190. a Book Worth Discussing- Res. of Son of God

7/30/2019 190. a Book Worth Discussing- Res. of Son of God

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A Book Worth Discussing: The

Resurrection of the Son of God

John H. Tietjenf

The Resurrection of the Son of God. By. T. Wright. Minneapolis: Fortress

Press, 2003. xxiand817 pages. Cloth.

$49.00.

"If Christ has not been raised, your faith is

futile and you are still in your sins. Then

those who have died in Christ have per

ished. If for this life only we have hoped in

Christ, we are of all people most to bepitied" (1 Cor 15:17-19).

So the apostle Paul concludes his re

sponse to those Christians in Corinth who

argued against the resurrection ofthe dead.

Forme the apostle's point is verypersonal.

If Christ has not been raised, I have been

living and proclaiming a lie.

. T. Wright's masterful work on the

resurrection argues cogently and persua

sively that the unanimous witness of the

New Testament is that God raised Jesus

from the dead and that, because God did,

the followers of Jesus will also be raised.

The resurrection of Jesus, Wright affirms,

was for the Christians of the New Testa

ment the evidence that the crucified Jesus is

the Messiah and that his resurrection is thefirst fruits of resurrection to come for all

at the outset that he intends to challengewhat he calls "a broadly dominant para

digm for understanding Jesus' resurrec

tion," a paradigm "widelyaccepted in the

worlds of scholarship and of mainline

churches" (p. 7). Wright describes this

dominant paradigm as follows:

( 1 ) that the Jewish context provides onlya fuzzy

setting, in which 'resurrection' could mean avariety of different things; (2) that the earliestChristian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodilyresurrection, but held a 'more spiritual' view;(3) that the earliest Christians believed, not inJesus' bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/ascension/glorification, in his 'going to heaven'in some kind of special capacity, and that theycame to use 'resurrection' language initially tonote that beliefand only subsequently to speakofan emptytomb or of 'seeing' therisenJesus;

(4) that the resurrection stories in the gospels arelate inventions designed to bolster up this second-stage belief; (5) that such 'seeings' of Jesusas may have taken place are best understood interms of Paul's conversion experience, whichitself is to be explained as a 'religious' experience, internal to the subject ratherthan involvingthe seeing of any external reality, and that theearly Christians underwent some kind of fantasyorhallucination; (6) that whatever happened to

Jesus' body (opinions differ as to whether it waseven buried in thefirstplace), it was not 'resuscitated' and was certainly not 'raised from the


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Tietjen. A Book Worth Discussing: The Resurrection of the Son of God

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series titled Christian Origins and the Ques

tion of God. In the first volume, The New

Testament and the People of God, Wrightdescribed and defended his preferred his

torical method, which he calls critical real

ism. He exemplified the method further in

the second volume, Jesus and the Victory

of God, and employs the method through

out in the present third volume.

In direct opposition to the claims of the

Enlightenment, Wright affirms that the res

urrection of Jesus was historical. Jesus

raised from the dead was an event in history

that can be discerned as other events are

discerned. It is at the same time the crucial

evidence ofthe truth of Jesus' claim about

the inbreaking of God's rule and the begin

ning of the age to come. Far from simple

resuscitation, Jesus' resurrection meant that

he was alive again in a transphysical body.Wright waits until the end ofhis book

to take up an analysis of the accounts of

Jesus' resurrection in the four Gospels. He

begins the book with the context in which

Jesus and the first Christians lived: the

Hellenisticworld, which for Jews like Jesus

and the first Christians was dominated by

the worldview and language of second-

Temple Judaism.That context did not allow for the

modern way of speaking that equates resur

rection with life after death. The Greek

world allowed no room for resurrection.

Homer, whose works Wright identifies as

the Old Testament of the Greeks, was pes

simistic about the state of the dead; at best

the dead were "shades" in an unpleasant

underworld. Plato, whose writings Wright

identifies as the New Testament of the

At the time of Jesus and the New

Testament the world of second-Temple

Judaism was dominant among Jews andwith it the teaching that on the day of the

Lord God would raise the dead bodily,

some for life with him and others for de

struction, a view held by the Pharisees and

denied by the Sadducees. Wright main

tains that the New Testament view of resur

rection is a major modification of the

second-Temple view, according to which

the crucified Jesus, who was truly the Mes

siah, was raised from the dead to signal the

onset of God's new age and to be the

representative figure for all of his follow

ers, who will be raised with him at his

second coming. Resurrection in the New

Testament, Wright asserts, is life after life

after death, though very little is said in the

New Testament about "life" between deathand resurrection. Paul affirms that it is to

be with theLord, and John the Seer pictures

the dead as under the altar of God in heaven

praying for vindication. As in the Nicene

Creed "the life of the world to come" flows

from "the resurrection of the dead."

After describing what the apostle Paul

has to say about resurrection in his other

writings, Wright analyzes the apostle'sviews in First and Second Corinthians.

What Wright has to say about the verse

translated "It is sown a physical body, it is

raised a spiritual body" (1 Cor 15:44) has

made it clear to me that whenever I read

that verse publicly again, I will have to

provide a translation of my own. The

contrast in the Greek is between soma

psychikon and soma pneumatikon. What

ever else those terms may mean Wright


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Tietjen. A Book Worth Discussing: The Resurrection of the Son of God

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"pneumatic body." Paul is contrasting the

life of this present age with its burden of sin

and corruption and the life of the age tocome, fully energized by the Spirit. In both

terms, however, the life is that of a body.

Resurrection life is therefore the transphysi

cal life energized by God's Spirit.

When Wright finally deals with the

accounts of Jesus' resurrection in the four

Gospels, he says that what they have in

common attests to their early (pre-Paul)

oral circulation. What they have in common is (1) their silence in reference to the

Scriptures, (2) their absence of expressions

of personal hope, (3) their strange portrait

of Jesus, and (4) the presence of women in

the stories. These common factors are

surprising if, as most scholars affirm, the

resurrection narratives are later writings,

"a back-projection of later theology," or

"coded message in support of the political

or leadership claims of the disciples in

volved." Rather, Wright asserts, the stories

are

answers to the question: why did early Christianity begin, and why did it take this shape? Theanswer is: because the early Christians believedthat something had happened to Jesus after his

death, something to which the stories in the fourcanonical gospels are as close as we are likely toget. (pp. 614-15)

In a chapter on "Easter and History"

Wright asserts that two things about the

first Easter must be regarded as historically

secure: the empty tomb, and the meetings

with Jesus. He summarizes his argument

as follows:

1. To sum up where we have got so far: theworld of second Temple Judaism supplied the

If Christ hasnot been

raised, I have beenliving and proclaiming

alie.

stories about Jesus' tomb being empty, and stories about him appearing to people, alive again.

2. Neither the empty tomb by itself, however, nor the appearances by themselves couldhave generated the early Christian belief. Theempty tomb would be a puzzle and a tragedy.Sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or

hallucinations, which were well enough knownin the ancient world.

3. However, an empty tomb and appearances of a living Jesus, taken together, wouldhave presented a powerful reason for the emergence ofthe belief.

4. The meaning of resurrection withinsecond-Temple Judaism makes it impossible toconceive of this reshaped resurrection beliefemerging without it being known that a body

disappeared, and that the person had been discovered to be thoroughly alive again.

5. The other explanations sometimes offered for the emergence of the belief do notpossess the same explanatory power.

6. It is therefore historically highly probable that Jesus' tomb was indeed empty on thethird day after his execution and that the disciples did indeed encounter him giving everyappearance of being well and truly alive.

7. This leaves us with the last and mostimportant question: what explanation can begiven for these two phenomena? Is there an


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torically unsatisfying. He concludes: "The

proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from

the dead possesses unrivaled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early

Christianity" (p. 718).

For the

believer atdeath the consumma

tion of the age to come

is now. There is no

waiting in eternity.

In a final chapter Wright takes up the

issue of the meaning ofJesus' resurrection

for the worldview of the first Christians.

Beginning with Paul's assertion that Jesus

was "declared to be the Son of God . . . by

resurrection from the dead" (Rom 1:4),

Wright affirms that for the first Christians

the resurrection of Jesus meant first of all

that he was Israel's Messiah, the one long-promised to inaugurate God's new age.

Second, as Messiah Jesus was also "Lord,"

a political claim made in opposition to the

claim that the emperor was Lord. Not only

was Jesus Israel's Messiah and as Lord the

reality for which Caesar was a parody; as

son of the Creator and Ruler of the world

Jesus was also "the personal embodiment

and revelation o/the one true god [sic]" (p.

731; emphasis in original).

third day, for his followers at the consum

mation of the age to comebodily resur

rection brings death to an end.I share Wright's conviction that the

Christian hope for resurrection to the life of

the world to come is grounded in Jesus'

resurrection on the third day after his death

by crucifixion. But Christians in the twenty-

first century have a worldview different in

some respects from that of New Testament

Christians. We have become convinced by

the views of scientists that we live in anexpanding universe shaped by a space-

time continuum. Space-time is part of the

created order and shares in the burden of

brokenness that characterizes life in the

present age. For us who live in the world

of space-time bodily resurrection is indeed

in the future, and we are limited by the

space-time constraints of life in this present

age.

But God is eternal, and when we die

we go to be with God in eternity, which is

no longer governed by space-time. We

leave space-time behind. For the believer

at death the consummation of the age to

come is now. There is no waiting in eter

nity. Bodily resurrection is no longer fu

ture but now. So, when we lay loved onesto rest "in the sure and certain hope of the

resurrection to eternal life, through our

Lord Jesus Christ" {Occasional Services,

p. 126), we can comfort our hearts with the

confidence that, because God raised Jesus

from the dead, our loved ones share already

now in the resurrection that for us is still in

the future.


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190. a Book Worth Discussing- Res. of Son of God