Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh

The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology

Nathan Hitchcock

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781610978026
  9781498262200
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621895657
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Early Christian writers preferred to speak of the coming resurrection in the most bodily way possible: the resurrection of the flesh. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth took the same avenue, daring to speak of humans' eternal life in rather striking corporeal terms. In this study, Nathan Hitchcock pulls together Barth's doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, anticipating what the great thinker might have said more systematically in volume V of his Church Dogmatics. Provocatively, Hitchcock goes on to argue that Barth's description of the resurrection--as eternalization, as manifestation, as incorporation--bears much in common with some unlikely programs and, contrary to its intention, jeopardizes the very contours of human life it hopes to preserve. In addition to contributing to Barth studies, this book offers a sober warning to theologians pursuing eschatology through notions of participation.

1

Redeeming the Flesh

In the end, flesh. That has been the conviction of the Church’s best theologians, who in their eschatological imagination have dared to populate the coming world with living humans, that is, bodies fully alive, rejoined and renewed in the coming world. According to this vision, nothing is lost at the resurrection. On the day of Christ’s return the saints are made new, yet in this newness everything is strangely familiar: muscle and bones, skin and scars, all beautiful, and altogether the persons who once lived. Bodies which grew and acted and sickened and died are somehow identical with the bodies raised by God on the last day. Credo in resurrectionem carnis, says the Apostles Creed, representative of this holy imagination:
I believe in the resurrection of the flesh.

Before examining Karl Barth’s fresh and multifaceted view, one does well to know a bit about the development of the doctrine of the general resurrection through the centuries. This chapter provides part of that history, making two observations. First, every theologian within the bounds of the holy catholic Church felt a common burden to describe the resurrected person in physical, material, earthly terms. The earliest Christians articulated hope in that way, and later thinkers sought to do the same in more sophisticated ways. However—and this is the second point of the chapter—theologians from Origen to Thomas Aquinas came up with rather different descriptions of the future body. Specifically, I detect two basic trajectories of thought regarding the resurrection of the flesh. A sketch of the two paths serves as a valuable historical backdrop as I set up some parameters of conversation about Barth’s own view.

The Early Church’s Scandalous Doctrine

While Jewish thought had wide precedent for belief in the resurrection of the dead,1 the uncircumcised were baffled over the idea of bodily resurrection. Mockery and curiosity typified the reception of the gospel in Paul’s gentile mission. Various Platonists had immunized themselves against such an idea through their own doctrine of the immortality of the soul; blurry Stoical conceptions of semi-personal soul survival or cosmic reintegration hardly welcomed bodily renewal. Even the more materialistic philosophers of the period would have found the Christian hope inane at worst, curious at best,2 exemplified by Paul’s audience at the Areopagus: “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead some scoffed, but others said, ‘We will hear you again on this’” (Acts 17:32). Their grounds for skepticism were quite simple: to the philosophical mind the flesh epitomized change, which in turn suggested the restlessness inherent in imperfection. Flesh is that which morphs, ages, sickens, dies, decays, disintegrates. For the Greco-Roman world which prized immutability so highly, it seemed unthinkable to entertain a gospel that vouchsafed a temporal, concrete, bodily future to humans.

We have no record of anyone in the primitive Church longing for simple resuscitation. The resurrection was newness of life, after all, the entrance into immortality. Yet for the early Christians the resurrection suggested something of a re-surrection, something of a coming back, a return of what was, a newness of the old. Had this not been the double affirmation of their Christ? Jesus “appeared” to the disciples in newness (Luke 24:34; 1 Cor 15:5–8)—yet the old tomb was emphatically empty (Matt 28:6; Mark 16:4–8; Luke 24:3,12; John 20:1–9).3 In His newness He could circumvent locked doors, arriving and vanishing instantaneously (Luke 24:31, 35; John 20:26)—yet He proved Himself through physical demonstrations to be the same flesh and bone (Matt 28:9; Luke 24:13–31; 24:37–43; John 20:17; 21:12–13). The risen Jesus ascended into heaven to prepare a celestial house (Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9; John 14:1–4; 2 Cor 5:1–10)—yet that house was destined for the terrestrial setting (Matt 5:4; Rev 21:2; cf. Zech 14:6–11).

This fundamental juxtaposition of new and old, of discontinuity and continuity, is nowhere more concentrated than in the locus classicus of the resurrection doctrine, 1 Corinthians 15. There Paul entertains the question of the glorified body in images of similitude and dissimilitude.4 The seed metaphor (vv.36–38, 42–44) depicts a body in radical alteration, passing beyond death to a new form of the person, wholly fructified, yet somehow identical with the original, pre-death seed. The differing fleshes of living organisms (v.39) suggest the possibility of different bodies, as do the disparate glories of heavenly orbs (vv.40–41). But it is really the seed-to-plant metaphor which best describes the change Paul has in mind: the seed is sown a “natural” body (sōma psuchikon) and raised a “spiritual” body (sōma pneumatikon). Identity-in-difference itself is governed by Christology in the form of a dialectic between the earthly and heavenly Man (vv.45–50). The first Adam, a “natural soul” (psuchēn zōsan), had to become the last Adam, Jesus Christ, a “lifegiving spirit” (pneuma zōopoioun). The logic extends to the general resurrection: just as the first Adam became the last Adam, our old body-self will become its new body-self. We will overcome death in this consummate transformation, though it will be we ourselves who “put on” immortality, imperishability, glory and power (vv.51–57). It is not my purpose to untangle Paul’s semiotics, only to appreciate how themes of discontinuity and continuity converge dramatically in talk of eschatological flesh. We will live again—to the life which is and is not the life we had before. Our flesh will be raised—which will and will not be the flesh of our former existence. Both sides of the paradox must be upheld.

It is striking, then, how in the earliest records after the apostles we find defense after defense of the continuity of the body. Greek and Latin writers alike prefer to speak of the resurrection of the dead not in terms of the raising of the person (prosōpon; persona), or even of the body (sōma; corpus), but of the flesh (sarx; caro). While they utilize Pauline texts, the early apologists and ecclesiastical writers prefer to dialogue in the Johannine idiom: the Savior came “in the flesh” (John 1:14; 1 John 4:2; 2 John 7), suffered “in the flesh” (1 John 5:6–8) and rose again giving many corporeal proofs (John 20:19–31, 21:9–14; 1 John 1:1?). The early fathers take up residence in this kind of discourse. Better, one might say that in their prose and poetry they choose to abide in the Hebraic mindset: flesh is what is means to be human, what it means to be the creature of God, even the covenant-partner of YHWH, showered with all His material blessings. God is pouring out His Spirit upon all flesh—but flesh is flesh.

Since others have supplied exhaustive documentation of writings about the Christian hope in the second and early third centuries,5 let me touch on some select examples of the robust, gritty sense with which the fathers spoke of the resurrection of the flesh. In a document that may be contemporaneous with the later New Testament writers, Clement of Rome writes that the resurrection of the dead is a concrete and credible future occurrence, as evidenced by the example of the (supposedly real) phoenix, which rises out of the same material in which it died.6 Ignatius repeats the Johannine language when he says that Jesus after His resurrection “ate and drank as a fleshly one [hōs sarkikos], though He was spiritually united to the Father.”7 That kind of earthly continuity matters for the general resurrection too, according to the narrative of the second century Epistula Apostolorum, which can be read as a rebuke to spiritualizing eschatology. When the disciples state that it is the flesh that falls in death, Jesus responds, “What is fallen will arise, and what is ill will be sound, that my Father may be praised therein.”8 The site of death and decay will be the site of redemption. In this vein the writer of the pseudepigraphal 2 Clement teaches, “If Christ the Lord who saved us, though he was first a Spirit, became flesh and thus called us, so also shall we r...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Redeeming the Flesh
• Chapter 2: Young Barth’s Resurrection Dialectic
• Chapter 3: The Resurrection of the Flesh as Eternalization
• Chapter 4: The Resurrection of the Flesh as Manifestation
• Chapter 5: The Resurrection of the Flesh as Incorporation
• Chapter 6: A Future in the Flesh
• Bibliography
• Index