“One can say that St. Paul sees the reality of the future resurrection as a certain restitutio in integrum, that is, as the reintegration and at the same time as the attainment of the fullness of humanity. […] Restitutio in integrum, linked with the resurrection and the reality of the “other world,” can only be an introduction to a new fullness.” (TOB 72: 3)
For Pope St John Paul II, the key text for St Paul’s anthropology of the resurrection is found in 1 Corinthians 15: 42-46. This text makes clear what Jesus could not have made clear to the Sadducees. Jesus was speaking to them before his own resurrection, which gives us the light to see what resurrection really means. Neither those priestly experts in the Law of Moses nor anyone else could understand what resurrection really means. They could understand the idea of a dead person’s returning to life, although they did not believe it. This is why they could imagine the problem of a dead woman being married to all seven brothers at once.
In answering them, Jesus said they did not know the power of God. That power became manifest in Jesus’s own resurrection, which was a complete triumph over death and suffering. This is what St Paul explains in his remarkable passage in 1 Corinthians. Here Paul recapitulates what Christ had taught about the original state of Creation and what he said in the Sermon on the Mount. The damage of the Fall— the “slavery to corruption—is now overcome in the mystery of redemption.
This redemption means far more that forgiveness. It means that in the resurrection we will be restore in integrum, in the wholeness of our being. With this, John Paul II can turn to the idea of celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom and, later on, to the true mystery of marriage and conjugal love and their place in the redemption of the body.
St Paul & the Resurrection of the Body