The Resurrection of History. David Prewer Bruce
the challenges head on. He argues that if Christians in our day and age want to take their own faith seriously, they will have to come to grips with what the first Christians genuinely thought and said about the resurrection of Jesus, and then seriously wrestle with how we may embrace those claims as our own, should we choose to do so. In the end, Bruce is more interested in twenty-first-century Christians speaking about their faith with integrity than “proving” the resurrection of Jesus to some imaginary neutral observer.
As a Christian minister, I have used David’s Jesus 24/7 series in my congregations, delighted by his ability to communicate the most subtle of concepts in the simplest, clearest way possible. As the author and editor of the Three Testaments series, I have been able to count on Bruce to represent the broader Christian tradition of the interreligious context in a manner that is not only faithful to the teachings of the church, but at the same time respectful of the beliefs of others. Recent Jewish commentary (The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective, by Pinchas Lapide) and traditional Islamic writings (questioning the crucifixion but not necessarily the resurrection) provide their own oeuvres on the profundities addressed by David Bruce, appropriate to interfaith conversations of a mutually respectful nature, which is becoming a twenty-first-century hallmark.
Whether you are Protestant or Catholic, liberal or conservative, or even if you are from another religious tradition “looking in” on what Christians are saying, you will find yourself challenged to go deeper into your own values, your own assumptions, and your own personal faith by letting David Bruce guide you in pondering the pivotal Christian claim that “Jesus Christ is risen indeed.”
Brian Arthur Brown
Contributing editor, Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel and Quran
1 Introduction
In Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, Batman is surprised to see that an old nemesis, Ra’s al Ghul, has escaped from the “inescapable” prison that he had been exiled to and presumably died in. The caped crusader, with a hint of whimsy, asks him what he had been doing with himself lately, to which his arch enemy replies that he has been busy practicing his favorite hobby: “Resurrection.”
There is no doubt that the term “resurrection” is often used in a colloquial, casual fashion without theological implications. Most loosely, it acts as a synonym for “resurgence,” as when the career of a politician or an athlete gets back on track after some time on the sidelines. In the case of Batman’s enemy, as with anyone who has experienced prolonged unemployment, it can mean a return to active duty. For others, it means the return of hope and optimism, or simply even normalcy after a devastating setback or assault on their person.
When it comes to how scholars and believers view the resurrection of Jesus, there are essentially two points of view, with many subtle variations. Both have become widely influential in our time among both Catholics and Protestants. One point of view depicts the resurrection of Jesus as an event that happens independently of the perception of the disciples, which is then interpreted and transmitted by them. The other point of view depicts the resurrection of Jesus as an event that happens principally within or among the hearts and minds of Jesus’ disciples, and what they transmit is their interior experience translated into narrative form. Before we examine in subsequent chapters the theoretical and technical issues involved in asserting either of these positions to be plausible, we need to be reasonable and commit to listening to both points of view.
The Orthodox Understanding of the Resurrection of Jesus
For some, the label “orthodox” may mean Orthodox with a capital “O” in distinction with Western, Catholic Christianity; for others, “orthodox” may mean communally responsible, and therefore morally virtuous; for still others, “orthodox” may mean the highly technical, over-refined dogmatic view defended by a monolithic medieval institution against all who would dare to think for themselves. In this writing, all I mean by the label “orthodox” is the core understanding most commonly held by the majority of Christians through the last twenty centuries. I might have preferred to use the label “traditional,” but that label has already been taken up by a particular form of history writing, as you will see below.
The orthodox understanding is that Jesus was raised from the dead in the way that the texts of the New Testament portray: several days after his crucifixion, Jesus rose bodily from the dead, emerging from his tomb more than a full day after his crucifixion, and appearing to his disciples on several separate occasions. The resurrection signaled, among other things, Jesus’ victory over sin and evil, God’s acceptance of Jesus’ death as an offering on behalf of humanity, and the issuing of a new invitation to all to participate in the divine life. Despite the recent trend toward vilifying the ancient and medieval church for holding unwaveringly to orthodox formulae as a means of controlling the faithful, there are actually several sources of motivation for the church for having maintained and still maintaining the traditional view of the resurrection of Jesus as an objective historical event, all of them honorable and worthy of thoughtful consideration.
First, the orthodox understanding is anti-reductionistic, and empowers those who are wary or at least skeptical of the tendency of the reigning intelligentsia to believe they have the last word on reality. Science, for instance, though long in the ascendancy in the Western world, can never finally furnish us with answers to the most fundamental questions of existence and meaning. A recent case in point was the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the so-called God particle, whose presence explained why atomic material has mass. While not discounting the scientific importance of this finding, most philosophers and theologians seemed unimpressed with the finding that there is more “stuff” in the universe than previously thought, since the more fundamental questions are (1) why there is any stuff at all? and (2) what is the point of anything existing in the first place? To reduce the resurrection of Jesus to the impact of the disciples’ collective memory of Jesus is merely to replace metaphysics with psychology and reduce the ultimately mysterious workings of God to the relatively known quantities of human behavior, and in this way participate in “the domestication of the transcendent.”1
Second, the orthodox understanding asserts that our understanding of what is must in some respects precede our understanding of what we ought to do. The resurrection of Jesus is a great big “stone in the river,” around which our fluid debates about ethics and social progress must flow, because it reveals something of God’s enduring character and God’s purposes for humankind. Construing the resurrection of Jesus purely in terms of a metaphor with ethical implications begs the question of whose ethics we are employing: the ethics of the rich, the ethics of the poor, the ethics of the powerful, or the ethics of the weak. Ethics without attention to the givens of reality, whether metaphysical or historical, lacks any enduring points of reference and winds up being only the expression of the social order of the day. What we ought to be about must be more than a matter of social convention; it must be grounded in our most fundamental understandings of reality. If we endorse the idea that ethics are merely the production of a given society, we will ultimately have to evaluate all impetus for social reform as accidental by-products of history rather than the disciplined application of reasoned judgment, a view which denigrates human rationality and freedom. Enduring values require metaphysical grounding if they are to be the standard against which a society is measured, or else they are simply the dressed-up expressions of self-interest of different social groupings. Just as experimentation without attention to scientific method is only an application of the experimenter’s own prejudices, so ethical reasoning without recourse to an overarching worldview or metanarrative has no claim to universality. If the resurrection of Jesus is a historical event, it could be regarded as revealing of the God who brought it about, and that would give us insight into the very values of God. In fact many argue that the significance of the resurrection lies in its eschatological (eschaton is a Greek word referring to the ultimate goal of history) character, that is, of what it says about human destiny and therefore proper human values.
Third, the orthodox understanding affirms the value of the body. In the broader Christian tradition, and especially in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions where the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is upheld, the incarnation of God is understood to demonstrate