Of The Resurrection of Christ

Abstract

Abstract The resurrection of Jesus from death on the cross has always been central to Christian faith. It has been at once glorious and disconcerting to Christians right from the beginning of the formation of the Christian community (as reflected, for example, in Saint Paul’s Corinthian correspondence): glorious because it is the heart of the good news of salvation, disconcerting because it is utterly mystifying to our ordinary understanding and belief. That Jesus was raised from the dead is the virtually unanimous testimony of the New Testament, although modern commentators have disagreed about the historical and theological import of that testimony. We may distinguish four modern views about the nature of the resurrection, each of which entails a specific outlook on the relationship of the New Testament texts to the reality of the resurrection. In the first view, the statements of the New Testament that Jesus was raised from the dead are simply a mythological way of saying that the cross of Christ came to be accepted for its saving efficacy by the earliest Christian community. The miracle of the resurrection—whatever the fate of Jesus—was something that happened to the faith of the disciples and other followers of Jesus, not to Jesus himself. At most, in this view, one can say that we do not know what happened historically in the original events called “resurrection,” but it is in any case not theologically significant. The important thing is that where there had been despair among Jesus’ followers, now there was faith. This is the meaning of “resurrection.” To be sure, it was taken by them as well as later Christians to be part of the miraculous grace of God, and they believed that this miraculous effect could not have taken place without the prior, greater miracle that Jesus himself was raised from the dead. But at this point a “modern” believer has to affirm that the history of Jesus ends with the crucifixion, and the reality of the resurrection is the faith of those who have confessed him as Lord. This, of course, runs counter to the interpretation of the New Testament texts by the vast majority of “premodern” Christian readers, all of whom, according to the demythologizing version, would have to be consigned by definition to the “mythical” state of mind, because they read the resurrection narratives as applying to Jesus and go on furthermore to affirm that application as the truth. In the demythologizing view, the real textual subject matter of the New Testament narratives is the birth of faith after Jesus’ death, and not the historical Jesus himself; and the extratextual reality of the resurrection is the re-presentation of Jesus wherever the life of faith is truly proclaimed and accepted.