4.3 The Debate over the Resurrection

4.3 The Debate over the Resurrection

Case Studies

Case Study 4.1 The Quests of the Historical Jesus

The modern period has seen a series of developments of fundamental importance to Christology, which have no real parallel in previous Christian history. The rise of a rationalist worldview saw a series of challenges to traditional understandings of the identity and significance of Jesus, without any real parallel with earlier times. In view of the importance of these developments, they are considered here in some detail. Earlier case studies explored the development of classical Christology, which continues to be a major aspect of theological reflection within the church. The present case study explores this issue further, focusing on three “Quests of the Historical Jesus” – the “original,” “new,” and “third” quests.

The term “quest” has strongly romantic overtones, suggesting an affinity with the great Arthurian “quest for the Holy Grail.” In fact, the term was introduced into the English-language discussion of the (much more prosaically entitled) “Historical Jesus Question” by the translator of Albert Schweitzer’s masterpiece of 1906 (published in English translation, 1911). A rough English translation of the German title is: “From Reimarus to Wrede: On the History of the Question of the Historical Jesus.” The translator, doubtless concerned that a dull title featuring two unknown German scholars might damage its sales potential in Britain, transferred their names to a subtitle, and inserted a new title: “The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede.” The term “Quest of the Historical Jesus” was neither used nor endorsed by Schweitzer; nevertheless, it passed into general circulation and continues to be used to this day.

The Original Quest for the Historical Jesus

Both Deism and the German Enlightenment developed the thesis that there was a serious discrepancy between the real Jesus of history and the New Testament interpretation of his significance. Underlying the New Testament portrait of the supernatural redeemer of humanity lurked a simple human figure, a glorified teacher of common sense. While a supernatural redeemer was unacceptable to Enlightenment rationalism, the idea of an enlightened moral teacher was not. This idea, developed with particular rigor by Reimarus, suggested that it was possible to go behind the New Testament accounts of Jesus and uncover a simpler, more human Jesus, who would be acceptable to the new spirit of the age. Thus the quest for the real and more credible “Jesus of history” began. Although this quest would ultimately end in failure, the later Enlightenment regarded this “quest” as holding the key to the credibility of Jesus within the context of a rational natural religion. Jesus’ moral authority resided in the quality of his teaching and religious personality, rather than in the orthodox suggestion that he was God incarnate, which appeared to be indefensible to the “Age of Reason,” within which the quest was initially located.

The original “Quest of the Historical Jesus” was based upon the controlling assumption that there was a radical gulf between the historical figure of Jesus and the interpretation that the Christian church had placed upon him. The “historical Jesus,” who lies behind the New Testament, was a simple religious teacher; the “Christ of faith” was a misrepresentation of this simple figure by early church writers. By going back to the historical Jesus, a more credible version of Christianity would result, stripped of all unnecessary and inappropriate dogmatic additions (such as the idea of the resurrection or the divinity of Christ). Such ideas, although frequently expressed by English Deists of the seventeenth century, received their classic statements in Germany in the late eighteenth century, especially through the posthumously published writings of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768).

Reimarus became increasingly convinced that both Judaism and Christianity rested upon fraudulent foundations and conceived the idea of writing a major work that would bring this fact to public attention. The resulting work – entitled “An Apology for the Rational Worshipper of God” – subjected the entire biblical canon to the standards of rationalist criticism. However, reluctant to cause any controversy, Reimarus did not publish the work during his lifetime. At some point after his death, however, the manuscript fell into the hands of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), published as a selection of extracts from the work in 1774, without naming the author. The work, now generally known as the “Wolfenbüttel Fragments,” caused a sensation, partly because of its attack on the historicity of the resurrection.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). A significant representative of the German Enlightenment, noted for his strongly rationalist approach to Christian theology.

The final section, entitled “On the aims of Jesus and his disciples,” concerned the nature of our knowledge of Jesus Christ and raised the questions of whether the gospel accounts of Jesus had been tampered with by the early Christians, who invented the idea of the resurrection of Jesus to cover up the shame of his unexpected death. As a result, the disciples invented doctrines quite unknown to Jesus, such as his death being an atonement for human sin, adding such ideas to the biblical text to make it harmonize with their beliefs. As a result, the New Testament as we now have it is riddled with fraudulent interpolations. The real Jesus of history is concealed from us by the apostolic church, which substitutes a fictitious Christ of faith, the redeemer of humanity from sin. Jesus was, according to Reimarus, simply a Jewish political figure, who confidently expected to cause a decisive and victorious popular rising against Rome and was shattered by his failure. The idea of the “resurrection” was invented to cover up this failure, leading to an essentially political message becoming spiritualized.

In his Quest of the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer argued that Reimarus’ radical approach to the identity and significance of Jesus of Nazareth obliged modern Christians to “leave behind what we learned in the catechism regarding the metaphysical divine sonship, the Trinity, and similar dogmatic conceptions, and go out into a wholly Jewish world of thought.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965). This leading German Protestant theologian was noted particularly for his work on the historical Jesus, which led to a series of influential publications calling the validity and presuppositions of the “quest of the historical Jesus” into question. In 1913, he gave up his theological career to undertake medical work in Africa.

The Critique of the Quest, 1890–1910

Reimarus raised questions that would become of fundamental importance in later discussions, including his explicit distinction between a real historical Jesus and a fictitious Christ of faith. The resulting “quest of the historical Jesus” arose as a direct result of the growing rationalist suspicion that the New Testament portrayal of Christ was a dogmatic invention. It was genuinely believed to be possible to reconstruct the real historical figure of Jesus and disentangle him from the dogmatic ideas in which the apostles had clothed him. Yet it proved difficult, if not impossible, to carry out such an historical reconstruction of Christ, which often involved projecting the ideas of the present upon the past.

The most sustained challenge to the “life of Jesus” movement developed on a number of fronts during the final decade of the nineteenth century. Three main criticisms of the “religious personality” Christology of liberal Protestantism emerged in the two decades before the First World War; we shall consider them individually.

Kähler states his two objectives in this work as follows: first, to criticize and reject the errors of the “life of Jesus” movement and, second, to establish the validity of an alternative approach. For Kähler:

The historical Jesus of modern writers conceals the living Christ from us. The Jesus of the “life of Jesus” movement is merely a modern example of a brain-child of the human imagination, no better than the notorious dogmatic Christ of Byzantine Christology. They are both equally far removed from the real Christ. In this respect, historicism is just as arbitrary, just as humanly arrogant, just as speculative and “faithlessly gnostic,” as that dogmatism which was itself considered modern in its own day.

Kähler concedes immediately that the “life of Jesus” movement was completely correct in so far as it contrasted the biblical witness to Christ with an abstract dogmatism. He nevertheless insists upon its futility, a view summarized in his well-known statement to the effect that the entire life of Jesus movement is a blind alley. His reasons for making this assertion are complex.

The most fundamental reason is that Christ must be regarded as what Kähler terms a “supra-historical” rather than an “historical” figure, so that the critical historical method cannot be applied in his case. The critical historical method could not deal with the supra-historical (and hence supra-human) characteristics of Jesus, and hence was obliged to ignore or deny them. In effect, the critical historical method could only lead to an Arian or Ebionite Christology, on account of its latent dogmatic presuppositions. This point, made frequently throughout the essay, is developed with particular force in relation to the psychological interpretation of the personality of Jesus and the related question concerning the use of the principle of analogy in the critical historical method.

Kähler notes that the psychological interpretation of the personality of Jesus is dependent upon the (unrecognized) presupposition that the distinction between ourselves and Jesus is one of degree rather than kind, which Kähler suggests must be criticized on dogmatic grounds. More significantly, Kähler challenged the principle of analogy in the interpretation of the New Testament portrayal of Christ in general, which inevitably led to Jesus being treated as analogous to modern human beings, and hence to a reduced Christology. If it is assumed from the outset that Jesus is an ordinary human being, who differs from other humans only in degree and not in nature, then this assumption will be read back into the biblical texts and dictate the resulting conclusion – that Jesus of Nazareth is a human being who differs from us only in degree.

Second, Kähler argued that “we do not possess any sources for a life of Jesus which an historian could accept as reliable and adequate.” This is not to say that the sources are unreliable and inadequate for the purposes of faith. Rather, Kähler wants to emphasize that the gospels are not the accounts of disinterested, impartial observers, but rather accounts of the faith of believers, which cannot be isolated, in either form or content, from that faith: the gospel accounts “are not the reports of alert impartial observers, but are throughout the testimonies and confessions of believers in Christ.” In that “it is only through these accounts that we are able to come into contact with him,” it will be clear that the “biblical portrait of Christ” is of decisive importance for faith.

What is important for Kähler is not who Christ was, but what he presently does for believers. The “Jesus of history” lacks the soteriological significance of the “Christ of faith.” The thorny problems of Christology may therefore be left behind in order to develop what he termed “soterology” and defined as “the knowledge of faith concerning the person of the savior.” In effect, Kähler argues that the “life of Jesus” movement has done little more than create a fictitious and pseudo-scientific Christ, devoid of existential significance. Christian faith is not based upon this historical Jesus, but upon the existentially significant and faith-evoking figure of the Christ of faith. For Kähler, “the real Christ is the preached Christ.”

Others took similar views. The German historian of dogma Friedrich Loofs (1858–1928), for example, argued that theological reflection about the person of Jesus of Nazareth had to take historical research seriously. Yet it was also necessary to realize that there was more to the significance of Jesus of Nazareth than what historical research was able to disclose reliably:

Faith will, therefore, have to oppose the science of history, if the latter, unwilling to recognize that Jesus stands beyond the reach of its standards, thinks that it has to eliminate those traits in the picture of Jesus which surpass the ordinary bounds of human life. Faith will have to claim – and it has a right to do so – that historical science shall acknowledge that it cannot say the last word about Jesus. … [Jesus] was a real man, and yet not a man like all others, a man in whose case the analogy of all other human experience is of no use, a unique man among all the children of God (or sons of God as the New Testament says), the unique one, the only begotten son.

Concerns such as these about the limits of the historical method gradually came to dominate the theological scene, and may be regarded as reaching their climax in the writings of Rudolf Bultmann, to which we may now turn.

The Retreat from History: Rudolf Bultmann

A second response to the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” was to disengage from history. The German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann regarded the entire enterprise of the historical reconstruction of Jesus as a blind alley. History was not of fundamental importance to Christology; it was merely necessary that Jesus existed and that the Christian proclamation (which Bultmann terms the kerygma) is somehow grounded in his person. Bultmann thus famously reduced the entire historical aspect of Christology to a single word – “that.” It is necessary only to believe “that” Jesus Christ lies behind the gospel proclamation (or kerygma).

Bultmann’s disengagement with history, however, needs to be set in its historical context. Bultmann served as a professor of theology at the German university of Marburg from 1921 until his retirement in 1951. When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1934, new racial laws were passed that made it illegal to discuss Jesus as a Jewish figure. This made it impossible for German New Testament scholarship to discuss the historical figure of Jesus, leading to a disengagement with history that lasted until the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). A German Lutheran writer, who was appointed to a chair of theology at Marburg in 1921. He is chiefly noted for his program of “demythologization” of the New Testament and his use of existential ideas in the exposition of the twentieth-century meaning of the gospel.

For Bultmann, the cross and the resurrection are indeed historical phenomena (in that they took place within human history) – but they must be discerned to be divine actions by faith. The cross and the resurrection are linked in the kerygma as the divine act of judgment and the divine act of salvation. It is this divine act that is of continuing significance and not the historical phenomenon that was originally its bearer. The kerygma is thus not concerned with matters of historical fact, but with conveying the necessity of a decision on the part of its hearers, and thus transferring the eschatological moment from the past to the here and now of the proclamation itself. “Jesus Christ encounters us in the kerygma and nowhere else.” For Bultman, the kerygma transmits the existential and transhistorical significance of Jesus.

The kerygma does not proclaim universal truths or a timeless idea – whether it is an idea of God or of the redeemer – but an historical fact. … Therefore the kerygma is neither a vehicle for timeless ideas nor the mediator of historical information: what is of decisive importance is that the kerygma is Christ’s “that,” his “here and now,” a “here and now” which becomes present in the address itself.

It is therefore not possible to go behind the kerygma, using it as a “source” in order to reconstruct an “historical Jesus” with his “messianic consciousness,” his “inner life,” or his “heroism.” That would merely be “Christ according to the flesh,” who no longer exists. It is not the historical Jesus, but Jesus Christ, the one who preached, who is the Lord.

Bultmann’s move away from history alarmed many. Without history, how could anyone rest assured that Christology was properly grounded in the person and work of Jesus Christ? How could anyone begin to check out Christology, if the history of Jesus was an irrelevance? The British New Testament scholar N. T. Wright argues for the need for an interplay of theology and history in responsible reflection on the identity of Christ:

History and theology function well together; in fact they are distorted when one functions without the other. History, then, prevents faith from becoming fantasy. Faith prevents history from becoming mere antiquarianism. Historical research, being always provisional, cannot ultimately veto faith, though it can pose hard questions that faith, in order to retain its integrity precisely as Christian faith, must struggle to answer, and may well grow strong through answering.

It seemed to an increasing number of writers, within the fields of both New Testament and dogmatic studies, that Bultmann had merely cut a Gordian knot, without resolving the serious historical issues at stake. For Bultmann, all that could be, and could be required to be, known about the historical Jesus was the fact that he existed. For the New Testament scholar Gerhard Ebeling (1912–2001), the person of the historical Jesus is the fundamental basis of Christology and if it could be shown that Christology was a misinterpretation of the significance of the historical Jesus, Christology would be brought to an end. Ebeling pointed to what he considered to be a fundamental deficiency in Bultmann’s Christology: its total lack of openness to investigation (perhaps “verification” is too strong a term) in the light of historical scholarship. Might not Christology rest upon a mistake? How can we rest assured that there is a justifiable transition from the preaching of Jesus to the preaching about Jesus? In this, Ebeling may be seen as expressing the concerns that underlie the “new quest of the historical Jesus,” to be discussed in the following section.

The New Quest of the Historical Jesus

The “new quest of the historical Jesus” is generally regarded as having been inaugurated by Ernst Käsemann (1906–1998), in a significant lecture of October 1953 on the problem of the historical Jesus. The full importance of this lecture only emerges if it is viewed in the light of the presuppositions and methods of Bultmann’s school up to this point. Käsemann concedes that the synoptic gospels are primarily theological documents and that their theological statements are often expressed within the form of the historical. In this, he endorses and recapitulates key axioms of the Bultmann school, here based upon insights of Kähler and Wrede.

Nevertheless, Käsemann immediately went on to qualify these assertions in a significant manner. Despite their obviously theological concerns, the evangelists nevertheless believed that they had access to historical information concerning Jesus of Nazareth and that this historical information is expressed and embodied in the text of the synoptic gospels. The gospels include both the kerygma and historical narrative.

Building on this insight, Käsemann points to the need to explore the continuity between the preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus. There is an obvious discontinuity between the earthly Jesus and the exalted and proclaimed Christ; yet a thread of continuity links them, in that the proclaimed Christ is already present, in some sense, in the historical Jesus. It must be stressed that Käsemann is not suggesting that a new inquiry should be undertaken concerning the historical Jesus in order to provide historical legitimation for the kerygma; still less is he suggesting that the discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the proclaimed Christ necessitates the deconstruction of the latter in terms of the former. Rather, Käsemann is pointing to the theological assertion of the identity of the earthly Jesus and the exalted Christ being historically grounded in the actions and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth. This theological affirmation is, Käsemann argues, dependent upon the historical demonstration that the kerygma concerning Jesus is already contained in a nutshell or embryonic form in the ministry of Jesus. In that the kerygma contains historical elements, it is entirely proper and necessary to inquire concerning the relation of the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.

It will be clear that the “new quest of the historical Jesus” is qualitatively different from the now-discredited quest of the nineteenth century. Käsemann’s argument rests upon the recognition that the discontinuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith does not imply that they are unrelated entities, with the latter having no grounding or foundation in the former. Rather, the kerygma may be discerned in the actions and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, so that there is a continuity between the preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus. Where the older quest had assumed that the discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith implied that the latter was potentially a fiction, who required to be reconstructed in the light of objective historical investigation, Käsemann stresses that such reconstruction is neither necessary nor possible.

The growing realization of the importance of this point led to intensive interest developing in the question of the historical foundations of the kerygma. Four positions of interest may be noted.

The “New Quest of the Historical Jesus” was thus concerned to stress the continuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. Whereas the “Old Quest” had the aim of discrediting the New Testament portrayal of Christ, the New Quest ended up consolidating it, by stressing the continuities between the preaching of Jesus himself and the church’s preaching about Jesus. Since then, there have been other developments in the field. In the last two decades, particular attention has been directed toward exploring the relation between Jesus and his environment in first-century Judaism. This development, which is especially associated with English and American writers such as Geza Vermes (1924–2013) and E. P. Sanders (born 1937), has renewed interest in the Jewish background to Jesus and further emphasized the importance of history in relation to Christology. The Bultmannian approach – which devalues the significance of history in Christology – is widely regarded as discredited, at least for the moment. We shall turn to consider this “Third Quest” in the concluding section of this case study.

The Third Quest

Since the general collapse of the “New Quest” during the 1960s, a series of works have appeared offering re-evaluations of the historical Jesus. The term “Third Quest” has often been applied to this group of works, which began to appear in the 1970s, before going into decline in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The designation has been called into question by a number of writers, who point out that the works and scholars who are gathered together under this term do not have enough in common to categorize them in this way. For example, some writers within the group make an appeal to sources outside the New Testament, especially the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, in their analysis; others restrict their analysis to the New Testament materials, especially the synoptic gospels. Despite such reservations, the term has gained general acceptance and it is therefore appropriate to include it in this survey.

While the “Third Quest” resists precise definition, a number of themes feature in many of its representative works. The most important of these is a reaffirmation of the importance of the Jewish identity of Christ, which many believed had been marginalized in classic discussions of the “historical Jesus” from the 1790s to the 1960s. It is important to appreciate that the marginalization of Christ’s Jewishness is a recent development. Paul’s New Testament letters show a proper appreciation of the importance of Christ’s Jewish identity and this is echoed in early Christian theologians, such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Augustine of Hippo.

“Third Quest” writers such as Dale C. Allison Jr., E. P. Sanders, and N. T. Wright argued that the Jewishness of Christ was the proper starting point for exploring his historical and theological significance. Jewish voices – such as that of Geza Vermes – now became part of a wider scholarly discussion of the “historical Jesus.” This development was stimulated by a number of factors, including the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls and growing scholarly dissatisfaction with the rigid distinction drawn by earlier historians between Second Temple Judaism and Hellenism. Yet while many within the “Third Quest” emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus, others – such as Dominic Crossan and Burton Mack – have suggested that certain distinctive features of his teaching and ministry originate from outside Judaism – for example, from within the Greco-Roman Cynical tradition.

Among significant contributions to the “Third Quest,” the following are of particular interest:

Either we “know” ahead of time that Jesus is “divine” (it is usually assumed that the force of this predicate is already understood), in which case the writing of the history of his life “must” reflect this fact. … Alternatively, we commit ourselves to ruthless historical investigation, and expect, whether gladly or fearfully, that we will thereby “disprove,” or at least seriously undermine, orthodox theology. … [Yet] rigorous history (that is, open-ended investigation of actual events in first-century Palestine) and rigorous theology (that is, open-ended investigation of what the word “god,” and hence the adjective “divine,” might actually refer to) belong together, and never more so than in discussion of Jesus.

On the basis of this brief analysis of some representatives of the “Third Quest,” it will be clear that, despite some shared themes, it generally lacks a coherent theological or historical core. There is significant disagreement concerning whether Jesus is to be seen against a Jewish or Hellenistic background; about his attitude to the Jewish law and its religious institutions; his view of the future of Israel; and the personal significance of Jesus in relation to that future. Nevertheless, the term has found at least a degree of acceptance, despite its clear weaknesses, and it is likely to remain an integral part of scholarly discussion of this important issue.

It is still too early to evaluate the outcomes of the “Third Quest,” or speculate about what the next phase in historical Jesus scholarship might be, but it is becoming clear that this more recent movement reflects a growing trend to treat the gospel as essentially reliable historical documents, allowing us to situate Jesus of Nazareth against the intellectual context of his day. In particular, the Third Quest tends to see Jesus of Nazareth as the proclaimer of the kingdom of God, as understanding himself to be the Lord’s anointed, destined to rule Israel. This bears little relation to Robert W. Funk’s “Jesus Seminar” of the 1980s and 1990s, which is increasingly seen as reflecting the assumptions and methods of earlier approaches to the question, particularly its questionable historical positivism. Crossan is one of many scholars to point out that most attempts to “rediscover” the “Jesus of history” lack methodological security and integrity, and have often used questionable methods and assumptions that have led to the enterprise being seen as “something of a scholarly bad joke” in many circles.

So will there be a “Fourth Quest?” Recent scholarly trends in the field suggest that there is dwindling interest in the prevailing tendency to chart the intellectual history of research into the “historical Jesus” in terms of “quests.” Each of the three “quests” noted in this brief discussion turns out to be much more diverse than might at first appear, so that there is a tendency to impose this framework upon scholars who do not necessarily share the same presuppositions or conclusions. For example, Funk’s “Jesus Seminar” is seen by some as an element of the “Third Quest,” when Funk himself resisted this interpretation. A good case can be made for suggesting that each of these quests is essentially a “historiographical construct,” a framework imposed by historians upon an essentially continuous and ongoing discussion, allowing it to be broken down into manageable segments. This research will continue; it is, however, now unlikely to be branded in terms of coherent “quests.”

Case Study 4.2 The Basis and Nature of Salvation

In 1521, the German Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon – then aged 24 – published his Loci Communes (“Common Places”), a theological textbook that organized its discussion around central topics such as the identity and significance of Christ. The stand-out quote in this work is this: “to know Christ is to know his benefits.” To understand who Christ is, Melanchthon declares, we need to understand what Christ has done for us, rather than to speculate about the theological fine details of the incarnation. The Christian understanding of salvation – often referred to as “soteriology” – involves identifying the “benefits of Christ,” mapping the multiple ways in which the New Testament understands Christ to have transformed human existence.

The question of how salvation is attained and how that salvation is to be understood has been the subject of discussion throughout Christian history. The patristic period witnessed the exploration of a variety of approaches, often with a particular concentration on the theme of Christ’s victory over death or his transformation of corporate humanity through deification. The Middle Ages witnessed a new interest in the morality or legality of atonement (see Case Study 2.2). In the modern period, the discussion has continued. The present case study offers a survey of that discussion, beginning with a consideration of the relation between the doctrines of the person and the work of Christ – or, to use more technical language, between Christology and soteriology.

The Relation between Christology and Soteriology

In the great works of systematic theology dating from the periods of high scholasticism and Protestant orthodoxy, a rigorous distinction was made between the “person of Christ” and the “work of Christ.” In the modern period, this distinction has been generally abandoned, on account of an increasing recognition of the inextricable connection of these two areas of theology. Christology and soteriology are increasingly being regarded as the two sides of one and the same coin. A number of considerations have led to this development.

The first is the influence of a Kantian epistemology, particularly in German-language theology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kant argued that we can only know the “thing-in-itself” (Ding-an-sich) in terms of its effect upon us. If this general approach is translated to the cluster of issues centering upon the identity and significance of Jesus Christ, it would seem to follow that the essence or identity of Christ (that is, Christology) cannot be separated from his effect or impact upon us (that is, soteriology). This is the approach adopted by Albrecht Ritschl in his Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1874). Ritschl argued that it was improper to separate Christology and soteriology, in that we perceive “the nature and attributes, that is the determination of being, only in the effect of a thing upon us, and we think of the nature and extent of its effect upon us as its essence.”

The second consideration is the general recognition that, even in the New Testament, there is a strong correlation between the Christological titles of Jesus and their soteriological substructure. “A separation between Christology and soteriology is not possible, because in general the soteriological interest, the interest in salvation, in the beneficia Christi, is what causes us to ask about the figure of Jesus” (Wolfhart Pannenberg).

Despite this consensus, there is continuing disagreement over the emphasis to be given to soteriological considerations in Christology. For example, the approach adopted by Rudolf Bultmann appears to reduce Christology to das Dass – the mere fact “that” a historical figure existed, to whom the kerygma can be traced and attached (see Case Study 4.1). The primary function of the kerygma is to transmit the soteriological content of the Christ-event. A related approach, found in A. E. Biedermann and Paul Tillich, draws a distinction between the “Christ principle” and the historical person of Jesus.

This has led some writers, most notably Pannenberg, to express anxiety that a Christology might simply be constructed out of soteriological considerations (and thus be vulnerable to the criticisms of Ludwig Feuerbach), rather than grounded in the history of Jesus himself. Yet while this is a reasonable concern, the New Testament itself presupposes the interconnectedness of Christ’s identity and significance. The New Testament offers us an interpretation of Christ, framed in terms of his importance for believers. The New Testament scholar Morna Hooker makes this point clearly: “it is no use turning to the New Testament and looking there for the ‘truth’ about Jesus, stripped bare of Christian interpretation, for what the New Testament offers us is itself ‘the gospel about Jesus Christ.’” Far from being “raw data” susceptible to objective interpretation by later historians, their historical narratives are already shaped by the theological beliefs of the early Christian community – above all, about what Christ achieves and its impact for the human situation.

Interpretations of the Work of Christ

The New Testament is emphatic that something new has happened through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, with the capacity to transform human life and thought. So how is this new way of existing to be described? New Testament writers drew on a series of metaphors and analogies that connected with the experiential world of their readers, enabling them to imagine or envisage what had happened to them in embracing Christ. Some were drawn from the rich heritage of Judaism, from which Christianity had emerged; others had their origins in first-century Greco-Roman commercial, legal, and social worlds, familiar to so many readers of the New Testament letters. These ideas became the basis of both teaching within the church and outreach beyond the church.

Modern discussions of the meaning of the cross and resurrection of Christ are best grouped around four central controlling themes or images. It must be stressed that these are not mutually exclusive and that it is normal to find writers adopting approaches that incorporate elements drawn from more than one such category. Indeed, it can be argued that the views of most writers on this subject cannot be reduced to or confined within a single category without doing serious violence to their ideas.

Sacrifice

The New Testament, drawing on Old Testament imagery and expectations, presents Christ’s death upon the cross as a sacrifice. This approach, which is especially associated with the Letter to the Hebrews, presents Christ’s sacrificial offering as an effective and perfect sacrifice, which was able to accomplish that which the sacrifices of the Old Testament were only able to intimate, rather than achieve. This idea is developed subsequently within the Christian tradition. For example, in taking over the imagery of sacrifice, Augustine states that Christ “was made a sacrifice for sin, offering himself as a whole burnt offering on the cross of his passion.” In order for humanity to be restored to God, the mediator must sacrifice himself; without this sacrifice, such restoration is an impossibility. For Augustine, this sacrifice is commemorated in the Eucharist. Similar ideas may be discerned in the theology of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period.

The sacrificial offering of Christ on the cross came to be linked especially with one aspect of the “threefold office of Christ” (munus triplex Christi). According to this typology, which dates from the middle of the sixteenth century, the work of Christ could be summarized under three “offices”: the prophet (by which Christ declares the will of God), the priest (by which he makes sacrifice for sin), and the king (by which he rules with authority over his people). The general acceptance of this taxonomy within Protestantism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a sacrificial understanding of Christ’s death becoming of central importance within Protestant soteriologies. Thus John Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed of 1659 insists upon the necessity of the sacrifice of Christ in redemption and specifically links this with the priestly office of Christ.

The redemption or salvation which the Messiah was to bring consisteth in the freeing of a sinner from the state of sin and eternal death into a state of righteousness and eternal life. Now a freedom from sin could not be wrought without a sacrifice propitiatory, and therefore there was a necessity of a priest.

Since the Enlightenment, however, there has been a subtle shift in the meaning of the term. A metaphorical extension of meaning has come to be given priority over the original. Whereas the term originally referred to the ritual offering of slaughtered animals as a specifically religious action, the term increasingly came to mean heroic or costly action on the parts of individuals, especially the giving up of one’s life, with no transcendent reference or expectation.

This trend may be seen developing in John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity of 1695. Locke argues that the only article of faith required of Christians is that of belief in Christ’s Messiahship; the idea of a sacrifice for sin is studiously set to one side. “The faith required was to believe Jesus to be the Messiah, the anointed, who had been promised by God to the world. … I do not remember that [Christ] anywhere assumes to himself the title of a priest, or mentions anything relating to his priesthood.”

These arguments were developed further by the Deist writer Thomas Chubb (1679–1747), especially in his True Gospel of Jesus Christ Vindicated of 1739. Arguing that the true religion of reason was that of conformity to the eternal rule of right, Chubb argues that the idea of Christ’s death as a sacrifice arises from the apologetic concerns of the early Christian writers, which led them to harmonize this religion of reason with the cult of the Jews: “As the Jews had their temple, their altar, their high priest, their sacrifices and the like, so the apostles, in order to make Christianity bear a resemblance to Judaism, found out something or other in Christianity, which they by a figure of speech called by those names.” Chubb, in common with the emerging Enlightenment tradition, dismissed this as spurious. “God’s disposition to show mercy … arises wholly from his own innate goodness or mercifulness, and not from anything external to him, whether it be the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ or otherwise.”

Even Joseph Butler, in attempting to reinstate the notion of sacrifice in his Analogy of Religion of 1736, found himself in difficulty, given the strongly rationalist spirit of the age. In upholding the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death, he found himself obliged to concede more than he cared to:

How and in what particular way [the death of Christ] had this efficacy, there are not wanting persons who have endeavoured to explain; but I do not find that Scripture has explained it. We seem to be very much in the dark concerning the manner in which the ancients understood atonements to be made, that is, pardon to be obtained by sacrifice.

Horace Bushnell’s Vicarious Sacrifice of 1866 illustrates this same trend in the Anglo-American theology of the period, but in a more constructive manner. Through his suffering, Christ awakens our sense of guilt. His vicarious sacrifice demonstrates that God suffers on account of evil. In speaking of the “tender appeals of sacrifice,” Bushnell might seem to align himself with purely exemplarist understandings of the death of Christ; however, Bushnell is adamant that there are objective elements to atonement. Christ’s death affects God and expresses God. There are strong anticipations of later theologies of the suffering of God, when Bushnell declares:

Whatever we may say or hold or believe concerning the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, we are to affirm in the same manner of God. The whole Deity is in it, in it from eternity. … There is a cross in God before the wood is seen on the hill. … It is as if there were a cross unseen, standing on its undiscovered hill, far back in the ages.

The use of sacrificial imagery has become noticeably less widespread since 1945, especially in German-language theology. It is highly likely that this relates directly to the rhetorical debasement of the term in secular contexts, especially in situations of national emergency. The secular use of the imagery of sacrifice, often degenerating to little more than slogan-mongering, is widely regarded as having tainted and compromised both the word and the concept. The frequent use of such phrases as “he sacrificed his life for King and country” in British circles during the First World War and Adolf Hitler’s extensive use of sacrificial imagery in justifying economic hardship and the loss of civil liberties as the price of German national revival in the late 1930s served to render the term virtually unusable for many in Christian teaching and preaching, on account of its negative associations. Nevertheless, the idea continues to be of importance in modern Roman Catholic sacramental theology, which continues to regard the eucharist as a sacrifice and to find in this image a rich source of theological imagery.

Christus Victor

The New Testament and early church laid considerable emphasis upon the victory gained by Christ over sin, death, and Satan through his cross and resurrection. This theme of victory, often linked liturgically with the Easter celebrations, was of major importance within the western Christian theological tradition until the Enlightenment. With the advent of the Enlightenment, however, it began to fall out of theological favor, increasingly being regarded as outmoded and unsophisticated. The following factors appear to have contributed to this development.

The rehabilitation of this approach in the modern period is usually dated to 1931, with the appearance of Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor. This short book, which originally appeared in German in the form of an article in Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie (1930), has exercised a major influence over English-language approaches to the subject. Aulén argued that the classic Christian conception of the work of Christ was summed up in the belief that the risen Christ had brought new possibilities of life to humanity through his victory over the powers of evil. In a brief and very compressed account of the history of theories of the atonement, Aulén argued that this highly dramatic “classic” theory had dominated Christianity until the Middle Ages, when more abstract legal theories began to gain ground. The situation was radically reversed through Martin Luther, who reintroduced the theme. However, the scholastic concerns of Protestant orthodoxy led to its being relegated once more to the background. Aulén argued that this approach could no longer be allowed to be the victim of historical circumstances; it demanded a full and proper hearing.

Historically, Aulén’s approach was soon found to be inadequate. Its claims to be treated as the “classic” theory of the atonement had been overstated. It was indeed an important component of the general patristic understanding of the nature and mode of procurance of salvation; nevertheless, if any theory could justly lay claim to the title of “the classic theory of the atonement” in early Christianity, it would be the notion of redemption through unity with Christ.

Nevertheless, Aulén’s views were sympathetically received during the 1930s, in the midst of an economic crisis and growing indications of international instability. There was growing disenchantment with the Enlightenment worldview in general following the catastrophe of the First World War, which also highlighted the reality of evil in the world. The insights of Sigmund Freud in the 1920s concerning the ways in which adults could be spiritually imprisoned by their subconscious, raised serious doubts about the Enlightenment view of the total rationality of human nature and lent new credibility to the idea that humans are held in bondage to unknown and hidden forces. Aulén’s approach seemed to resonate with a growing realization of the darker side of human nature. It had become intellectually respectable to talk about “forces of evil” and the theological need to explain how these could be overcome.

Aulén’s approach mediated between the two main soteriological alternatives then on offer within mainstream liberal Protestantism – both of which were regarded as flawed. The classic legal theory was regarded as raising difficult theological questions, not least concerning the morality of atonement; the subjective approach, which regarded Christ’s death as doing little more than arousing human religious sentiment, seemed to be seriously religiously inadequate. Aulén offered an approach to the meaning of the death of Christ that bypassed the difficulties of legal approaches, yet vigorously defended the objective nature of the atonement. Nevertheless, Aulén’s Christus Victor approach did seem to face some serious criticisms. For example, it offered no rational justification for the manner in which the forces of evil are defeated through the cross of Christ. Why the cross? Why not in some other manner?

Since then, the image of victory has been explored in various ways in Christian theology. Rudolf Bultmann extended his programme of demythologization to the New Testament theme of victory, interpreting it as a victory over inauthentic existence and unbelief. Paul Tillich offers a reworking of Aulén’s theory, in which the victory of Christ on the cross is interpreted as a victory over existential forces that threaten to deprive us of authentic existence. Bultmann and Tillich, in adopting such existentialist approaches, thus convert a theory of the atonement that was originally radically objective into a subjective victory within the human consciousness.

In his Past Event and Present Salvation (1989), Oxford theologian Paul Fiddes (born 1947) emphasizes that the notion of “victory” retains a place of significance within Christian thinking about the cross. Christ’s death does more than impart some new knowledge to us or express old ideas in new manners. It makes possible a new mode of existence:

The victory of Christ actually creates victory in us. … The act of Christ is one of those moments in human history that “opens up new possibilities of existence.” Once a new possibility has been disclosed, other people can make it their own, repeating and reliving the experience.

Legal Approaches

A third approach centres on the idea of the death of Christ providing the basis by which God is enabled to forgive sin. This notion is traditionally associated with the eleventh-century writer Anselm of Canterbury, who developed an argument for the necessity of the incarnation on this basis. This model became incorporated into classical Protestant dogmatics during the period of orthodoxy and finds its expression in many hymns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Three main models were used to understand the manner in which the forgiveness of human sins is related to the death of Christ.

With the onset of the Enlightenment, this approach to the atonement was subjected to a radical critique. The following major points of criticism were directed against it.

These criticisms were given added weight through the development of the discipline of the “history of dogma” (Dogmengeschichte). The representatives of this movement, from G. S. Steinbart through to Adolf von Harnack, argued that a series of assumptions, each of central importance to the Anselmian doctrine of penal substitution, had become incorporated into Christian theology by what were little more than historical accidents. For example, in his System of Pure Philosophy of 1778, Steinbart argued that historical investigation disclosed the intrusion of three “arbitrary assumptions” into Christian reflection on salvation:

For such reasons, Steinbart felt able to declare the substructure of orthodox Protestant thinking on the atonement to be a relic of a bygone era.

More recently, the idea of guilt – a central aspect of legal approaches to soteriology – has been the subject of much discussion, especially in the light of Freud’s views on the origin of guilt in childhood experiences. For some twentieth-century writers, “guilt” is simply a psychosocial projection, whose origins lie not in the holiness of God but in the weaknesses and anxieties of human nature. These psychosocial structures are then, it is argued, projected on to some imaginary screen of “external” reality and treated as if they are objectively true. While this represents a considerable overstatement of the case, it has the advantage of clarity, and allows us to gain an appreciation of the considerable pressure that this approach to the atonement is currently facing.

Nevertheless, this view continues to find much support. The collapse of the evolutionary moral optimism of liberal Protestantism in the wake of the First World War did much to raise again the question of human guilt and the need for redemption from outside the human situation. Two significant contributions to this discussion may be regarded as precipitated directly by the credibility crisis faced by liberal Protestantism at this time.

P. T. Forsyth’s Justification of God (1916), written during the First World War, represents an impassioned plea to allow the notion of the “justice of God” to be rediscovered. Forsyth is less concerned than Anselm about the legal and juridical aspects of the cross; his interest centres on the manner in which the cross is inextricably linked with “the whole moral fabric and movement of the universe.” The doctrine of the atonement is inseparable from “the rightness of things.” God acts to restore this “rightness of things,” in that God makes available through the cross a means of moral regeneration – something that the First World War demonstrated that humanity needed, yet was unable to provide itself.

The cross is not a theological theme, nor a forensic device, but the crisis of the moral universe on a scale far greater than earthly war. It is the theodicy of the whole God dealing with the whole soul of the whole world in holy love, righteous judgment and redeeming grace.

Through the cross, God aims to restore the rightness of the world through rightful means – a central theme of Anselm’s doctrine of atonement, creatively restated.

More significant is the extended discussion of the theme of “atonement” or “reconciliation” (the German term Versöhnung can bear both meanings) in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. The central section (IV/1, §59, 2) addressing the issue is entitled – significantly – “The Judge Judged in Our Place.” The title derives from the Heidelberg Catechism, which speaks of Christ as the judge who “has represented me before the judgment of God, and has taken away all condemnation from me.” The section in question can be regarded as an extended commentary on this classic text of the Reformed tradition, dealing with the manner in which the judgment of God is in the first place made known and enacted; and in the second, is taken upon God himself (a central Anselmian theme, even if Anselm failed to integrate it within a Trinitarian context).

Barth’s analysis here is steeped in the language and imagery of guilt, judgment, and forgiveness. In the cross, we can see God exercising his rightful judgment of sinful humanity (Barth uses the compound term Sündermensch to emphasize that “sin” is not a detachable aspect or feature of human nature). The cross exposes human delusions of self-sufficiency and autonomy of judgment, which Barth sees encapsulated in the story of Genesis 3: “the human being wants to be his own judge.”

Yet alteration of the situation demands that its inherent wrongness be acknowledged. For Barth, the cross of Christ represents the locus in which the righteous judge makes known his judgment of sinful humanity and simultaneously takes that judgment upon himself.

What took place is that the Son of God fulfilled the righteous judgement on us human beings by himself taking our place as a human being, and in our place undergoing the judgement under which we had passed. … Because God willed to execute his judgement on us in his Son, it all took place in his person, as his accusation and condemnation and destruction. He judged, and it was the judge who was judged, who allowed himself to be judged.

The strongly substitutionary character of this approach will be evident. God exercises his righteous judgment by exposing our sin, by taking it upon himself, and thus by neutralizing its power. The cross thus both speaks “for us” and “against us.” Unless the cross is allowed to reveal the full extent of our sin, it cannot take that sin from us:

The “for us” of his death on the cross included and encloses this terrible “against us.” Without this terrible “against us,” it would not be the divine and holy and redemptive and effectively helpful “for us,” in which the conversion of humanity and the world to God has become an event.

Exemplarist Approaches

A central aspect of the New Testament understanding of the meaning of the cross relates to the demonstration of the love of God for humanity. With the rise of the Enlightenment worldview, increasingly critical approaches were adopted to theories of the atonement that incorporated transcendent elements – such as the idea of a sacrifice that had some impact upon God, or Christ dying in order to pay some penalty or satisfaction that was due for sin. The increasingly skeptical attitude to the resurrection tended to discourage theologians from incorporating this into their theologies of atonement with anything even approaching the enthusiasm of earlier generations. As a result, the emphasis of theologians sympathetic to the Enlightenment came to focus upon the cross, which they considered to be a clear example of an historical fact, capable of theological interpretation.

However, many Enlightenment theologians also had difficulties with the “two natures” doctrine. The form of Christology that perhaps expresses the spirit of the Enlightenment most faithfully is a degree Christology – that is to say, a Christology that recognizes a difference of degree, but not of nature, between Christ and other human beings. Jesus Christ was recognized as embodying certain qualities that were present, actually or potentially, in all other human beings, the difference lying in the superior extent to which he embodied them.

When such considerations are applied to theories of atonement, a consistent pattern begins to emerge. This can be studied from the writings of leading representatives of the German Enlightenment, such as Steinbart. Its basic features can be summarized as follows.

This approach became highly influential in rationalist circles throughout nineteenth-century Europe. The mystery and apparent irrationalism of the cross had been neutralized; what remained was a powerful and dramatic plea for the moral improvement of humanity, modeled on the lifestyle and attitudes of Jesus Christ. The model of a martyr, rather than a savior, describes the attitude increasingly adopted toward Jesus within such circles.

The most significant challenge to this eighteenth-century rationalist approach to the cross is due to F. D. E. Schleiermacher, who insisted upon the religious value of the death of Christ. Christ did not die to make or endorse a moral system; he came in order that the supremacy of the consciousness of God could be established in humanity. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher was often represented as teaching a view of the atonement as Lebenserhöhung, a kind of moral elevation of life (as in the account set forth by Gustaf Aulén). His distinctive ideas proved to be capable of being assimilated to purely exemplarist understandings, rather than posing a coherent challenge to them.

The most significant statement of an exemplarist approach to atonement in England is to be found in the 1915 Bampton Lectures of the noted modernist Hastings Rashdall (1858–1924). In these lectures, Rashdall launched a vigorous attack on traditional approaches to the atonement. The only interpretation of the cross that is adequate for the needs of the modern age is one already associated with the medieval writer Peter Abelard:

The church’s early creed, “There is none other name given among men by which we may be saved,” may be translated so as to be something of this kind: “There is none other ideal given among men by which we may be saved, except the moral ideal which Christ taught us by his words, and illustrated by his life and death of love.”

Other English writers who adopted similar or related approaches include G. W. H. Lampe (1912–1980) and John Hick (1922–2012). In his essay “The Atonement: Law and Love,” contributed to the 1962 volume Soundings, Lampe launched a fierce attack on legal approaches to his subject, before commending an exemplarist approach based on “the paradox and miracle of love.”

The position of John Hick is of especial interest, in that it relates to the place of the work of Christ in inter-faith dialogue. The religious pluralist agenda has certain important theological consequences. Traditional Christian theology does not lend itself particularly well to the homogenizing agenda of religious pluralists. The suggestion that all religions are more or less talking about vaguely the same thing finds itself in difficulty in relation to certain essentially Christian ideas – most notably, the doctrines of the incarnation, atonement, and the Trinity. The suggestion that something unique is made possible or available through the death of Christ is held to belittle non-Christian religions. In response to this pressure, a number of major Christological and theological developments may be noted. Doctrines such as the incarnation, which imply a high profile of identification between Jesus Christ and God, are discarded, in favor of various degrees of Christologies, which are more amenable to Hick’s theological reductionism.

A sharp distinction is thus drawn between the historical person of Jesus Christ and the principles that he is alleged to represent. Paul Knitter (born 1939) is one of many pluralist writers who distinguished between the “Jesus-event” (which is unique to Christianity) and the “Christ-principle” (accessible to all religious traditions and expressed in their own distinctive, but equally valid, ways). Viewed in this pluralist light, the cross of Christ is thus understood to make known a universal religious possibility that is accessible in other ways and through other religious figures. Thus Hick argues that the Christ-event is only “one of the points at which God has been and still is creatively at work within human life,” as his distinctiveness relates solely to his being a “visible story” and not an “additional truth.”

The Cross: Constitutive or Illustrative?

In his Doctrine of Reconciliation of 1898, Martin Kähler posed the following question concerning theories of the atonement: “Did Christ just make known some insights concerning an unchangeable situation – or did he establish a new situation?” With this question we come to a central aspect of soteriology. Does the cross of Christ illustrate the saving will of God? Or does it make such a salvation possible in the first place? Is it constitutive or illustrative?

The latter approach has been characteristic of much writing inspired by the Enlightenment, which treats the cross as a historical symbol of a timeless truth. The Scottish theologian John Macquarrie (1919–2007) firmly defended this approach in his Principles of Christian Theology of 1977:

It is not that, at a given moment, God adds the activity of reconciliation to his previous activities, or that we can set a time when his reconciling activity began. Rather, it is the case that at a given time there was a new and decisive interpretation of an activity that had always been going on, an activity that is equiprimordial with creation itself.

A similar approach is associated with Maurice F. Wiles (1929–2005), who argued in his Remaking of Christian Doctrine of 1974 that the Christ-event is “in some way a demonstration of what is true of God’s eternal nature.” Christ’s death does not change God’s attitude to sinners from hate to love; it is grounded in God’s love. Brian Hebblethwaite (born 1939) made a similar point: “it needs to be stated quite categorically that God’s forgiving love does not depend on the death of Christ, but rather is manifested and enacted in it.”

Yet the debate is far from over. In his Actuality of Atonement (1988), Colin Gunton (1941–2003) suggests that non-constitutive approaches to the atonement run the risk of falling back into exemplarist and subjective doctrines of salvation. Yet it is necessary to say that Christ does not just reveal something of importance to us; he achieves something for us – something without which salvation would not be possible. Raising the question of whether “the real evil of the world is faced and healed ontologically in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus,” Gunton argues that there must be a sense in which Christ is a “substitute” for us: he does for us something that we ourselves cannot do. To deny this is to revert to some form of Pelagianism or a purely subjective understanding of salvation.

The Nature of Salvation

What is the salvation that is made known or possible through the death of Christ? “Salvation” is an enormously complex notion, embracing a number of related and mutually interacting ideas. The following major themes may all be discerned in modern discussions of the subject, and are noted simply to indicate the complexity of the subject, as well as to allow the reader to gain an appreciation of some of the characteristic emphases within modern theology.

It must be stressed that a major theological point underlies the various manners in which salvation is interpreted. The growth of Christianity in recent centuries, chiefly through missionary work, has raised the issue of contextualization. How should the vocabulary and conceptual framework of the Christian tradition be adapted or refined to meet the new situations into which the Christian faith has expanded? The American missiologist and theologian Harvie M. Conn (1933–1939) argues that salvation is to be particularized in terms of the situation addressed by the gospel at any given moment. Historically, this has meant that notions of salvation have varied from one cultural context to another – a point that lends added weight to Wolfhart Pannenberg’s plea that Christologies should not be constructed solely on soteriological foundations, but should engage with and be grounded in the history of Jesus of Nazareth. A brief survey will indicate the considerable diversity of concepts of salvation that have gained influence since 1700.

This brief survey of the understandings of salvation in modern Christian thought has touched on the main issues of debate. Inevitably, most have been discussed at only a fraction of the length that they merit. It will, however, be clear that discussion of these issues – including the contextualization of salvation – will remain a perennial task of responsible Christian theology.

Case Study 4.3 The Debate over the Resurrection

The resurrection has been one of the most widely-debated areas of modern Christian theology. In part, this reflects the fact that the important question of the relation of faith and history often comes to focus on the question of the resurrection of Christ. The question of the resurrection of Christ – more specifically, whether Christ was indeed raised from the dead and, if so, what that event might mean – brings together the central components of the Enlightenment critique of traditional Christianity. In what follows, we shall outline the main positions to have developed during the modern period and attempt to assess their significance.

The Enlightenment: The Resurrection as Non-event

The characteristic Enlightenment emphasis on the omnicompetence of reason and the importance of contemporary analogues to past events led to the development of an intensely skeptical attitude toward the resurrection of Christ in the eighteenth century. G. E. Lessing provides an excellent example of a writer to adopt this skeptical attitude. Lessing confesses that he does not have first-hand experience of the resurrection of Jesus Christ; so why, he asks, should he be asked to believe in something that he has not seen? The problem of chronological distance, according to Lessing, is made all the more acute on account of his doubts (which he evidently assumes others will share) concerning the reliability of the eyewitness reports. Our faith eventually rests upon the authority of others, rather than the authority of our own experience and rational reflection upon it. “Since the truths of these miracles has completely ceased to be demonstrable by miracles happening now, since they are no more than reports of miracles.” In other words, as men and women are not raised from the dead now, why should we believe that such a thing happened in the past?

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). A significant representative of the German Enlightenment, noted for his strongly rationalist approach to Christian theology.

As we have seen, rationalist writers such as Reimarus and Lessing denied that human testimony to a past event (such as the resurrection) was sufficient to make it credible if it appeared to be contradicted by present direct experience, no matter how well documented the original event may have been. Similarly, the leading French rationalist Denis Diderot declared that if the entire population of Paris were to assure him that a dead man had just been raised from the dead, he would not believe a word of it.

This growing skepticism concerning the “miraculous evidences” of the New Testament forced traditional Christianity to defend the doctrine of the divinity of Christ on grounds other than miracles – which, at the time, it proved singularly incapable of doing. Of course, it must be noted that other religions claiming miraculous evidences were subjected to equally great skeptical criticism by the Enlightenment: Christianity happened to be singled out for particular comment on account of its religious domination of the cultural milieu in which the Enlightenment developed.

At issue here is a central theme of the Enlightenment: human autonomy. Reality is rational and human beings have the necessary epistemological capacities to uncover this rational ordering of the world. Truth is not something that demands to be accepted on the basis of an external authority; it is to be recognized and accepted by the autonomous thinking person, on the basis of the perception of congruence between what that individual knows to be true and the alleged “truth” that presents itself for verification. Truth is something that is discerned, not something that is imposed.

For Lessing, being obligated to accept the testimony of others is tantamount to compromising human intellectual autonomy. There are no contemporary analogues for the resurrection. Resurrection is not an aspect of modern experience. So why trust the New Testament reports? For Lessing, the resurrection is little more than a misunderstood non-event, of no fundamental importance to the moral significance of Jesus.

David Friedrich Strauss: The Resurrection as Myth

In his Life of Jesus (1835), Strauss provided a radical new approach to the question of the resurrection of Christ. Strauss himself notes that the resurrection of Christ is of central importance to Christian faith:

The root of faith in Jesus was the conviction of his resurrection. He who had been put to death, however great during his life, could not, it was thought, be the Messiah: his miraculous restoration of life proved so much the more strongly that he was the Messiah. Freed by his resurrection from the kingdom of shades, and at the same time elevated above the sphere of earthly humanity, he was now translated to the heavenly regions and had taken his place at the right hand of God.

Strauss notes that this understanding of what he terms “the Christology of the orthodox system” has come under considerable attack since the Enlightenment, not least on account of the core rationalist presupposition that miracles (such as a resurrection) are impossible.

On the basis of this a priori assumption, which corresponds neatly to the Enlightenment worldview, Strauss declares his intention to explain “the origin of faith in the resurrection of Jesus without any corresponding miraculous fact.” In other words, Strauss was concerned to explain how Christians came to believe in the resurrection, when there was no objective historical basis for this belief. 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 historical Jesus is thus transfigured into an imaginary risen Christ.

Strauss’ distinctive contribution to the debate was to introduce the category of “myth” – a reflection of the gospel writers’ social conditioning and 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. The gospel writers must be regarded as sharing the mythical worldview of their cultural situation. Strauss distances himself from Reimarus’ suggestion that the evangelists distorted their accounts of Jesus of Nazareth, whether unconsciously or deliberately. He argues that mythical language is the natural mode of expression of a primitive group culture that had yet to rise to the level of abstract conceptualization.

For Reimarus, the gospel writers were either confused or they were liars – more likely the latter. Strauss moved the discussion away from this by his introduction of the category of “myth.” The resurrection was to be viewed as a myth – not a deliberate fabrication, but an interpretation of events (especially the memory and “subjective vision” of Jesus) in terms that made sense in first-century Palestinian culture, dominated by a mythical worldview. Belief in the resurrection as an objective event must be regarded as becoming impossible with the passing of that worldview.

Strauss’ Life of Jesus, along with other rationalizing works of the same period, such as Ernest Renan’s work of the same name (1863), attracted enormous attention. The resurrection, traditionally seen as the basis of Christian faith, was now viewed as its product. Christianity is seen as relating to the memory of a dead Jesus, rather than the celebration of a risen Christ. However, the debate was far from over. In what follows, we shall consider later developments in this intriguing chapter of modern theology. Perhaps Strauss’ most acute reinterpreter in the twentieth century has been Rudolf Bultmann, to whose distinctive views on the resurrection we may now turn.

Rudolf Bultmann: The 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. Similar points had been made by other thinkers sympathetic to the Enlightenment.

Bultman famously argued that belief in an objective resurrection of Jesus, although perfectly legitimate and intelligible in the first century, cannot be taken seriously today. “It is impossible to use electric light and radio equipment and, when ill, to claim the assistance of modern medical and clinical discoveries, and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.” The human understanding of the world and of human existence has changed radically since the first century, with the result that modern humanity finds the mythological worldview of the New Testament unintelligible and unacceptable. A worldview is given to someone with the age in which they live and they are in no position to alter it. The modern scientific and existential worldview means that the worldview of the New Testament is now discarded and unintelligible.

Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). A German Lutheran writer, who was appointed to a chair of theology at Marburg in 1921. He is chiefly noted for his program of “demythologization” of the New Testament and his use of existential ideas in the exposition of the twentieth century meaning of the gospel.

For this reason, the resurrection is to be regarded as “a mythical event, pure and simple.” The resurrection is something that happened in the subjective experience of the disciples, not something that took place in the public arena of history. For Bultmann, Jesus has indeed been raised – in the sense that 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. Historical issues – such as the “narratives of the empty tomb” – are of “no consequence.” For Bultmann, the fundamental meaning of the Easter faith is “to believe in the Christ present in the kerygma.”

Consistent with his anti-historical approach in general, Bultmann 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: The Resurrection as an Historical Event beyond Critical Inquiry

Barth wrote a small work entitled The Resurrection of the Dead in 1924. However, his mature views on the relation of the resurrection to history date from considerably later and have clearly been influenced by Bultmann. Barth’s essay “Rudolf Bultmann – An Attempt to Understand Him” (1952) set out his misgivings concerning Bultmann’s approach. This was followed up by a sustained engagement with the issues at stake in Church Dogmatics IV/1 (1953). In what follows, we shall attempt to set out Barth’s position and compare it with that of Bultmann.

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 comes to place considerable emphasis upon the gospel accounts of the empty tomb. The empty tomb is “an indispensable sign” that “obviates all possible misunderstanding.” It demonstrates that the resurrection of Christ was not a purely inward, interior, or subjective event, but something that left a mark upon history.

Karl Barth (1886–1968). Widely regarded as the most important Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. Originally inclined to support liberal Protestantism, Barth was moved to adopt a more theocentric position through his reflections on the First World War. His early emphasis on the “otherness” of God in his Romans commentary (1919) was continued and modified in his monumental Church Dogmatics. Barth’s contribution to modern Christian theology has been immense.

This would seem to suggest that Barth regards 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 it is not as simple as this. Barth consistently refuses to allow the gospel narratives to be subjected to critical historical scrutiny. While it is not entirely clear why he takes this position, the following factor appears to have influenced 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 are calling for “a decision of faith.” Historical investigation cannot legitimize nor 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 belief that 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, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he lacks credibility at this point. It is perhaps for this reason that the approach of Wolfhart Pannenberg has been the subject of considerable attention.

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