The Tombstone that Trembled

The central mark of the Christian message, one that distinguishes it from nearly all the competitive religious claims in the world today, is its emphasis on the redemptive acts of God in history. The Gospel is unmistakably historical and incarnational. To the earliest disciples of Jesus, the bodily resurrection of their Lord was the decisive proof of his divinity and of the existence and power of his Father. The resurrection gave them both the core of their theology (Rom. 4:25) and the ground of certainty in their apologetic (Acts 17:31). To save man from both sin and uncertainty, God made a demonstration of his existence and character in the flesh and bone of history, in the empirical realm where men live and move. The “unknown God” is no longer unknown. He is risen!

The Apostle Paul boldly affirmed: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.… Your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:14, 17). Paul did not hesitate to insist that faith and historical reality were quite inseparable; he even went so far as to rest faith upon facts. There is a place in time and space where the power of God has been unequivocally demonstrated, and where it can be discerned by the use of historical reasoning. The resurrection provides skeptical man with a verification procedure by which he may surmount the hurdle of conflicting religious claims and come face to face with the Lord Christ. The resurrection caused that mighty explosion which was the primitive Church and without which the first Christian community is beyond explanation. A historical datum like the resurrection must be approached as such, through use of the historical method. Genuinely historical materials can yield only probable, and not mathematical, certainty. But this is true of all study in legal and historical evidence, and it is no liability for an intelligent faith.

If proof of the resurrection can approach a high degree of probability, this is sufficient to encourage any honest seeker to examine the New Testament data for himself and to face the claims of Christ on his life. Therefore, such proof is far from insignificant. A superb example of its usefulness is found in experience of Frank Morrison, who tried to write a book against the resurrection but couldn’t:

The stubbornness of the facts prevented his writing of the book he had intended to write and necessitated his writing another, in which he adduced the evidence, as he, the lawyer, saw it, for the historicity of Christ’s resurrection. Without doubt, the factual side of the resurrection is not the only side. But for the non-Christian seeking answers to questions, it is the most important side; for if it is true, all other issues can be settled quickly.

The Easter faith is prime evidence that the current streams of existential theology are in opposition to biblical religion at this point. To suggest, as Rudolf Bultmann does, that the absence of verifiable historical foundations beneath the Gospel is the essence of the scandal of the Cross, is a magnificent distortion, in precise opposition to the apostolic witness itself. The evangelists were convinced of the factual integrity of their proclamation, and were prepared to ground the legitimacy of their appeal upon it.

Modern theology has had a failure of nerve, and evangelicals ought to have no part of it. It is no weakness to establish our apologetic where the apostles did, on the reality of the incarnation (John 1:14; 1 John 1:1–3) and particularly of the resurrection (1 Pet. 1:4). C. S. Lewis became a Christian when “God closed in.” The quest for God of Wolfhart Pannenberg, a theologian so important today in the debate over this very question, ended in faith in Christ through rational, historical reflection more than any other way. The beauty of the Christian message is its open-to-investigation form, which opens a door to the Gospel for any honest seeker. Easter faith requires sound historical underpinnings, and believers rejoice to know that these are solid. It is imperative for Christian and non-Christian alike to realize that the claims of the Gospel are rooted in objective evidences.

In considering the resurrection we are in the realm of history and are dealing with historical data, empirical in nature. Canon Westcott wrote: “Indeed, taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the resurrection of Christ” (The Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 4). Happily, theology is again beginning to take seriously the fact that the Christian faith is inseparably tied to history (see Theology as History, edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr., Harper & Row, 1967). Evangelical scholars have long been saying the same thing (see Daniel P. Fuller, Easter Faith and History, Eerdmans, 1965; John Warwick Montgomery, The Shape of the Past, Edwards Brothers, Inc., 1962, especially chapter five; and, most recently, Clark H. Pinnock, Set Forth Your Case, Craig, 1967, especially chapters seven to eleven).

In the accompanying discussion in this issue, Dr. Lawrence Burkholder balks at the use of historical reasoning in verifying the resurrection faith, and perhaps at the empty tomb itself. Both he and Dr. Harvey Cox seem to agree that the arguments of David Hume are valid against any such use of Christian evidences as Professor Anderson employs. But is not their confidence in the methodology of Hume quite mistaken and outdated? For some time now science has been content with the humble role of describing events for which testimony exists, and has disavowed the Humean inclination of authorizing what events may occur on the basis of a naturalistic a priori. Anyway, it is a rather well-known fact that, in his argument, Hume cheats. He answers the question of miracles negatively only on the basis of an assumed, unproven, and unprovable uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. The experience against miracles is uniform only if we know that all the reports about miracles are false, and this we do not know. No one has an infallible knowledge of “natural laws,” so that he can exclude from the outset the very possibility of unique events. Science can tell us what has happened, but it cannot tell us what may or may not happen. It observes events; it does not create them. The historian does not dictate what history can contain; he is open to whatever the witnesses report. An appeal to Hume bespeaks ignorance of historical method, and sadly so, because at this very point of a historical resurrection, the Gospel is abundantly clear. Pannenberg is quite correct in exorcising the ghost of Hume from this whole discussion.

The proper question to Cox and Burkholder is this: If you do not know the resurrection event through historical reasoning with genuine materials from the past, how do you know it? My immediate experience cannot determine what Caesar did in Gaul, Napoleon in Russia, or Alexander in Persia. The apostles claim that the resurrection is a historical event capable of critical examination. The resurrection fact calls for resurrection faith. The suggestion by Professor Cox that we start with the experience of Christ risen is a subtle appeal that may actually mask real agnosticism about the factuality of that event. The claim to valid knowledge about God based upon private experience is far shakier, far more open to equivocation, than the historical claim of Professor Anderson. For the very same naturalism that seeks to rob us of the supernatural significance of the resurrection is glad to relieve us of the supernatural significance of our experience of it, too! We are then left without either. If Christianity is to advance, naturalism must retreat, and the strongest asset on the side of the Christian message is precisely the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Professor Cox implies that the apostles could have entertained the idea of resurrection without thinking of an empty tomb. In the same manner, Paul Tillich insisted that the resurrection need be nothing more than the reawakening of new being in the minds of Jesus’ disciples after his death. Pannenberg is absolutely correct in giving an emphatic no to this faulty argument. An empty tomb is self-evident to the idea of resurrection. There is not a scrap of evidence to show that a Jew of the first century could have conceived of it differently. In alluding to the burial of Christ, Paul unmistakably makes reference to the empty tomb (1 Cor. 15:4). We are shut up to the fact that the explanation of the belief of the disciples, and of the survival and expansion of the Easter faith in the midst of enemies who, had they been able, would have disproved the resurrection claim, is given in the words of the angel: “He is not here; for he has risen as he said.”

The aspect of Pannenberg’s multi-faceted theology that excites the evangelical is that here at last a theological school is arising in Germany that is not stamped with the dialectical theology of the twenties. Finally it has become possible, in the mart of contemporary theology, to talk about one history, instead of two, and to locate God’s acts and words in that! Many more have suspected, but too few have dared to say it, that dialectical theology made faith virtually an unintelligible act for thinking men. It made the Holy Spirit a deus ex machina acting in a cognitive vacuum, or, as Pannenberg deftly put it, an asylum of ignorance. Now faith can again be viewed, as Warfield insisted a generation ago, as an intelligible decision based upon sufficient evidences deemed trustworthy by suitable criteria. Even Kendrick Grobel admits that Luke deliberately presents the resurrection as objectively factual and historical (Theology as History, p. 173). In his attempt to ground the event in history, Pannenberg is being faithful to the intent of the New Testament itself.

The appeal for an honest investigation of the facts is the one best calculated to induce the non-Christian to look into the question for himself. Evangelical theology offers modern men a verifiable truth claim, and not a highly subjective self-analysis that bears little relation to the religion of Jesus Christ it purports to represent. Here we agree with Pannenberg:

If historical study keeps itself free from the dogmatic postulate that all events are of the same kind, and at the same time remains critical toward its own procedure, there does not have to be any impossibility in principle in asserting the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus [Revelation as History, pp. 264 f.].

The one point in Pannenberg’s thesis that gives us pause is his belief in legendary elements in the resurrection narratives, in particular the account of Jesus’ eating after his resurrection. This is surely an unusual objection from one who so ably defends the factual character of the witness to the resurrection. For if, as Pannenberg admits, the New Testament testimony to the bodily resurrection is sound, what could be more natural than to discover in the accounts incidents that would have proved this very point to incredulous disciples like Peter and Thomas?

The New Testament writers took pains to distinguish between myth and fact in their accounts. Pannenberg’s ready admission of legendary elements in these narratives weakens his whole case; his audience is driven to wonder just how much falsification in the witness he can allow without destroying the fundamental argument. Paul’s saying that flesh and blood will not inherit the Kingdom of God cannot be used to refute both Luke and John in their vivid insistence on the reality of the bodily resurrection; as Professor Anderson observes, they wanted to show, not that the resurrected body was merely flesh and blood, but that the glorified, spiritual body was real. Certainly he needed no food, but for their sakes he ate it, to convince them he was no mere ghostly apparition but the risen Jesus Christ.

If the resurrection can be vindicated by historical reasoning, however, a heavy burden of responsibility rests upon pastors, teachers, and scholars to make such a demonstration for our time. For both biblical and strategic reasons, the cross and the resurrection belong at the center of our apologetic today. We live in a world that requires adequate evidence for belief, and this we are obliged to provide.

If acceptance of the historical data precedes faith, and is indispensable to it, then it is the duty of Christian thinkers to undertake immediately a more profound and systematic defense of its basis. Lessing’s ditch between fact and faith is not “ugly” to us as it was to him. But if through our negligence the gap is left unbridged, the next generation will find it as difficult to leap as he.

The certainty of the apostles was founded on their experiences in the factual realm. To them Jesus showed himself alive “by many infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3). The term Luke uses is tekmerion, which indicates a demonstrable proof. The disciples came to their Easter faith through inescapable empirical evidence available to them, and available to us through their written testimony. It is important for us, in an age that calls for evidence to sustain the Christian claim, to answer the call with appropriate historical considerations. For the resurrection stands within the realm of historical factuality, and constitutes excellent motivation for a person to trust Christ as Saviour. The Church has the obligation, within its Great Commission, to verify the central fact of its proclamation and faith for each generation.—CLARK H. PINNOCK, associate professor of theology, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

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