In what sense was Jesus’ resurrection ‘bodily’?
There was some brouhaha final week when it was announced that Dr John Shepherd, retired Dean of St. George's Cathedral, Perth, Western Australia, was appointed interim managing director of the Anglican Heart in Rome. The role includes being the Envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Run across of Rome, but it was pointed out that Dr Shepherd is on record as urging Christians to move beyond belief in the actual resurrection of Jesus, in gild to run into it every bit a spiritual reality.
The Resurrection of Jesus ought not to be seen in physical terms, but equally a new spiritual reality. It is of import for Christians to be set up gratuitous from the idea that the Resurrection was an extraordinary concrete event which restored to life Jesus' original earthly trunk…
Jesus' early on followers felt His presence later His death every bit strongly as if information technology were a physical presence and incorporated this sense of a resurrection feel into their gospel accounts. But they're not historical records as we understand them. They are symbolic images of the breaking through of the resurrection spirit into human lives…
Jesus lived … as a transformed spiritual reality.
(You tin sentinel the actual video that was broadcast, and is however online, here). I don't think that this was news to anyone who knew him in Australia; as far as I can tell, his views were well known, and (as has been pointed out) he was 'in adept standing' in his diocese as an Anglican minister. (In fact, if y'all read carefully between the lines, it looks as though the Archbishop of Wales holds very like views—at least that's what the Daily Mail thinks.) Afterwards some protests, Dr Shepherd issued a further statement:
Information technology is my religion that Jesus rose from the dead, and I have never denied the reality of the empty tomb. The risen Christ was non a ghost — he ate and could be touched — but at the aforementioned time he appeared in a locked room (John 20.26), and vanished from sight (Luke 24.31), and he was often not immediately recognised.
I don't really know how to read that, since his before statementdoes appear to 'deny the reality of the empty tomb', and he does not renounce his earlier statement. We do all need to bear in mind that the Anglican Center in Rome was in a difficult position: the previous director, Archbishop Bernard Ntahoturi, stepped downwardly very all of a sudden after an accusation of sexual misconduct, and an experienced 'safety pair of hands' was needed whilst a new permanent director was found.
For critics, a primary question is how someone can represent the Archbishop of Canterbury to Rome if they do not agree to what is set out in formularies of the Church of England, and in particular the 39 Articles of Religion.
IV. OF THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
CHRIST did truly rise over again from decease, and took once again his body, with mankind, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man'due south nature; wherewith he ascended into Sky, and there sitteth, until he render to judge all Men at the last solar day.
What I found interesting well-nigh Dr Shepherd's remarks was that they too me back to my theology caste, and the module on historical theology which explored the rising of Liberal Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries, when a desire to brand the Christian organized religion accessible to the intelligentsia of the day demanded that we strip the New Testament of its miraculous claims and (somewhen) focus on its existential or 'spiritual' claims without demanding that readers take the supernatural claims of the gospel accounts 'literally'. Although Dr Shepherd'due south comments might wait similar they are attending to the literary forms of the gospels, I think the only way to make sense of them is to locate them within this kind of philosophical outlook.
A couple of years ago, Andrew Davison did an excellent job of tracing these kinds of moves in his summary article on the theological debates effectually the resurrection.
A survey of theological approaches to the resurrection might first from Friedrich Schleiermacher'due south (1768-1834) thunderclap launch of liberal Protestant thought, The Christian Faith (1831). He could non encounter how the resurrection relates to redemption at all. Indeed, the link is "impossible" to see, and nosotros could understand Christ perfectly well without even knowing about his resurrection. Schleiermacher did not dispense with the resurrection in his scheme; it simply does not play a prominent part.
In contrast, the resurrection was excised by the 19th century's more thoroughgoing radicals, such as David Strauss (1808-1874), who rejected it as role of their general rejection of all that is supernatural in the Gospel stories.
That menstruum of Gospel research, or Gospel dissection, came to an stop with the work of Albert Schweitzer (1874-1965). In the era later on the First Earth War there was a decisive turn away from this rather corrosive attenuation of the story about Jesus. As William Lane Craig has pointed out, all the same, the physical resurrection inappreciably gained a prominent place in what followed, either in the existentialist theology of Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), or in the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth (1886-1968).
Bultmann emphasised the result of the resurrection message on the believer. He thought that our emphasis should be on the proclamation of the resurrection, and its claim on united states of america, not on anything that did or did non happen in the tomb. The resurrection is "a definitely not historical event" (Kerygma and Myth, English language translation by SPCK, 1953).
Bultmann was correct to emphasise that the resurrection is non some neutral fact: it is transformatory, or it is zilch. Less convincing was his sense that this announcement could stand on its ain ii feet: an result without a cause, we might say.
Davison goes on briefly to reject this kind of separation betwixt fact and pregnant, or rather betwixt the bodily and the spiritual understanding of resurrection.
The bulletin of resurrection has invariably been of influence because of a literal conventionalities in a risen body, not in spite of information technology. Bultmann was right to ascribe more to the resurrection than the resuscitation of a corpse, but the early on Christians clearly saw that already. Any wider significance was grounded, for them, in what the Greek word for resurrection, anastasis, means: Jesus "sat up".
This matters for united states of america in space and time, considering something happened in space and fourth dimension. Often in 20th-century Anglican circles, fifty-fifty those who accepted the physical resurrection, such as the Doctrine Commission in its 1938 report, typically sought to distance themselves from anything that looked like naïvety.
For my part, I would say that the resurrection is true in wider senses just because it is start of all true in this "naïve" fashion.
It is striking that this kind of fence is nothing new in academic theology—simply neither is information technology new in debates within the Anglican Communion. In 1998, the 'radical' John Spong, so Bishop of Newark in New Hampshire, issued a call for a 'new Reformation' in Christian belief, away from traditional theism. This new faith was in fact rather old, reaching back to Schleiermacher and Strauss, and rejecting the notion of the miraculous within the physical earth. A certain Bishop of Monmouth, one Rowan Williams, found his proposals both unpersuasive and uninteresting.
Bishop Spong describes the resurrection as an act of God. I am not clear how an immanent deity such as I think he believes in is supposed to act; just if such a God does act, I don't see why information technology should be easier for God to act in people's mind than their bodies. 'Jesus was raised into the meaning of God'; yep, merely meanings are constructed past material, historical beings, with cognitive cortices and larynxes. How does God (or 'God') make a difference to what people hateful?
Spong clearly has no time for the empty-tomb tradition; and then it is no surprise that he too dismisses the virginal conception (though why on earth this makes Jesus'south divinity 'impossible' I fail to sympathize). I am aware that there are critical historical grounds for questioning both narrative clusters and I don't want to dismiss them. But I am very wary of setting bated the stories on the ground of a broad-brush denial of the miraculous.
For the record: I have never quite managed to see how we tin can make sense of the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and I accept never managed to meet how to put together such a theology without belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked 'Jesus of Nazareth' turned upwardly, I should save myself a lot of problem and get a Quaker. (Church Times, 17th July 1998)
My friend Frederik Mulder gives a brief overview of both the historical debate and the fashion it has cropped up amongst Anglican leaders in his short YouTube video here. (See too Martin Davie's critique of Shepherd'south view, linking non-bodily views of the resurrection to changes in sexual ethics.) Information technology is articulate that some hold strongly to the theological views Dr Shepherd espouses, which dominated the academic world in the 1960s. Catechism Anthony Phillips was the chaplain at my higher in Oxford when I was an undergraduate, and was consistently antagonistic towards evangelicals; he responded to Andrew Davison'southward ascertainment of the electric current situation with complaining:
Sir, – Am I alone in feeling utterly depressed past the annotate in the Revd Dr Andrew Davison's article "What's the latest on the resurrection?" when, speaking of his work with the Cambridge Theological Federation, he notes: "I would have difficulty in finding a single ordinand who would non subscribe to the physical resurrection of Christ"? Another reason for lamenting the passing of the 1960s.
Merely Davison sees the current prevailing mood, expressed in the recent writing of Rowan Williams, much more than positively.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams was clearly influenced by this tradition of interpreting the resurrection with an heart to tragedy when he wrote that information technology makes God present "in all suffering, at the heart of suffering and fifty-fifty in expiry" (Open to Judgement, DLT, 1994).
Here, and in after writing, the emptiness of the tomb is his cardinal paradigm. The tomb is empty because Jesus has been "freed" to be "with the states". That freedom, however, is more prominently the freedom to exist with us in pain than it is freedom from the pains of death, and exhalation to reign in glory.
How theologians arroyo history is central. For Lord Williams, the emptiness of the tomb is an result in history. Information technology must therefore remain both historical and empty. Too much historical reconstruction, in what he calls an "atoning" vein, has us filling the emptiness, but neither will it exercise for us to entertain "a theologically dictated indifference to history" (On Christian Theology, Blackwell, 2000), where Lord Williams names Bultmann, although Barth would as stand.
The best exposition of all this is, of course, Tom Wright'sThe Resurrection of the Son of God, in which he not only locates NT understandings of resurrection in the contrasting context of Greco-Roman ideas most the afterlife, only as well tackles the problems of 'radical' liberal understandings rooted in Liberal Protestantism. (This earlier writing has, I remember, been more influential and less contested than his later, longer writings on Paul.) And he is always able to connect this with pastoral reality and personal hope, every bit this video from some years agone illustrates.
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