The Capacity for Resurrection

Indeed, if the presence of God in us does not take the same form now as it did in Christ, we can at least agree in recognizing that God is in us today no less than he was then.  Today, he is involved with us in as much as he maintains creation in existence.  In the incarnation he mingled himself with our being in order to make us divine through contact with his nature, after he had snatched it from death.  His resurrection becomes for mortals the promise of our return to immortality.

Our whole nature had to be recalled from death to life. God therefore stooped over our dead body, offering his hand (so to speak) to the poor creature lying there.  He came near enough to death to make contact with our mortal remains, and by means of his own body provided human nature with the capacity for resurrection, thus by his power raising to life the whole of humanity.

— from The Catechetical Oration of Gregory of Nyssa (335–394)