From Resurrection to New Creation

A First Journey in Christian Theology

Michael W. Pahl

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608992591
  9781498212472
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621892656
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What is Christianity really all about? Is it-in its essence-about proper religious rituals, or correct religious beliefs, or acceptable moral behavior? What is at the heart of an authentic Christian faith and life? In From Resurrection to New Creation Michael Pahl provides an introduction to Christian theology which attempts to answer these questions, proposing that the heart of Christianity is not a set of rituals or beliefs or behaviors, but an event-the resurrection of the crucified Jesus from the dead-that prompts a story-the gospel or "good news" of salvation through Jesus. Jesus' resurrection, Pahl claims, is the starting place and the compass in the journey of Christian theology, our journey to understand God, God's work in the world, and how we should live out God's purposes for humanity. Thus, beginning with Jesus' resurrection and using this event as a guide, Pahl surveys the terrain of classic Christian belief and practice. The Trinity, the identity of Jesus, the work of the Holy Spirit, the nature of humanity, Christ's atonement for sin, salvation and the gospel, baptism and the Eucharist, the church and the future state-all these landscapes and more are explored in this concise introductory survey of essential Christian theology.

1

Resurrection

Before you read . . .

• What comes to mind when you think of the word “resurrection”?

• Why do you believe in Jesus’ resurrection?

• How would you describe the significance of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead?

In the beginning God raised Jesus from the dead.

Of course, Christians affirm that God had acted long before this, creating the universe “in the beginning” and working throughout human history to achieve his purposes. God had, according to the sacred narratives of the Jewish Scriptures, chosen a people to shine the light of his creative power, perfect justice, and faithful love to all the nations of the earth. Through this power, justice, and love God had sustained the chosen people of ancient Israel through slavery and wars and exiles and oppression.

A great deal had also happened to Jesus before this. He had grown up in Nazareth, much like any other Jewish boy of his era, learning and living the Law of Moses, loving and laughing and lamenting within the tight weave of kinship and friendship in that small Galilean village. He had left home in his early thirties, taking up what he sensed to be a prophetic call to proclaim throughout the towns and villages of Israel that God’s sovereign and saving rule had arrived. He had become known as a teacher, a miracle-worker, even a messiah—as well as a glutton, a drunkard, and a keeper of the most unseemly company. He had pushed the buttons of the Jewish religious establishment in Jerusalem and caught the attention of the Roman political authorities in Caesarea, eventually being charged with blasphemy by the former and sedition by the latter. And he had, as a result, been crucified on a crude Roman cross outside the walls of Jerusalem like a common criminal.

Yet for the earliest followers of Jesus his resurrection from the dead was a new beginning, the vindication of their teacher, their prophet, their miracle-working Messiah. Jesus’ resurrection was the end of his pre-determined end, the beginning of a promised new existence. For the earliest followers of Jesus, his resurrection from the dead was a fresh start in God’s action in the world, even the beginning of a new act of creation. By raising Jesus from the dead, transforming him to a new life untouched by sin and death, God initiated a new era in the history of humanity and the world.

This event was also the beginning of a new way of thinking for the first followers of Jesus, a new way of perceiving reality and knowing truth. The resurrection of Jesus was, in the sharpest sense of the term, an “apocalyptic” event; that is, it turned the world upside down and so changed forever the way in which the world must be viewed. Indeed, the central contention of this book is that the resurrection of the crucified Jesus is the ground and center of all truly Christian thought and action, both the source and the focus of all belief and behavior that can be called authentically Christian. The earliest Christian theology and practice grew out of the reality—and was centered on the reality—that the crucified Jesus had been resurrected from the dead. Or, to put this another way, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus was both the starting place and the compass for the first followers of Jesus in their journey to understand God and God’s work in the world and to live out God’s purposes for them, and so should it also be for Christians today.

¶

The concept of “resurrection” in its fullest form was a relatively recent development in Jewish thought in Jesus’ day, having evolved from earlier biblical hopes into a well-developed doctrine by the time of Jesus. The age-old stories of the Israelites and their surrounding cultures had long played with “life-after-death” motifs. The never-ending cycle of life to death to new life was felt in the rhythms of changing seasons and the cadence of human existence, and this cycle echoed in the mythological deeds of gods and goddesses. Resuscitations were not unheard of in the ancient world, with claims of the dead or near-dead being revived even through miracle or magic. And some sort of existence after death was assumed by most people, whether as a pale shadow of one’s earthly self or as a disembodied soul freed from its earthly cage.

But the bold idea of resurrection was not like any of these. Unlike mythic stories of the gods in a never-ending cycle of life, resurrection was for real people, flesh-and-blood men and women and children who had actually lived and died. Unlike claims of resuscitations, resurrection was forever; a person resuscitated, however miraculously so, would still die again, but the future resurrection of the dead would involve a transformed existence untouched by death. And unlike popular ideas of continued existence after death, resurrection was not just for souls but also for bodies—a genuinely holistic human existence.

By Jesus’ day, the significance of this Jewish concept of resurrection could be summed up in two ideas: renewal and vindication. Resurrection was an eschatological event; that is, it was seen as a mark of the end of the present age and the beginning of the eternal new age, the time of the eschaton. So, for those Jews who believed in it, “resurrection” was bound up with such other ideas as “new creation,” “kingdom of God,” “final judgment,” and, in many quarters, the promised “Messiah.” The resurrection of the righteous, those who had faithfully maintained their covenant relationship with God, was vitally connected to the promise of God’s renewal of creation. In this eternal new age God was to reverse the curse of sin imposed on Adam’s children, turning death and hostility, pain and futility, into life and peace. In the Messiah-wrought kingdom of God, the resurrected people of God would experience renewed life in a new creation.

Resurrection was also about vindication. Death is the ultimate oppression of humanity, the final act of shame and condemnation in the tragedy of human life. Death by crucifixion especially emphasized this. The Romans were cruelly capable in crucifying the unwanted, but crucifixion was more than simply an efficient means of execution. Those who were crucified had been convicted of the most heinous crimes in the Empire; they were stripped of their clothing and displayed prominently on public roads outside city gates; they were the outcasts of empire, the non-citizens and conquered peoples. Everything about crucifixion reinforced the exalted status of the Roman Empire and emphasized the lowly status of the crucified as the condemned, the shamed, the oppressed. The Jewish hope of the resurrection was an expectation that all this would be reversed: the unjustly condemned would be justified, the wrongly shamed would be honored, and the cruelly oppressed would be liberated. At the resurrection of the righteous, God’s people would finally be vindicated before the world.

Jesus’ resurrection was just such a vindication. As Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts states it, the religious and political rulers of the day might have condemned Jesus on a cross, “but God raised him from the dead” (Acts 2:24). By raising Jesus from the dead, God had overturned the verdicts of blasphemy and sedition by which Jesus was condemned; God had justified Jesus, declaring before the world that he was in fact innocent of all charges, that his kingdom teachings and actions were in fact true expressions of God’s will in the world. By raising Jesus from the dead, God had honored Jesus, turning the shame of his crucifixion into the glory of an exalted status in God’s presence. And by raising the oppressed and marginalized Jesus from the dead, God liberated him and brought him into the very center of God’s purposes in the world.

Jesus’ resurrection was also a renewal. For Jesus the curse of sin was decisively reversed, with death, hostility, pain, and apparent futility transformed into life and peace. Jesus was raised to new creation life, forever untouched by sin and death. As Peter’s Pentecost sermon goes on to say, he was “[freed] from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him” (Acts 2:24). Or, as Paul describes, Jesus’ resurrection involved a transformation from dishonor, weakness, corruptibility, and mortality, to glory, power, incorruptibility, and immortality—through Jesus’ resurrection “death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54). Jesus became the first person to fully experience shalom, the “peace” or wholeness and harmony of human existence eternally blessed by God. He became the first person to finally fulfill the promise of imago Dei, the royal stamp of the “image of God” on his beloved human children and the mark of God’s call to extend his loving rule throughout creation.

These sorts of thoughts are hinted at in the very early Christian description of Jesus’ resurrection as “on the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:4). The “third day” was, after all, the awaited time of God’s action on behalf of his people: the divine deliverance of Abraham’s promised, beloved son Isaac from certain sacrifice occurred “on the third day” (Genesis 22:4); it was “on the third day” that God met Moses before the gathered people of Israel on Mount Sinai to give the Law and establish the nation (Exodus 19:16); Hezekiah’s restoration from the edge of death to full health and purity was to be acknowledged in the Temple “on the third day” (2 Kings 20:5); Hosea’s promised restoration of the people of Israel from oppression and exile would take place “on the third day” (Hosea 6:2). And so it was only appropriate that God raised Jesus from the dead “on the third day,” finally bringing about the long-awaited renewal and vindication to creation and humanity.

Such confident expectation of divine renewal and vindication through resurrection, patterned after Jesus’ attitude toward his own future and based upon Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, is summed up in a significant biblical word: hope.

¶

Of course, all this assumes that Jesus was in fact “raised from the dead.” But how do we know that he ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Resurrection
• Chapter 2: Crucifixion
• Chapter 3: Son
• Chapter 4: Gospel
• Chapter 5: Father
• Chapter 6: Spirit
• Chapter 7: Creation
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Bibliography