The Resurrection

If we, just for a moment, allow Homer and Plato to divide the Greek world (at least as it pertains to flesh and spirit), as N.T. Wright does in his The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), we must confront a world, certainly the world that Paul traversed, that provided no precedent for a resurrection. Not only was there no precedent, the Greek world would have found the idea repulsive or simply false, so beautiful was Plato's soul fleeing the bondage of its fleshly prison. The Jewish world, while having an understanding and even a hope of a Resurrection on the last day (or some time in the distant future), was no less inhospitable to the idea of a man being resurrected into the here and now. A. Hendricksen has provided a brief and useful survey of the fields of responses, from Aeschylus to Celsus, to the notion of the Resurrection. How a message built upon the Resurrection of a Palestinian Jew, crucified and humiliated, could have survived at all, let alone thrive, is a study in the impossible.

The New Testament record captures the absolute radicality of the Resurrection. The disciples are incredulous, as are Paul's interlocutors, so scandalous was the idea; yet the growing faith itself was deemed in vain without the Resurrection of Jesus. The impossible discomfiture experienced by the first witnesses to the Resurrection as well as that experienced by the hearers of the gospel was nonetheless overcome by an impossible authenticity. Otherwise, there could be no ekklesia, then or now. Christianity should have died as quickly as its central figure, but instead it went on to transform a world predisposed to laugh it out of existence.

The historical impossibility of Christianity marks off posse ipsum, possibility itself. It is constitutive of the Resurrection to breed faith or ridicule, and the experience of the early Church witnesses precisely to this dichotomy. The Resurrection is disturbing, invasive, radical and transformative. Its radical reality is the only explanation for historical Christianity. It is also the only explanation for the continuance of the Church past the time when sheer novelty could explain a brief Christian appearance given countenance by the seekers of wisdom also seeking a little amusement.

If we put aside our prejudices against the quality of thinking in the ancient world, that somehow these ancient people walked in fear and superstition without any concept of knowledge or wisdom, we confront a people quite similar to ourselves, the difference perhaps akin to the difference between the quantum physics people we are today and the Newtonian physics people we were 200 years ago. As critical thinkers, we can no longer afford to think of the people of the early Church as our intellectual inferiors, a strategy that poorly serves the peoples of the past and present.

The Resurrection is just as impossible for us today as it was for those who witnessed it. Even as cogent a critic of the early church as Gerd Luedemann admits that the most difficult thing to explain about the church is Easter faith. It must come to us of the Higgs-Boson as quite a shock that the best explanation of Christianity is contained in 2000 year old texts.

And yet it moves...