Father Stephen De Young: We’ll go ahead and get started. When we get started, we’re going to be picking up St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 29, where we left off last time. And so to get a sort of caught up to where we were in this 15th chapter of First Corinthians, St. Paul has been talking to us concerning the resurrection of the dead. He began by addressing apparently some significant portion of the community in Corinth which did not accept the reality of the resurrection of the dead, primarily with regard to believers and others, to humans in the world.

And in order to argue against it, St. Paul’s first tact was to point out, well, if people are not raised from the dead, then that would mean Christ is not raised from the dead. And then to enumerate all the consequences of what that would mean if that were true, that Christ had not been raised from the dead. And so, St. Paul began really by setting up this link between Christ’s resurrection and our resurrection, by folding those two together.

He then went on after talking about all the evidence for Christ’s resurrection, because by demonstrating the reality of Christ’s resurrection, he then would connect that to our resurrection. He then, as we talked about last time, and as we saw last time, moved on to talk about the resurrection of the dead in general, the resurrection of all humanity that takes place on the last day. And so he spoke at length about Christ’s glorious appearing, sometimes called the Second Coming. We talked last time about why I think that language is a little bit misleading, not really totally accurate to the Bible’s language, but when Christ is present once again among us at the last day for the judgment, he showed how that will bring about the resurrection of all human beings who have ever lived as part and parcel of that event.

And so that’s what we’ve seen so far as we’ve been progressing through this chapter about the resurrection, which is, as we said, sort of the peak of St. Paul’s entire discussion in his first epistle to the Corinthians. After chapter 15, after this sort of theological climax about the resurrection both of Christ and of us, he’s going to close the letter in Chapter 16 and that’s the end of the first epistle to the Corinthians.

So as we pick up tonight, he’s going to be transitioning not to a new topic altogether. He’s still talking about the resurrection in general and our resurrection in particular, but he’s going to be talking about sort of different aspects of that. And when we first pick up here, this evening, he’s going to be talking about another, we could say, potential objection. But odds are this would be some version of the actual objection offered by some of the members of the community in Corinth whom St. Paul is addressing. Because remember, we’ve talked several times about the fact that St. Paul’s epistles are not sort of theological treatises or philosophical treatises on topics. Those kinds of things existed in the ancient world, but St. Paul’s epistles are not those. St. Paul’s epistles are directed to real, actual, worshiping Christian communities and addressing real issues. Now, he talks about theological matters and doctrinal matters in the gospel and reiterates and emphasizes certain points within that. But it’s always with the intent of then applying that to some problem or issue or place where there needs to be education in the actual life of that actual community.

And so that’s even true here. First Corinthians 15, which, as we’ve already seen, is some pretty deep, in-depth theology. But even this. St. Paul is aiming at something that’s going on, discussions that are happening, arguments that are happening, places where there needs to be education and understanding within this actual community of actual people.

We’ll pick up now here in St. Paul’s. First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 35:

But someone will say, “How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?” Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies.

Let’s pause for a second. So the first objection that he raises here, that people are offering as an objection, is that someone is asking, “Well, how is this going to happen? How are the dead going to be raised?” That question surrounds… someone dies, they are buried, their body decays, all that’s left is dust or is gone, or a person’s body is burned, or a person is in some other kind of accident where their body is not intact for very long once they die.

This kind of question presupposes that being raised from the dead is some kind of resuscitation. That being raised from the dead means that the person’s body that’s lying in the grave or that’s lying in a tomb is just going to sort of sit up and walk around. Now, obviously this might give you images of zombie movies where you have sort of half decayed people shambling around, which is a silly idea, but that’s sort of the point of the objection. The point of the objection is, well, how can you do that? How can you bring this person back to life? Their body is gone. The body is gone or corrupted or otherwise not there to come back to life, even though they didn’t have the scientific knowledge we have today, we of course know today that bodies are made up of molecules, that when someone dies and their body decays, that the matter that made up their body is actually preserved, but becomes part of other things. It becomes part of plants and becomes part of eventually it can become part of other animals. It can become parts of all kinds of other parts of the creation. The molecules move around.

They didn’t have quite that idea, but they did sort of have this idea that animal life and human life was generated sort of from the earth and that obviously you bury the dead body of an animal or of a human. They understood that there was a fertilization process that took place, that things would grow from and grow stronger, grow in more abundance from places that were fertilized by decaying, formerly living matter. And so they understood that as being that this new life was sort of coming out of the old life that was gone. And so again, they understood that once a person’s body has decomposed, that matter has gone into other things. This process, this sort of cycle has continued. And so they’re saying, well, how can you then go back to this person who was alive 300 years ago? And, what put them back together, pull all the bits? What if they’re in other people and other things? How would that work? That’s the objection. The objection is sort of a “Well, that’s impossible!”, that their body could come back to life and remember, the key here with resurrection, the key here with what St. Paul is arguing for is not a quote unquote, “afterlife”.

St Paul, and none of the biblical writers for that matter, are interested in arguing for what we would call an afterlife, some sort of disembodied permanent state. This may be a shock to some people hearing this, but the whole idea that a person dies and then their soul goes to heaven or hell and stays there forever is not Christian eschatology. That’s not Christian teaching. That’s not what the Bible teaches. That’s not what the Fathers taught. There have been religions that have had views similar to that, but Christianity is not one of them.

Christianity has always been based on what St. Paul is arguing for here, that the day will come when there will be a resurrection of the body, meaning we will live bodily again. And so, there is an intervening period which St. Paul isn’t really talking about here, because, again, as we said, St. Paul’s epistles are topical. He’s only addressing certain topics, not everything at once. He’s not writing a treatise or a systematic theology. But there’s a period that St. Paul talks about elsewhere where we are separated from our body when we physically die and before the resurrection. So there’s a period in between there where we exist separated from our body, but that is an anticipation of the bodily resurrection.

So, there’s a fairly famous New Testament scholar, at least as famous as New Testament scholars get, named N.T. Wright. And he makes this point by saying he’s not interested in talking about life after death. He’s interested in talking about life after life after death. He’s interested in talking about the resurrection, the bodily resurrection. And this is what we profess in the Nicene Creed when we talk about the life of the world to come or the life of the age to come. It’s this resurrected life that goes on forever, that is eternal in the world to come, in a world that’s been purified, as we talked about last time, that’s been purified of sin and evil and suffering and pain.

So, there’s contained within this question, though, a second objection. The first part of the question, or the first objection is, well, how can you raise a body from the dead if the body no longer exists? Maybe if we were all Egyptians practicing mummification practices or something, where you preserve the body somehow. Well, okay, then that might make sense. The soul could come back into the body, and it could get up again. Even then, it would be kind of shrunken and decomposed and unpleasant looking like the old mummy movies from the 40s and 50s, but that would be understandable. But the bodies of these people are gone, so how can that happen?

So then the second question is or the second part of the question, or the second objection is, and what kind of body will they have? And this encompasses a whole bunch of possible questions or objections in that it’s asking, “Well, what does this mean? Is it going to be like this body? I mean, am I going to be overweight? Are my knees going to hurt? Is my back going to hurt? How old am I going to be? Am I going to have all my hair? Will I have lost some of my hair? Will I ever lose my hair? Will I have facial hair?” There are all these sorts of questions you could ask, and if you go certain places on the Internet, you’ll find people with all kinds of theories about… these people who are very sure that everyone in the Resurrection, everyone in the world to come, will be like 30 years old or whatever else they’ve determined is sort of the perfect age. And everyone will have their hair back, and everyone will be sort of perfectly built. Everybody will have six pack abs or what have you. So there’s a whole series of questions encompassed in this. And again, they’re not serious questions. They’re not questions looking for answers in the sense that someone would say that to St. Paul and expect St. Paul to say, “Oh, well, here’s how old you’ll be, and here’s what your body will be like, and here’s how your digestive tract will work in the Resurrection.” They’re not expecting that. They’re pointing to all these questions as a way of saying, well, look, what you’re saying is kind of ridiculous and doesn’t make sense.

In fact, I was just watching a recent TV show, and there was a character who was supposed to be a scientist who was talking to a child about the idea of the afterlife. And he used basically the same objection. He said, “Well, what how old would I be?” And all these kinds of questions to try to sort of disprove the whole idea. And so that’s why St. Paul is addressing this as an objection. This is all sort of obfuscation to say “This whole idea of us rising from the dead is silly. Our body is gone. It’s decomposed. And then, oh, yeah, it comes back to life. Well, am I as old as I was when I died? If I live to be 100 and then I die, do I come back 100 years old, and then I’m in this old, elderly infirm body for eternity? That makes no sense.”

So this is what St. Paul’s addressing. This is sort of the pushback to the whole idea of the bodily resurrection. And while you could certainly see why this would come from a number of the converted pagans of a more philosophical bent who we know are in the community in Corinth. They could also equally come from, as we mentioned before, members of various Jewish groups, like the Sadducees being the most famous, who didn’t accept the idea of the bodily resurrection. They could have borrowed some of these same arguments to just sort of say, “Well, this whole thing is silly and superstitious, if you want to talk to me about an afterlife where my soul goes into some heavenly realm and experiences bliss, well, okay, maybe we can talk about that. But this whole idea that we come back to life’s just fraught with problems and is kind of ridiculous and silly on the face.”

So St. Paul begins his response by saying, “Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies.” Okay? So he starts by calling them dumb. In the Greek it’s sort of literally like, “Idiot, comma.” right? And the reason for that address, the reason for that kind of insult is that this is something St. Paul’s really been dealing with all the way through his first epistle to the Corinthians is that there’s a segment of the community there in Corinth who considers themselves to be very wise and considers themselves to be very knowledgeable, but really isn’t. And so St. Paul, as sort of the spiritual father to this community, is doing a diagnosis here, and he’s saying, “These kinds of objections, and you thinking the idea of the bodily resurrection is so silly is really coming from that same spirit of pride and arrogance and thinking, you know, when you don’t know.” And so he’s calling them fools to sort of start by bringing them down a peg or two.

And so his initial response is something that should be obvious. When you plant something in the ground, it’s not made alive unless it dies. And what he’s talking about here is he’s talking about planting seeds. Again, we’re dealing with people who are mainly farmers, and if they aren’t farmers, they probably grew up on a farm. And if somehow, they aren’t farmers and didn’t grow up on a farm, they’re interacting with farmers every day. So they’re very close to the planting of crops. And so what St. Paul is saying, “Look, you plant something in the ground that’s not identical to what you get out.” You don’t go and take a whole carrot and shove it into the ground in order to grow carrots. You plant seeds or you take something dead that has the seed in it and you bury that in the ground and the decomposition of the thing that is dead and the seed then bring to life something that’s different from the seed that you planted.

But what you grow is not disconnected from the seed that you planted. It’s not that you take a seed that came out of an apple and plant it and “Oh, look, a pear tree grew!” That doesn’t happen either. So this is an apple seed. It came from an apple. There’s a connection here. But what you get when you plant the apple seed is a tree. Not just sort of seeds multiplying more and more seeds in the ground. And so this is going to be St. Paul’s sort of analogy for understanding the relationship between our body now, not the body we inhabit, our soul is not us, and our body is like a vehicle that we’re in, but the body that is us. Our body is us as much as our soul is. The relationship between this body and the body of the resurrection, the body that comes to life at the time of the resurrection. So they’re not disconnected, they’re not unrelated, they’re not two different things, but at the same time, they’re not identical. St. Paul is saying, he’s actually taking seriously and answering the question that they’re just using it as an objection.

He’s talking about what we can know about what that body is like. So he’s saying, yes, of course, it is silly to think that your soul is just going to come back into your physical body in whatever state it’s in, at whatever age it is, and it’s just going to reanimate and you’re going to walk around like Frankenstein or one of the walking dead, right? That’s obviously not what he’s talking about. These things are not disconnected from each other, but they’re not identical. One is present within the other in seed form.

And if we think a little deeper about that connection, at least as it was understood in the ancient world, that was understood in terms of potency or sometimes translated potentiality. So what the seed has within it is the potential to become the tree. Seed has the potential to become the tree. And so there is, in the lifecycle of plants and animals, there is this sort of continuum between potency or potentiality on the one hand, and actuality or reality on the other hand. And so this is how the life cycle of living things was understood in the ancient world. So you have a seed or you have a baby animal or a baby human, right? And at that point, they’re pretty much all potential. They’re actually or really not much. They’re this tiny little thing that’s kind of helpless and can’t do much. In the case of a seed, it’s just a tiny little bit. So it’s all on the side of potential. It has all the potential to be something, but it’s actually really not much as of yet.

And then over the course of its life, that balance shifts. The potentiality shifts to actuality or to reality. And so the plant or the animal or the person grows, develops, generates, and becomes more and more what they had the potential to be. And then there’s ultimately, it’s sort of like a curve, ultimately, you’re over the hill and you start to go down the other side. And that’s when decay and mortality set in for living things.

So what this means is contained in St. Paul’s metaphor is the idea that in not just our soul, but in our body, is the potential to become what we are going to become in the resurrection. So this counteracts a number of Greek philosophical ideas, a number of later Gnostic ideas, where the human soul is seen as some spark of the divine or the human soul, at least of some people, if we’re talking about the pagan world and the Gnostic world, have the potential to sort of become divine. Have the potential to become like God. Especially once they’re separated from the body. Now they’re able to become something greater. At least at least potentially. But what St. Paul is saying is that the potential to become what we are destined to become in Christ, the potential to become sons of God, the potential of what’s going to be realized in the resurrection is already present with us, not just in our souls, but in our souls and in our bodies now.

And so this is why the Orthodox Church always emphasizes the unity of the soul and the body in terms of repentance, in terms of salvation, in terms of transformation, in terms of becoming like Christ. This is why our worship, we don’t just go and sit in a room and listen to teaching that addresses our mind while we sit there and our bodies are passive. But when we’re repenting, we’re on our knees with our knees hurting, at least if you’re my age and your face on the ground and getting up and down, we’re making the sign of the cross, we’re smelling, we’re tasting, we’re seeing, we’re hearing. The whole person, contained within our whole person is the potential to become what we’re going to become.

And so, St. Paul is saying, but in order, through this metaphor, in order for us to go from the potential that is there now to the actuality, for us to become in reality for us to receive that destiny in reality, who we are now, who we are now has to die. Who we are now has to die and decay in order that we can then come to that reality. And so contained within this metaphor that St. Paul is giving is the answer to another question that he’s not directly addressing here. But that question is, and it’s a question that any of us could ask after hearing the hymnography that we sing on Pascha, we sing over and over again about how Christ has conquered death, Christ has defeated death, Christ has defeated the devil who held the power of death. Death is gone, death is defeated, death is destroyed. We sing this and say this over and over again. And then probably at some point somebody remembers, “Oh yeah, but all of us are still going to die. Why is that? If Christ has defeated death, why aren’t we all just immortal now?”

And the answer is that all the way back at the beginning, in Genesis 3, when humanity was expelled from paradise, God said it is not good for man to live forever in this state, in this state of corruption that’s been brought about by his sin. That’s why death was brought to bear in the first place, as sort of a mercy from God in the book of Genesis. And so, St. Paul is saying for us to become that, that’s why we still have to die. Because this corrupted person who I am, body and soul. Who has the mixture together of the image of God that I was given when God created me, of all of the work that God has done in my life, all of the grace I’ve received, all of the gifts that he’s given to me, all of the transformation that’s taking place is still in there. Mixed in with my flesh, my sin, my corrupt desires. We spend our whole life fighting against those we spend our whole life repenting of those seeking to be transformed.

And so St. Paul is saying, when this person, who we are, dies, it’s not everything about us that dies, but it’s what he calls the flesh, it’s what he calls sin. Not sins, but sin, the power of sin itself that’s at work in our members. It’s all of the corruption that’s taking place. Those things die, those things are buried. Those things aren’t raised. Those things dissolve and decay. And so that has to happen, so that in the resurrection that full potential can be realized. And all of those things I mention, the grace that we’ve received, the transformation that’s happened in Christ, our likeness to Christ, the image that we were gifted with in the beginning can shine forth and be purified on their own.

So now St. Paul’s going to continue with that metaphor. He says:

And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain—perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as He pleases and to each seed its own body.

So, he says, once again, you don’t just take an ear of corn and shove it in the ground to get more ears of corn. You don’t take an apple, shove it in the ground and more apples pop out. But you plant seeds, or you plant wheat, you plant some grain and then the whole body of the plant grows. So, he’s just sort of filling out that metaphor.

And so, yes, when I die, on whatever day God chooses, when I die, my body will be buried in the ground and on that day of Christ’s glorious appearing, then God will give me a body as he sees fit. That’s what St. Paul is saying. Again, those two are related, they’re not unrelated. God doesn’t make pear trees grow from apple seeds, usually. He could, I suppose, but not usually. In the same way, so there’s this connection, but they’re not identical, they’re not the same.

St Paul goes on:

All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds.

So he’s saying, look, it’s not that every living thing is identical. Dogs, cats, fish, birds, humans. There’s coldblooded animals and warm blooded animals. There’s mammals, there’s animals that lay eggs, right? So there’s all different kinds of bodies. He’s not just talking about living things, right? He’s moved from… first he gives this agricultural analogy, talking about plants. Now he’s talking about animals, right? There’s all kinds of living things. They’re all different. They have different qualities, different properties, different bodies. It’s not just different configurations, but there are actual differences in how they are put together.

Again, we don’t have modern science at this point in history, but already with Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., writing On the Parts of Animals, Aristotle was collecting animals brought back to them from all over the world by Alexander the Great’s armies. He was collecting those animals and he was dissecting them, and he was looking at how they were put together and how they operated. And so, people were well aware at this time that they were very different and they were structured very differently, not just they look different or acted different.

So, St Paul’s saying there’s all kinds of different bodies, so why would you think that the only option—because the objections presume that the resurrection must mean that this body that I am right now comes back to life exactly as it is at the point of the resurrection. And St Paul is saying, well, why would you think that? There’s all kinds of different bodies. Why would you assume that when I’m talking about the resurrection, I must mean that our body and the resurrection is identical to the body, the exact same body we have now? And if it’s not, then both objections make no sense. Both objections make no sense, if this is a new type of body which is connected to, but not identical to the ones that we currently are.

He goes on and expands more:

There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs from another star in glory.

So this verse, that may be confusing at first where he’s going, because as modern scientific people who have had a fairly materialist upbringing, when we think about the sun and the moon and the stars, first of all we would say, “Well, the sun and the stars are the same thing, the moon is something completely different. The moon is a big chunk of rock, right? The sun is a massive incandescent gas. It’s a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is turned into helium and so are the stars. They’re just farther away. That’s why they look smaller, right?”

But for us, we think of them as in the category of inanimate objects. So for us, it’s like, well, St. Paul’s talking about plants first, and then he moves to animals and then he starts talking about inanimate objects and he’s talking about the glory of these celestial objects, these objects in the sky, compared to objects on Earth. And we might be tempted to think that by glory he means, “Oh, they’re shiny, right? Well, the stuff in the sky, those are shiny and we’re not shiny. Maybe that’s what he means.” And of course, if you take that approach, this passage makes absolutely no sense in context. I challenge you to come up with a way that has anything to do with what he’s talking about. Unless maybe you’re going to argue that, well, in the Resurrection, we’re all going to be shiny, “shiny happy people holding hands”, I guess. But that’s not at all what St. Paul is going for or talking about. Because, of course, he’s not a modern person who’s been brought up taught about materialist science.

And so when he talks about celestial bodies, that’s not what he’s talking about. When St. Paul talks about celestial bodies, to put it very directly, St. Paul’s talking about angels, what we would call angels, angelic beings, which includes not just angels, but archangels, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominion, powers, all the classes of angelic beings. This would also include most of the demonic beings, including the devil.

Now, this may strike us as strange because we may be used to the idea. In fact, they’re called all the time in the Orthodox Church in our worship, they’re called “the bodyless powers of heaven”. We’ve heard “bodyless” so much, I don’t know if it’s the official one we still use or if it’s an older one, but that refers to in the Canon of the Akathist refers to them as disembodied minds, which is a really weird translation from the perspective of modern English, where “disembodied” means like, disconnected from their bodies. So the idea of a “disembodied mind” may give us the idea of a brain in a jar or something, but that’s not what that means either.

But the angelic beings and the devil, the powers and principalities, are bodyless compared to us. They were not in the minds of ancient people, in the minds of the apostles and other people living in the first century when the apostles lived, they were not bodyless, period, in the sense that they had no body, that they were not made up of stuff. It was some kind of very fine stuff, but it was still stuff. And of course, that’s because anything created, right, they aren’t God. And anything created is made out of stuff. It’s made out of something. It exists, and it exists by virtue of being made out of something. That’s why God, Yahweh, the God of Israel, the Holy Trinity, is of a completely different character than all created things. Uncreated means there’s no material element, except, of course, Christ in the incarnation, second person of the Trinity.

So we need to keep that in mind. The angelic beings, fallen or not, have bodies. They’re just bodies, as St. Paul is affirming here, they’re bodies of a different sort than ours. And he talks about that difference in terms of glory. To get an idea of what exactly that means in terms of glory, we need to look at, for example, St. Dionysius the Areopagite in his Celestial Hierarchies, talks about how the angelic beings, based on their appointed tasks and functions, are closer or farther away from the throne of God. And the closer they are, the more they participate in his glory. So the glory of created things is never glory in and of itself possessed by those created things. The glory of any created thing is a reflection, a reflection of the glory of God. And so there’s a different participation in the glory of God.

And so this is what St. Paul is saying, that right now, right now, in this age, the angelic beings who are in the presence of God are therefore more glorious. Their celestial bodies are more glorious. They are participating in the glory of God to a greater degree than we do here on earth. Now, he’s going to talk about how that’s going to change in the future, but at this point, at this point, that is true.

So, while we’re used to thinking of the sun, moon and stars as these objects, St. Paul’s referring to this ancient view, this ancient view is found in the scriptures. It’s found in Deuteronomy 4, where Yahweh, the God of Israel, is teaching against idolatry. And he not only talks about idols per se, graven images and the pagan worship of idols, but he says specifically that the Israelites are not to worship the sun and the moon and the stars and the rest of the heavenly host to whom God has appointed the other nations.

And this is connected to something we’ve already talked about here in Deuteronomy 32 where at the Tower of Babel event, God stepped back away from his creation and appointed angelic beings to govern it for him. And then he drew close again to Abraham and to Israel. But the idea that they’re appointed to the other nations, he’s referring not to the physical objects, not to the big ball of plasma that gives heat and light to the earth and not to the big chunk of rock that orbits around the earth, but he’s referring to the spiritual beings that those represent, that those serve as bodies for.

Because another important element of the way St. Paul understands angelic beings is that angelic beings are not just sort of sitting around on harps or singing all day and they aren’t just bringing messages all over like the postal service. They’re not trying to show George Bailey how wonderful his life is, but they are assisting God. They’re given the privilege of assisting God in governing his creation and governing not just in general, but governing specific elements of it. And so, we see this all through the scriptures, we see references to this. The Book of Ezekiel talks about the angel of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south wind. The devil is called the prince and the power of the air. So the angelic beings have these elements of the creation that they were given to govern and that they’re associated with.

And so this is important for us to understand paganism too. We often look at pagans, for example, who worship the sun or a sun god, and we say “Dummies are worshiping the big fireball in the sky.” But it’s much more subtle than that. They understood that the sun in the sky that they saw, they saw as being one of the bodies of a god. They weren’t actually worshipping the object. They thought that there was some powerful spirit associated with it and that’s who and what they were worshiping. That’s why when you go to a museum’s Egyptology section, you will see statues and images of the god Re: it’s not just a picture of the sun. They understood that the sun was one of Re’s bodies, he was the Sun God, but they also understood that he had to take a humanoid appearance or have these other bodies and other appearances.

So, St. Paul does not think that these are gods to be worshiped, but he understands that there are angelic beings associated with these elements of creation and they are not to be worshiped as god, they too are created by God. But so St. Paul in this offhanded way, he can now expand his metaphor. He starts with plants, he moves to animals. Now he’s talking about the visible and invisible creation. He’s talking about the angelic beings and humans, he says, “Look, they’re different and they differ in glory.” And he says “Even the stars themselves, the angelic beings themselves, differ from each other in glory.” There are seraphim who are the closest to the throne of God, who have this greater participation in his glory than the angels, who are serving as God’s messengers too, who are sort of going into our visible world to bring messages. So there’s even a differentiation there in their participation in the glory of God. So he’s making the point that within God’s creation, within his creation, they’re all different types of bodies that differ from each other in different ways. They differ from each other physically. Now he’s talking about they’re different in how they relate to God. The bodies are different in how they relate to God. That’s important. Not souls, not people, not entities have different relationships with God, but their bodies themselves are different based on their participation in God’s glory and this relationship. So this is groundwork for what St. Paul is about to get into concerning our bodies in the resurrection.