The Preterist Blog ~ 100% Hyperpreterist Free|we can haz rezurekshun?

I found some wonderful gems in a work by Oscar Cullman Immorality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Body that are VERY relevant to the hyperpreterist debate. Enjoy!

…death as such is the enemy of God. For God is Life and the Creator of life. It is not by the will of God that there are withering and decay, dying and sickness, the byproducts of death working in our life. All these things, according to Christian and Jewish thinking, come from human sin. Therefore, every healing which Jesus accomplishes is not only a driving back of death, but also an invasion of the province of sin; and therefore on every occasion Jesus says: “Your sins are forgiven.” Not as though there were a corresponding sin for every individual sickness; but rather, like the presence of death, the fact that sickness exists at all is a consequence of the sinful condition of the whole of humanity. Every healing is a partial resurrection, a partial victory of life over death. That is the Christian point of view. According to the Greek interpretation, on the contrary, bodily sickness is a corollary of the fact that the body is bad in itself and is ordained to destruction. For the Christian an anticipation of the Resurrection can already become visible, even in the earthly body.

The New Testament certainly knows the difference between body and soul, or more precisely, between the inner and the outer man. This distinction, does not, however, imply opposition, as if the one were by nature good, the other by nature bad….Both belong together, both are created by God. The inner man without the other has no proper, full existence. It requires a body. It can, to be sure, somehow lead a shady existence without the body, like the dead in Sheol according to the Old Testament, but that is not a genuine life. The contrast with the Greek soul is clear: it is precisely apart from the body that the Greek soul attains to full development of its life. According to the Christian view, however, it is the inner man’s very nature which demands a body.

In the End-time in which we live—that is, since Christ has broken the power of death in His own death and has arisen—this power of life is at work in all members of the community (Acts 2:16): ‘in the last days’). Like the flesh, it too already takes possession of the whole man, inner and outer. But whereas, in this age, the flesh has established itself to a substantial degree in the body, though it does not rule the inner man in the same inescapable way, the quickening power of the Holy Spirit is already taking possession of the inner man so decisively that the inner man is ‘renewed from day to day,’ as Paul says (2 Corinthians 4:16). The whole Johannine Gospel emphasizes the point. We are already in the state of resurrection, that of eternal life—not immortality of the soul: the new era is already inaugurated. The body, too, is already in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Wherever the Holy Spirit is at work we have what amounts to a momentary retreat of the power of death, a certain foretaste of the End. This is true even in the body, hence the healings of the sick. But here it is a question only of a retreat, not of a final transformation of the body of death into a resurrection body. Even those who Jesus raised up in His lifetime will die again, for they did not receive a resurrection body, the transformation of the fleshly body into a spiritual body does not take place until the End. Only then will the Holy Spirit’s power of resurrection take such complete possession of the body that it transforms it in the way it is already transforming the inner man. It is important to see how different the New Testament anthropology is from that of the Greeks. Body and soul are both originally good in so far as they are created by God; they are both bad in so far as the deadly power of the flesh has hold of them. Both can and must be set free by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit.

We shall see, it is true, that the soul is the starting-point of the resurrection, since, as we have said, it can already by possessed by the Holy Spirit in a way quite different from the body. The Holy Spirit already lives in our inner man. “By the Holy Spirit who dwells in you (already),” says Paul in Romans 8:11, “God will also quicken your mortal bodies.” Therefore, those who kill the body only are not to be feared. It can be raised from the dead. Moreover, it must be raised. The soul cannot always remain without a body. And on the other side we hear in Jesus’ saying in Matthew 10:28 that the soul can be killed. The soul is not immortal. There must be a resurrection for both; for since the Fall the whole man is “sown corruptible.” For the inner man, thanks to the transformation by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection can take place already in this present life: through the “renewal from day to day.” The flesh, however, still maintains its seat in our body. The transformation of the body does not take place until the End, when the whole creation will be made new by the Holy Spirit, when there will be no death and no corruption.

This tension is already present in and with Jesus. He proclaims the Kingdom of God for the future; but on the other hand, He proclaims that the Kingdom of God has already broken in, since He Himself with the Holy Spirit is indeed already repulsing death by healing the sick and raising the dead (Matthew 12:28, 11:3ff, Luke 10:18) in anticipation of the victory over death which He obtains in His own death. Schweitzer is not right when he sees the original Christian hope only a hope in the future; nor is C.H. Dodd when he speaks only of realized eschatology; still less Bultman when he resolved the original hope of Jesus and the first Christians into existentialism. It belongs to the very stuff of the New Testament that it thinks in temporal categories, and this is because the belief that in Christ the resurrection is achieved is the starting-point of all Christian living and thinking. When one starts from this principle, then the chronological tension between “already fulfilled” and “not yet consummated” constitutes the essence of the Christian faith.

NOTE: Not all of these paragraphs are contiguous in the original.