Tertullian, Apology 48

Suppose some philosopher declares, as Laberius quotes Pythagoras, that a man can spring from a mule and a snake from a woman, and twists every argument with rhetorical flair to prop up the claim. Wouldn't he win a following and plant a conviction that even animals must be shunned? Who, once persuaded, would dare eat a steak for fear it came from a long-dead ancestor? Yet let a Christian promise that a human being will rise again as the very same human — Gaius returns as Gaius — and the mob instantly cries blasphemy, demanding stones, not even granting a bare-knuckle hearing. As if the principle that governs the return of human souls to bodies did not itself require their recall into the identical bodies they once inhabited; for to be recalled is to be exactly what they were. If they are not what they were — human, clothed in that same flesh — they are no longer the same souls. And if they are no longer themselves, how can they be said to have returned? Either they have become something else and so are not themselves, or they remain themselves and therefore cannot have come from somewhere else. One would need endless jokes and idle leisure to play out the farce of deciding which beast each soul might turn into. But our position — that a man rises from a man, anyone for anyone, provided he rises as a man so that the same quality of soul is restored to the same condition, even if not the same outward form — deserves far more serious credence. The very rationale for restoration is the destination of judgment; therefore the identical person who once lived must appear again, so that God may render judgment on merit, whether good or bad. Consequently bodies must also reappear, because a soul alone cannot undergo anything without stable matter, namely flesh; and whatever souls are destined to suffer from God's judgment they earned within that flesh, inside which they did all their deeds. You ask how dissolved matter can be produced again? Look at yourself, man, and you will find the proof. Recall what you were before you existed: absolutely nothing; you would remember if you had been something. So you who were nothing before you were made, and become nothing again when you cease to be — why can you not be made once more from nothing by the will of the same Author who willed you into being from nothing? What novelty awaits you? You who did not exist were made; when you cease to exist again, you will be made again. Produce the reason you were made the first time, then demand the reason you will be made the second. And in fact it is easier to be remade into what you once were, since it was no harder to be made into what you never were before. I suspect the only doubt lies in God's power — the One who composed this world-body from what did not exist, animating it with the Spirit that animates every soul, and signing it through Him as a testimony to you of human resurrection. Daily the light is killed and shines again; darkness takes its turn in equal measure; dying stars revive; times that end begin anew; fruits are consumed and return; seeds spring up more fruitfully only after they are corrupted and dissolved. All things are preserved by perishing; all things are reformed from destruction. You, man — a mere name if you grasp your own nature, or learning from the Pythian title — are Lord of all who die and rise; do you die merely to perish? Wherever you are dissolved, whatever matter destroys, swallows, obliterates, or reduces you to nothing, that nothing will give you back. Nothingness itself belongs to the One to whom the whole belongs. So you object: "Then we must die forever and rise forever." If the Lord of things had so ordained, you would experience the law of your condition ungratefully. But He has ordained otherwise, exactly as He has foretold. The same Reason that composed the universe from diversity — binding rival substances into unity: void and solid, animate and inanimate, comprehensible and incomprehensible, light and darkness, life and death themselves — has also fixed the ages in a destined, distinct order: this first epoch from the beginning of things, which we inhabit, flows toward its end in temporal duration; the next, which we await, stretches into infinite eternity. When the end and the middle boundary that intervenes arrive, so that the very form of the world is transferred — temporal, spread like a veil before the disposition of eternity — then the whole human race will be restored, to cancel out what each has earned in this age, good or bad, and from then on to depend on the vast perpetuity of eternity. Hence there will be no more death, no more repeated resurrections; we shall be the same as we are now, not others afterward: God's worshipers with God forever, clothed in the substance of eternity; the profane and those not whole toward God in equally unending punishment of fire, a fire that draws its incorruptibility from the very nature of God, from the divine administration of incorruptibility. The philosophers themselves knew the difference between secret and public fire. The fire that serves human use is worlds apart from the fire that appears for God's judgment — whether lightning from heaven or erupting from earth through mountain peaks. It does not consume what it burns; even as it pours out, it repairs. Thus burning mountains endure forever, and the one touched by heavenly fire survives, never reduced to ashes by any flame. This will be the testimony of eternal fire, this the example of perpetual judgment feeding its punishment. Mountains burn and endure: what of the guilty and enemies of God?