To Florus 6.34

He would never say, ‘If the dead do not rise, Christ has not risen either,’ if someone could reply: But Christ rose exceptionally because he was born from a virgin; humans do not rise because they were born from a diabolical union. He would immediately answer: Then what was the empty point of rising, if it served neither our hope nor our instruction? What reasonable teaching or weighty example could there be if a nature unlike ours left us without both the hope of reigning with him and the power to imitate him?

The apostle’s faith stands far, very far from this opinion. Filled with the same Spirit as Peter, he knows Christ died for us to give us an example, so that we might follow his footsteps (1 Peter 2:21). Knowing that sacrifice and example were the purpose of so great a mystery, he does not hesitate to pronounce—indeed, carefully stresses—that Christ the human has reached no place from which any of us is excluded by our nature’s condition.

‘If there is no resurrection of the dead,’ he says, ‘Christ has not risen either. But if Christ has risen from the dead, how do some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead?’ (1 Corinthians 15:12–13). That is: If you acknowledge him, as human, to have possessed the same nature as ours, on what grounds do you either think resurrection occurred in him or will not occur in the rest? Having set out the conditions, he completes the judgment on every side: ‘But now Christ has risen from the dead’ (1 Corinthians 15:20); therefore there will be resurrection of the dead.