Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ: Teaching, Rhetoric, and Reception. By Gerald O’Collins

Abstract

This slim and accessible book brings together first a brief account of what Augustine taught in various writings about the resurrection of Jesus and its central place in Christian faith and in his understanding of Christ’s eternal priesthood (chs. 1–2). Second, this teaching is brought into a fruitful conversation with later Christology and with objections which have been put to a reasonable belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus (chs. 3–4). In this way Professor O’Collins defends the continuing relevance of Augustine’s thought but also seeks to supplement its shortcomings. Chapter 1 shows how Augustine, influenced by John’s Gospel, ‘highlights Christ’s active role in his own resurrection’ (p. 1). For Augustine ‘Jesus rose in the same body in which he died’ (p. 8), which is ‘spiritual’, not in the sense of ceasing to be physical, but in the sense of being ‘sustained by a life-giving spirit’ (p. 9, citing De civ. dei, 13.22). While the risen Christ eats before the ascension to scotch the notion of his being a ghost, Augustine insists that the risen body is incorrupt and needs no such sustenance (pp. 17–18). Such appearances do not tell us whether we shall actually eat and drink at the heavenly banquet. The risen Christ is both the pledge and instrument of his followers’ resurrection (p. 20), and they will share this incorruption. Like his, their bodies will remain sexually differentiated, but there is to be no marriage, intercourse, or child-bearing in the life to come. Augustine also distinguishes between the resurrection of the soul ‘brought about by the eternal and unchanging substance of Father and Son’ and the resurrection of the body brought about ‘through the efficacy of the Son’s [crucified, risen, and glorious] humanity, which is not co-eternal with the Father’ (p. 22, citing Io. ev. tr. 23.13).