1 Corinthians 15:46

“Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is psychical; and afterward that which is spiritual.”

Are we right in regarding this as a general law, or must we, with Osiander and others, understand the substantive σῶμα, body, and apply the verse exclusively to the particular fact under discussion? The former meaning alone agrees with the ellipsis of the verb, which, if understood, can only be the present. In the latter sense, Paul would have required to use a verb in the aorist (ἐγένετο, 1 Corinthians 15:45). His object is to justify by a general principle what has taken place in respect of the body: the priority of the psychical to the spiritual body.

The law here enunciated, when rightly understood, throws a vivid light on the general course of God's work within humanity. The life of the spirit is substantially identical with holiness; it could not therefore have been given immediately to man at the time of his creation; for holiness is not a thing imposed, it is essentially a product of liberty, the freewill offering of the individual. God therefore required to begin with an inferior state, the characteristic of which was simply freedom, the power in man to give or withhold himself. On the choice which he should make between these two alternatives, to keep his natural life or to give it in order to get it back transformed into a higher life, was to depend his fall or progress. In the former case, spiritual life could not be communicated to man; in the latter, it was accorded to him in response to his free and fervent aspiration; and elevation to the perfect state, even for the body, took place in the direct way of progress. But, even in the opposite case, it was not denied to him for ever; for the miseries of sin might, by a long and sad circuit of experience, bring man to exclaim: “Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens, that Thou wouldest come down!” (Isaiah 64:1). It was to secure the production of this aspiration, the condition of the gift of the Spirit, that during the course of the psychical period, God adopted a people in the midst of whom this need of the economy of the Spirit was intended to be more forcibly developed under the pedagogic influence of the law and the prophets. And when the longing awakened by these two means had reached its full intensity, the answer could at length be granted: the fulness of the times was come; the Son was sent, and the Spirit given (Galatians 4:4-6). The apostle does not therefore share the idea, so long regarded as the orthodox view, according to which humanity was created in a state of moral and physical perfection, and fell from that height. He holds, that even independently of the fall there would have been progress from a lower state, the psychical state assigned as a point of departure, to a higher state, the spiritual state foreseen and willed as the end from the beginning. Apart altogether from sin, psychical humanity was called to develop in all directions the manifold powers with which it was endowed, that it might present to the heavenly guest, the Spirit, when He should come to dwell in it, the psychical and bodily organ fitted to display His perfection in the richest and most varied forms, those of art, science, industry, and social life in all its manifestations. The abnormal intervention of sin did not altogether prevent the realization of this Divine thought. In the East, the sense of the Great; in Greece, that of the True and Beautiful; in Rome, that of the Just; in Phenicia, through its commerce and colonies, that of the Useful; in Israel, that of the Holy, served to prepare for the spiritual economy, the new humanity; that Christendom in which we find so many miseries, but in which notwithstanding also the spirit of Pentecost unfolds. Thus, then, with or without the fall, two economies, that of the human soul (normal ancient history) and that of the Divine Spirit (normal modern history): such is the profound law which, from the viewpoint of a free humanity and a healthy Divine preparatory training, must control the history of man. First the psychical, then the pneumatical. This law applies, as Olshausen already remarked, to the course of collective no less than of individual life. What light is shed by this law on true Christian education! Instead of imposing the spiritual state on the child, begin by awakening the need of it, while giving free scope to the expansion of the psychical powers in every direction, which is morally legitimate.

The apostle renders the distinction palpable between the two economies which he has just distinguished, that of the soul and that of the spirit, by contrasting the two heads of both (1 Corinthians 15:47); thus he will come to the two races (1 Corinthians 15:48), and so return to the two bodies (1 Corinthians 15:49).