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It is certain that Christ rose in the same bodily stature in which He
died, and that it is wrong to say that, when the general resurrection
shall have arrived, His body shall, for the sake of equalling the
tallest, assume proportions which it had not when He appeared to the
disciples in the figure with which they Were familiar. But if we say
that even the bodies of taller men are to be reduced to the size of the
Lord's body, there will be a great loss in many bodies, though He
promised that, not a hair of their head should perish. It remains,
therefore, that we conclude that every man shall receive his own size
which he haiti in youth, though he died an old man, or which he would
have had, supposing he died before his prime. As for what the apostle
said of the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ, we must
either understand him to refer to something else, viz., to the fact
that the measure of Christ will be completed when all the members among
the Christian communities are added to the Head; or if we are to
refer it to the resurrection of the body, the meaning is that all shall
rise neither beyond nor under youth, but in that vigor and age to which
we know that Christ had arrived. For even the world's wisest men
have fixed the bloom of youth at about the age of thirty; and when this
period has been passed, the man begins to decline towards the defective
and duller period of old age. And therefore the apostle did not speak
of the measure of the body, nor of the measure of the stature, but of
"the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ."
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