Apologetics · Creation — theistic evolution’s central claim is continuity. Paul’s resurrection argument runs on the opposite premise, and he states it out loud.
Arguments about origins almost always get fought in Genesis 1, which is reasonable, since that is where the subject comes up. But there is a place worth fighting it that nobody goes to, and it is not in the Old Testament at all. It is in the middle of the greatest chapter on the resurrection ever written, in a sentence Paul drops almost in passing while he is answering a question about dead bodies.
Before we get there, let us say the other position fairly, because a caricature is not worth refuting.
What Theistic Evolution Actually Claims
Theistic evolution — many who hold it prefer the term evolutionary creation — says that God is the Creator of everything that exists, and that the mechanism He used to produce the diversity of living things is the one mainstream biology describes: common descent, variation, selection, deep time. On this view the Bible tells you Who and why; biology tells you how.
The people who hold it are not, as a rule, secret skeptics looking for the exit. Many of them affirm the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, and the authority of Scripture, and they arrive at this position because they are trying to stay honest with two things at once — the text in front of them and the evidence in front of them. Their motive is integration, not surrender. Anyone who pretends otherwise is arguing with a cartoon.
But strip the view to its load-bearing claim and you get one word: continuity. There is no sharp biological line between the flesh of a man and the flesh of a beast, because the one came from the other by unbroken descent. Every category we use — man, beast, bird, fish — is a convenient label stuck onto a single branching river of life.
Hold that thought, and go read what Paul does with those same four categories.
The Sentence in the Resurrection Chapter
Someone in Corinth has asked a hostile question: How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? It is a sneer dressed as curiosity. Paul takes it seriously anyway and builds an argument from how God makes things.
But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. (1 Corinthians 15:38-40, KJV)
Watch the architecture. Seeds first: God gives each seed its own body, the one that suits it. Then flesh: not all flesh is the same, and he lists the kinds. Then bodies: celestial and terrestrial, each with its own glory. Three tiers, one claim — God makes a body appropriate to an order of existence, and the orders are genuinely distinct.
Then he lands the plane.
So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15:42-44, KJV)
The resurrection body is not the old body improved by degrees. It is a different order of body, given by a God who has been making different orders of body since the beginning. That is the argument. Discontinuity is not a decoration on it. Discontinuity is it.
The Best Answer the Other Side Has
Now take the strongest version of the reply, because there is one and it is not stupid.
Paul is not doing biology. He is reaching for everyday categories that any first-century fisherman would recognize — men, cattle, fish, birds — exactly the way Genesis 1 groups them, and exactly the way you would group them today if you were standing in a market. He is no more making a claim about descent than he is making a claim about astrophysics when he contrasts the glory of the sun with the glory of the moon. He uses the furniture of ordinary observation to illustrate a theological point. Pressing his illustration into a scientific thesis is reading him the way nobody reads anyone.
That is a real argument and it deserves to be stated at full strength. So state it, then weigh it.
Illustrations Can Be Load-Bearing
Here is the difficulty. There is a difference between a decorative illustration and a premise, and you can tell which one you are looking at by asking what happens to the conclusion if you remove it.
Remove Paul’s sun-and-moon comparison and the argument survives; it was a second example. Remove the claim that God makes genuinely different kinds of bodies for genuinely different modes of existence, and there is no argument left at all. The whole answer to with what body do they come is: God has always done this, and He will do it again on a scale you have not seen. If the kinds are only labels we drape over a continuum, Paul’s reassurance evaporates — because what the Corinthians feared was precisely that a buried body is just matter, continuous with the dirt around it, and that there is no categorical new thing God could make out of it.
Notice too that Paul is not describing gradual improvement anywhere in the passage. Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption. Sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body. Not refined, not developed, not selected for over generations. Sown one thing, raised another. The grammar of the chapter is discontinuity from start to finish.
And he presses the same logic all the way back to the first man — the first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven — a direct reach back to the dust of Genesis 2, used as the anchor of the whole comparison. Paul is not the only one. When Jesus answered a question about marriage He went to the same place and said God made them male and female from the beginning of the creation. The apostolic habit is to treat the opening chapters of Genesis as the floor they are standing on, not as a poem they are quoting.
Where the Line Goes Missing
Push continuity hard enough and something downstream starts to wobble — not in biology, in ethics.
Scripture grounds the protection of human life in a categorical fact, not a gradient. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man. Why may a man eat a lamb and not eat a man? Not because the man scores higher on a continuous scale. Because he is a different kind of creature, made on purpose, bearing something no beast bears.
The careful theistic evolutionist has an answer here, and it is worth hearing: the image of God is conferred, not evolved. It is a status God grants, a vocation He assigns, and a granted status requires no biological discontinuity at all. God could take a creature produced by ordinary means and set him apart by divine act.
Fair enough — but notice what that answer concedes. It admits that at some point God acted directly and made a real, sharp, categorical difference where biology shows none. Continuity has been given up exactly where it mattered most, and given up by divine fiat. The man who says that has already agreed with Paul about the thing Paul is actually asserting: that man is a kind, set apart by God’s own act. The remaining disagreement is only about the raw material.
Where Believers on Both Sides Actually Agree
Say the agreements out loud, because they are not small and the internet never mentions them.
- God is the Creator. Nothing exists that He did not make.
- Man is not an accident. He is intended, named, and accountable.
- Sin is real, the Fall is real, and the world is not the way it is supposed to be.
- Christ rose bodily from a tomb, and that is the hinge of history.
A brother who holds evolutionary creation and affirms all four is a brother. The argument here is not about whether he is saved. It is about whether the categorical language Scripture keeps using is doing real work or decorative work — and that question has consequences he may not have traced yet.
The Method Follows You Home
Here is the part that is not academic.
Whatever rule you adopt for reading a text does not stay in the chapter where you adopted it. If kinds are a figure of speech when the subject is biology, you will have to work very hard to keep them literal three paragraphs later when the subject is your own body in the ground. If the first man is a population, you will need a different rule to keep the second man a person. The interpretive habit travels.
And it travels in a direction. The reason this matters is not that getting Genesis right earns points. It is that the same God who says He makes kinds is the God standing over a grave making a promise about yours.
With What Body Do They Come
Eventually this argument stops being about fossils and starts being about a specific plot of ground with your name going on a stone above it.
Paul’s answer to the Corinthian sneer was not a theory of gradual improvement. It was a God who speaks and a new kind of thing exists. The body that goes into the ground is corruptible, dishonoured, weak, natural — and what comes out is incorruptible, glorious, powerful, spiritual. Not an upgrade. A different order, given by the same hand that gave every seed its own body in the first place.
Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. (1 Corinthians 15:51-52, KJV)
In a moment. Not over an age. That is the God the chapter is about — the one who is perfectly capable of taking His time and perfectly capable of not taking it, and who tells you which He did.
So when you read all flesh is not the same flesh, do not hurry past it as scenery. It is the premise Paul is standing on when he tells a frightened church what happens to the people they buried. He believed God makes kinds. He staked the resurrection on it.
You are not a modified beast with a theological badge pinned on. You are a kind — made, named, fallen, and bought. And the body you will be given on that day will be as new, and as deliberate, and as much a direct work of God as the first man formed out of the dust of the ground.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist