The Power of Christ's Resurrection

The ancient question of Job, “If a man die, shall he live again?,” remains the fundamental question haunting all men today. Although recent advances in genetics, surgery, agriculture, space exploration, and other scientific fields lead some to speculate that man will one day be able to control his own destiny, the brutal reign of death reminds every man of his ultimate fate. He is surrounded by evidence of physical and spiritual death. Physical death overtakes him through war, violence, catastrophe, accident, disease, or deterioration of the body. Spiritual death is seen in man’s egocentric existence lived in rebellion against his Creator, his failure to dwell in peace with his fellows, his inability to master his passions and live up to the demands of his own conscience. Dwelling in spiritual darkness and facing an inevitable grave, man can find no way out of his predicament. Then in the providence of God the darkness is pierced by the lightbringing words of Jesus Christ: “Because I live, you shall live also.” And on the Sunday after his Friday crucifixion, Jesus Christ, true to his word, bursts the bonds of death. His resurrection is announced by God’s messengers at the empty tomb: “He is not here—he is risen!”

The triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ, together with his vicarious death on the cross, is the heart of the Gospel. In the cross is seen the greatness of God’s love for rebellious man. In the resurrection is demonstrated God’s power over sin and death. Without the resurrection, life is absurd and men have absolutely no hope; but because of it, life has eternal meaning, and men who believe are assured a victorious present and a glorious future.

The reality of God’s mighty act in raising Jesus from the dead is taught throughout the New Testament. Matthew recites the angel’s words that “he is risen from the dead.” Mark tells of the appearances of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene, to the two who walked into the country, and to the eleven disciples. Luke describes how Jesus invited his disciples to see and touch his crucified body and ate fish in their presence. John relates many confrontations of the risen Christ with his followers, including his appearance to convince doubting Thomas of his resurrection. Paul declares that Christ was “raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,” describes his own encounter with the risen Christ, and repeatedly stresses the significance of the resurrection. The writer of the Book of Hebrews offers a benediction to “the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus.” Peter declares that by God’s great mercy “we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

The early Christians who first proclaimed the Christian Gospel were so convinced of Jesus’ resurrection that they freely gave up their personal ambitions, their possessions, and even their lives to make Christ’s message known. At his death men who had followed Jesus during his public ministry were grievously discouraged, perplexed, and fearful. They expected no resurrection, for they had not really grasped Jesus’ teaching about it. Even when Mary Magdalene told them of the angelic announcement of Christ’s resurrection, they did not believe it. Except for John, who believed when he saw the grave clothes lying in the empty tomb, those closest to Jesus did not believe in the resurrection until they saw and recognized the risen Christ. In his appearances Jesus not only showed them his wounded body but also reminded them of his own predictions and the testimony of the Scriptures regarding his resurrection. The empty tomb, his appearances, the disciples’ conversations with Jesus, and their reflections upon the Scripture led them to understand fully the truth of Jesus’ resurrection. As Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes, all these factors had their place “in leading the apostles through fear to wonder, through wonder to faith, and through faith to worship.”

The historical fact of the resurrection is well established by the evidence of the empty tomb and the events surrounding it, the disciples’ testimony of their actual experiences with the risen Lord, the emergence of the Church with its message of resurrection, and the changed lives of those who trusted the living Christ. Had Jesus chosen to show himself to the world at large after his resurrection, men would have been forced either to admit his triumph over death or to resort to a falsehood (as they did when his body disappeared from the tomb) to deny his resurrection. But Jesus chose to show himself only to people of faith. Why? Because true knowledge of the resurrection has a spiritual as well as an empirical basis. Knowledge of Jesus Christ as the resurrected Lord requires openness to the Holy Spirit, belief in God’s revealed promises, recognition that God acted miraculously to raise Jesus from the dead, and willingness to confess Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. The risen Christ appeared to his followers not only to convince them of the fact of God’s triumph over sin and death but also to lead them to a vital faith in him as the one “designated Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.”

The Kingdom of God was made known on earth with the coming of the Son of God in human flesh. But it was in Christ’s resurrection that the power of God’s reign in history was fully demonstrated, for by this act sin and death were utterly defeated. Christ’s victory makes possible man’s redemption from sin and assures believers of eternal life. This life is not only a matter of survival beyond the grave; it is a new kind of life to be lived in an entirely different dimension. No longer are men to live unto themselves as slaves to sin; now believers are to share in the very life of Jesus Christ himself. They are to experience his love, his joy, his peace, his power. As members of his body, the Church, they are summoned to be active participants in the carrying out of God’s purpose in history: to call out a people for his name. Those who are “born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven” for them, look forward to the culmination of God’s eternal purpose in the return of Jesus Christ at the end of the age. Then believers, alive or dead, will be joined with Christ. Their bodies will be changed to be like that of their resurrected Lord. They will bow to worship him, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Thus the resurrection of Jesus Christ solves man’s most baffling problem and removes the sting of death. Job’s question has been decisively answered. If a man die, he shall live again—if by faith he shares in the resurrected life of the Son of God. Christ’s resurrection alone offers man hope. The power of his resurrection is the greatest power in the universe. Because of Jesus’ triumph over sin and death, Satan has been defeated; he has no claim on the Christian believer. To those who trust in Jesus Christ, salvation is a reality for today and for eternity. God’s offer of salvation in the risen Christ stands before all men: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

One new star twinkling in the murky sky of contemporary theology is Jürgen Moltmann, whose Theology of Hope supplies a fresh orientation for religious discussion. At Duke University, where Moltmann has served as guest professor, 200 American religious leaders are massing to assess the Tübingen scholar’s contribution.

Moltmann’s view may be viewed in relation to three religious perspectives: (1) recent dialectical-existential speculation; (2) still broader neo-Kantian Protestant currents; (3) biblical theology.

Constructively, its significance lies in a considerable recovery of the scriptural sense of future—of the openness of history to the eschatological promises and purposes of God. Moltmann directly confronts Kant’s view that nature and history are experienced only as causally uniform realms excluding any unique divine action. He boldly repudiates the dialectical-existential isolation of the human self from the world and history as if divine revelation were to be salvaged only in immediate personal response.

Critically evaluated, Moltmann’s theology—whatever its advances beyond Barth and Bultmann—includes a highly unsatisfactory view of divine revelation that reflects (despite announced differences from Kant) Kant-like limitations on religious knowledge, and distressing obscurity about the nature, if not the reality, of the super-natural. The unhappy result is the surrender of ontological knowledge of God’s being, and indeed of any final knowledge whatever in the spiritual realm. The word of God is transformed into provisional divine promise that lacks universal validity. And so open is history to the future, so pliable to evolutionary possibilities, that the process of reality seems not to be bound to divinely created structures and providential ordering.

Evangelicals will not quarrel with Moltmann’s emphasis that biblical eschatology cannot be reduced to a subjective demand for the practical realization of ethical selfhood (Kant); to historical fantasy, or predictive insight into the meaning and goal of the historical process (Protestant modernism); to a dialectic of time and a transcendental eternity that hovers above all ages of history (neo-orthodox theology); to an existential moment in which one gains human self-understanding (existentialism). Nor can it be reduced merely to a doctrinal appendix of Christian beliefs concerning endtime events wholly unrelated to the present age.

Moltmann defines eschatology as God’s promised fulfillment, and he connects the character of biblical revelation as a whole with the final closing crisis of mankind.

This is theological gain insofar as Moltmann disowns Kant’s exclusion of divine revelation from history and the world, frees God’s promise and act from being unanswerable to regularities of nature and history, grounds authentic eschatology (contrary to utopian projections) in the person and history and future of Jesus Christ, and recognizes in the eschatological future a “coming” reality toward which we move in time (which even Barth finally acknowledged, against his earlier dialectical notion of God’s Kingdom as “beyond history”).

Contrary to Enlightenment determination of what is historical, historically probable, or historically possible through scientific projections of uniform causality (with its resultant exclusion of once-for-all events), Moltmann affirms history’s openness to God’s promise in view of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. Pantheistic, and positivistic theories, assuming the causal similarity of all events, are discredited by the theological-eschatological realities of nature and history.

With Moltmann, however, eschatology becomes “the medium of theological thinking as such” so that “the nature and trend” of God’s promise “dominates the understanding of divine revelation which governs systematic theology.” In thus subsuming revelation under eschatology, Moltmann sponsors an over-corrective of the recent neglect or subversion of eschatological realities; a recovery of a balanced evangelical view of revelation and the Bible would overcome this distortion of eschatological concerns without raising eschatology to theological priority.

As Moltmann puts it:

The Church lives by the word of God.… This word provides no final revelation.… As the promise of an eschatological and universal future, the word points beyond itself, forwards to coming events and outwards into the breadth of the world to which the promised closing events are coming.… It is valid to the extent that it is made valid. It is true to the extent that it announces the future of the truth. It communicates this truth in such a way that we can have it only by confidently waiting for it and wholeheartedly seeking it [Theology of Hope, Harper & Row, 1967, p. 326].

Moltmann thus ascribes to eschatology a finality that dilutes and demeans the scriptural revelation: “The doctrine of the revelation of God … must be eschatologically understood, namely, in the field of the promise and expectation of the future of truth” (p. 43).

Whereas in the Bible divine revelation or truth defines and characterizes eschatology, and eschatology does not relativize revelation, Moltmann comprehends logos only in alien Greek terms. His rejection of Greek ideas of God’s epiphany in history—of the eternal presence of Being in time (which assumes a divine immediacy that annuls the need of Christ’s historic mediation and reconciliation)—is wholly appropriate. But his one-sided emphasis on “the future of promise” and “the future manifested God” over-reacts against a speculative “presence of the eternal” by diluting the legitimate presence and present of God on the basis of special divine revelation and redemption. God’s promise loses the clear character of an intelligible spoken Word; his coherent revelation of his plan is excluded.

Asserting that the Bible has “no unequivocal concept” of revelation (p. 139), Moltmann veers away from defining revelation in terms of new knowledge of religious truth.

“Promise” is a fundamentally different thing from a word-event which brings truth … between man and the reality that concerns him.… Its relation to the existing and given reality is that of a specific inadaequatio rei et intellectus [p. 85].

Our knowledge, as a knowledge of hope, has a … provisional character [p. 92].

The whole force of promise, and of faith in terms of promise, is essentially to keep men on the move in a tense inadaequatio rei et intellectus as long as the promissio which governs the intellectus has not yet found its answer in reality [p. 102].

Moltmann rightly rejects the dialectical-existential correlation of revelation solely with immediate personal confrontation, and insists that “only in the correlation between understanding of self and understanding of the world” can understanding of God be acquired. Only in the light of “the biblical understanding of God” does human existence experience itself as moved by the question of God” (p. 276). Yet Moltmann criticizes Barth’s emphasis on divine self-revelation (pp. 52 ff.). By oriienting revelation exclusively toward the future of God, Moltmann principally undermines the possibility of ontological knowledge of God’s transcendent nature (p. 281). The “theology of the Word of God” gives way, in effect, to a “theology of history” viewed eschatologically.

Moltmann depicts divine revelation as a different kind of knowledge, distinguishable from universally valid truth, not as valid knowledge of a different reality. “Promise stands between knowing and not knowing …” (p. 202), is “prospective and anticipatory … provisional, fragmentary, straining beyond itself” (p. 203). But his “new understanding of ratio” (p. 73) is exasperatingly unclear. History is viewed as by definition impervious to universally valid truth; one assertedly relapses to Greek-logos speculation if he seeks unity, coherence, and rational consistency in universal experience, or if he looks for universally valid truth on the basis of revelation (pp. 250, 258 ff.). “Yahweh’s faithfulness is not a doctrine that has been received from the ancients … but a history which must be recounted and can be expected” (p. 297). “Christian proclamation is not a tradition of wisdom and truth in doctrinal principles” (p. 299). Paul’s Gospel “does not seek to transmit doctrinal statements by or about Jesus …” (p. 299). “Christian tradition is … not to be understood as a handing on of something that has to be preserved …” (p. 302).

If, as Moltmann insists, revelational disclosure gains its meaning from the future and is therefore neither final nor universally valid in the present, one may ask: By what special privilege did Moltmann acquire this fixed and all-controlling insight? If theological concepts indeed give no “fixed form to reality, but … are expanded by hope …” (p. 36), why should Moltmann exempt even his concept of hope from this same lack of finality? On what epistemological basis, moreover, can he speak confidently in our time of a future eschatological “all-embracing truth” (p. 164)?

What we are offered, apparently, is a new gnosis, a revelation-theory that reserves not only complete but valid truth for the end of history, and assumes that historical process serves to relativize all intermediary knowledge (p. 245).

The texts which come to us from history … have to be read in terms of their … own historical connections before and after.… Since this comprehensive context of history can be expressed in the midst of history only in terms of a finite, provisional and therefore re-visable perspective, it remains fragmentary in view of the open future [p. 277].

Although Moltmann combats the Enlightenment prejudice against a unique divine event (the Resurrection) in external history, he concedes the Enlightenment prejudice against unique revelation of objectively valid religious knowledge. By relativizing the Bible because of historical inevitabilities, while inconsistently exempting Christ’s resurrection from such treatment, Moltmann causes one to wonder whether he can avoid relativizing the revelation in Christ as well. His sub-intellectual species of revelation encourages the verdict that he replaces, not only dispassionate observation and passionate decision, but rational revelation as well, by the category of “passionate expectation” (p. 260). Moltmann writes:

“The Word” in “the words” can, rightly understood, only have an apocalyptic sense and mean the “Word” which here in history is only to be witnessed to, only to be hoped for and expected, the “Word” which God will one day speak as he has promised [p. 281].

The Protestant Reformers, whom neo-Protestant theologians invoke routinely and selectively, hardly correlate faith, as Moltmann contends, with the “promissio Dei” rather than “with an idea of revelation” (p. 44); they hold scriptural revelation and christological manifestation together.

If Moltmann recognizes in Kant’s speculations a formidable barrier to a recovery of the Christian revelation, his counterthrust is too qualified to achieve a confident return to biblical perspectives. Commendably he challenges Kant’s expulsion of divine revelation from nature and history and his denial of human knowledge of the eschata. Regrettably, however, he bows to Kant’s contention that man has no cognitive knowledge of metaphysical realities—and that is a decisive issue for the future of Christian truth.

Moltmann’s “theology of hope” raises other concerns; hope without an assured basis in the God of truth and the truth of God must of necessity be a dubious hope. Does it enfeeble the eschatological specifics of the Bible and imply universal salvation as its outcome? Does it authentically derive its call to ecumenical socio-political involvement from the resurrection of Christ? Does its neglect of biblical origins and of Logos-created structures reflect a desire for Marxist dialogue more than for biblical prerequisites (p. 289)?

In view of its proposed rescension of the biblical understanding of revelation, however, the unresolved question bequeathed to us by the “theology of hope” is whether eschatological reorientation by itself can provide an answer to despair.

CHARLES E. FULLER

Charles E. Fuller, the voice of the “Old Fashioned Revival Hour,” is dead at the age of eighty.

For more than forty years Dr. Fuller used radio to preach the Gospel around the world. His ministry began at the crest of the modernist assault on the Christian faith. He was converted under the ministry of Paul Rader and studied at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and his simple faith was built on the integrity of the Word of God. With his husky frame (he played football and captained the Pomona College team) and abundant white hair, he was for many years a commanding figure at rallies all over America and at the Municipal Auditorium in Long Beach, from which the “Old Fashioned Revival Hour” was broadcast. During World War II, tens of thousands of servicemen listened to the shortwave broadcast of the program, whose continuing theme was, “Jesus Saves.” Few listeners will forget the homey, country-boy style of this spiritual giant who evangelized the masses and also popularized the dis-pensationalist theology of the Scofield Reference Bible.

Dr. Fuller’s father, Henry, was a Methodist. Charles’s brother studied for the ministry and traveled to Germany for post-graduate training. Deeply influenced by German higher criticism, he disappointed his devout, missionary-minded father, who then left his considerable estate in care of Charles for Christian purposes. It was Henry Fuller’s fortune, increased by careful oversight, that enabled Charles E. Fuller to venture into theological education. Fuller Seminary, named after Henry Fuller, opened its doors in 1947 and became one of the consuming passions of Charles E. Fuller’s life. In part it was created to fill the space left by liberalism’s capture of so many seminaries. Dr. Fuller’s own son, Daniel, left an institution inclined to non-evangelical theology to become a member of the first Fuller graduating class.

The death of Charles Fuller broadens the already sizable gap in the ranks of veteran radio preachers made by the loss in recent years of Walter Maier (“The Lutheran Hour”) and Martin DeHaan (“Radio Bible Class”). An individualist who was in some respects a lonely man, Fuller by his radio ministry blessed the hearts of millions.

THE BATTLE OF THE CANDIDATES

The 1968 presidential race may be the most bitterly fought election in American history. Serious division in both major parties over U.S. policy in Viet Nam and the means of coping with urban problems, is deepening as primary battles accelerate. Robert Kennedy’s bid for the Democratic nomination, alongside Eugene McCarthy’s, widens the obstacles to Lyndon Johnson’s renomination. While Richard Nixon seems almost a shoo-in as Republican nominee he will not escape sharp vocal opposition.

Growing national disunity indicates a need for candidates to debate issues fairly in a spirit of good will. No candidate can hope as president to unify the citizenry if he spends his campaign energies dividing an already disturbed populace. What the nation needs now is a plea for truth, justice, righteousness, and order in public affairs.

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