NT Wright in Surprised by Hope, pp. 152-154

This is the point at which we modern Westerners are called to make a huge leap of the imagination. We have been buying our mental furniture for so long from Plato’s factory that we have come to take for granted a basic ontological contrast between “spirit“ in the sense of something immaterial and “matter“ in the sense of something material, solid, physical. We think we know that solid objects are one sort of thing and…

We know the bodies decay and die; that houses, temples, cities, and civilizations fall to dust; and so we assume that to be bodily, to be physical, is to be in permanent, changeable, transitory, and that the only way to be permanent, unchanging, and immortal is to become non-physical.

Paul’s point here is that this is not so. Actually it wasn’t so even in the dominant cosmology of his day, which was stoic rather than platonic. Still less was it so within the Jewish creation theology, which formed the seedbed out of which, because of the resurrection of Jesus himself, Paul grew his theology of new creation. Paul is making his Corinthian readers think in new patterns, and he has the same effect on us…

We sometimes speak of someone who’s been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one. Or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.