THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS: FACT OR ANCIENT FICTION?
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With N.T. Wright
In the video interview below, N.T. Wright (University of St. Andrews) explains the historic context of Jesus' resurrection. A timely reflection in this season of Easter. Then, we offer the first of a two-part series on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH AND LISTEN:
THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS FROM THE DEAD - PART 1
By Fr Billy Swan
“Let us not flee from the resurrection of Jesus” declares Pope Francis in ‘The Joy of the Gospel’.[1] For Francis, the resurrection of Christ crucified is the foundational key to the recovery of kerygmatic preaching, spirituality and the apostolic mission of the Church today. Later in the same document, he urges the Church to have a new conviction in the resurrection and a new boldness in proclaiming Christ as risen from the dead. In a section entitled ‘Evangelisation and a Deeper Understanding of the Kerygma’, Francis writes:
“We have rediscovered the fundamental role of the first announcement or kerygma, which needs to be the center of all evangelising activity and all efforts at Church renewal….On the lips of the catechist the first proclamation must ring out over and over: ‘Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.’ This first proclamation is called ‘first’ not because it exists at the beginning and can then be forgotten or replaced by other more important things. It is first in a qualitative sense because it is the principal proclamation, the one which we must hear again and again in different ways, the one which we must announce one way or another throughout the process of catechesis, at every level and moment”.[2]
Similarly, in ‘Rejoice and Be Glad’, the pope exhorts that the boldness and courage of the first witnesses to the resurrection, inspire the Church today:
“We need the Spirit’s prompting, lest we be paralyzed by fear and excessive caution…When the Apostles were tempted to let themselves be crippled by danger and threats, they joined in prayer to implore parrhesia (boldness): ‘And now, Lord, look upon their threats, and grant to your servants to speak your word with all boldness’ (Acts 4:29)”.[3]
Likewise to members of the Neocatechumenal Way, he said: “Christian communities…have the essential task of making this message visible. And what is this message? Christ is risen! Christ lives! Christ is living among us!”[4]
There are two major implications for this retrieval by Francis of the centrality of the resurrection for the Christian life. The first is the intimate accessibility of the risen Lord to all to which he invites everyone to a “renewed personal encounter”.[5] Francis promises that those who accept this encounter with the risen Lord “are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness”.[6] The second implication of this re-centering on the resurrection is a greater faith in the inherent power of the Church’s proclamation that ‘Christ lives’ (Christus Vivit) and that the Spirit of the risen Christ makes all things new. This is what Francis calls the principal proclamation of his saving love which “comes before moral and religious imperatives”.[7] The Spirit of the risen Lord is the presence and power that animates individuals, communities and cultures. In contrast to symbolic interpretations of the resurrection, what has come back to life is not just Jesus’ message and kingdom, but his person. In ‘The Joy of the Gospel’, he cautions against a type of evangelisation that is more “philosophical than evangelical”[8] and spells out the communal and societal repercussions of a kerygmatic spirituality that becomes incarnate in history.[9]
Reductionisms and Reponses
This emphasis by Francis on the centrality of the resurrection of Christ, is a contemporary push back against reductionist interpretations that are nothing new. In the second half of the 18th century in Germany, Gottfried Lessing (1729-1781) published the writings of Biblical scholar Hermann Reimarus (1694-1768) in which Reimarus attacked the historicity of the resurrection. This lead to a theological earthquake as the fundamental doctrine of Christan faith was seriously questioned and disputed. Around the same time, another German rationalist, Johann Semler (1725-1791), argued that faith in the resurrection was not essential to being Christian thereby subordinating the resurrection to the teachings of Jesus. Later in the 19th century, with the further growth of subjectivism, David Strauss’ work Lieben Jesu published in 1835 drove another painful wedge between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. For Strauss, the Jesus of history was true but not meaningful while the Christ-myth was profoundly meaningful but not historically grounded. For Strauss and his disciple Bultmann, the original events of the life of Christ were completely reshaped through mythological and legendary influences.[10]
In the twentieth century, Karl Barth’s dialectical theology championed the doctrine of the resurrection but would have nothing to do with the resurrection as an event of history. The miraculous elements of the Gospel must be demythologized to reveal the true Christian message.[11] The resurrection is a mere symbolic restatement of the message of Jesus. Within the Protestant tradition, this view was challenged by Wolfhart Pannenberg whose entire theology is based on the historical evidence for Jesus’ ministry and resurrection. For Pannenberg, the resurrection of Christ confers a totality that embraces all of history.[12] Resurrection is both within history and yet beyond it. Similarly, N.T. Wright’s ‘The Resurrection of the Son of God’ concludes with a firm affirmation of the bodily and trans-historical nature of the resurrection. This is supported by the coherence between Jesus’ physical resurrection appearances, Paul’s teaching on the resurrection of the body and the empty tomb.[13] In the Catholic tradition, there also appeared reductionist interpretations of the resurrection before and after Vatican II. Edward Schillebeeckx’s work ‘Jesus: An Experiment in Christology’ was influential as was Roger Haight’s work ‘Jesus: Symbol of God’.[14] What the works by Schillebeeckx and Haight have in common is a diminishment of the resurrection as an objective and historical event in favour of the experience of the first believers. In response to this reductionist view, Hans Urs von Balthasar followed the thought of Pannenberg and described the resurrection as a “meta-historical event” that took place within history but one that opens up towards all of history.[15] In 1992, the ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church’ re-stated the objective truth of the resurrection in these terms:
“By means of touch and the sharing of a meal, the risen Jesus establishes direct contact with his disciples. He invites them in this way to recognize that he is not a ghost and above all to verify that the risen body in which he appears to them is the same body that had been tortured and crucified, for it still bears the traces of his Passion. Yet at the same time this authentic, real body possesses the new properties of a glorious body: not limited by space and time but able to be present how and when he wills; for Christ's humanity can no longer be confined to earth, and belongs henceforth only to the Father's divine realm. For this reason too the risen Jesus enjoys the sovereign freedom of appearing as he wishes: in the guise of a gardener or in other forms familiar to his disciples, precisely to awaken their faith”.[16]
In the second volume of his trilogy ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, the late Pope Benedict XVI followed the traditional hermeneutic and insisted on the objectivity of the resurrection event that grounds Christian faith:
“The Apostolic preaching with all its boldness and passion would be unthinkable unless the witnesses had experienced a real encounter, coming to them from outside with something entirely new and unforeseen, namely, the self-revelation and verbal communication of the risen Christ. Only a real event of a radically new quality could possibly have given rise to the Apostolic preaching which cannot be explained on the basis of speculations or inner, mystical experiences. In all its boldness and originality, it draws life from the impact of an event that no one had invented, an event that surpassed all that could be imagined”.[17]
The Modern Cultural Landscape
In the light of this brief history of interpretation of the resurrection, the teaching of Pope Francis appears in continuity with the kerygmatic and evangelical spirit of the early Church. The resurrection is not a mere symbol or analogy but a power of divine love that breaks into history and that re-orders and renews all things in Christ. This retrieval of the objective grounding of the resurrection is timely for there are genuine concerns that reductionisms of the full impact of the Easter message are still with us today. For example, in his 2016 Easter message, former British Prime Minister David Cameron described Christianity in general and Easter in particular as something that involves: “Values of responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, and pride in working for the common good, and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families, and our communities.”[18] Now Christianity certainly does embody these values and ought to witness to these things. However, it is not difficult to see how the true Easter message was being pared down to suit the plural Britain David Cameron was speaking to. To put it another way, can you imagine St Peter after Pentecost saying something like this: “The message we proclaim is about values, hard work, charity and the common good”. If that was what the Apostles did preach, then few would have taken them seriously and Christianity would never have got off the ground.
Other examples of reductionist interpretations of the resurrection in popular culture and even within the Church itself include it being championed as a symbol of positivity, the triumph of the human spirit, resilience, courage and so forth. While the Easter message certainly includes all these things, the more subjective interpretations of the resurrection hold sway, the more Christianity is vulnerable to Feuerbach’s critique of faith being a projection of our own desires and wish fulfillment.
PART 2 next week
[1] Para. 3.
[2] Para. 164.
[3] Rejoice and Be Glad, 133.
[4] March 6th 2015.
[5] The Joy of the Gospel, 3.
[6] The Joy of the Gospel, 1.
[7] Interview with Pope Francis, 21st September 2013.
[8] Para. 165.
[9] The fourth chapter of ‘The Joy of the Gospel’ is concerned with ‘The Social Dimension of Evangelisation’ and the first section of this chapter spells out the ‘Communal and Societal Repercussions of the Kerygma’ (para. 177-185).
[10] Cf. D.F. Strauss, The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A Critique of Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus, ed. L. Keck, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1977. I am indebted to William Laine Craig’s book ‘Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics’, Crossway, Illinois, 2008, for a historical overview of resurrection controversies in the 18th, and 19th centuries. See pp. 333-400.
[11] See K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (First published 1919), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1968.
[12] See W. Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1968.
[13] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, SPCK, London, 2003.
[14] E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. H. Hoskins, Seabury Press, New York, 1979; R. Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God, Orbis Press, New York, 1999.
[15] H. Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990, p. 194.
[16] Para. 645.
[17] Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2011, p. 275.
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