How Do We Teach Resurrection?  (By Joseph Fielding McConkie, from his book 50 Truths, page 65)

“The perfect evidence that salvation rests in Jesus Christ is found in His resurrection.  Critics explain away His teachings and His miracles, but if in fact He broke the bands of death and thereby made immortality and eternal life possible, all efforts to deny Him fail and He is indeed the Son of God and the Savior of all humankind.

The Christian world, while divided on a great host of issues, all of one accord unite to proclaim the resurrection of Christ.  What is singularly significant is that none of its churches or denominations can tell us what the resurrection is.  Is it not the obligation of the true Church to correctly define and teach what the resurrection is?  If there is uncertainty on this doctrine, of what can we be certain? 

Dictionaries uniformly define the resurrection as the calling one forth from death to life.  If this is what resurrection is then Lazarus should have lived forever and Christ was not the first fruits of the resurrection as scripture proclaims.

I have heard a rabbi define resurrection as the memory of us that our family and friends will carry in their minds.  As the reader will note there is no need of Christ in such a definition.

In discussing the resurrection, most religious leaders cite the words of Paul wherein he said that in the resurrection we will have ‘a spiritual body (1^st Corinthians 15:44).  Some interpret this to mean that we will return to the spirit essence from which we were made and become a drop of essence in the great ocean of essences.  All seem united in the belief that gender will no longer exist and that marriage and family serve no purpose and will therefore not exist either.

If we can trust the expressions common to obituaries, their doctrinal expressions fall on deaf ears and people much prefer to rest their faith in the scripture of the heart, which suggests quite the opposite to them.  In fairness to the world of Bible believers, we as Latter-day Saints would have no more knowledge than they if not for that which was revealed through Joseph Smith…

We know that death is the separation of the body and the spirit.  We learn from Alma that in the resurrection they are united together ‘never to be divided.’  You cannot be resurrected and die again.  We also learn that the phrase ‘spiritual body’ as used by Paul means that the resurrected being can never again be subject to that which is temporal.  This is the kind of body that Adam and Eve had before the Fall (Moses 3:7).  Alma also tells us that the resurrected body can no more ‘see corruption,’ meaning that it cannot age or experience sickness of any kind.

In the vision of the redemption of the dead Joseph F. Smith describes that for which those assembled in the paradise of God waited, ‘Their sleeping dust was to be restored unto its perfect frame, bone to his bone and the sinews and the flesh upon them, the spirit and the body to be united never again to be divided, that they might receive a fulness of joy.’ (D&C 138:17).

Not only does this passage affirm Alma’s testimony that the union of body and spirit is such that it can ‘never again’ be divided, but is also affirms that the phrase ‘sleeping dust’ is not to be taken literally.

Our spirits do not return to dust having no consciousness after death, as many so-called Bible believers have told us, but rather is a figurative phrase not meant to discount the manner in which life continues in the world of the spirits…

The doctrine of resurrection as restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith holds that all things were given birth first as spirits and then granted physical tabernacles in the flesh and that after their death they will be resurrected to inherit eternal glory.  When our revelation states that all things were created ‘spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth,’ it is referring to the fact that in their creation both as spirits and as physical beings they were not subject to death.  It is the Fall that introduced death (Moses 3:5,9).

This means that in the resurrection elephants will be elephants, bears will be bears…and that men will be men and women will be women, with the sanctified among them granted the power to give birth to those of their own species (D&C 77:3).  A church cannot be held to be true that cannot declare the doctrine of the resurrection.  This doctrine plucked from the tree of paradise gives birth to a thousand other doctrines.  It is only in the revelations of the Restoration that we find a definition of the resurrection.”