Why the Resurrection?

My reflections on the cross and my response to Giles Fraser’s Church Times article attacking penal substitution generated a bit of interest in the blogosphere. I had a brief, but fairly unfruitful, exchange with Giles himself on Thinking Anglicans (a rare foray for me, these days), and on the Fulcrum forums it started an entire thread.

Unfortunately, the Fulcrum thread is headed ‘Cross vs Resurrection’, which is, of course, slightly mad, but does reflect the tenor of the discussion, just as Giles Fraser accuses believers in penal substitution of having no rôle for the resurrection in salvation, as if it were a matter of ‘either/or’.

Incidentally, as Alexander Kalorimos points out in the essay quoted by Giles Fraser, the notion of the penal death of Christ is the core Western tradition of both Catholics and Protestants, not some peculiarly ‘evangelical’ — much less ‘Conservative Evangelical’ — view. As the Anglican Prayer Book has it, Christ made on the cross a “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world,” and in the 39 Articles we read that Christ “truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.” Hence also it is news when a Roman Catholic bishop says that “Christ did not die for the sins of the people”.

That notwithstanding, it is true, as Tom Wright has observed in Surprised by Hope, that this tradition has often failed to incorporate the resurrection adequately into its theological perspective. The words, “There’s a home for little children, above the bright blue sky, where Jesus reigns in glory, a home of peace and joy,” may have addressed the felt needs of a generation where infant mortality was commonplace, but they reflect a popular, rather than biblical, understanding of the Christian message.

But what part, if any, does the resurrection play in our salvation? In what follows, I am conscious of going out on a limb. Those who generally like what I write are invited to read it with discernment. Those who do not will need no such urging.

The first recorded proclamation we have of Christ’s resurrection is Peter’s speech to the crowd in Acts 2,

This man [Jesus of Nazareth] was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. (Acts 2:23-24)

The first point to note is that the resurrection is presented here, as elsewhere in Scripture, as an act of God on Christ (“God raised this Jesus to life,” v 32). It is something done to Jesus, not by Jesus.

The ‘saving work’ of Jesus in relation to the resurrection is therefore, I would suggest, an expression of his humanity through waiting in obedient and passive trust on his Heavenly Father.

Thus Peter quoted David’s attitude to death as prophetic of Christ:

... my body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the paths of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence. (2:26b-28)

The second point to note from Peter’s speech is that the resurrection (and accompanying ascension) are declarative acts. They represent God’s ‘not guilty’ verdict on Christ’s condemnation, and God’s own testimony that “This is my beloved Son” (cf 2:30):

For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said, ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”’ Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. (2:34-36)

The ‘shock value’ of the resurrection, as I have suggested previously, was not that God raises the dead but that God raised “this Jesus”, making him Lord and Messiah.

The second point I would make, then, is that the resurrection actually functions to throw us back on the crucifixion, confronting us with the scandal of the cross as both the work of “wicked men” and “God’s set purpose” (2:23).

But there is (I think) more, and it is not (I suggest) the obvious point that God’s future for the world is ‘resurrection shaped’ in terms of being a transformed ‘new heavens and new earth’, rather than a place ‘beyond the blue’. That hope, as I have observed earlier, was already part of the faith of Israel by this time. There was nothing remarkable in the idea that God raised the dead (Acts 26:8), or in the idea that God’s kingdom and the general resurrection would coincide (cf Jn 11:24).

The key, I think, lies in Romans 6:9,

For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him.

However, this is actually not self-evidently true unless one understands the nature of the resurrection. Lazarus, after all, was raised from the dead (and was truly dead!), yet he died again. Why should Christ be any different? The answer Paul gives is not that Christ is Christ, but that Christ has been raised. But what does this mean, and how does it differ from the raising of Lazarus, or Jairus’s daughter, or Dorcas? The answer, I suggest, lies in vv 6-7:

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin — because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

The sinner who dies has been, as Paul puts it “justified from” (NIV etc, “freed from”) sin. Dying is the outcome of “sin unto death” (6:16), and the sinner who dies has suffered the just penalty for sin. In that sense, their slate is ‘clean’. But if they remain a sinner in death, then re-animation is no help. It helps to remember that we are not ‘souls in bodies’ but ‘embodied persons’. Resuscitated sinners would thus be back in the same realm of sin because they would be back as the same sinful people.

There is, however, the possibility of truly breaking the cycle, and we see it in Christ himself when we consider the course of his whole pilgrimage. For as Hebrews puts it,

... we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin. (Heb 4:15)

The picture this presents of Christ is outwardly familiar: he was tempted (specifically in the wilderness, but right through his earthly life), yet unlike us (and Adam) he did not sin. But there are two important questions this raises: was Christ capable of sin, and is he still open to temptation? Both are fundamental, and I suggest the answer to the first is yes, and the answer to the second is no.

If Christ was incapable of sin he was not tempted ‘as we are’. Similarly, his resistance to sin was, I take it, a real resistance, not a mere indifference, and therefore he was not ‘faking it’ in being tempted but ‘going through it’. (This itself has something to do with the Cur Deus Homo issue, and is also something he did ‘for us and for our salvation’.)

However, if he is still open to temptation then the life of the godhead is not what we have been led to believe, and there is the potential for corruption within God himself (contra James 1:13). To entertain this possibility would be to undermine the entire basis of our theology. But equally, we are taught that this freedom from temptation is not because Christ has left behind an assumed humanity. On the contrary,

Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherefore he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth ... (Article VII)

This may seem odd to those who have not considered it before, but it essential to our salvation, for it means that human nature can be subsumed into God’s nature. Christ’s pilgrimage is thus the pilgrimage God intends for all humanity: that though we may be capable of sin (and unlike Christ, have sinned), we will one day no longer be open to temptation, and in that day will cease to sin.

My third point, then is that resurrection is not about ‘getting a new body’ but about ‘being a new creation’, whose embodiment is necessarily different from our present embodiment in this creation, where we remain simul justus et peccator — both righteous and sinners.

God’s resurrection of Christ is the outcome and expression of his ‘perfection’ as the term is used in Hebrews:

In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. (2:10)

This does not mean that Christ was ever imperfect in the sense of being ‘faulty’, but it does mean that until he had suffered Christ was not all that he was to become. After he had suffered, however, he could move on to the final stage of his pilgrimage. In biblical-theological terms, his resurrection (and ascension) is his entering into the Sabbath rest:

After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. (Heb 1:3)

And we are called to persevere until we also enter that rest:

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience. [...] Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.(4:10-11, 14)

Similarly, then, for us, resurrection is our reception into Sabbath rest. The cross obtains the forgiveness of our sins, without which we would face only the punishment of being driven from God’s presence and deprived of life, as mankind has been since the Fall (Gen 3:22-24). Yet forgiveness is not all that God has in store for us, and should not be all that we hope for ourselves:

For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

The answer is that God will, through Jesus Christ our Lord who died for our sins and was raised to life by him for our justification (Rom 4:25) — our being brought finally and fully into our right relationship with God.

Revd John P Richardson
29 April 2009

PS: I am conscious of glaring gaps and problems in relation to what I have said above. One is the nature of the resurrection of the wicked! However, it has taken several hours to write this and I offer it for comment from those willing to engage with it.

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

On becoming 'theologians of the cross'

As some may have noticed, I’ve been away from the world of blogging and e-mail for a few days break (near the New Forest). I’m grateful to those who submitted comments about my post on Giles Fraser’s ‘Thought for the Day’ and sorry some of them took so long to appear.

I also couldn’t help being struck by the fact that a post put together at the last minute attracted so much comment —indeed it has generated its own thread on the Fulcrum website! Typical when something which took ten minutes gets the attention, whilst other things that take hours sink without trace!

However, it does rather make the point I was basically arguing, that there is a real tension between ‘cross centred’ and ‘resurrection centred’ theologies. Of course, neither is an ‘either-or’ approach, despite the tendency to caricature. The question is one of balance, not of choosing alternatives, and even Giles Fraser’s approach has a place for both.

I do, nevertheless, hold that whichever provides the ‘centre of gravity’ will shape the rest of our theology, and that, furthermore, it is the cross which should rightly take that position. Martin Luther’s dictum, Crux sola est nostra theologia (“The cross alone is our theology”), is, I think, a true summary of the Christian faith.

One of the points I was arguing, therefore, in my four Good Friday meditations is that we cannot think of the cross solely in terms of its salvific effects. We may, for example, have a theology which entirely accepts penal substitutionary atonement (another bone of contention), and yet which is not a ‘theology of the cross’. Without wishing to start a whole new argument (or create a whole new set of enemies!), I think much Charismatic theology falls into this category. Indeed, one could argue that the letters to the Corinthians very much address this problem. Compare Paul’s understanding of Apostleship with the Corinthian understanding of the Way of Christ:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings! Indeed, I wish that you had become kings, so that we might be kings with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. (1 Cor 4:8-9)

Despite the denial of the resurrection by some in the Corinthian church, it is widely accepted by commentators that a major part of the Corinthian problem was an over-realized eschatology — thinking that the benefits of the world to come could all be experienced in the ‘here and now’. The present application of the cross for these Corinthians was therefore the experience of life rather than death, whereas for the Apostle it was life through death:

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Cor 4:8-12)

The evangelical (that is to say, gospel) way is therefore not to assert that ‘because Christ has died, we live’. That is at best a mistake and at worst triumphalism. Rather, we must realize that because Christ has died we must die daily, and through that daily experience of death will come life, for us, and for the world.

Now it seems to me that this Apostolic understanding (which stands in contrast with the Corinthian understanding despite their faith in Christ!) relies on the cross being the transformative feature of our theology. As I argued before, there is nothing revolutionary in the belief that God raises the dead, and thus I must disagree with Tom Wright’s analysis which sees the resurrection as the ‘world-view changing’ element of the gospel message.

The Apostle Paul was a believer in the resurrection before he was a believer in Jesus, and presented this belief as an example of Jewish orthodoxy. Again, we might look to the exchange between Jesus and Martha concerning Lazarus:

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” (Jn 11:23-24)

Of course there are issues here about bringing a future hope into the present in the person of Jesus. To repeat, this is not about choosing between cross and resurrection. But it is clear that Martha already believes (albeit without much present comfort) in the resurrection. The issue for her is that this Jesus is the one who embodies that hope. And of course that understanding will undergo further transformation through the crucifixion.

Indeed, as John presents it, the raising of Lazarus is a trigger for the death of Jesus — a death on which Caiaphas delivers the prophetic verdict, “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (Jn 11:50). Once again, therefore, it is the cross which is the focal, and transformative, element in the gospel.

Once again, though, I would emphasize the need to see that this transformation is not simply in us being saved, nor merely in knowing that we are saved. It is a transformation which comes from experiencing the cross — from being ‘theologians of the cross’ in Luther’s sense of “dying and being damned” and knowing God most intimately in this (the experience of what Luther called anfechtung).

And this, I venture to say, is so alien to most contemporary Christian theology that we all have something to learn.

John Richardson
19 April 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.