A book worth discussing: The Resurrection of the Son of God

Currents in Theology and Mission, April, 2005 by John H. Tietjen

The Resurrection of the Son of God. By N. T. Wright. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. xxi and 817 pages. Cloth. $49.00.

"If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Cor 15:17-19).

So the apostle Paul concludes his response to those Christians in Corinth who argued against the resurrection of the dead. For me the apostle's point is very personal. If Christ has not been raised, I have been living and proclaiming a lie.

N. T. Wright's masterful work on the resurrection argues cogently and persuasively that the unanimous witness of the New Testament is that God raised Jesus from the dead and that, because God did, the followers of Jesus will also be raised. The resurrection of Jesus, Wright affirms, was for the Christians of the New Testament the evidence that the crucified Jesus is the Messiah and that his resurrection is the first fruits of resurrection to come for all who live and die in the Messiah. In the process Wright demolishes the notion that for Paul the resurrection was spiritual, not physical.

While asserting that his book is primarily "positive and expository," Wright states at the outset that he intends to challenge what he calls "a broadly dominant paradigm for understanding Jesus' resurrection," a paradigm "widely accepted in the worlds of scholarship and of mainline churches" (p. 7). Wright describes this dominant paradigm as follows:

(1) that the Jewish context provides only a fuzzy setting, in which
'resurrection' could mean a variety of different things; (2) that the
earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection,
but held a 'more spiritual' view; (3) that the earliest Christians
believed, not in Jesus' bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/
ascension/glorification, in his 'going to heaven' in some kind of
special capacity, and that they came to use 'resurrection' language
initially to note that belief and only subsequently to speak of an empty
tomb or of 'seeing' the risen Jesus; (4) that the resurrection stories
in the gospels are late inventions designed to bolster up this second-
stage belief; (5) that such 'seeings' of Jesus as may have taken place
are best understood in terms of Paul's conversion experience, which
itself is to be explained as a 'religious' experience, internal to the
subject rather than involving the seeing of any external reality, and
that the early Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or
hallucination; (6) that whatever happened to Jesus' body (opinions
differ as to whether it was even buried in the first place), it was not
'resuscitated', and was certainly not 'raised from the dead' in the
sense that the gospel stories, read at face value, seem to require.
(p. 7)

Wright is Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey and SPCK Research Fellow. This book is the third volume in a series titled Christian Origins and the Question of God. In the first volume, The New Testament and the People of God, Wright described and defended his preferred historical method, which he calls critical realism. He exemplified the method further in the second volume, Jesus and the Victory of God, and employs the method throughout in the present third volume.

In direct opposition to the claims of the Enlightenment, Wright affirms that the resurrection of Jesus was historical. Jesus raised from the dead was an event in history that can be discerned as other events are discerned. It is at the same time the crucial evidence of the truth of Jesus' claim about the inbreaking of God's rule and the beginning of the age to come. Far from simple resuscitation, Jesus' resurrection meant that he was alive again in a transphysical body.

Wright waits until the end of his book to take up an analysis of the accounts of Jesus' resurrection in the four Gospels. He begins the book with the context in which Jesus and the first Christians lived: the Hellenistic world, which for Jews like Jesus and the first Christians was dominated by the worldview and language of second-Temple Judaism.

That context did not allow for the modern way of speaking that equates resurrection with life after death. The Greek world allowed no room for resurrection. Homer, whose works Wright identifies as the Old Testament of the Greeks, was pessimistic about the state of the dead; at best the dead were "shades" in an unpleasant underworld. Plato, whose writings Wright identifies as the New Testament of the Greeks, envisioned death as the soul's liberation from its prison in the body for life in a much more pleasant Hades. Resurrection meant life after life after death, and that was impossible for all Greeks, Homeric or Platonic.

At the time of Jesus and the New Testament the world of second-Temple Judaism was dominant among Jews and with it the teaching that on the day of the Lord God would raise the dead bodily, some for life with him and others for destruction, a view held by the Pharisees and denied by the Sadducees. Wright maintains that the New Testament view of resurrection is a major modification of the second-Temple view, according to which the crucified Jesus, who was truly the Messiah, was raised from the dead to signal the onset of God's new age and to be the representative figure for all of his followers, who will be raised with him at his second coming. Resurrection in the New Testament, Wright asserts, is life after life after death, though very little is said in the New Testament about "life" between death and resurrection. Paul affirms that it is to be with the Lord, and John the Seer pictures the dead as under the altar of God in heaven praying for vindication. As in the Nicene Creed "the life of the world to come" flows from "the resurrection of the dead."