The writers of the Gospels view the Resurrection as the key to the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth
Beyond any doubt, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a highly important aspect of the Christian faith. All the Gospels record it and see it as the culminating point of Jesus’ life. Although, for chronological reasons, it is found at the end of each Gospel, in reality it is the starting point of the Evangelists. To them it is the key to the mystery of the man Jesus of Nazareth and his cross. Actually one should read the Gospels backwards, for so they have been written. The writers see the whole life of Jesus in the light of his resurrection. The resurrection is the prism that brings out the constituent colors of Jesus’ life. Only after and through the resurrection did the apostles themselves really understand who he was.
The same stress on the resurrection is found in the Epistles of Paul. In the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, Paul formulates it sharply: The whole Christian faith stands and falls with the resurrection. If Jesus was not raised from the dead, then everything is lost. The apostolic preaching is in vain and the faith of the congregation is in vain (v. 14). About the apostolic preaching Paul says: “We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised” (v. 15). And about the faith of the congregation he says: If Christ was not raised, everything is a tragic mistake, and your whole Christian life is an illusion. Your past has not been reconciled: “you are still in your sins” (v. 17). Your future is a phantom: “those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished” (v. 18). Your present struggle is senseless: you “are of all men most to be pitied” (v. 19).
Mode Of The Resurrection
How should we conceive of the resurrection? Is it bodily, physical? There seems to be no room for doubt on this point if one studies the scriptural data. Of course, not everything in the resurrection stories is clear for us. Despite many attempts, scholars are still faced with problems in trying to harmonize the records found in the final chapters of the Gospels. But whatever the difficulties may be, one thing is perfectly clear: The biblical records purport to describe a bodily or physical resurrection.
First of all there is the fact of the empty tomb, mentioned in all four Gospels. Admittedly, this fact taken by itself does not conclusively prove that Jesus arose in his body. Taking it in isolation from the other scriptural data, one can easily explain it in different ways. In fact, in one of the Gospels we already find such an explanation. Matthew recounts how the soldiers, at the instigation of the priests, spread the story that Jesus’ body had been stolen by the disciples. The empty tomb as such is ambiguous.
It is therefore not surprising to find that the Christian Church never made this fact the historical ground of its belief in the resurrection. This does not mean that it is unimportant. On the contrary, it is an indispensable part of the whole Gospel. From the negative point of view, it can be called an essential part of the resurrection kerygma. For if it could be proved that, after the third day, Jesus’ body was still in the tomb, there would not have been a resurrection. But the Church never identified its belief in the resurrection with the fact of the empty tomb. The two facts are different matters. The one is only the presupposition; the other is the miracle itself.
This also explains why Paul can be silent about the empty tomb in First Corinthians 15. It is simply inconceivable that this fact did not belong to the tradition he had received (v. 3). It is so firmly embedded in the tradition that all the Gospels speak of it. Furthermore, Paul’s own argument in First Corinthians 15 cannot be understood without this presupposition. But the empty tomb is not itself the miracle. The miracle is that Jesus arose from the tomb.
Secondly, in addition to the empty tomb, there are the appearances. All the Gospels record some of them. In First Corinthians 15, Paul emphatically declares that these appearances belong to the tradition he has received. “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: [a] that Christ died for our sins …, [b] that he was buried, [c] that he was raised on the third day …, and [d] that he appeared …” (vv. 3–5). It is further evident from all the records that these appearances were not visions. The people who saw Jesus touched him. Thomas was invited to put his finger in the marks made by the nails and place his hand in Jesus’ side. The apostles themselves saw the risen Jesus eat before their eyes.
The records show also that the appearances have a different function from that of the empty tomb. For the apostles, they were the unquestionable proofs of the reality of the resurrection. We may say that the apostles’ faith in the risen Lord was based on these appearances. To use the terms “proofs” and “based” is not to take the resurrection out of the realm of faith and make it an event that everyone can verify on purely objective, scientific grounds. Such a verification is impossible for the simple reason that the appearances themselves belong to the realm of faith. We cannot do better than quote Acts 10:40, 41, where Peter says: “God raised him on the third day and made him manifest; not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses.…” In this present dispensation God confines the manifestation of the risen Lord to a certain selected group of people. The risen Lord showed himself, not to Pilate or Herod or to the Sanhedrin or to the crowd that cried for his blood, but only to those selected by him to be his witnesses. In this way, acceptance of him as the conqueror of sin and death remains a matter of faith.
But we must add that for these witnesses themselves, the manifestation was unquestionable. No room was left for any doubt of its physical nature. Peter himself adds to the words quoted above: “Who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”
Thirdly, Paul’s discussion in First Corinthians 15 also clearly indicates that the resurrection was physical. Although he does not state this explicitly, it is the underlying presupposition of the whole argument. From verse 35 onward the Apostle deals at great length with the resurrection body of believers in the great day of the general resurrection, at the end of the ages. This argument would simply make no sense if Paul were not convinced that Jesus’ own resurrection was also in the body. For the two are inseparably related. We may even go further and say that to Paul they are part of the one great resurrection miracle. Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of the great resurrection: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20).
Denial By Liberal Theology
Despite this clear testimony of Scripture, however, people have tried time and again to get away from the bodily resurrection while yet claiming to believe in the resurrection itself. In fact the New Testament informs us that already in the days of the Apostle Paul some were trying to spiritualize the resurrection. This tendency lies behind the discussion in First Corinthians 15. We do not know the exact background, but most likely it was the Greek dualism of body and soul and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Another instance is found in the teaching of Hymenaeus and Philetus, recorded in Second Timothy 2:17. Again we do not know the exact form of their thought, but they evidently were spiritualizing the resurrection.
The great attack on the resurrection, however, took place in the nineteenth century, and it is being repeated in our day. Both nineteenth-century liberalism (Harnack and others) and the neo-liberalism of today (Bultmann, Tillich, Robinson, Van Buren, and others) deny the physical nature of the resurrection. The two forms of liberalism, though definitely not identical, have much in common.
The denial by the old liberalism was the result of the unconditional acceptance of both the world view of modern science and the basic principles of idealism. The world view of nineteenth-century science was based on the idea of closed causality. Everything in this world is governed by the law of nature, and consequently there is no place for divine intervention. In this view, all miracles (except those that could be explained psychologically) were rejected. Scholars demythologized the Bible by eliminating everything that savored of the supernatural. Naturally, one of the first things to go was the fact of Christ’s physical resurrection.
Yet at the same time, these scholars wanted to retain the idea of the resurrection. They found the solution in the essentially Platonic concept of the immortality of the soul. Just as some people at Corinth did, they accepted the Greek dualism of body and soul. The soul is the really important aspect of man’s being, and this soul survives death. In this way they thought they could retain the resurrection of Christ and also our resurrection.
Their fundamental mistake, of course, was forgetting that immortality is essentially different from resurrection. Immortality is a “natural” concept. It speaks of an inherent quality of the human soul so strong that not even death affects it. It is another way to express man’s continuation through death. But the biblical idea of resurrection is totally different. Resurrection is not part of a natural continuum, of man’s essential structure; rather, it is an act of redemption by God. By his quickening power, God, in his grace, redeems man from death. According to the Bible, when man dies, he dies with his whole being: body and soul. And the resurrection is the divine miracle that this man in body and soul is saved out of the power of death.
This new liberalism of today also takes its starting point in the modern scientific world view. But it goes beyond the old liberalism. The old was still essentially supernaturalistic. It still believed in a personal God, in a world beyond this world, and in a life after death. The new liberalism (at least in the form of Tillich’s and Robinson’s theology) rejects all supernaturalism. There is no world beyond this world. There is no personal God who in eternal majesty transcends this world. There is only one world, the world to which we belong, a world governed by unchangeable laws of nature. Therefore the demand of demythologizing the Bible is again being heard. On this point the new liberalism is not new at all (only the term is new); it is in perfect agreement with the old.
There is, however, a great difference in method. While the old liberalism demythologized by eliminating all mythological elements, the new liberalism propagates demythologizing through reinterpretation. We have to seek for the existential self-understanding that lies behind all the cosmological-mythological expressions of the Bible.
But what does it all amount to, when we come to the fact of the resurrection? On this point in particular, the results of the new program are just as devastating as those of the old one. For Bultmann, the resurrection is nothing else than the origin of faith in the cross of Jesus as the saving event, on the side of the disciples. Tillich explains the resurrection in this way: The concrete picture of Jesus of Nazareth became indissolubly united with the reality of the New Being in the minds of the disciples. Robinson, in Honest to God, hardly speaks of the resurrection at all; it does not seem to play a very important role in his thinking. For Paul van Buren, the resurrection is the apostles’ experience of seeing Jesus in a new way and of sharing in the freedom that had been his.
In spite of all the differences in expression, the result is the same in all cases. All that is left is faith in the cross as the revelation of man’s authentic existence (Bultmann) or as the manifestation of the New Being (Tillich) or as the experience of a new freedom (Van Buren). In other words, the resurrection (whatever the factual experience may have been) has a noetical function only. It is only an “appendix to the cross,” an “illuminating” appendix.
Criticism Of The Denial
This whole position is, to me, untenable. I wish to point out two aspects in particular.
First, there is an over-estimation of the modern scientific world view. I am afraid that there is much confusion here, both in and outside the Church. Now, no one wishes to deny this world view and its relative value; it is the indispensable starting point for all scientific work. But at the same time we must keep in mind the adjective “relative.”
The scientific world view deals with only one aspect of reality. It sees the world as a mechanism, ruled by the laws of nature. In other words, it studies the “natural” connection between the various parts of the cosmos. But science, as science, can never go beyond this mechanistic aspect. It cannot make any statement about the relation of the cosmos to God, for this relation cannot be observed by the natural eye or measured with natural instruments.
I do not want to suggest that the two aspects (the mechanistic and the God-cosmos relationship) have nothing to do with each other. Still less do I want to say they are contradictory. On the contrary, they are complementary (see the symposium Christianity in a Mechanistic Universe, edited by D. M. Mackay, British Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1965); one gets the full picture only by taking the two aspects together.
It is therefore a serious mistake (which, unfortunately, is often found in conservative circles) to divide the estate between science and faith, to say that part of the cosmic reality is the sole domain of science while another part is reserved for faith. The scriptural position is that faith deals with the whole field that belongs to the proper sphere of science. For example, when science says, “This is a matter of the laws of nature,” faith says: “It is a matter of the divine power that upholds everything.” These are not contradictory statements; they are two ways of speaking about the same reality. Both deal with the immanent aspect of the God-cosmos relationship—the one from the scientific-mechanistic angle, the other from the religious angle.
But, secondly, the denial of the bodily resurrection can also be criticized on the grounds that faith also goes further than science. Faith knows an aspect that transcends the visible aspect measured by mechanical experiments. Faith also knows about God, angels, demons, a heaven. The resurrection belongs to this transcendent aspect.
This is very clear from what the Bible tells us about it. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is a new act of God. It is much more than an existential interpretation of the cross and of the faith of the disciples. It is a new fact that happens after the death of the man Jesus of Nazareth on the cross. I deliberately used the word “fact.” I even want to stress that it is a historical fact, for it happened in the history of this world. But at the same time it transcended the historical dimensions of this world. The resurrection of Jesus Christ was not simply a return to this life and this world. It was his entering into eternal life and into the new world of God’s Kingdom.
EASTER DIRGE
Who would breathe life
Into the lifeless form of our Lord,
Buried under the delta
Outpourings of the river of life,
Entombed under the debris
Of generations?
The ignoble death follows the noble one
By slow degrees.
Raised on the cross, he
Caught the eye of mankind.
The touch of an angel rolled
The stone away.
Now, who will forgive us
Our slow entombment of the Christ?
Will an angel’s touch
Roll our sin away?
Or must the earth, itself, quake
And crack open to free our Lord
From the deep grave, the second tomb,
We make for him.
MCGREGOR SMITH, JR.
Such a new act of God is, of course, impossible from the viewpoint of naturalism. In the naturalistic world view, everything remains immanent. The closed world view does not allow a new act of God; the whole system would be demolished by such a new act.
But it is characteristic of the Bible’s testimony that the resurrection is a new act of God by which this life, and death too, are transcended in a new life that is beyond the possibility of death. Indeed, it is fully a matter of transcendence. “New life” is not another term for immortality, which is nothing else than man’s continuity through death. No, the new life is redemption from death! It is not a return to this life, either. Such a return would mean only a temporary victory over death. The final result would be a new dying, and death would still have the last word. The resurrection is nothing else than entrance into the eternal life with God.
According to the Bible, this new life comprises the whole man, soul and body. The physical aspect is essential in the kerygma of the resurrection, just as essential as in the kerygma of the incarnation. Emphatically John declares: “The word became flesh …” (John 1:14); every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is the spirit of the antichrist (cf. 1 John 4:2, 3). This is not merely a verbal argument; it has to do with the very reality of the incarnation. The Son of God really became man. He really entered into our human existence in all its earthly, physical reality. He really partook of our flesh and blood (cf. Heb. 2:13, 14). For this is the way we as men live, this is our real existence: a life in the body (cf. 1 Cor. 6:13, 14). And as such people, living in the body, we will be saved. That is why the in-carn-ation requires a real resurrection of the flesh.
TO A SKEPTIC
Upon Mars’ Hill I stand
to plea with those who say,
“There is no God.”
You might as well tell me:
there is no nail on this bent finger;
no hair upon this graying head;
no feet encased in leather
to bear my weight
while walking through this world;
no joints to double me in laughter
at some great hour of mirth;
no throat to swell with joy
when observing beauty
in an age-wrinkled life;
no eye to behold the first faint smile
on a new face at birth.
I know there is a God.
He lives in a bone-framed
dirt-daubed house.
CAROLINE E. McELVEEN
All denial of such a resurrection is essentially a form of docetism. One can be a docetist, not only in Christology (incarnation and human nature of Christ), but also in eschatology (Christ’s resurrection and ours—both are aspects of the one great eschatological event of the renewal of heaven and earth). Motives for the denial may differ. They may spring from a dualistic world view (the older liberalism) or from a monistic world view (the new liberalism). But the result is the same: a docetic theology.
Theological Implications
The theological importance of this matter cannot be overrated. One’s whole theology is determined by one’s view of the resurrection. Only those who accept the biblical witness of Christ’s bodily resurrection can do justice to the full riches of the revelation. Only they can maintain the biblical doctrine of creation: The world as created by God was “very good” (Gen. 1:31), and man, in his totality (both his spiritual and his physical aspect), was created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26, 27). Only they can maintain the biblical doctrine of redemption: The Son of God really became flesh, and in the very same flesh he died in order to redeem man in soul and body. Finally, only they can maintain the biblical eschatology: the resurrection of the flesh, and a new earth.
From the creation, through the redemption, unto the final regeneration is one continuous line (Matt. 19:28). It is the one great plan of God. And in this plan the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the real turning point. Everything depends on it. If Christ did not rise, and rise bodily, our faith is in vain. “But in fact,” says the Apostle Paul, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). It is true. There is no place for doubt or question. Christ has been raised. The victory has been won. The Kingdom of God is an absolute certainty.
“I saw a new heaven and a new earth.… And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God … and I heard a great voice from the throne saying: ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them’ ” (Rev. 21:1–3). This is the completion of the great “regeneration” of which the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the foundation and the first fruits. A new earth! God with men!
