Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-011 (Theology)

THEOLOGY IS IN LIFE AND DEATH STRUGGLE, SAYS THEOLOGIAN

KEY ISSUE IS THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS

By David W. Virtue

Christian theology is in a life and death struggle to set itself free from the long shadow of death cast by the secular canons of historical reason that have prevailed in post-Enlightenment Protestant theology, says a Lutheran theologian, who heads the Minneapolis-based Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology.

Addressing some 300 theologians, priests, bishops and laymen at SEAD – the Scholarly Engagement for Anglican Doctrine, an ecumenical conference held in Charleston, SC this past weekend – Dr. Carl Braaten said that in a deeper sense the death we are talking about is the “death of God”, because the God of Christian faith is the One who raised Jesus from the dead.

Addressing the reality of the resurrection, Braaten argued that prior to the Enlightenment theologians were not vexed by the question, “Did the resurrection of Jesus really happen?” What the apostle Paul said placed the question beyond dispute: “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith is in vain…If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”

Braaten says that for most post-Enlightenment Christians Paul’s words no longer seem to settle the matter. “Theologians like Lessing, Kant, Schleiermacher, Troeltsch, Bultmann Wedderburn and the Jesus Seminar have concluded that Paul’s argument is thoroughly flawed, his logic has lead him astray.”

“If that is so can we still be Christians?” David Friedrich Strauss dissolved the entire life of the historical Jesus, from the incarnation to the resurrection into a Christ-myth. He simply and honestly said “no.”

The motto of the Enlightenment was “sapere aude!” Have courage to use your own reason. In his book on The Resurrection of Jesus, Gary Luedemann said an emphatic “No” to the bodily resurrection and then argued that we “can still believe all that is truly essential – Jesus’ exemplary life and moral teachings. The resurrection adds nothing that was not already present in the historical Jesus, such as forgiveness of sins, affirmation of life, and experience of eternity here and now.”

Later Luedermann reconsidered his answer and renounced the Christian faith, said Braaten. “There is something tragically clarifying about that decision, one that the likes of Bishop Spong, Marcus Borg, and a host of others lack the insight or courage to make.” JESUS’ RESURRECTION DEFINITIVE

Braaten argues that for Christians the question of the identity of God was given a definitive answer in the event of the Jesus’ resurrection. “Faith in God is not separable from the belief that God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead. We cannot expect other religions to stake their claim to the knowledge of God on the resurrection of Jesus. But we do expect that every theology that merits the name Christian will do so.”

Braaten condemned American Process theologian Schubert Ogden’s notion that the resurrection of Jesus “would be just as relevant to my salvation as an existing self or person as that the carpenter next door just drove a nail into a two-by-four.”

“Ogden taught future Methodist pastors at seminary. Can you imagine the joy of the gospel according to his theology would bring the faithful on Easter Sunday?”

Braaten said that David Griffin, another defender of Process Theology said that “Christian faith is possible apart from belief in Jesus’ resurrection in particular and life beyond bodily death in general…this explains why so many of us have a difficult time seeing the resemblance between the God of American process thought and the God of classical Christian tradition.”

“Christians believe in God because he raised Jesus from the dead, and they believe in Jesus for the same reason. We believe in God for Jesus’ sake and we believe in Jesus for God’s sake. When the apostle Paul spoke to the Athenian philosophers in front of the Areopagus, he did not adjust his telling of the good news about Jesus and the resurrection to fit their metaphysical beliefs.

“He told them what sounded like babbling nonsense: God will judge the world by Jesus of Nazareth, and this he guaranteed by raising him from the dead. Some scoffed, some believed, same story now as then, but with this difference; now the scoffers are to be found inside the church, among them Episcopal ministers, seminary professors, and parish pastors. Paul would comment: What a pitiful thing! What a bunch of fools!”

Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” For us this means that we have no way into the heart of God the Father except through his Son and the Spirit whom he sent. If Jesus had not been raised, he might have been vaguely remembered as an unsuccessful leader of a tiny Palestinian sect. At best he would be recognized as a teacher of religion and ethics, like Socrates or Gautama, but not the Savior. If Jesus had not been raised, his special claim to divine authority to forgive sins would have been discredited by his crucifixion.”

Says Braaten; “the resurrection was an act by which God identified himself with the cause of Jesus, vindicating Jesus’ claim to represent the kingdom of heaven in his earthly ministry. At the same time, the resurrection was an act of God by which the cause of Jesus could be continued in history, and not terminated by humiliation on a criminal’s cross. Thus the resurrection is the pivotal point in the story we love to tell about Jesus and his love.”

The traditional theory is that the resurrection is a real event that happened to Jesus and that its meaning is located in its very occurrence, said Braaten.

“Nothing is more fatal to the Christian faith than to locate the meaning of the resurrection outside its happening. The resurrection is not worth talking about unless it happened, for as an illusion it cannot be the ground of hope and the source of life. From the beginning Christianity has presupposed the resurrection of Jesus as the ground of its existence. Without the Easter faith there would have been no Christian Church and the New Testament would not have been written. Even the most skeptical of scholars admit that.”

THE RESURRECTION A REAL EVENT

“The consensus is widespread among scholars, conservative or liberal, that for the early Christians the resurrection was an event in space and time and there were men and women with real eyes and ears who witness the appearances of the risen Jesus.”

“For Bultmann the risen Christ can be found only in the word of preaching as kerygma, not as the historical Jesus whom God raised from the dead on the third day. What becomes of the resurrection? It is an expression of the faith of the disciples and of their commitment to continue the cause of Jesus (sache Jesu) after his death. Since the resurrection is a non-event, it can only evaporate into words.”

“Our knowledge of God and the resurrection of Jesus come from the same source, from the scriptures and the Church. We cannot explain the resurrection by using the reductive categories of historical positivism or humanistic psychology, and we see no point in the attempts of the Jesus-Seminar to do so. Such procedures only bring people to the unbelief with which they started.”

In our view, says Braaten; the resurrection is more than the resuscitation of the physical body dead in the tomb. If it were just that, Jesus would not be unlike a Lazarus, who returned to life three days after his death. But Lazarus has to die again; his return to life did not transcend the conditions of this mortal existence. The resurrected body of Jesus is a new kind of body. Said the apostle Paul: it is soma pneumatikos, a spiritual body, quite unlike the kind we are walking around with.

“We cannot know more than the earliest Christians told us on the basis of their experiences. If we do not trust their testimonies, we will not believe that Jesus really rose from the dead. Christ did not appear to them because they believed but in order that they might believe and confess that Jesus is Lord. It is therefore erroneous to interpret the primitive witness to the resurrection as a product of an hallucinating imagination of faith.”

“The tomb was empty because Christ was raised from the dead. He was no longer bodily there. Photographers could not have taken a picture of him lying in the tomb. “I’ll settle for what Karl Barth once said on the matter: ‘Christians do not believe in the empty tomb but in the living Christ,’ but that does not mean that ‘we can believe in the living Christ without believing in the empty tomb’.”

The early Christians did not come to believe in the risen Jesus by their own “reason and strength.” The Holy Spirit made the reality of the resurrected Christ present in the life of each individual believer and the whole community of faith, said Braaten.

“There can be no authentic Christianity without belief in the resurrection of Jesus. There can be no greater heresy in the modern church than its outright denial.”

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From the Virtuosity Digest: David Virtue <> To subscribe direct – http://orthodoxanglican.org/virtuosity