David Ritsema draws attention to a lecture by Tom Wright: “Can Scientists Believe in the Resurrection”. You can read it here, or choose to listen to it or watch it from the links provided by David, or on the NT Wright Page. Unsurprisingly, Tom quickly moves the question onto the grounds of history and “scientific” historiography. The lecture also provides a useful and compact summary of some of the key lines of argument in his massive book The Resurrection of the Son of God.
I want to pick up one thing here that Wright says specifically:
the Christian claim was from the beginning that the question of Jesus’ resurrection was a question, not of the internal mental and spiritual states of his followers a few days after his crucifixion, but about something that had happened in the real, public world, leaving not only an empty tomb, but a broken loaf at Emmaus and footprints in the sand by the lake among its physical mementoes
Now I happen to agree with Wright on the empty tomb, I’m not sure about whether Emmaus has its origins in witness memory or in Lukan creativity (or a combination of both), but the “footprints in the sand” raises the nub of the problem. How does Wright know there were footprints in the sand? Because people walking on sand leave footprints. But do resurrected bodies walking on sand leave footprints? How would we know? After all, if we fully take the gospel accounts as history, resurrected bodies can get into locked rooms, and resurrected bodies can choose when to be recognizable, as well as being able to eat broiled fish. So how would we know whether they leave footprints?
Wright doesn’t do ambiguity and ambivalence very well, yet what we might call the “physicality” of the risen Christ is ambiguous in the gospel narratives. Assertions that the resurrection is historical and then deduce “footprints in the sand” from what historical is presumed to mean are as problematic as those that assert it is eschatological and then deduce from what eschatological means to them that the empty tomb is irrelevant.
One of the stronger historical reasons, to my mind, for asserting the authenticity of the empty tomb comes from the pattern of belief. The disciples’ experience of the risen Jesus unquestionably transformed their believing, and also quite precisely their belief in resurrection, as a hitherto corporate, cosmic and creational event comes to be applied to a single individual ahead of the time expected. What does not change, however is the belief that the resurrection transformation they still awaited was still corporeal. The transformation of the world remains the heart of what they hope for, and ideas of escape from the world and the body do not start to make real headway until the second and third centuries, before being ruled out of the catholic court. That belief in corporeal transformation is a strong logical pointer to the transformation of the specific body that was once entombed.
There is another problem with the way that Wright treats that future corporeal resurrection that we now call the parousia, and its relationship to the resurrection of Christ. He seems to assume that we can simply restate the relationship between the two in a way that repeats affirmatively the statements of the New Testament, and need ourselves to return to a much more (in his view) biblical and Jewish way of conceiving the renewal of all things.
But even within, say, 1 Corinthians 15, we see a shift. At the start of Paul’s argument resurrection is defined by the Jewish and Pharisaic hope, and the explanation of what happened to Jesus is worked out in the categories of that understanding. By the end of the argument, what resurrection for all means is defined primarily by what happened to Jesus, and the hope for all things turns on the specific events of Easter. But the risen Jesus is no longer corporeally present; the last of his appearances to Paul is recognized as out of time and abnormal. There is something different about how Jesus is now present in his church and to the world, and that difference is precisely what allows the negative views of body and creation to gain headway as Christian views, before the church comes to clarify what a Christian view is.
But after 2000 years of resurrection being defined by Jesus risen, but whose presence among us is not corporeal in the way in which the Jesus of the limited time of appearances is corporeal, things look different. The corporeality of Jesus is known through the body of the Church and the body of the Eucharist. Resurrection seems to have a lot more to do with eternity, and with God beyond the world, than it did for Paul, and a simple restatement of Pauline theology may not be the right way to go.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Peter Kirk // Jun 29, 2007 at 11:13 pm
I agree that we don’t know about footprints in the sand, and anyway if I remember rightly the shore at Capernaum is rather rocky, not good for footprints. But in the New Testament accounts there is no ambivalence about the physicality of the risen Jesus, he is explicitly not a ghost but “flesh and bones”, Luke 24:39. As for how he got through locked doors, John doesn’t tell us, but since we know from Acts that God could open locked prison doors to let his people out, the simplest explanation is that Jesus opened the doors by the power of God and walked in in the normal way.
As for “broiled fish”, why the Americanism? Here in the UK we would call this grilled fish. But this is an issue with British editions of Bibles.
2 David Ritsema // Jun 29, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Thank you for referencing my blog article.
Your review of Wright is excellent. I appreciate it.
3 doug // Jun 29, 2007 at 11:38 pm
David, my pleasure. Thanks for drawing my attention to Wright’s lecture.
Peter, I think I find the resurrection narratives more mysterious than that. I affirm the corporeality of the risen Jesus, but think that putting too much emphasis on “flesh and bones” out of the context of the narrative comes dangerously close to resuscitation. And although Luke uses the term differently to Paul (and Paul in Corinthians uses the language differently to Paul in Romans), “flesh” is precisely not what the risen body is characterised by. The language is difficult, but Jesus is in control of his being seen in a way in which before his death and resurrection he is not. He does not simply belong to the causal realm of cause and effect, nor the created world of entropy and decay, but exists beyond this world, however he manifests himself within it.
On the broiled fish - I was (I think) being international.
4 Steven Carr // Jun 30, 2007 at 8:38 am
Early Christian converts to Jesus-worship in Corinth scoffed at the idea that God would choose to raise a corpse.
Paul thinks all discussion of how a corpse can become a resurrected being is foolish , and reminds the Corinthians that earthly things are as different from heavenly things as a fish is different from the moon.
Nobody expects a fish to turn into the Moon!
Paul trashes the idea that resurrected beings are made out of the dust that corpses dissolve into :-
47 The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. 48 As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven.
Paul pleaded in Romans 7:24 to be rescued from his body.
Whatever body Paul thought Jesus had (and he could not use eyewitness accounts to explain to the Corinthians what he meant), Paul did not believe it was the body that was planted into the ground.
That body was history. It brought death with it, and Jesus had become a life-giving spirit.
5 doug // Jun 30, 2007 at 12:10 pm
I think, Steven, that you mistake at least some points of Paul’s argument. Not least, because the analogy of seeds being sown implies continuity as well as radical change. I also think that, given some very different contexts, Paul’s use of body, soul, flesh and spirit is significantly different in many respects between Romans and Corinthians, so that it is unwise to move too quickly from one to the other.
Please note, everyone, that discussions which Steven enters into have, elsewhere, rapidly degenerated into slanging matches. I do not intend that to happen here.
6 Steven Carr // Jun 30, 2007 at 4:23 pm
You might well be right about differences between Romans and Corinthians.
Romans was written by Tertius, not Paul.
Perhaps Tertius used vocabulary that was slightly different to how Paul would have expressed it, if he had personally written the letter.
Just a thought.
7 Steven Carr // Jun 30, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Seeds do imply continuity, as Paul explains.
If you sow wheat, God created wheat.
If a human body is sown, God will give it a body.
What you sow determines what God creates.
There was ‘continuity’ and ‘radical change’ when God transformed a rib of Adam into Eve.
That doesn’t mean that Eve was the same person as Adam.
Eve was a new creation.
Leave a Comment