Chapter 8 analyzes Augustine’s narration, in Confessiones, of his experience of the spiritual resurrection of his dead soul. As Augustine confesses, God graciously and gradually lifts him up from his descent into the triple sin of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and worldly ambition (1 Jn 2:16) along an ascent into the baptismal and ecclesial life of put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom 13:14). Augustine’s various presentations of the degree of his spiritual death, however, do not map neatly onto his threefold schematization of the soul’s paschal mystery. By these complications, Augustine suggests that he cannot coherently grasp the unfathomable depths of his spiritual death, which eludes his comprehension, but not the reach of God’s resurrecting power. As baptized Catholics, Augustine and Monica ascend together in hope for the beatific resurrection of the Church, entrusting themselves completely to the Eucharistic mercy of the Lord.

Chapter 7 searches into Augustine’s theological elaboration and scriptural defense of the spiritual resurrection of the soul from its death in sin to its life in Christ. For Augustine, the incarnational character of the spiritual resurrection consists in its intrinsic connections with the fleshly resurrection at the end of time and with the embodiment of a resurrected lifestyle in Christ even now. While the soul has the power to sin and fall into spiritual death, nothing and no one other than the God of the resurrection has the power to graciously resurrect the dead soul through its Christological incorporation and configuration. Augustine provides theological analyses of our two resurrections and pastoral descriptions of concrete occurrences of the spiritual resurrection. His scriptural paradigm of the spiritual resurrection includes how Jesus’s three miraculous resurrections in the Gospel figuratively signify three gravities of spiritual death and resurrection.

Chapter 3 focuses on Augustine’s early consideration of the resurrection as the transmutation of human flesh into an angelic body. In pondering Christ’s bodily ascension into heaven, Augustine experiments with the substantial transmutation of flesh and blood into an angelic, celestial, and ethereal body. As an attempt to handle our advancement in and through our beatific resurrection, Augustine’s experiment allows him to defend the bodily resurrection against the philosophical objections of unbelievers, who claim that earthly bodies cannot exist in heaven, and the exegetical objections of the Manichaeans, who insist that the substance of flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God (1 Cor 15:50). What permits this experiment, however, is Augustine’s conviction that the continuity and integrity of our human identity, both personal and communal, are grounded and crowned by the God of the resurrection. Augustine’s later precisions of his early concept of angelic transmutation manifest its insufficiencies.

Chapter 5 explores Augustine’s understanding of how Christians can come into contact with Christ’s resurrected flesh, especially through the scriptural proclamation and specular preaching of the resurrected Christ within the context of the Church. Augustine appreciates that Jesus makes his resurrected flesh available for believers of every nation and generation to see and touch in faith. Moreover, as one of Christ’s specular preachers, Augustine facilitates present encounters of himself, his hearers, and his readers with their risen Lord by preaching on the historical event of Jesus’s resurrection and surrounding events such as Christ’s crucifixion, death, burial, descent into hell, resurrection appearances, ascension into heaven, and sending of the Spirit. The impacts of our contact with the resurrected Christ include our gradual and integral resurrection in and through his risen flesh.

Chapter 1 locates Augustine’s earliest documentary adumbration of the resurrection in Soliloquia. It first contextualizes Augustine’s theology of the resurrection within the early Church by surveying the thoughts of other closely connected patristic theologians on the resurrection: Tertullian of Carthage, Ambrose of Milan, and Gregory of Nyssa. It then offers an approach to and an appreciation of the resurrection in Augustine’s earliest works, where he investigates the structure of the human person, identifies the essence of the happy life, and considers the status of the body. While Augustine’s mention of and allusions to the resurrection remain ambiguous, along with the tensions it generates with certain adopted Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrines, their significances remain. His later adjustments to and attenuations of his markedly philosophical notions of the soul’s immortality and the body’s dispensability evince his commitments to the Catholic faith in the resurrection and to the God of Jesus Christ.

The introduction contextualizes and outlines an approach to Augustine’s theology of the resurrection. After presenting the centrality and the meaning of the resurrection in Augustine’s works, it observes the discrepant paucity of current scholarship on this topic, while acknowledging both the merits and the limits of two modern trends in approaching it: (1) The first focuses exclusively on the bodily resurrection and (2) the second treats the resurrection in its plenitude. Following an outline of the book’s chapters, the introduction reflects upon Augustine’s theological methodology of faith seeking to understand the mystery of the resurrection through faithfully following the guidance of the resurrected Christ, the one true teacher of all, who abides in heaven and in the human heart.

Chapter 10 studies Augustine’s arguments for and descriptions of the future resurrection of all human flesh. Augustine defends the credibility and intelligibility of the fleshly resurrection not only against those pagans who doubt or deny human immorality and eschatology of any kind, but also against those who assume or assert some alternative version of human immorality and eschatology, especially such Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophers as Plato and Porphyry. Whereas their pride prevents these opponents from accepting the bodily resurrection, Augustine insists upon the Christlike humility that opens both the mind to accept it and the flesh to experience it truly and happily. Augustine’s Catholic faith in the resurrection prompts him to revise the cosmological and anthropological paradigms of classical antiquity. Furthermore, he identifies the recipients of the future resurrection as both the entirety of our human race and the entirety of our human flesh, even down to its smallest particles.

Chapter 6 investigates Augustine’s explanation, in De trinitate, of how the single paschal mystery of Christ’s dead and resurrected flesh harmonizes with our double paschal mystery, serving both as the sacrament of the spiritual death and resurrection of our interior man and as the example of the fleshly death and resurrection of our exterior man. As Augustine recognizes, the sacramentality and exemplarity of Christ’s fleshly death and resurrection are furnished to us on account of our spiritual blindness. In exegeting the theophany of God’s back to Moses, Augustine observes that living faith in Christ’s resurrection makes us friends with God and socializes us anew within the Catholic Church. Augustine articulates how Christ, the humble mediator of life, has vanquished the devil, the proud mediator of death, and his demonic and human associates, by the justice of Christ’s obedience unto death, and by the power of Christ’s resurrection to eternal life.

Chapter 4 argues that Augustine reaches a theologically coherent articulation of the resurrection in Contra Faustum Manicheum. At this culminating moment, Augustine defends human flesh and its resurrection against the Manichaean repudiations of both. Despite the Manichaean claim to promote the spiritual resurrection, Augustine diagnoses their mental captivity within their ideological constructs of an alternative reality and of a phantom and deceptive Christ as deriving from their disbelief in Christ’s true flesh and fleshly resurrection. Augustine shows how the risen Jesus and Scripture testify to the enduring substance of the flesh in its resurrection, whereby God vindicates his creation and accomplishes our salvation. Augustine progresses to a more sophisticated reading of key scriptural verses by distinguishing between the flesh’s substantial constitution and its qualitative conditions of corruption and incorruption. Moreover, in elevating believers’ hope and by transfiguring their sacraments, Christ’s fleshly resurrection has advanced them towards the kingdom of God.

Chapter 9 considers how Augustine features some of the most extreme expressions of the spiritual resurrection and of hope for the fleshly resurrection as Christians approach their bodily deaths and handle those of others. Augustine’s teaching and preaching on Christian dying, celebrating the Christian martyrs, handling Christian funerary and commemorative practices, and consoling Christian survivors serve to highlight the embodied spiritual life and activities of Christians whose souls have already been resurrected and whose bodies will eventually be resurrected, hopefully to eternal life. Among these discussions, Augustine acknowledges that Paul, the martyred apostle of the resurrection, provides some of the deepest theological insights not only into the mystery of the resurrection, but also into the interim condition of the human person after physical death and before fleshly resurrection. Despite the personal brokenness of death, Augustine sees that the continuity of human identity always remains in the hands of God.