by Angus Harley

To this day, William Barclay, a Scottish minister, is lauded and raised up by Evangelicals, including conservatives, as a good example of an Evangelical scholar. His commentaries are found on some conservative Evangelical sites. How can he be wrong? He says so many great things, some will think. Yet, he denied the physical resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ. What should we think of him now? Before answering that question, there is another: how is it that conservative Evangelicals read Barclay and come away thinking he’s a good example of an exegete? It is because he uses language similar to the bible, similar to Evangelical tradition, but he often means the opposite of what the bible and tradition teach. Let’s take a look at his teaching on the resurrection of the body.

Barclay’s ‘traditional’ comments

“1 Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel that I preached to you, that you received and on which you stand, 2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. 3 For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received—that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures….”

Barclay gives what seems on the face of things to be a traditional understanding of 1 Corinthians 11:1-4:

“It is of great importance to remember that the Corinthians were denying not the Resurrection of Jesus Christ but the resurrection of the body; and what Paul was insistent upon was that if a man denied the resurrection of the body he thereby denied the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and therefore emptied the Christian message of its truth and the Christian life of its reality.”[1]

A couple of factors stand out in line with traditional teaching: 1) Paul was upholding the doctrine of the resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ; 2) the Corinthians were not, and because of this were emptying the Christian message of its truth. Barclay makes numerous quotes like this in his commentaries and other books. Open and shut case. Right? Not really!

Barclay on psuchikos

Barclay observes, as us all, that Paul teaches the body goes into the ground as one type and is raised as another. Barclay interprets this teaching as the body goes into the tomb as a physical body, but is raised as a spiritual body. In this, Barclay interprets the Greek term psuchikos as “physical” in 1 Corinthians 15:44 (x2), 46, not as ‘natural’, as is commonly believed. The body goes into the ground a physical body and is raised a spiritual body, interprets Barclay. A physical body is cast off, and it is replaced with a spiritual body. There is no resurrection of a physical body.

The traditional interpretation: the physical body went into the ground in a “natural” state, one of death and mortality; the same physical body rose from the dead as spiritual, in a state of immortality, etc..

Barclay: there is no resurrection of the physical body of Jesus from the dead; rather, it is a spiritual body that is raised from the dead.

The “natural” is another way of referring to the fallen world and fallen flesh, not physicality in opposition to spirituality. Paul does not imply in 1 Corinthians 2:14 that the ‘physical’ man does not accept the things of God, for it is the “natural” man that does not understand, man as controlled by sin and the Fall in Adam. Thus, James 3:15 and Jude 1:19, too, give to psuchikos a meaning close to ‘sensual’, or ‘worldly’.

Barclay’s understanding of the spiritual body

It is vital the reader understands where Barclay is coming from in rejecting the resurrection of a physical body, for he argues that the spiritual body is the person and his personality:

“But Paul never said that we would rise with the body with which we died. He insisted that we would have a spiritual body. What he really meant was that a man’s personality would survive. It is almost impossible to conceive of personality without a body, because it is through the body that the personality expresses itself. What Paul is contending for is that after death the individual remains. He did not inherit the Greek contempt of the body but believed in the resurrection of the whole man. He will still be himself; he will survive as a person. That is what Paul means by the resurrection of the body. Everything of the body and of the soul that is necessary to make a man a person will survive, but, at the same time, all things will be new, and body and spirit will alike be very different from earthly things, for they will alike be divine.”[2] [Bold text is mine]

As before, Barclay accepts traditional language. He affirms, even, an on-the-surface reading of Paul, for he refers to two types of body, one not resurrected and mortal, the other resurrected and immortal. Barclay also retains Paul’s language of a body and bodies.

Even so, he cannot accept the traditional teaching of the resurrection of Jesus’ physical body from one type of body to another kind of body. So, he follows the Liberal path of arguing for a non-physical, resurrection body that is spiritual. And by ‘spiritual’ he means, as you saw above, that the person is retained. The person survives in a non-physical, spiritual body. Barclay cannot even refer to, in context, a physical body, for that would confuse things too much. So, he simply opts to ignore that problem, bypassing it.

However, I would like to press Barclay with a question: which body is he referencing to describe human personality? What is his point of reference? Surely there is but one answer: it is human personality as embodied in a physical body! How else does anyone know the personality of a person? Having quashed the physicality of the resurrection body, Barclay is left with no alterative than to blunder his way through his explanation by arguing for “man’s personality” as the spiritual body.

This ‘personality’ view is somewhat similar, in my estimate, to a mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism concerning reincarnation. Like Buddhism, the ‘elements’ (skandhas) of life are carried from one body to the other in incarnation; like Hinduism, it is the person that goes from one body to the other. Yet, even Buddhism and Hinduism have the sense to speak about man in a physical body, as personality via physicality.

Jesus’ physical resurrection

Let us go back to 1 Corinthians 11:3-4:

“3 For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received—that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures….”

The ordinary Christian reads this as saying that Christ died in his physical body, was buried in his physical body, and was raised in his physical body. Not so Barclay! One wonders how there was, then, an empty tomb, when it was not a physical body that was raised!

When you read Barclay’s interpretations, in his commentaries, of the various resurrection accounts, he does not express Jesus’ resurrection as of his physical body, but merely as a spiritual resurrection of the body. Read his commentary on John 20, for example, in which he has many things to say about Jesus’ resurrection and his ‘body’, but nothing much to say about its physicality. The fact that Jesus’ body had the nail imprints is proof enough in itself that Jesus body was not only physical, for it was the exact same physical body that went into the grave and was then raised from the dead.

Two types of body vs two bodies

There can be no doubt that the apostle Paul stresses that what is buried is one type of body, and what is raised is another:

“42 So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”

The body, “it”, is sown one type of body (perishable), and raised another (imperishable). All agree.

However, what Barclay does is make ‘body’ a neutral concept, which can then bear the meaning of physicality in death, and then spirituality in resurrection life. The default, traditional, meaning of ‘body’ as a physical body for both types of body is cast off and replaced by Barclay’s model. It is not two versions of a physical-body that Paul is teaching, thinks Barclay, but two different bodies: one physical, the other spiritual. And if it will be objected that Barclay is not thinking this argument, then, let it be said, reader, his system inexorably takes us to that conclusion!

It is patent, however, that what Paul has in mind is the two different types of the physical body, as there are zero other bodies associated with mankind to be resurrected (the point of reference argument). Man is not a cartoon character, an x-man, or the like. The physicality of man’s body is not merely ‘retained’ as an aspect in the resurrection body, for there is no human body without physicality: body = physicality, in this case. Therefore, what Paul does is assume the most basic point of all in regard to the body: man is a physical being. Man in this world is fallen, and so his physical body, his flesh, is natural, of death, mortal, corruptible. Man in Christ, following the pattern of the resurrected Christ, will have his physical body raised unto newness of life and immortality. Paul does not have to say ‘physical’, for he assumes there is no body with physicality. What is contrasted in context is not physicality to spirituality, but mortality and death to spirituality and immortality.

In this light, Barclay’s view goes beyond Paul’s teaching of two kinds of the physical body to two separate bodies. The Gospels embrace the physicality of Jesus’ resurrection body: he is the same man, in the same body; he bears the same wounds of that physical body as before on the cross; he talks in that body, like any other human; he eats fish, chewing it and swallowing it. This is not just ‘a’ body, nor merely a ‘spiritual’ body; it is fundamentally a physical body, for there is no other kind for man!

Barclay’s Modernist rejection of tradition

Perhaps the reader is still not convinced and thinks I am being harsh by a mile on Barclay. Please read this from him:

“Scripture does not speak either of the resurrection of the body or of the resurrection of the flesh.”[3]

Why would Barclay say this? This comment of his comes at the end of a paragraph looking at how the Scripture refers to the resurrection, and it does not use the phrase ‘resurrection of the body’, or the other phrase ‘resurrection of the flesh’. Job 19:26 does, he notes, say, “You will raise up my flesh”. Barclay is undeterred in his pursuit of undermining the Apostles’ Creed statement, “resurrection of the flesh”, and so he goes on to conjure up arguments against its accuracy.[4]

Barclay’s mind works like a virus: he is inside the ‘body’ of tradition (no pun intended), destroying it from within. He acts like a modern lawyer who looks for phrases that are not present in the bible, and even when there are similar phrases he simply explains them away with a ‘plausible’ argument or two.

Unfortunately, Barclay’s brazen attitude doesn’t stop there. His book is essentially one of those twisted arguments where he rejects the traditional reading only to say that, well, he kind of agrees with it. You see this type of brazen, twisted attitude in many of the Old Testament scholars today, in particular. Why do they do this? They do it because there is no Christianity without that tradition, and the churches that are empty are non-traditional ones! So, these snakes seek to justify their own demonic beliefs by ‘modification’ (aka, rejection!) of the very tradition itself.

Barclay’s Modernist rejection of Scripture

Of course, the Modernist’s deceptive work is aimed primarily at the bible itself. To Barclay, a physical resurrection is problematic according to the NT evidence itself. Jesus’ body materializes then disappears. A physical body does not do this. So, Barclay writes:

“A physical resurrection will not entirely explain the way in which Jesus came and went. at will. Nor does this explain what ultimately happened to his physical body.”[5]

Yes, concedes Barclay, there are instances in which the Gospels do indicate that some believers thought of Jesus’ body as physically resurrected, but there is too much evidence in the Gospels themselves, in fact, in the NT as a whole, that undermine their perspective. Barclay issues his conclusion:

“The conclusion we teach is that in the stories of the experiences which the disciples had of the Risen Christ the physical details are not at all important; they are in fact just the kind of details which would be added to the stories with the idea of enhancing verisimilitude. The really important thing is a spiritual experience of the power and the presence of the Risen Christ in such a way as to make it certain that he is alive for evermore.”[6] [Bold text mine]

Is the reader surprised at this comment by Barclay? He was a Modernist, a Liberal, who by definition rejected the bible’s history and faith-accounts as riddled with inaccuracies and the symptom of the pre-modern, pre-scientific era. (Do not be naive, reader, for to the modern theologian the true ‘AD’ is the Enlightenment!) Barclay, like Barth and Bonhoeffer, like Paul Badham, wanted a faith that is wholly tailored for the modern mindset. To that end, Barclay was prepared to dilute, dissect, and destroy the biblical testimony. Read on:

“In the last analysis there are two ways of reading the New Testament. It may be read in literal and physical terms. If we do so read it, we can hardly escape a wistful regret that things like that do not happen now, and that we live in a time in which the supreme experiences of the Christian life are bluntly no longer possible. But if we read the New Testament as a book of spiritual truth, often symbolising in a series of pictures that which is not the event of a moment but a continuing possibility, if we read it as a book of pictures written by men who could not write theology or philosophy in the modern sense of the terms, but who were thinking and writing in the childlike way which was all that they knew—and how great it was!—then we have the triumphant radiant certainty that whatever happened in the early days can and does still happen to us and for us.”[7] [Bold text mine]

To the supposedly ‘enigmatic’ and ‘great’ Barclay, the NT is merely “a book of spiritual truth”, relying on symbols and pictures of an event, written by men who were ignorant of the future and its omniscient knowledge. Here’s the really scary part: brazen Barclay trashes the bible, to then argue that we all agree!

Preterism

Some modern Preterists likewise reject the teaching that there was/is to come, according to 1 Corinthians 15, an actual physical resurrection of the body, for there was only a spiritual resurrection. Yet, on Evangelical websites who allow these Preterists, far too often the Preterist is treated as just another contributor to the debate. ‘How can we reach them with the Gospel, if we don’t interact with them and prove them wrong?’, it might be said. I’m all for preaching the Gospel to all men, of all theologies, and for discarding their theologies and replacing them with the truth; but, there comes a point when this has been attempted numerous times, and the Preterist is as obdurate and unrepentant as ever; it is then time to rebuke that one in the name of the Lord! Scripture’s teaching, not Facebook’s rules or academia’s mores, is our only guide on this matter!

[1]  William Barclay, comm. 1 Corinthians 15, intro.

[2] Ibid.

[3] William Barclay, The Plain Man Looks at the Apostles’ Creed (London & Glasgow: Collins Press, 1967), 334.

[4] The term in the Creed carnis resurrectionem has been translated ‘resurrection of the flesh’ and ‘resurrection of the body’.

[5] Barclay, The Plain Man, 156

[6] Ibid., 159.

[7] Ibid., 159-160.