The Reconstruction of Resurrection Belief

Peter Carnley

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532667541
  9781532667558
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532667565
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In the companion volume to this, The Resurrection in Retrospect, Peter Carnley focuses on the inadequacies for faith in Jesus Christ of an approach to his resurrection purely as an event of past historical time. The Reconstruction of Resurrection Belief articulates an alternative understanding of resurrection faith as essentially a response of trust based upon a knowledge by acquaintance with the living presence of Christ today. This book seeks to articulate an understanding of the nature of resurrection faith in the language of today, with as much logical coherence as possible, in the hope that it may have some traction in the increasingly secular world of contemporary scientific materialism. It faces the key challenge of seeking to explain how the claim that the animating Spirit of the Christian community that Saint Paul spoke of as "the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" (Rom 8:2) may be justifiably identified in faith today as "the living presence of Jesus of Nazareth."

1

Resurrection and the Ecclesial Experience of the Raised Christ

The theology of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ falls into two broad categories. The first is comprised of the work of those who are anxious to prove “that it happened.” In other words, there are those who believe that Christ’s Resurrection should be handled retrospectively as a historical event of the past, just like any other event of human history. Access to the knowledge of it is gained by relying upon the historical reason and the techniques of critical historical research. B. F. Westcott in the nineteenth-century, and Wolfhart Pannenberg in the twentieth-century, for example, are among the most notable proponents of this kind of approach.1 More recently, an outstanding example has also been provided by N. T. Wright, whose monumental book, The Resurrection of the Son of God,2 is in fact the reigning paradigm of this kind of methodological commitment. Wright has mounted a confidently aggressive attempt to prove the occurrence of Christ’s Resurrection purely as a historical event, which, he says, is open to public examination by any right thinking person “of any persuasion.”3

Then, second, there are those who are not at all convinced about the viability of this kind of historical approach, and turn instead to the handling of the Resurrection essentially as a mystery of God with an uncompromisingly transcendental character. James D. G. Dunn, for example, expresses his discomfort with attempts to handle the Resurrection of Christ purely as a historical event, given the strength of the New Testament witness to the fact that it was from the first understood as a going from this world of historical time to the timeless eternity of God. A leaving of history to sit “at the right hand of the Father” hardly qualifies as a historical event. As Dunn rightly says, ‘“resurrection” almost by definition is an exit from history and so not properly speaking “historical.’”4 Though the reported verbal precipitate of the human perception of its occurrence is certainly open to historical enquiry, such an “event” is itself not amenable to critical historical research.

In the nineteenth-century R. W. Macan pointed out, in response to B. F. Westcott’s approach to an understanding of the Resurrection as an event of historical time of the kind that might be appropriated by the public exercise of the historical reason, that dogmatic judgments and faith commitments were already involved and, in fact, necessarily presupposed, in attempts to handle the New Testament evidence relating to the Resurrection of Jesus even as a historical event.5 This caused Westcott to revise his language and to talk of the “revelation” of the Raised Christ by contrast with something accessible by reason alone.6 In much twentieth-century theology, a similar appeal was also made to the category of revelation in the face of a perceived disenchantment with the capacity of all historical research ever to come up with fixed and certain conclusions. In the twentieth-century, as theologians sought to identify a “storm-free area” (sturmfreies Gebiet) for the commitment of faith that was independent of the shifting sands of historiographical research, the central theological interest came to focus exclusively on a religiously significant content with a transcendent and revelatory character. This was a primary motivation for both Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, in different ways, to eschew a reliance on the historical reason and to base their understanding of faith on the category of the revelation of the Word of God. Hence, the surpassing popularity of the great twentieth-century “Word theologies” of Barth and Bultmann, whose joint efforts ensured that, today, the claim that the Raised Christ is encountered as a reality of present experience is most likely to be grounded in the hearing of what is understood to be his “living Word.”

In the case of Barth, this outcome was achieved by pursuing a kind of “middle distance” reading of the New Testament witness, in which potential believers were invited to discern the “Word of God” within the words of the scriptural texts. The concern was in the judgment of faith to isolate and appropriate the objective content of the historical revelation of the Word of God in Christ, to which the Word of Scripture was said to bear witness. Bultmann, on the other hand, took the opposite course of insisting that the objectifying language of the New Testament witness had to be so proclaimed as to be heard as a revelatory “Word of address,” which precipitated a revised existential self-understanding in the hearer. By having the New Testament witness de-objectified, which Bultmann famously spoke of as “demythologizing,” the hearer was said thereby to grasp a new self-identity in faith, now as a creature under the Creator, or as an obedient disciple of Jesus Christ by appropriating the saving effect of his Cross. The hearing of this “Word of address” thus warranted Bultmann’s celebrated declaration that Jesus had been “raised into the kerygma” so as to be met anew in the “Word-event” of the church’s proclamation Sunday by Sunday.

It was in large part in reaction to the heavy reliance on faith alone of these Word theologies of the previous generation that Wolfhart Pannenberg pursued his attempt in the late 1960s to revive a reliance on human reason so as to prove the occurrence of the Resurrection as a historical event of the past. Since then, there have been a number of studies, however, that have demonstrated the inadequacies of Pannenberg’s attempted historical proof.7 On the other hand, in the companion volume to this,8 I have endeavored to demonstrate the failure, at almost every turn of argument, of N. T. Wright’s historical “proof” in The Resurrection of the Son of God of 2003.9

Sometimes, non-historical approaches at once humbly acknowledge the limitations not just of the historical reason, but even the limitations of the capacity of human language to talk reasonably about the Resurrection in a literal matter-of-fact, clear and distinct kind of way. Those of this view are therefore constrained to rely upon the category of faith as the essential avenue of approach to it, and openly acknowledge the shortfall between religious experience and the capacity of finite language adequately to speak of it. Dunn himself speaks of “The Metaphor of Resurrection.”10 It is ultimately a mystery that defies attempts even to describe it in clear and distinct literal language. Indeed, sometimes at least, even those who are concerned to affirm the historical nature of the Resurrection as an event of space and time are prepared to acknowledge this aspect of “resurrection language.” Wolfhart Pannenberg, for example, admits that the Resurrection “is so absolutely unique that we have no other name for this than the metaphorical expression of the apocalyptical expectation” (of Second Temple Judaism).11 However, he insists that “Only the name we give to the event is symbolic, metaphorical, but not the reality of the event itself . . . In this sense, the resurrection of Jesus is an historical event, an event that really happened at that time.”12 This immediately raises an issue about the priority of questions of meaning over questions of truth: it is at the outset difficult to prove the occurrence of an event when exactly what happened is hidden behind a symbolic or metaphorical image.

Very often, those unconvinced about the capacity of critical historical research to prove the occurrence of the Resurrection of Christ think instead of faith as a religious commitment based upon the perception of what is identified as “the presence of the Raised Christ” in one form or another. For example, in the biblical tradition it is possible to begin an examination of Christ’s Resurrection through what is reported to have been a concrete acquaintance with his “life-giving Spirit” (as in Paul’s reference in 1 Cor 15:45). In St. John’s Gospel, this kind of encounter is spoken of as an engagement with Christ’s “abundant Spirit” or “Spirit without measure” (John 3:34). The revelatory and transcendent quality of it notwithstanding, in the context of an essentially empirical experience this means that it makes an appeal to faith as a kind of knowing in the present, rather than to the historical reason with its inescapable focus upon the past.

Thus, the theology of the Resurrection has wavered broadly between these two quite different methodological approaches. My own view is that the valiant attempts of those who have set out to prove the occurrence of the Resurrection of Christ purely as a historical event by relying on the historical reason and the techniques of critical historical research are...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Resurrection and the Ecclesial Experience of the Raised Christ
• Chapter 2: The Nature of Faith
• Chapter 3: The Object of Faith
• Chapter 4: Paul and Stoicism?
• Chapter 5: Faith and the Senses
• Chapter 6: The Presence of a Person
• Chapter 7: Faith and Freedom, Ambiguity and Doubt
• Chapter 8: Faith as Remembering and Knowing
• Chapter 9: A Veridical Memory?
• Chapter 10: A Uniquely Referring Memory?
• Chapter 11: The Resurrection of the Body
• Chapter 12: A Little More Platonic Light
• Chapter 14: Postscript
• Bibliography