The blessed eternity of matter; or, rather, God is still incarnate

"The flesh is redeemed and glorified, for the Lord has risen for ever.  We Christians are, therefore, the most sublime of materialists.  We neither can nor should conceive of any ultimate fulness of the spirit and of reality without thinking too of matter enduring as well in a state of final perfection.  It is true that we cannot picture to ourselves in the concrete how matter would have to appear in this state of final endurance and glorification for all eternity.  But we have so to love our own physicality and the worldly environment appropriate to it that we cannot reconcile ourselves to conceiving of ourselves as existing to all eternity otherwise than with the material side of our natures enduring too in a state of final perfection.  And—one shudders at the 'blasphemy' which such an idea must represent for the Greek mentality—we could not conceive of the divine Logos either in the eternal perfection which belongs to it for ever otherwise than as existing for ever in the state of material incarnation which it has assumed.  As materialists we are more crassly materialist than those who call themselves so.  For among these it would still be possible to imagine that matter as a whole and in its entirety could, so to say, be raised at one blow onto a new plane and undergo a radical qualitative change such that, for purposes of definition, it could no longer be called matter because this future state would be so utterly different from the former one in which it originated.  We can entertain no such theory.  We recognize and believe that this matter will last for ever, and be glorified for ever.  It must be glorified.  It must undergo a transformation the depths of which we can only sense with fear and trembling in that process which we experience as our death.  But it remains.  It continues to perform its function for ever.  It celebrates a festival that lasts for ever.  Already even now it is such that its ultimate nature can survive permanently; and such too that God has assumed it as his own body.  Non horruisti virginis uterum.  Non horruisti materiae beatam aeternitatem."

     Karl Rahner, "The festival of the future of the world" (1961), Theological investigations 7:  further theology of the spiritual life 1, trans. David Bourke (New York:  Seabury, Crossroad, 1971), 183-184 (181-185) =Schriften zur Theologie 7 (Einsiedeln, Zürich, & Köln:  Benziger Verlag, 1966), 180-181 ="Christi Himmelfahrt," Korrespondenzblatt des Collegium Canisianum 96 (1961/1962):  6?-68.  "Non horruisti materiae beatam aeternitatem" is, I think, of Rahnerian coinage, though clearly the appropriate Christian gloss on the "mundi aeternitas" of Aristotle and other ancients.