Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
From here comes that stock witticism of unbelief. 'If,' they say, 'the very same substance is called back, with its own shape, outline, and quality, then it comes back with its remaining marks too — so the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed will rise as such, and whoever died marked will return marked just the same.' And what if it were so? Do you disdain to receive so great a grace from God, whatever form it takes? For do you not, even now, admitting salvation to the soul alone, assign it to men cut in half? What is it to believe in resurrection, except to believe in a whole one? For if flesh can be restored from dissolution, far more easily can it be recalled from mere impairment. The greater cases give the rule to the lesser. Is not the severing or maiming of any limb the death of that limb? If universal death is undone by resurrection, why not a partial one? If we are changed into glory, how much more into soundness? Bodily disfigurement is an accident; wholeness is proper to us. We are born to it. Even if we are disfigured in the womb, it is still the suffering of a man — the kind comes before the mishap. As life is bestowed by God, so it is returned: such as we receive it, such we get back. We are restored to nature, not to injury; we come back to life as we were born, not as we were maimed. If God does not raise men whole, he does not raise the dead at all. For what dead man is whole, even if he died whole? Who is sound who is lifeless? What body is unharmed once it has been killed, once cold, once pale, once stiff, once a corpse? When is a man more helpless than when he is entirely so? When more paralyzed than when wholly motionless? So the raising of the dead is nothing other than being made whole again, lest a man remain dead in that very part in which he has not risen. God is fit to restore what he made. He has already promised this power and generosity of his sufficiently in Christ — indeed he has shown himself not only the reviver of flesh but its restorer to wholeness. And so the apostle too says: 'And the dead will rise incorrupt' — how, unless whole, they who before were corrupted both by the ravages of sickness and the decay of the grave? For when he laid down both conditions above — that this corruptible nature is to be clothed with incorruption, and this mortal one with immortality — he was not repeating himself but marking a distinction: assigning 'immortality' to the undoing of death and 'incorruption' to the erasing of decay, tempering the one to resurrection, the other to restoration of wholeness. And I think he made the same promise of the complete wholeness of every substance to the Thessalonians too. So in the future no bodily blemishes need be feared: wholeness, whether preserved or restored, can admit nothing amiss, since even what had been lost is given back. For in laying down beforehand that the flesh which is to die must rise again subject to the same sufferings, you are rashly defending nature against its own Lord, and impiously asserting law against grace — as if God were less free both to change nature and to keep it safe without regard to law! Why then do we read: 'What is impossible with men is possible with God,' and 'God has selected the world's foolish things so as to put to shame the wisdom of the world'? I ask you: if you set your slave free, since the same flesh and soul remain that were once subject to the whip, the fetters, and the branding-irons, must they therefore suffer the same things still? I think not — rather he is honored with the sheen of a white robe, the dignity of a gold ring, the name and tribe and table of his patron. Grant this same power to God — by the force of that transformation, to reshape condition, not nature — so that sufferings are removed while defenses are conferred. So the flesh will remain, even after the resurrection, capable of suffering only insofar as it is itself, the same flesh, and yet incapable of suffering, because it has been set free by its Lord for this very purpose — that it may suffer no more.