ectypal.net

That a change will take place inherent in the resurrection-act for believers that are raised follows not only from explicit or more or less implicit statements, but rests besides on the stronger ground of the analogy between the resurrection of Jesus and that of believers which Paul throughout presupposes. According to Rom. 1:1-4, while the identical Jesus who had been buried rose from the grave, yet it was by no means the same Jesus in the endowment and equipment of his human nature. Not only a new status had been acquired through the resurrection: new qualities amounting to a reconstructed adjustment to the future heavenly environment had been wrought in Him by the omnipotent power of God: He had been determined (declared effectually) the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of Holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. It is self-evident that these words do not refer to any religious or ethical transformation which Jesus in the resurrection had to undergo. Such a thought nowhere finds support in Paul’s Christology, nor in his general teaching. Only, in the quite justifiable eagerness for excluding this, there is too narrow an interpretation put upon the sentence, as though it meant to affirm a purely bodily transformation. The other, psychical, side of our Lord’s human nature was obviously affected no less than the physical side. This comprehensive change was inseparable from the resurrection itself; it was not an additional element, but an integral part of the first and only act required. Had this been lacking, then not the resurrection, but the subsequent transformation ought to have furnished the pattern upon which the soteric renewal of believers was fashioned. As it is the Pauline formula reads “raised with Christ,” and of this generic designation of the renewal of the Christian the particular form “changed with Christ” could be only a specific variation.