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| All creatures, including the fallen angel, partaking in the final restoration.
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42. I have given you one
instance in which he has expressed his own opinion without any
ambiguity on the universal resurrection. I will give one more, and with
this bring to an end the first book of my Apology. His statements,
indeed, on this point are innumerable. The one I select is on the
passage where it is written:2912
“From whom
all the body, fitly framed and knit together through that which every
joint supplieth according to the working in due measure of each several
part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in
love.” He begins thus:
“In the end of all things,
when we shall have begun to know God face to face, and shall have come
to the measure of the age2913
of the fulness
of Christ, of whose fulness we all have received,2914
so that Christ will not be in us in part
but wholly, and, leaving the rudiments of babes, we shall have grown
into the perfect man, of whom the Prophet says,2915
“Behold the man whose name is the East,” and whom John the
Baptist announces in the words:2916
“After me cometh a man who has come to be2917
before me, for he was before me”;
then by the concurrence in a common faith, and in a common recognition
of the Son of God, whom now through the variety of men’s minds we
cannot know and recognize with one and the same faith, the whole body,
which before had been disintegrated and torn into many parts, will be
joined and fitted together, and brought into one; so that there will be
but one administration, and one and the same operation,
and an absolute perfection of the one age,2918
| 2918 Or stature, see above. | whereby the whole body will grow
equally, and all its members according to their measure will receive an
increase of age. But this whole process of up-building, by which the
body of the church is increased in all its members, will be completed
by mutual love. We can understand the whole mass of rational creatures
by the example of a single rational animal; and whatever we say of the
single creature, we may be sure will be applicable to every creature.
Let us imagine this creature, then, to have had all its limbs, veins
and flesh so torn apart that neither bone should cleave to bone nor
muscle be joined to muscle, that the eyes lie in one place apart, the
nose in another, that the hands are placed here and the feet thrown out
there, and the rest of the members are in a similar way dispersed and
divided. Then let us suppose that a physician arrives on the spot, of
such skill as to be able to imitate the acts of Æsculapius, as
told in the stories of the heathen, and to raise up a new form, the new
man Virbius.2919
| 2919 Formerly Hippolytus. See the story in Ovid, Met. xv,
544. | It will be necessary for him to
restore each member to its own place, to couple joint to joint, and to
replace the various parts and glue them together, so as to make the
body one again. So far this single comparison has carried us. But now
let us take another typical case, so as, by a similar illustration to
make clear that which we wish to have understood. A child is growing
up; moment by moment, though the process is hidden from us, he is
tending to perfect maturity. His hands enlarge, his feet undergo a
proportional increase; the belly, though we cannot see it, is filled,
the shoulders widen unmarked by the eyes, and all the members in each
part grow according to their measure, but in such a way that they
evidently increase not for themselves but for the body. So will it be
in the time of the restitution of all things, when the true physician
Jesus Christ, shall come to restore to health the whole body of the
church which is now dispersed and torn. Every one, according to the
measure of his faith and his recognition of the Son of God (it is
called recognition because he first knew him and afterwards ceased from
knowing him), will receive his proper place, and will begin to be what
he once had been: not that, according to another opinion which is a
heresy,2920
| 2920 Or,
“according to another heresy”—Juxta aliam
hæresim. See Jer. Apol. i, 27. | all will be placed in one
condition,2921
| 2921 Lit. age. The word may come either from taking the wrong meaning
of the Greek word for Stature, or may be a synonym for the word
Æon, which would here mean a range or order of being. | that is, all restored to the
condition of Angels, but that every member will be perfected according
to its measure and office: for instance, that the apostate angel will
begin to be that which he was originally made, and man who had been
cast out of the garden of Eden will be brought back to cultivate the
garden again. But all these things will be so constituted that they
will be joined to one another by mutual love, each member rejoicing
with its fellow and being gladdened by its advancement; and so the
church of the first born, the body of Christ, will dwell in the
heavenly Jerusalem which the Apostle in another place calls the mother
of the Saints.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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