The Resurrection of Christ: History and Interpretation
The Resurrection of Christ: History and Interpretation
One issue that emerged as particularly important throughout the various “quests for the historical Jesus” was the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In what follows, we shall outline some of the main positions to have developed during the modern period, and briefly note their significance.
The Enlightenment: Resurrection as Nonevent
The characteristic Enlightenment emphasis on the importance of contemporary analogs to past events led to the development of an intensely skeptical attitude toward the resurrection in the eighteenth century. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing provides an excellent example of this attitude. He confesses that he does not have personal first-hand experience of the resurrection of Jesus Christ; so why, he asks, should he be asked to believe in something which he has not personally witnessed?
For Lessing, being obligated to accept the testimony of others is tantamount to a compromising of human intellectual autonomy. There are no contemporary analogs for the resurrection. Resurrection is not an aspect of modern-day experience. So why trust the New Testament reports? For Lessing, the resurrection is little more than a misunderstood nonevent.
David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74): Resurrection as Myth
In his Life of Jesus (1835), David Friedrich Strauss provided a radical new approach to the question of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Strauss declared his intention to explain “the origin of faith in the resurrection of Jesus without any corresponding miraculous fact.” Having excluded the resurrection as a “miraculous objective occurrence,” Strauss located the origin of the belief at the purely subjective level. Belief in the resurrection is not to be explained as a response to “a life objectively restored” but is “a subjective conception in the mind”: faith in the resurrection of Jesus is the outcome of an exaggerated “recollection of the personality of Jesus himself” by which a memory has been projected into the idea of a living presence. A dead Jesus is thus transfigured into an imaginary risen Christ – a mythical risen Christ, to use the appropriate term.
Strauss's distinctive contribution to the debate was to introduce the category of “myth” – a reflection of the gospel writers' social conditioningand cultural outlook. To suggest that their writings were partly “mythical” was thus not so much a challenge to their integrity but simply an acknowledgment of the premodern outlook of the period in which they were written. Perhaps Strauss's most astute reinterpreter in the twentieth century has been Rudolf Bultmann, to whose distinctive views on the resurrection we now turn.
Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976): Resurrection as an Event in the Experience of the Disciples
Bultmann shared Strauss's basic conviction that, in this scientific age, it is impossible to believe in miracles. As a result, belief in an objective resurrection of Jesus is no longer possible; however, it may well prove to be possible to make sense of it in another manner. History, Bultmann argued, is “a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect.” The resurrection, in common with other miracles, would thus disrupt the closed system of nature.
Belief in an objective resurrection of Jesus, although perfectly legitimate and intelligible in the first century, cannot be taken seriously today. The resurrection is to be regarded as “a mythical event, pure and simple.” The resurrection is something which happened in the subjective experience of the disciples, not something which took place in the public arena of history. For Bultmann, Jesus has indeed been raised – he has been raised up into the kerygma. The preaching of Jesus himself has been transformed into the Christian proclamation of Christ. Jesus has become an element of Christian preaching; he has been raised up and taken up into the proclamation of the gospel. “The resurrection itself is not an event of past history. All that historical criticism can establish is that the first disciples came to believe in the resurrection.”
Bultmann thus directs attention away from the historical Jesus toward the proclamation of Christ. “Faith in the church as the bearer of the kerygma is the Easter faith which consists in the belief that Jesus Christ is present in the kerygma.”
Karl Barth (1886–1968): Resurrection as an Historical Event Beyond Critical Inquiry
In his early writings, Barth argued that the empty tomb was of minimal importance in relation to the resurrection. However, he became increasingly alarmed at Bultmann's existential approach to the resurrection, which seemed to imply that it had no objective historical foundation. For this reason, Barth came to place considerable emphasis upon the gospel accounts of the empty tomb. The empty tomb is “an indispensable sign” which “obviates all possible misunderstanding.” It demonstrates that the resurrection of Christ was not a purely inward, interior, or subjective event but something which left a mark upon history.
This would seem to suggest that Barth regarded the resurrection as being open to historical investigation, to clarify its nature and confirm its place in the public history of the world, rather than in the private interior experience of the first believers. Yet this is not so. He consistently refuses to allow the gospel narratives to be subjected to critical–historical scrutiny. It is not entirely clear why. The following factor appears to have weighed heavily in his thinking at this point.
Barth emphasizes that Paul and the other apostles are not calling for the “acceptance of a well-attested historical report” but for “a decision of faith.” Historical investigation cannot legitimate or provide security for such faith; nor can faith become dependent upon the provisional results of historical inquiry. In any case, faith is a response to the risen Christ, not to the empty tomb. Barth was quite clear that the empty tomb, taken by itself, was of little value in laying the foundation for faith in the risen Christ. The absence of Christ from his tomb does not necessarily imply his resurrection: “He might in fact have been stolen, he might have only appeared to be dead.”
As a result, Barth is left in what initially seems to be a highly vulnerable position. Concerned to defend the resurrection as an act in public history against Bultmann's subjectivist approach, he is not prepared to allow that history to be critically studied. In part, this rests upon his passionate beliefthat historical scholarship cannot lay the basis for faith; in part, it reflects his assumption that the resurrection of Christ is part of a much larger network of ideas and events which cannot be disclosed or verified by historical inquiry. However much one may sympathize with Barth's theological concerns at this point, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he lacks credibility. It is perhaps for this reason that the more recent approach of Wolfhart Pannenberg has been the subject of considerable attention.
Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014): Resurrection as an Historical Event Open to Critical Inquiry
One of the most distinctive features of the theological program of Wolfhart Pannenberg is his insistence that the resurrection of Jesus is an objective historical event, witnessed by all who had access to the evidence. Whereas Bultmann treated the resurrection as an event within the experiential world of the disciples, Pannenberg declared that it belonged to the world of universal public history.
This immediately raised the question of the historicity of the resurrection. As we noted earlier, many Enlightenment writers had argued that our only knowledge of the alleged resurrection of Jesus was contained in the New Testament. Since there were no contemporary analogs for such a resurrection, the credibility of those reports had to be seriously questioned. In a similar vein, Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) had argued for the homogeneity of history: in that the resurrection of Jesus appeared to radically disrupt that homogeneity, it was to be regarded as of dubious historicity. Pannenberg initially responded to these difficulties in his essay on “Redemptive Event and History,” and subsequently in Jesus: God and Man. His basic argument against this position can be set out as follows.
Troeltsch, in Pannenberg's view, has a pedantically narrow view of history which rules out certain events in advance, on the basis of a set of provisional judgments which have improperly come to have the status of absolute laws. Troeltsch's unwarranted “constriction of historico-critical inquiry” was “biased” and “anthropocentric.” It presupposed that the human viewpoint is the only acceptable and normative standpoint within history. Analogies, Pannenberg stresses, are always analogies viewed from the standpoint of the human observer; that standpoint is radically restricted in its scope, and cannot be allowed to function as the absolutely certain basis of critical inquiry. Pannenberg is too good an historian to suggest that the principle of analogy should be abandoned; it is, after all, a proven and useful tool of historical research. Yet, Pannenberg insists, that is all that it is: it is a working tool and cannot be allowed to define a fixed view of reality.
If the historian sets out to investigate the New Testament already precommitted to the belief “dead people do not rise again,” that conclusion will merely be read back into the New Testament material. The judgment “Jesus did not rise from the dead” will be the presupposition, not the conclusion, of such an investigation. Pannenberg's discussion of this question represents an impassioned and impressive plea for a neutral approach to the resurrection. The historical evidence pointing to the resurrection of Jesus must be investigated without the prior dogmatic presupposition that such a resurrection could not have happened.
Having argued for the historicity of the resurrection, Pannenberg interprets this event within the context of the apocalyptic framework of meaning. The end of history has proleptically taken place in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This maxim dominates Pannenberg's interpretation of the event. The resurrection of Jesus anticipates the general resurrection at the end of time and thus establishes an identity between Jesus and God, which can then be read back into his pre-Easter ministry.
In the present chapter, we have surveyed some classical themes of Christology. The issues involved will probably continue to be subjects for perennial debate within Christian theology, and it is essential that the student becomes familiarwith at least some of the questions discussed here. However, these issues were largely overshadowed during the period of the Enlightenment, as questions of a more historical nature came to the fore – questions which will be considered in the following chapter.