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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After describing what the apostle Paul has to say about resurrection in his other writings, Wright analyzes the apostle's views in First and Second Corinthians. What Wright has to say about the verse translated "It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Cor 15:44) has made it clear to me that whenever I read that verse publicly again, I will have to provide a translation of my own. The contrast in the Greek is between soma psychikon and soma pneumatikon. Whatever else those terms may mean, Wright points out that they do not mean the modern contrast between physical and spiritual. The word psychikon has to do with soul or human life but is 180 degrees different from what we mean by physical. The contrast is between a "psychic body" and a "pneumatic body." Paul is contrasting the life of this present age with its burden of sin and corruption and the life of the age to come, fully energized by the Spirit. In both terms, however, the life is that of a body. Resurrection life is therefore the transphysical life energized by God's Spirit.

When Wright finally deals with the accounts of Jesus' resurrection in the four Gospels, he says that what they have in common attests to their early (pre-Paul) oral circulation. What they have in common is (1) their silence in reference to the Scriptures, (2) their absence of expressions of personal hope, (3) their strange portrait of Jesus, and (4) the presence of women in the stories. These common factors are surprising if, as most scholars affirm, the resurrection narratives are later writings, "a back-projection of later theology," or "coded message in support of the political or leadership claims of the disciples involved." Rather, Wright asserts, the stories are

answers to the question: why did early Christianity begin, and why did
it take this shape? The answer is: because the early Christians believed
that something had happened to Jesus after his death, something to which
the stories in the four canonical gospels are as close as we are likely
to get. (pp. 614-15)

In a chapter on "Easter and History" Wright asserts that two things about the first Easter must be regarded as historically secure: the empty tomb, and the meetings with Jesus. He summarizes his argument as follows:

1. To sum up where we have got so far: the world of second-Temple Judaism supplied the concept of resurrection, but the striking and consistent Christian mutations within Jewish resurrection belief rule out any possibility that the belief could have generated spontaneously from within its Jewish context. When we ask the early Christians themselves what had occasioned this belief, their answers home in on two things: stories about Jesus' tomb being empty, and stories about him appearing to people, alive again.

2. Neither the empty tomb by itself, however, nor the appearances by themselves could have generated the early Christian belief. The empty tomb would be a puzzle and a tragedy. Sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or hallucinations, which were well enough known in the ancient world.

3. However, an empty tomb and appearances of a living Jesus, taken together, would have presented a powerful reason for the emergence of the belief.

4. The meaning of resurrection within second-Temple Judaism makes it impossible to conceive of this reshaped resurrection belief emerging without it being known that a body disappeared, and that the person had been discovered to be thoroughly alive again.

5. The other explanations sometimes offered for the emergence of the belief do not possess the same explanatory power.

6. It is therefore historically highly probable that Jesus' tomb was indeed empty on the third day after his execution and that the disciples did indeed encounter him giving every appearance of being well and truly alive.

7. This leaves us with the last and most important question: what explanation can be given for these two phenomena? Is there an alternative to the explanation given by the early Christians themselves? (pp. 686-87)

After presenting and evaluating the alternative explanations given since the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, Wright finds these explanations to be historically unsatisfying. He concludes: "The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivaled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity" (p. 718).

In a final chapter Wright takes up the issue of the meaning of Jesus' resurrection for the worldview of the first Christians. Beginning with Paul's assertion that Jesus was "declared to be the Son of God ... by resurrection from the dead" (Rom 1:4), Wright affirms that for the first Christians the resurrection of Jesus meant first of all that he was Israel's Messiah, the one long-promised to inaugurate God's new age. Second, as Messiah Jesus was also "Lord," a political claim made in opposition to the claim that the emperor was Lord. Not only was Jesus Israel's Messiah and as Lord the reality for which Caesar was a parody; as son of the Creator and Ruler of the world Jesus was also "the personal embodiment and revelation of the one true god [sic]" (p. 731; emphasis in original).

Wright is consistent and insistent in affirming that Christian hope is in two stages, as it was in the case of Jesus. Resurrection is life after life after death. Death brings an end to our life in this present age. After an interval of time--for Jesus on the third day, for his followers at the consummation of the age to come--bodily resurrection brings death to an end.

I share Wright's conviction that the Christian hope for resurrection to the life of the world to come is grounded in Jesus' resurrection on the third day after his death by crucifixion. But Christians in the twenty-first century have a worldview different in some respects from that of New Testament Christians. We have become convinced by the views of scientists that we live in an expanding universe shaped by a space-time continuum. Space-time is part of the created order and shares in the burden of brokenness that characterizes life in the present age. For us who live in the world of space-time bodily resurrection is indeed in the future, and we are limited by the space-time constraints of life in this present age.

But God is eternal, and when we die we go to be with God in eternity, which is no longer governed by space-time. We leave space-time behind. For the believer at death the consummation of the age to come is now. There is no waiting in eternity. Bodily resurrection is no longer future but now. So, when we lay loved ones to rest "in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Occasional Services, p. 126), we can comfort our hearts with the confidence that, because God raised Jesus from the dead, our loved ones share already now in the resurrection that for us is still in the future.

John H. Tietjen[dagger]