In his On the Resurrection of the Flesh, Tertullian wrote that:
“Everlasting joy,” says Isaiah,
“shall be upon their heads.” Well, there is nothing eternal until after the
resurrection. “And sorrow and sighing,” continues he, “shall flee away.” The
angel echoes the same to John: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes;” from the same eyes indeed which had formerly wept, and which might weep
again, if the loving-kindness of God did not dry up every fountain of tears.
And again: “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be
no more death,” and therefore no more corruption, it being chased away by
incorruption, even as death is by immortality. If sorrow, and mourning, and
sighing, and death itself, assail us from the afflictions both of soul and
body, how shall they be removed, except by the cessation of their causes, that
is to say, the afflictions of flesh and soul? where will you find adversities
in the presence of God? where, incursions of an enemy in the bosom of Christ?
where, attacks of the devil in the face of the Holy Spirit?—now that the devil
himself and his angels are “cast into the lake of fire.” Where now is
necessity, and what they call fortune or fate? What plague awaits the redeemed
from death, after their eternal pardon? What wrath is there for the reconciled,
after grace? What weakness, after their renewed strength? What risk and danger,
after their salvation? That the raiment and shoes of the children of Israel
remained unworn and fresh for the space of forty years; that in their very
persons the exact point of convenience and propriety checked the rank growth of
their nails and hair, so that any excess herein might not be attributed to
indecency; that the fires of Babylon injured not either the mitres or the
trousers of the three brethren, however foreign such dress might be to the
Jews; that Jonah was swallowed by the monster of the deep, in whose belly whole
ships were devoured, and after three days was vomited out again safe and sound;
that Enoch and Elias, who even now, without experiencing a resurrection
(because they have not even encountered death), are learning to the full
what it is for the flesh to be exempted from all humiliation, and all loss, and
all injury, and all disgrace—translated as they have been from this world,
and from this very cause already candidates for everlasting life; —to what
faith do these notable facts bear witness, if not to that which ought to
inspire in us the belief that they are proofs and documents of our own future
integrity and perfect resurrection? For, to borrow the apostle’s phrase, these
were “figures of ourselves;” and they are written that we may believe both that
the Lord is more powerful than all natural laws about the body, and that He
shows Himself the preserver of the flesh the more emphatically, in that He has
preserved for it its very clothes and shoes. (On the Resurrection of the
Flesh, 58 [ANF: 3:590-91])
According to this text, Tertullian is arguing that
Enoch and Elijah have been
translated and are now learning that it means for the flesh to be exempt from
humiliation, teaching us that the Lord is more powerful than natural laws . . .
(Rodney L. Petersen, Preaching in the Last Days: The Theme of ‘Two Witnesses’
in the 16th and 17th Centuries [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 23
n. 60)
