It is a fair question. Many of us have stood at a graveside and taken comfort that a loved one is with the Lord. Catholic Answers quotes the Athanasian Creed, which says that at Christ's coming all men have to rise again with their bodies. If a believer's soul is already with Jesus, why does God bring the body back at all?
Stephen Beale, writing at Catholic Exchange, feels the force of it. The souls of the saints are already with God, beholding Him. They will not need food, and Beale notes that Matthew 22:30 makes marriage unlikely there. His first answer is restoration. Augustine taught that Christ, in reversing the curse of original sin and redeeming a fallen world, restored all things to their original goodness. Beale anchors this in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 and Ephesians 1:8-10. The resurrection of the body, he writes, affirms its original goodness. God made the body. He does not throw it away.
Beale adds that the Fall broke the natural harmony between body and soul. In heaven that harmony is fully restored. Citing Job 19:25-26, Thomas Aquinas described the body as a kind of clothing for the soul. Aquinas also wrote, “Yet our body will have a certain beatitude from seeing God in sensible creatures: and especially in Christ’s body.”
What will that body be like? Catholic Answers says it will be the same body we had in earthly life, but it will not die. For the righteous it will be transformed into a glorified state, freed from suffering and pain. It points to 1 Corinthians 15:35-44 and 1 John 3:2. EWTN's question-and-answer from the Baltimore Catechism adds that body and soul will be united again, nevermore to be separated, and the bodies of the just will share forever in the glory of their souls.
This hope belongs to every Christian. Catholic Answers calls the resurrection of the body an essential Christian doctrine, citing Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised. The early church agreed. One early Christian writer quoted by Catholic Answers, from around A.D. 340, compared the body to a seed. You never sow wheat and reap barley, he said, so the body laid in the ground is the same body that rises.
So why the body? Because, as Beale says, our God is a God of abundance. Pointing to John 10:10, he calls the resurrection of the body the joy of abundant life that awaits the saints. The next time you stand at a grave, remember the seed. The body laid there is planted, and God has promised to raise it.
The teaching is older than any one church. Catholic Answers notes that the resurrection of the body appears in the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed as well as the Athanasian Creed, and that the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 taught that all people will rise with their own bodies, the ones they now wear. Augustine, writing around A.D. 419, answered those who asked how God could raise bodies that had been burned, eaten by beasts or turned to dust. Catholic Answers quotes him saying the Creator's power is fully able to recall every part.
Beale adds detail about what the raised body will be like. The Church teaches, he writes, that the bodies of the saints will have four qualities: clarity, a kind of bright translucency, agility, the ability to move anywhere at once, impassibility, the inability to suffer pain, and subtlety, a body so united to the soul that it becomes spirit-like, as when the risen Christ passed through material objects. Aquinas held that a soul without its body is in an unnatural state. The Baltimore Catechism, as given by EWTN, says the bodies of the just were temples of the Holy Ghost in this life, so the bodies of the faithful departed deserve respect, with burial places set aside for them and their graves blessed.
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, Ephesians 1:8-10, Job 19:25-26, 1 Corinthians 15:35-44, 1 John 3:2, John 10:10
