, plus scores of other teachings that support the concept. Here are seven important things to know and understand about the resurrection of the dead.

The human person has a body that is both material and immaterial. As the Catechism puts it, “The human person, created in the image of God, is at once both corporeal and spiritual…Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity” (CCC 362-368). A whole, individual person cannot be understood to exist without both body and soul.
The resurrection of our physical bodies is Biblical. First, numerous passages in the New Testament describe Jesus’ own resurrection. It is clear from these passages that He is not a ghost or a “Force spirit” (as some Star Wars fans might understand), but that when Christ rose from the dead it was His actual physical body that was glorified and restored (CCC 639-644). Furthermore, the Bible also attests to the resurrection of the dead in general (see Job 19:25-27, Romans 8:22-24, Philippians 3:20-21, and 1 Corinthians 15:51-52, among others).
As the New Adam and New Eve (CCC 411), Jesus’ bodily resurrection and ascension into Heaven, and later the Blessed Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into Heaven after her death (CCC 966-972), prefigure our own glorious, bodily transformation at the end of days. In Heaven, Jesus and Mary already enjoy a unity of glorified body and soul, offering a promise of what is to come for the faithful themselves.
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The great tragedy when a human being dies is that his physical and spiritual elements are separated, an unnatural split that God never intended and that is a result of sin (CCC 1008). God’s work of salvation is not fully complete until our bodies and souls are reunited in glory.
This is why Catholics take such special care of the bodies of the departed, because their remains are not simply an empty shell, but are who that person actually is and remains, although sadly separated from their immaterial elements. Traditionally the Catholic Church forbade practices like cremation of the dead because it seemed to suggest that the individual’s body has no further purpose. Today, the Church allows cremation so long as there is no thought or suggestion that doing so represents “a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body” (CCC 2299-2301).
The permanent and sacred bodily nature of the human person is also the reason Catholics place such great emphasis on sexual morality and the sanctity of life (CCC 2258-2400). Our bodies are not machines to be used for our selfish pleasures, nor can we ever think of our identity as men or women separate from our physical bodies as God created them. To deny our fundamental personhood defined by our physical characteristics is to disregard the dignity of human life.
Because we honor the dignity of our physical nature, we must avoid the temptation to feel shame and frustration with our bodies. There is something sinister in our culture than causes people to struggle so much with body image issues, and to inflict various harms on our bodies as a coping mechanism for dealing with our spiritual and emotional insecurities. Even the Lord Jesus’ glorified body was still marked with the wounds of His crucifixion (John 20:27). We, too, will carry into eternity this same body that we have lamented over in this life and damaged in various ways. Therefore, a part of the work God does in redeeming us is helping us make peace with our physical bodies and see the transfigured life we are destined to live with Him in the very flesh He gave us.

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Understanding the resurrection of the dead connects us more fully to ourselves in this life, and empowers us for more effective discipleship. As St. Paul tells us, “You are not your own. You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:20).

Missio Dei

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