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.

This chapter draws together the various threads of the previous chapters and suggests an outline for the Pauline gospel narrative as it emerges from a theological reading of contemporary exegetical proposals. This gospel narrative is in turn tested for its explanatory power by using it as a hermeneutical lens to read a central Pauline text, Romans 8, and to help negotiate the exegetical knots in that chapter.