Religion (1984) 14, 67-75

PAUL AND THE RESURRECTION:

A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH

Stephen Barton

INTRODUCTION In an earlier paper on Paul's doctrinc of the cross, I I tried to suggest the inadequacy of interpreting what Paul says about 'Christ crucified' in isolation of the social realities of the Pauline mission and of thc churches he founded. Working on an assumption drawn from thc social sciences, 2 that mental phenomena (such as ideas, beliefs and imaginings) are cultural items which express human meaning, I argued that the cross provided an alternative agenda for the formation of individual and communal identity by inverting the

�9 spiritual values and moral and political institutions of Paul's day. 3 My present purpose is to take this analysis further by asking after the social

meaning of Paul's doctrine of the resurrection. Nor is this an artificial design, since it is the cross and the rcsurrcction of Christ taken tog&her which form the core of Paul's gospel:

'Jesus our Lord, who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification' (Rom 4: 24-25; cf. 8:34).

In enquiring after the 'social meaning' ofthe resurrection, I will be enquiring after the contribution of this belief--and ihatJesus was belkved to have been raised is sufficient basis for the analysis--to the formation, definition and persistence of early Christian culture and community as reflected in Paul's letters.

THE SOCIAL MEANING OF THE RESURRECTION: FOUR SUGGESTIONS

1. The resurrection, as a claim about God, provided the mythological dimension of community-formation.

I t gave to the community's existence a foundation in the action of a transcendent being.

00-t8-.72 IX/84/010067 + 09502.00/0 (~)1984 Academic Press Inc. (London) Ltd.

68 S. Barton

For, in the first instance, the resurrection is understood as an act of God. Hence, the repeated use ofthe passive voice in 1 Cor 15: 'Christ . . . was raised on the third day' (15:4); 'Christ is preached as raised from the dead' (15:12); etc. As Conzelmann says, 'The passive is equivalent to the phrase that God raised him. '4 Hence also Paul's sensitivity t ~ the danger of misrepresenting God if the resurrection of the dead (and therefore of Christ) is denied (15:15). For Paul, the resurrection is part of ' the gospel of God' (Rom 1:1-4), a divine action in history which he feels compelled to proclaim.

This act of God is linked explicitly with the foundation ofthe community of believers. In Rom 4"16ff., Paul argues that, just as the 'resurrection' of the 'dead' (i.e. impotent and infertile) bodies of Abraham and Sarah made possible the creation of an elect people drawn from many nations, so the resurrection of the dead .Jesus made possible the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham in the creation of the community of faith consisting of Gentiles as well as Jews. The God 'who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist' (Rom 4:17) is the God who had called into existence this new, universalist community of the righteous, believed hitherto to be an ideal attainable only in the distant, eschatological future, s He has done this by an eschatological act in the present: the raising from the dead of.Jesus to become 'Lord' over the end-time community. Thus, Paul concludes that . 'righteousness' (which is the quali'fication for community membership)

' . . . will be reckoned to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord' (Rom 4:24).

It can hardly be,doubted that community-formation is given here a mythological foundation. (i) The resurrection is a focal-point ofthe story ofthe origin ofthe Christian

groups. (ii) It allows the Community to see itselfas a creatio ex nihilo (cf. Rom 4:17)

whose existence derives from a supernatural action by a supernatural being.

(iii) It sets the community firmly within sacred time, linking it to the past as the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham, and to the future as the anticipation ofthe long-awaited utopia.

(iv) It confirms the community as the locus of sacred space, a space no longer marked out by human 'works' but by divine 'grace'.

(v) The resurrection is affirmed in statements which have the appearance of being claims offact (e.g. Rom 1:1-4; 1 Cor 15:3-8; etc.); yet they are not susceptible ofverification or falsification since they refer to an event in the past in language whose point ofreference lies in the future.'

(vi) Hence, the importance of non-rational commitment for 'salvation' and access to the community:

Paul and the Resurrection 69

'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' (Rom 10:9).

In a word: faith, which Paul describes significantly in Rom 1:5 as a kind of'obedience'.

(vii) The compulsion which Paul feels (e.g. Rom 1:5, 14; 1 Cor 9:16-17) bears witness to the force of the myth. With the gift comes the obligation, as every anthropologist knows. For Paul and the Christians, their obligation was to 'confess' and 'believe': responses to God's 'grace' which powerfully reinforced the reality ofthe 'grace' itself. 6

2. The resurrection, as a claim aboutJesas, gave a particularity to the myth and lherefore also an identity to the community.

The elaboration ofits meaning for Jesus is, at the same time, an elaboration of its meaning for the community. It confers authority upon him and upon those who can claim contact with him. To illustrate:

(a) According to Rom 1:4, Jesus was exalted to divine sonship by his resurrection, was 'designated Son of God'. The name given to believers in Jesus corresponds directly. They are 'sons of God', 'children of God', and 'fellow-heirs with Christ' (Rom 8:14 IT.) and are 'predestined to be conformed to the image ofhisSon, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren' (Rom 8:29). It is striking to what extent the' conclusion of the anthropology of mortuary ritual m that 'the society of the'dead structures the society of tile living'7--holds true for early Christian society. The community's self-understanding is mirrored in, and, enlarged by, its representations of the crucified and risen Christ. That such representations brought psychological reliefand sociological reinforcement to the persecuted, minority societies of Christians is clear from Rom 8:31 IT:

'IfGod is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not alsogive us all things with him?.. . Is it Christ Jesus who died, yes who was raised from thedead, w.ho is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us?...'

Here, death and the dead a re made to serve life and the living: his name becomes theirs; his story, and especially his victory, become theirs also.

(b) In his book, Reason in Religion, George Santayana says:that

'every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncracy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in...-,8

Belief in Jesus' resurrection appears to have contributed significantly to the building of 'another world tO live in' for the early Christians. It did so by ascribing to him universal lordship (Rom 1:4). This lordship, cast in the idiom

70 S. Barton

of resurrection from death, of power through powerlessness, represented subversion of conventional norms of identity and status in favour of value which could be claimed as determined no longer by corporeality, heredit} tradition or rank. As Meeks has shown such a beliefwas especially appealin to many among Paul's urban clientele whose 'status inconsistency' (derivinl from their refusal or inability to conform to the status definitions applied b the socially dominant in the Greco-Roman world) and consequent socia alienation found confirmation in, and the possibility of transformation by, th, message of the Messiah's death and resurrectionP

This relocation of value and its very particular transference onto the riser Lord provided the basis for an alternative pattern ofcommunity , one iutendec to be undifferentiated by the normal markers of social stratification and religious belonging. Hence,

' lfwe live, we live to the Lord, and ifwe die, we die to the Lord... For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living' (Rom 14: 8-9).

Further, Paul's autobiographical reflections in Phil 3:3-11 show very clearly a displacement of the symbolic world of Judaism by the symbolic world of the resurrection. The particularity of the myth was revolutionary and uncompromising in social, as well as religious, terms.

3. The resurrection, as a resurrection from the dead of the one who had been crucified, sen'ea as a powerful theodicy.

The anomic threats to community life posed by t~be death of Jesus and by the suffering and death of other community members were overcome. The crucified leader was reincorporated into the community as its risen and heavenly Lord; and his triumph over death, repeatedly affirmed in creed, hymn and ritual, became a powerfid mythical symbol ofthe continuity ofthe community.

(a) The death of Je.sus posed the most severe threat to the continued existence of the group which had gathered around him (cf. 1 Cor 15:14, 17). For the society to continue, it needed assurance of its founder's presence and authority. This was guaranteed by the beliefin his resurrection, for this made Jesus forever present (cf. Matt 28:20) and therefore available and that on a universal scale. By so increasing Jesus' power, the community augmented its own:

'Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake ofhis name among all the nations' (Rom 1:5).

This may be seen as a process of compensation by expansion, l0 From being focused on the physical presence in Galilee ofthe charismatic leader, Jesus, its own spatiotemporal expectations set in relation to his personal itinerancy and

Paul and the Resurrection 7 !

proclamation ofan imminent End, the community's attention was able to shift in a universal direction with the temporal limits to its activity being represented in a variety of terms whose ambiguity served both to stimulate urgency and to facilitate rationalization.

Thus, the transformation of Jesus represented by the resurrection was also, and at the same time, the transformation of the community. Jesus' absence, interpreted as making possible his presence in another form, as Spirit (Rom 8:9: Gal 4:6) or as risen Lord, made room for a variety ofsocial developments. (i) It gave tile first followers of Jesus a novel and distinctive message, the legitimacy of which was based, not in tradition, but 'through a revelation of Jesus Christ ' (Gal 1:12); (ii) I t generated a strong impulse to universal mission (Gal 1:16; Rom 1:5--6,14-15); (iii) I t fostered a transition to leadership of the community by persons who could claim a commissioning by the Risen One (Gal 1:15-16; I Cot 15:5-10); (iv) It provided a new idiom in terms ofwhich community identity and practice could find expression. Hence, the community is to see itself as 'the body of Christ' (1 Cor 12:27); and their commensality depends upon eating Christ's body and drinking his blood (1 Cot 11:24-25). There could not b e two more explicit examples of the reincorporation of the dead into the community ofthe living.

(b) The deaths ofcommunity members also threatened social dislocation: it always does. 11 Paul repeatedly responds to this problem by discussing the implications of resurrection belief(e.g. 1 Thess 4:13-18; 1 Cor 15:12 IT.) The social meaning of the resurrection in l Thess 4:13-18 is quite explicit. (i) It is intended to be a source of hope (4:13) and comfort (4:18) alad therefore acts as a restraint upon social anomie in the face ofdeath. (ii) It unites the living with the dead by holding out the prospect ofimminent reunion with them in heaven (4:!7); (iii) The belief that the dead will rise 'first' reflects and reinforces respect for the dead among the living. Rather than being left behind (which would be an indicator of shame), Paul insists that they will have precedence (4:15, 16); (ix') Communal solidarity in the face ofdeath is reaffirmed by the belief that the division between insiders and outsiders will persist beyond death. Only insiders have grounds for hope (4:13, 16). Here are grounds for continuing in the community or for converting to it.

How this meaning attaches to the resurrection derives from the structure of the argumefit. It is of the 'as-with-Jesus-so-with-us' kind:

' F o r since w e believe that Jesus died and rose again, even s o . . . God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep' (4:14).

But this homogeneity between the fate of Jesus and of the believer is not,so complete as to obliterate what distinguishes-Jesus, for such would be to undermine the grounds upon which the initial identification was made, would

72 S. Barton

be to undercut Jesus' power to save from death. Hence the importance oftht belief that Jesus had already risen (4:14); that he was the exalted Lord ir heaven (4:15); and that he would be returning from heaven to initiate the resurrection of believers, to meet them en route, and to remain permanentl) with them (4:16-I 7). Thus,Jesus is established as the divine mediator betweer earth and heaven, between death and resurrection life: the guarantor of the community 's survival. I~

(c) The doctrine of resurrection also informs treatments of the problem ol suffering and persecution. (i) It promises a reward which compensates for present ills (e.g. 1 Cor 15:29-32; 2 Cor 4:17); (ii) It is a hope for tile future, the anticipation of which diverts attention from the present and serves, mythologically and psychologically, to foreshorten experiences of pain (2 Cor 4:17); 13 (iii) I t produces a devaluing of things visible and material in favour o1 things invisible and immaterial (2 Cor 4:18). This means that bodily affliction and material loss can be interpreted positively: as, for example, replicating the death of Jesus (2 Cor 4:10); or as proofof the claim that spiritual, rather than material, power is at work (2 Cor 4:10-12; ef. 6:1-10); or as part of the essential stripping away of the 'earthly' in preparation for 'the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens' (2 Cor 5:1); (iv) Such a hermeneutic ofsuffering permits the added implication that honour accrues to those who suffer most. Paul's repeated catalogues of his own suffering (1 Cor 4:9-13; 2 Cor 4:7-10; 6:4-10; 11:23-33) may be seen, then, as attempts to augment his authority in the churches. In a striking statement, cast specifically in the idiom of death and resurrection, Paul represents himself to the community in Corinth as a saviour-figure after the pattern of Christ:

�9 . . So death is at work in us, but life in you' (2 Cor 4:10-12; cf. 1 (:or 9:22b).

4. The resurrection functioned as a symbol of social and cultural change. Here, the structure ofthe belief, as well as its content, conveyed its meaning.

The binary pattern, death-resurrection, provided a form particularly amenable to the depiction ofalternatives, progressions and transformations, all ofwhich were means ofmarking out the limits of the new community.

(a) A classic instance of this occurs in Rom 6, where the closest possible identification is established between the fate of Jesus and that ofthe believer by means of a metaphorical interpretation of the ritual of baptism. I+ Here, tile death and resurrection. (i) There is a transition from the dominion of Sin to the Christian life, a mythological charter for self-perception and action (see esp. 6:3-4). The binary pattern of the doctrine serves to convey a series of transitions which are meant to follow upon participation with Christ in his death and resurrection:(i) There is a transition from the dominion of Sin to the dominion of God (6:10). Here, a statement in the indicative made at the mythological level (where God and Sin are competing spiritual powers)

Paul and the Resurrection 73

'cashes out' immediately in ethical admonitions in tile imperative: 'So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus' (6:11). The mythological action creates a new imaginative space which the community can inhabit. The powers of Sin and Death have been overcome and so tile believers--those who identify with Christ, who accept the myth as true---are enabled to rise, psychologically and sociologically to a new life, to life 'in Christ'; (ii) There is a transition from the dominion oflaw to the dominion of grace (5:20-21; 6:14). Once again, the imaginative space created by the myth sein, es to inform a transfer in sociological space also: from the communi'ty of law to the community of grace. Law has been displaced as the bounda~,- marker of tile religious community. A universalistic and pluralistic community is now made possible (Rom 10:4-14); I'i (iii) There is a somatic transfer: from the 'old man' and the 'sinful body' (Rom 6:6; cf. 6:i2-13) to a body whose 'members' have become 'instruments of righteousness' (6:13). The new man which the believer becomes, the new body which he is, remains for the time being a mortal body (6:12), but it is also transformed imaginatively into a 'new creation' by its passage with Christ in baptism from death to resurrection (6:4; cf. 2 Cor 5:15-17). (iv) There is a transition in time which is also a transformation of time. Dying and rising with Christ expresses and brings about a passage through death to 'eternal life' (Rom 5:21). It enables the believer to read his place in time in terms of Christ's place in time. So, Christ 's resurrection as an eschatological event in time past makes the future already present: a play on categories of time which allows the believer imaginatively to project his hopes for the future on to the present. It is

. . . . . . a .

slgmficant that Paul resists the mythological opuon ofd~ssolvmg the present in the future (6:5). By asserting that the believer's resurrection is still future, Paul qualifies the innovative power of the idea of resurrection. The somatic and specifically sexual orientation of Paul's concern here (6:12-13) may indicate that he wishes to forestall a situation of social anomie generated by end-time fantasy. There are indications that precisely this kind of situation had developed already in Corinth ( 1 Cor 5-7).16"

(b) It was not only the form and content ofthe beliefwhich made it a powe _rful symbol ofchange and model for change. For the transfer in human life-worlds which it meant was reinforced by its ritual context in baptism. This reinforcement derived from two factors, at least. (i) As a rite ofentry into the community, it was an expressive action performed at a point of heightened psychological and sociological awareness in the life ofboth the initiate and the initiated. 17 (ii) If baptism shares with other rites of passage the threefold structure of separation, segregation and aggregation, set forth by Arnold van Gennep in his classic study of 19081~--and the Didache points strongly in this directionlU~then it replicates in a striking and demonstrative manner that 'rite of passage' which lies at the very centre of Christian soteriology: the

74 S. Barton

passage of Jesus through death to resurrection life. For it seems hardly coincidental that, at several points in the Pauline tradition, the binary pattern ofdeath-resurreetion gives way to a tertiary pattern: death-burial-resurrection (see Rom 6:3-4; 1 Cor 15:3-4; Col 2:i2). Baptism, accompanied by a hermen- eutic which explicitly evokes Christ's 'initiation' into a new identity and sphere of existence, serves as a metaphoric assertion of the believer's passage into a new world (cf. 1 Cor 6:11; 12:13).

C O N C L U S I O N This analysis of the 'socio-logic' of the doctrine of resurrection is not exhaustive. The following points, at least, would reward filrther investigation: (i) the ambiguity ofthe doctrine which allowed the pneumatics in Corinth and elsewhere to invest it with social meanings quite difli~rent to those of Paul; (ii) the absence of the idea of resurrection from, say, Rom 13: 1-7, where a doctrine of political conservatism is based on appeals to God and conscience instead of the perhaps more subversive belief in resurrection; (iii) the probability that Paul's doctrine of the Spirit, as a development ofresurrection belief, functioned sociologically to keep alive the possibility ofchange; and (iv) the contribution of resurrection doctrine to authority patterns in early Christianity, amongst groups both orthodox and heterodox3 ~ But I have said enough, perhaps, to show that the doctrine ofthe resurrection playe d a crucial, role in the formation ofearly Christian culture. 21

NOTES 1 S.C. Barton, 'Paul and the Cross: A SodologicalApproach,'Theologv, LXXXV (Janua D'

1982), pp. 13-19. 2 See E. Leach, Culture and Communication (Cambridge: CUP, 1976); and idem, Sodal

Anthropology (Glasgow: Fontana, 1982). 3 Quite independently, ve D" similar conclusions were reached by Wayne A. Meeks

in 'The Social Context of Pauline Theology', Interpretation, XXXVII (1982), pp. 266-277.

4 H. Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians (ET, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), p. 256. 5 See F. Hahn, Mission in the New Testament (ET, London: SCM, 1965), pp. 18-25. 6 This confirms Clifford Geertz's definition of a religion, in The Interpretation of

Cultures (New York: Basic Book, 1973), p.90 as '(!) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order ofexistence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.'

7 R. Huntingdon and P. Metcalf, Celebrations of Death (Cambridge: CUP, 1979), p. 65.

8 Quoted in C. Geertz, Interpretation, p. 87. 9 W.A. Meeks, "Social Context', esp. pp. 270-276.

10 See further the application of the psychological theory ofcognitive dissonance to Christian missionary activity in J.G. Gager, Kingdom and CommuniO' (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. 37-49.

Paul and the Resurrection 75

11 For a classic discussion of thcodicy, see M. Weber, The Sodolog~ of Religion (ET, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 138-150.

12 Note such phrases ofmeditation and incorporation as 'through Jesus', 'with him' (4:14), 'in Christ' (4:16) and 'with the Lord' (4: ! 7).

13 See H. Desroche, The Sodology of Hope (ET, London: RKP, 1979). 14 See R.C. Tannehill, Dying and Rising with Christ (Berlin: T6pelmann, 1967). 15 On the social implications of conversion in the case of Paul himself, see S.R.

Isenberg, 'Some Uses of and Limitations of Social Scientific Methodology in the Study of Early Christianity', SBL 1980 Seminar Papers (Scholars Press, 1980), pp.29-49.

16 See P. Richardson's essay, 'Judgement, Immorality, and Sexual Ethics in 1 Corinthians 6', SBL 1980 Seminar Papers pp. 337-357. Wayne Meeks, 'Social Context', pp. 274-275, points out that the Corinthians' antinomian tendencies highlight the ambiguity of the social implicatons ofresurrection belief.

17 The formative influence ofbaptism is implied strongly in Paul's efforts to mitigate (what he regards as) its divisive social effects at Corinth: see 1 Cor 1: 11-17.

18 A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (ET, London: RKP, 1960). 19 The Didache, itselfintended for catechumens prior to their baptism, gives evidence

of (1) separation from the 'way of death' and its followers; (2) segregation for instruction, prayers and fasting; and (3) aggregation into the believing community through baptism and participation in the eucharistic meal (esp. Did. I-X).

20 On developments in Gnostic circles with respect to resurrection doctrine, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 3-32.

21 This paper is a revised version of one presented both to the Religious Studies Section of the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education and to the Senior N.T. Seminar at King's College, London. I am indebted to colleagues in both institutions for their criticism and encouragement.

I S T E P H E N B A R T O N is a part-t ime tutor in Religious Studies at the West !Sussex Inst i tute o f Higher Education, Bishop Otter College, Chichester, W. Sussex, U K .