The Spiritual Body #255074

In the rath Chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians the Apostle attempts to describe it. About fourteen years before the time of writing (that is to say in 43 or 44 a.d.) he had a wonderful experience in which his spiritual consciousness had for the time been so enlarged that he hardly seemed to be the same individual and in speaking of that which he in this state of rapture became, he speaks of himself as having been changed almost into a different person. The experience is beyond human utterance, but the important point to notice for the present purpose is a phrase repeated twice over in ahnost the same words. He says he does not know whether he was in the body or out of the body at that time. He is straining thought and language to express something that is too great for speech. In one sense he felt he was in the body, in another sense he felt he was outside it. That was the strange paradox. In that moment of ecstatic vision the spiritual body, which had grown strong within its sheltering prison, broke loose for a time and performed its spiritual functions unhampered by the grosser body of the flesh. And thus he was both within the body and without it at the same instant. He was within the spiritual body which with its ethereal movements was a perfect vehicle of his ecstatic experience, and he was outside the natural body which for that short time of rapture had almost been cast off. Thus St. Paul knew by experience that there is a spiritual body. As to the nature of this body he seems at first to have formed no theory, yet as years passed his experience could not but work within his mind and help him when in answer to the questioning of the Corinthians he first expounded the Doctrine of a Spiritual Body. Another element which bore a supreme part in forming this conception within the Apostle's mind was no doubt the glorified form of the risen Lord which appeared to him at his con version. Something he saw and heard in that great crisis of his life which convinced him that the Lord was living in a bodily yet spiritual state. This happened probably nine years before the experience just alluded to, and on it St. Paul based his belief in a bodily resurrection of the Christian.