Resurrection -- Various Views

RESURRECTION – VARIOUS VIEWS

1. TOMAS HALIK – “eschatological character”

As theologians emphasize, the word of the Greek text of the New Testament that we translate as “resurrection” is taken from the experience of people waking from sleep and of “resuscitation,” the return to this life after apparent death. It can therefore only serve as an analogy or metaphor for the mystery of Christ’s victory over death, which Christian belief interprets as something radically different and more profound. (It would be a total misapprehension if our drawing attention to the limitations of this concept were taken as a diminution of the Easter mystery—the opposite is true.)

[T]he view that the Resurrection is “nothing but a historical event among other historical events,” or a “miracle” among other miracles, leads to the abyss of fundamentalist banality. The Resurrection is an event of an eschatological character—that is indicated by the expression “the third day,” which is not simply a chronological fact—bursting into time; it needed time to penetrate the hearts and minds of the disciples and bring light thereto, enabling them also to understand the meaning of Christ’s suffering and cross.

[Tomáš Halík , Night of the Confessor (NY: Image Books, 2012), p. 216, notes 9 & 10.]

2. PHILIP CLAYTON & STEVEN KNAPP – “participatory theory”

…the creation of a new possibility of interaction between God and human beings…

…in the event that came to be known as Jesus’ resurrection, his self-surrendering engagement with God became newly available, through the agency of the divine Spirit, to his followers,, then and since, as the form, model, and condition of their own engagement with the divine.

…the theory of Jesus’ personal but nonphysical presence

According to the participatory theory, it is not Jesus himself who is literally made present—either in bodily or in continuing personal form—to the minds of his followers. What is made present instead is a new relationship with the divine reality in which Jesus’ followers find themselves able to participate. What they encounter is the Spirit of Christ, who calls them to the same kenotic or self-giving love that Jesus embodied…

…Jesus remained personally but not physically present to his disciples after his death. Call this option a Spirit-centered or pneumatological version of the participatory theory…. What the Spirit conveys is not just the mindset or attitude of Jesus, taken as an ethical or philosophical principle, but the definitive reality and authority of Jesus’ self-surrendering obedience to the ultimate reality he knew as “abba,” “father,” an obedience that is at the same time his self-surrendering openness to the needs of other persons. In that sense, an essential aspect of Jesus himself would continue to be spiritually present to his disciples after his death.

…not just a religious ideal or ethical principle…must include an eschatological dimension: Jesus, after his death, is sustained by God…as the finite subject…as the “head” of an eschatological community whose members in varying degrees participate in that unity of divine and human will.

This Spirit will dwell with and be “in” the disciples… the Spirit necessarily makes present the reality of the one whose life and unique relationship with God created that community…

Jesus’ resurrection must have involved a transition from finite to infinite personhood.

[Philip Clayton & Steven Knapp, The Predicament of Belief (Oxford University Press, 2011), 90, 105, 109-110, 133

3. PANNENBERG – “eschaton” 

Only the eschaton will ultimately disclose what really happened in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

[Jesus – God and Man (SCM Press, 1968), 397.]

4. RAHNER – “created heaven”

By his resurrection and ascension Jesus did not merely enter into a pre-existent heaven; rather, his resurrection created heaven for us.[Quoted in J. Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (SCM Press, 1990), 122.]

When the vessel of his body was shattered in death, Christ was poured out over the cosmos: he became actually, in his very humanity, what he had always been in his dignity, the innermost center of creation.

[On the Theology of Death (NY: Herder and Herder, 1961), 66.]

5. JOHN SHELBY SPONG – “midrash” 

The resurrection story is midrash. “It was a way to think mythologically about dimensions of reality for which the language of time and space were simply not appropriate.”

[Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1994), 16.]

6. MICHAEL WELDER—“not with eyes only”

In the midst of tensions between palpable encounters and appearances, theophanies and doubt, the witnesses “see” the risen Christ “not with eyes only.” They “see” him in his speaking to them, in the breaking of the bread, in the greeting of peace, in his opening to them the Scriptures, in his sending them, and in other signs. They “see” him in actual and symbolic actions which become ritual forms of the liturgy and life of the church. Not a resuscitated Jesus, but the whole Jesus Christ and his life in its fullness become present in the resurrection.

[From Cells to Souls—and Beyond, ed. Malcolm Jeeves (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 227f.]

7. JOHN POLKINGHORNE – “transmuted”

In a crude and inadequate analogy, the software running on our present hardware will be transferred to the hardware of the world to come. And where will that eschatological hardware come from? Surely the “matter” of the world to come must be the transformed matter of this world. God will no more abandon the universe than he will abandon us. Hence the importance to theology of the empty tomb, with its message that the Lord’s risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning within history of a process whose fulfilment lies beyond history, in which the destiny of humanity and the destiny of the universe are together to find their fulfilment in a liberation from decay and futility (cf. Rom. 8.18-25).

There is a deep-seated intuition of hope…a signal of transcendence…

John A. T. Robinson says, the present is “a point too charged with eternity to be understood except by myths which open a door into heaven and force upon every moment the terrible relevancy of the first things and the last, the elemental and the ultimate. [In the End God (James Clarke, 1950), 70.]

[The Faith of a Physicist (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 164.]

8. MICHAEL CASEY

The resurrection event did not take place in history, in the sense that it would have been possible to film a before-and-after sequence. The resurrection was Jesus’ passing over from an existence in space and time into eternity. Jesus lives, but his being is not limited to one location in space and time…In his humanity, Jesus exists in the sphere of God…

Jesus departs yet remains… There are two different modes of presence: one discernible by the senses, the other not.

Through the energy of the Spirit, there is a hidden presence of Christ that goes beyond the pomp and circumstance of ecclesiastical ceremony…

[Fully Human, Fully Divine (Liguori, MO: Liguori/Triumph, 2004), 306-7.]

9. DAVID W. CONGDON

The resurrection takes death up into the very life of God.

The Spirit is the risen Christ, insofar as the resurrection means that Jesus is not locked in the past but is able to be with us forever.

The Spirit is the continuation of Christ’s presence, the ongoing efficacy of his saving work…

“In the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ is present as the absent one.” (quoting Jungel)

[The God Who Saves (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 128, 141, 142.]

10. RICHARD ROHR

The best way to speak about the Resurrection is not to say, “Jesus rose from the dead”—as if it was a self-generated miracle—but to say, “Jesus was raised from the dead” (as many early texts state). The Eternal Christ is thus revealed as the map, the blueprint, the promise, the pledge, the guarantee of what is happening everywhere, all summed up in one person so we can see it in personified form.

If you can understand Jesus as the human archetype, a stand-in for everybody and everything, you will get much closer to the Gospel message. I think this is exactly why Jesus usually called himself “The Son of Man.” His resurrection is not so much a miracle that we can argue about, believe, or disbelieve, but an invitation to look deeper at what is always happening in the life process itself. Jesus, or any member of “the Body of Christ,” cannot really die because we are participating in something eternal—the Cosmic Christ that came forth from God.

If we are to speak of miracles, the most miraculous thing of all is that God uses the very thing that would normally destroy you—the tragic, the sorrowful, the painful, the unjust—to transform and enlighten you. Now you are indestructible and there are no absolute dead ends. This is what we mean when we say we are “saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus.” This is not a cosmic transaction, but a human transformation to a much higher level of love and consciousness. You have been plucked from the flames of any would-be death to the soul, and you have become a very different kind of human being in this world. Jesus is indeed saving the world

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Easter Homily: Reality Moves Toward Resurrection,” March 27, 2016, https://cac.org/easter-homily-reality-moves-toward-resurrection/.

11. PAUL TILLICH

The second symbol is the symbol of the “Resurrection of the Christ,” in which “the conquest of existence is expressed.” While Tillich believes that the cross event probably was an event of history, the stories of the resurrection are not: “The [Cross] is a highly probable fact; the [Resurrection] a mysterious experience of a few.”) While the Cross is a factual event that became a symbol, the Resurrection is a symbol that became an event. As Tillich argues, “A real experience made it possible for the disciples to apply the known symbol of resurrection to Jesus, thus acknowledging him definitely as the Christ. They called the experienced event the ‘Resurrection of the Christ,’ and it was a combination of event and symbol.” It is clear that for Tillich, the resurrection of Jesus Christ did not happen physically and literally. Instead, it happened existentially. While some believe in a spiritualistic resurrection of Jesus, Tillich maintains that such an explanation “cannot explain the factual side of the Resurrection of the Christ symbolized as the reappearance of the total personality, which includes the bodily expression of his being.” While the psychological one comes closer, explaining that “Resurrection is an inner event in the minds of Jesus’ adherents,” it misses the mark because it “misses the reality of the event which is presupposed in the symbol—the event of the Resurrection of the Christ.” Instead, “the power of his being had impressed itself indelibly upon the disciples as the power of the New Being. In an ecstatic experience the concrete picture of Jesus of Nazareth became indissolubly united with the reality of the New Being. He is present wherever the New Being is present.” Jesus as the Christ does not live on simply in memory, but in experience: Because the experience of Jesus’ existence was so overwhelming that it left its mark on the disciples, Jesus lived on—resurrected—in their existence.

In his sermon book, The New Being, Tillich best describes the symbol of the “Resurrection of the Christ,” especially its implications for today and the future:

resurrection means the victory of the New state of things, the New Being born out of the death of the Old. Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is resurrection…Resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us, in soul and history, in nature and universe.

The “Resurrection of the Christ” like resurrection now is viewed as victory over the old eon, which is existential self-destruction and self-estrangement, as we have already seen. The resurrection of Jesus, then, is experienced every time the death of a relationship is brought back to life through forgiveness, every time an inner-city child climbs out of illiteracy through tutoring, or every time an act of compassion makes a person’s day. In other words, the point of resurrection isn’t that it happened, but that it happens. For Tillich the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ didn’t happen physically, spiritually or psychologically, but rather it happens existentially.

[Tillich quoted: Systematic Theology, Vol. 2, 153-159; New Being, 24.]

From Jeremy Bouma’s blog, Vintage Faith Made Relevant, Aug 26, 2011

http://www.jeremybouma.com/the-gospel-according-to-paul-tillich-on-the-person-and-work-of-jesus-christ-3/

12. CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT

There are many skeptics who say that Resurrection is a myth, that Jesus never grows. I myself believe that he did, and I stand my ground with Christian tradition when I affirm his resurrection does indeed make a profound difference to how we live our lives here and now.

The resurrection body is of “a more subtle density.”

Mary Magdalene was looking for Jesus as a tangible corpse, not an intangible aliveness.

After the forty days, “Jesus rises from the physical plane.”

The death by physical form is not the death of our individual personhood. Our personhood remains alive and well, “hidden with Christ in God”(Col. 3.3).

Christian mystics proclaim that our whole universe is profoundly permeated with the presence of Christ. The entire cosmos has become his body and the blood flowing through it is his love.

Mystic visionaries claim that this “pan-cosmic’ saturation of his being into the deepest marrow of this created world was the cosmic cornerstone turned in his passage through death.

Without in any way denying or overriding the conditions of this earth plane, he has interpenetrated them fully, infused them with his own interior spaciousness, and invited us all into this invisible but profoundly coherent energetic field, so that we may live as one body, the mystical body of Christ. 

Jesus in his ascended state is not farther removed from human beings, but is more intimately connected with them. 

But to really know this presence you need to tune in on a different wavelength: to shift from your usual binary operating system to the heart frequency where this Jesus connection broadcasts.

[The Wisdom Jesus (Boston: Shambhala, 2008), 128-134.]

13. LEONARDO BOFF

Jesus of Nazareth, dead and buried, does not merely live on by means of his remembrance and his message of liberation for the oppressed conscience. He himself is present and lives a way of life that has already surpassed the limitations of our world of death and realized every dimension of all its possibilities. Hence, resurrection is not synonymous with resuscitation, the resuscitation of a body as was the case with the Lazarus. Resurrection must be understood as a total, exhaustive realization of human reality in its relationship with God, with others, and with the cosmos.

Christ did not leave this world with the resurrection. He penetrated it in a more profound manner and is now present in all reality in the same way that God is present in all things. Christian faith lives on this presence and has developed a viewpoint that allows it to see all reality as penetrated by the reverberations of the Resurrection. Owing to Christ’s resurrection, the world became diaphanous and transparent.

In him that which for us will take place only at the end of the world took place in time.

[Jesus Christ Liberator]

14. STANLEY HAUERWAS

Our attempts to ‘explain’ the resurrection are the way we, like Mary Magdalene, try to ‘hold on’ to Jesus. We cannot explain the resurrection. The resurrection explains us. If God did not raise Jesus on the third day, then our existence as a church is unintelligible. The resurrection of Jesus does not require explanation; it requires witnesses.

[critiquing Borg]: But if the world is God’s good creation, the resurrection of Jesus is not some supernatural event that is inexplicable; rather, resurrection is exactly what one should expect of the One who moves the sun and the stars and can be found in the belly of Mary.

[in footnote 5]: Robert Jenson makes the point that if the dead body of Jesus was available to the disciples, it would have become a relic to be worshipped or venerated.

[from Journal for Preachers, Easter 1998. “The Resurrection and the Jesus Seminar: A Sermon with Commentary” by Stanley Hauerwas.]

15. FREDERICK BUECHNER

We can say that the story of the resurrection simply means that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare…or that the spirit of Jesus is undying…like Socrates…or it is the language of poetry, pointing to a truth more profound than the literal… But there really is no story about the Resurrection in the N.T. There is no poetry about it. Instead, it is simply proclaimed as fact. Christ is risen!

[Listening to Your life (Harper San Francisco, 1992)]

16. CARDINAL JOSEPH RATZINGER (later to be Pope Benedict XVI)

…what “resurrection” means. It is the greater strength of love in face of death.

Only where someone values love more highly than life…can love be stronger and more than death.

It would cross the boundary—death—and create unity where death divides…then a new stage in life would have been reached. This would mean that the realm of biological evolutions and mutations had been left behind and the leap made to a quite different plane, on which love was no longer subject to bios but made use of it… It would signify the end of the sovereignty of bios, which is at the same time the sovereignty of death; it would open up the realm that the Greek Bible calls zoe, that is, definitive life, which has left behind the rule of death.

Jesus’ total love for us, which leads him to the Cross, is perfected in totally passing beyond to the Father and therein becomes stronger than death, because in this it is at the same time total “being held” by him… 

Love is the foundation of immortality… The life of him who has risen from the dead is not once again bios, the bio-logical form of our mortal life within history; it is zoe, a new, different, definitive life; life that has stepped beyond the mortal realm of bios and history, a realm that has here been surpassed by a greater power.

…the life of the Risen One lies, not within the historical bios, but beyond and above it…this new life begot itself in history and had to do so, because after all it is there for history, and the Christian message is basically nothing else than the transmission of the testimony that love has managed to break through death here and thus has transformed fundamentally the situation of all of us.

He rose again to definitive life, which is no longer governed by chemical and biological laws and therefore stands outside the possibility of death, in the eternity conferred by love. That is why the encounters with him are “appearances.”

He remains unrecognizable to the accustomed eye…he is discovered only in the realm of faith.

He who had been transposed into the other world of God showed himself powerful enough to make it palpably clear that he himself stood in their presence again…

One cannot have both the Christian faith and “religion within the bounds of pure reason.” 

[Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction To Christianity, Trans. by J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 301-310. Originally published in German in 1968; English 1969.]

17. GREGORY BAUM

Christians have never regarded the resurrection simply as the resuscitation of a dead body…but always as an elevation or glorification, as an entry of Christ into a new way of being, enabling him to be present to the whole community.

What counts for Christian faith is the resurrection as marvel, revealing God’s victory and making visible the future of mankind.

[Man Becoming (Herder and Herder, 1971), 278]

18. ROWAN WILLIAMS

It is an event which is not describable, because it is…the transfiguring expansion of Jesus’ humanity…

…the encounters with Jesus risen are historical…But there is a sense in which the raising of Jesus, the hinge between these two histories, the act which brings the latter out of the former, does not and cannot belong to history: it is not an event, with a before and after, occupying a determinate bit of time between Friday and Sunday. God’s act in uniting Jesus’ life with his eludes us…as a divine act it cannot be tied to place and time in any simple way. It is, indeed, an ‘eternal’ act…God decisively evades our grasp, our definition and our projection.

[Resurrection, 1982]

19. DAVID HART BENTLEY

[Christ’s] body has been not simply resuscitated, but transformed into a “spiritual body” (to use the language of St. Paul), at once concrete and yet transcendent of the normal limitations of time and space. He can appear and disappear at will…

His body has somehow already entered into the transfigured reality of the Kingdom of God; and thus, by his resurrection, the Kingdom has already “invaded” historical time.

[The Story of Christianity (NY: Quercus, 2009), 22-23.]