“Paul simply does not rate a prospect of future disembodied bliss anywhere on the scale of death as ‘salvation’, presumably since it would mean that one was not rescued, ‘saved’, from death itself, the irreversible corruption and destruction of the good, god-given human body. To remain dead, even ‘asleep in the Messiah’, without the prospect of resurrection, would therefore mean that one had ‘perished’.”
—N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 332-333.
You Have Heard It Said 