Methodius — Discourse on the Resurrection (ANF misc) Part 1

I. God did not make evil , nor is He at all in any way the author of evil ; but whatever failed to keep the law, which He in all justice ordained, after being made by Him with the faculty of free-will , for the purpose of guarding and keeping it, is called evil . Now it is the gravest fault to disobey God , by overstepping the bounds of that righteousness which is consistent with free-will . II. Now the question has already been raised, and answered, that the coats of skins Genesis 3:21 are not bodies. Nevertheless, let us speak of it again, for it is not enough to have mentioned it once. Before the preparation of these coats of skins, the first man himself acknowledges that he has both bones and flesh; for when he saw the woman brought to him: This is now, he cried, Genesis 2:23-24 bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

And again: She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. For this cause shall unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. For I cannot endure the trifling of some who shamelessly do violence to Scripture, in order that their opinion, that the resurrection is without flesh, may find support; supposing rational bones and flesh, and in different ways changing it backwards and forwards by allegorizing. And Christ confirms the taking of these things as they are written, when, to the question of the Pharisees about putting away a wife, He answers: Have you not read that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female; and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father, Matthew 19:4-5 and so on. III.

But it is evidently absurd to think that the body will not co-exist with the soul in the eternal state, because it is a bond and fetters; in order that, according to their view, we who are to live in the kingdom of light may not be for ever condemned to be bondmen of corruption. For as the question has been sufficiently solved, and the statement refitted in which they defined the flesh to be the soul's chain, the argument also is destroyed, that the flesh will not rise again, lest, if we resume it, we be prisoners in the kingdom of light. IV. In order, then, that man might not be an undying or ever-living evil , as would have been the case if sin were dominant within him, as it had sprung up in an immortal body, and was provided with immortal sustenance, God for this cause pronounced him mortal, and clothed him with mortality.

For this is what was meant by the coats of skins, in order that, by the dissolution of the body, sin might be altogether destroyed from the very roots, that there might not be left even the smallest particle of root from which new shoots of sin might again burst forth. V.