[Dialogue] 5/26/16, Spong: Charting a New Reformation, Part XXIII - The Seventh Thesis, The Resurrection

Thu May 26 07:20:03 PDT 2016

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Charting a New Reformation
Part XXIII - The Seventh Thesis, The Resurrection

“The Easter event gave birth to the Christian Movement and continues to transform it. That does not mean, however, that Easter was the resuscitation of Jesus’ deceased body back into human history. The earliest biblical records state that “God raised him.” The reality of the experience of resurrection must be separated from its later mythological explanations.”

Without Easter, there would be no Christianity! Whatever it was that constituted the Easter experience, the obvious fact is that there was enormous power in that moment that cries out for explanation. That power changed lives; it redefined the way that people thought about God; it created a new consciousness, and in time it even caused a new holy day to be born. Each of these changes points beyond itself to something that must be big enough to account for these changes. At the same time, this undeniable explosion of power does not lend itself to a particular explanation and it forces us to acknowledge that whatever Easter was and is, we can only approach it inside the time and space vocabulary of human existence, for none of us can escape the limits of our humanity. So over the years, the church has offered a variety of these time and space-bound explanations, only to discover that all were filled with contradictions. When these explanations were later literalized they served to make believing increasingly difficult.
In our world, the scholarly and critical explorations of the biblical narratives inevitably brings two facts quickly into our awareness. First, while not one word of the New Testament was written without a firm commitment to the reality of the Easter experience, we need to recognize that none of the Bible’s sources represents eye-witness, first generation reporting. Second, there is hardly an Easter detail proclaimed in one part of the New Testament that is not contradicted in another. A quick glance makes this case.
To start with Paul and the gospels disagree on both whether there was a tomb into which Jesus was laid and on whether that tomb literally became empty. All of the gospel sources agree that women went to that tomb on the first day of the week, but they disagree on who the women were and on what they found. They disagree on whether these women actually saw the risen Christ. Mark says no, Matthew says yes, Luke says no and John says yes! They disagree on where the twelve were when the risen Christ supposedly appeared to them for the first time. Mark implies that it would be in Galilee; Matthew states that it was Galilee; Luke says it was only in Jerusalem and John says it was in Jerusalem first. They disagree on whether the resurrection occurred on “the third day” or “after three days.” The two descriptions do not give us the same day. They disagree on who saw the raised Christ first. It was Peter said Paul; the woman at the tomb said Matthew; Cleopas in Emmaus said Luke, and Magdalene said John.
One cannot harmonize the contradictory content of the Bible’s Easter narratives no matter how hard one tries. These sources have been available for people to read since the end of the first century, which means that these facts have been available to the Christian Church for over 2000 years! Very few people, however, have taken the time to look, to read or even to notice. Perhaps in a believing age that was considered unnecessary. The 21st century, however, is not a believing age and so we are troubled by these things in a way that our ancestors in faith did not seem to be. If we are seeking to “Chart a new Reformation,” however, we must raise and address all of these questions. In our look at the seventh thesis, regarding the Easter story, I intend to do just that and, in the process, to offer a new way to understand and to appreciate this central cornerstone of the Christian faith. What does the resurrection of Jesus mean?
The resurrection must be treated very differently from the virgin birth that we dismissed earlier in this series as mythology. There we documented first the fact that the virgin birth was a later developing tradition. The resurrection, however, was the experience that brought Christianity into being. Second, only two of the five major writers of the New Testament even mention a miraculous birth, making it tangential, not central, to the Christian story, while there is no verse of the New Testament that does not assume the reality of the Easter experience. So the thrust of this thesis seems fraught with peril to many, sometimes even to me. for if Easter is finally revealed as nothing substantial, then Christianity collapses. Thus this seventh thesis, like none of the others, goes to the very heart of our faith tradition. We start our probe with our earliest Christian source.
Paul, the first author of any part of what was later to constitute the New Testament, wrote his authentic epistles between the years 51 and 64 CE. He describes Easter in the briefest of ways. Jesus “was raised from the dead in accordance with the scriptures,” he says (I Cor. 15:1-4). Note two things about this first written reference to the resurrection. First, the verb Paul uses is passive. Paul does not say that Jesus “rose,” but rather that he “was raised.” The Easter action did not come out of Jesus. Something outside Jesus acted on him to “raise” him. Jesus, Paul asserts, was raised by God. “Into what?” then become our next question. Did God raise Jesus back into the physical life of our world, thus restoring him to the life he had possessed prior to the crucifixion? From everything that Paul says in other parts of the body of his work, the answer to each of these questions is “NO!” In Romans, Paul indicates that this Jesus, who was raised from the dead, is at “the right hand of God.” Oh, we say, but that simply describes the Jesus who, after his resurrection, ascended into heaven and thus into his exalted position in the presence of God. The only problem with that quick and easy explanation is that the story of the ascension of Jesus did not enter the Christian tradition until Luke writes some 25-30 years after Paul’s death. Paul could, therefore, not be referring to something about which no one had ever heard. For Paul the resurrection itself placed Jesus “at the right hand of God,” not back into human history. For most of us that is a new idea.
Paul reinforces his understanding when he states a few years later in Romans (8:11) that “the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you…and will give life to your mortal bodies.” There is a connection in Paul’s mind between the spirit that raised Jesus and the spirit that will raise us and bind us to God in a new way. In these words there is no hint that this action could or would raise either Jesus or us back as resuscitated bodies, able to continue our mortal journeys. No matter what we have thought before, resurrection was never resuscitation.
Another hint as to Paul’s meaning is found in Romans (6:9). Here Paul says: “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death hath no dominion over him.” If resurrection meant being restored to life in this world then those resurrected people would presumably have to die again, but that is not what Paul says. For Paul, the Easter event was a matter of being raised to a new dimension of life that he does not, perhaps cannot, describe, but it is beyond the power of death ever to threaten or strike again.
In the epistle to the Philippians, which was probably Paul’s last epistle, the great apostle speaks of Jesus as “emptying himself.” Was Paul not asserting that because Jesus had reached this new dimension of life, that God had highly exalted and bestowed on him a name that is above every name and that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Phil. 2:5-11)? Jesus had entered into the oneness of God. This is clearly what Paul understands the Easter experience to be. A deceased body walking out of a tomb to take up anew the life before his crucifixion simply is not the meaning of Easter that motivates the first author in the New Testament. The one thing that is clear is that Easter did not, in the earliest years of the Christian story for which we have any written record, mean that Jesus was restored to the life of this world.
Most biblical scholars do not today believe that Paul is the author of the epistle we have named Ephesians. That epistle appears to have been written as a cover letter that served to introduce a collection of Paul’s authentic epistles, which had been gathered together by his followers, in order to send them to other churches. It was the first step in proclaiming them as “scripture.” The church in Ephesus may have been the first designation of this collection. In any event this epistle appears to have been written by Paul’s disciples, who wanted to spread abroad his teachings. It is not a stretch then to suggest that while not being from the hand of Paul, this epistle might nonetheless be Pauline in content. It also appears to be dated earlier than any of the gospels. If so, then we note that this epistle also refers to God as raising Jesus “from the dead” in order to allow him “to sit at God’s right hand in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 1:20).
The epistle we call Colossians is in that same category, that is, it was written within a decade after Paul’s death by those who were disciples of Paul and thus sympathizers with the point of view expressed in Paul’s teaching. Scanning through this epistle we discover these words about Easter: “If you have been raised with Christ, seek those things which are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God” (Col.3: 1).
So the first step that those of us who wish to “Chart a New Reformation” must take is to recognize that the founding moment of the Christian story is not about either an empty tomb or the resuscitation of a deceased body. Its original proclamation asserted that in some manner God had raised Jesus into being part of who God is. Jesus was raised by God into God. Is that not quite different from what we have been taught to think over the centuries of Christian history? It is and it will force us to look at Easter in a brand new way. We will proceed to do just that as this series continues, so stay tuned, same time, same station.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
The Rev William Rimkus of Emanuel Church LaGrange, Illinois, writes:

Question:
My understanding is that if it weren’t for Paul, the Jewish sect of Jesus’ followers would not have survived and become the “church” as we know it.
I’m curious, what do you think that Paul understood as the gospel? The doctrine of atonement was not formulated until Paul was long gone-yet he preached “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ…and him crucified.” Was Paul just stating an historical fact or was there more to it? In either case, what was Paul preaching?
Answer:
Dear Bill,
Thank you for your letter. I have some questions about your opening statement. I do not think Paul ever thought of himself as helping “a Jewish sect of Jesus’ followers” to survive. When you read his apologia for Judaism in Romans 9-11, it appears that he saw the struggle between traditional Judaism and the Jewish “followers of the Way, “ who would later become the Christian movement, as a debate about whether or not universalism could arise out of Judaism. I look at his insight in Galatians when in Christ the barriers between Jew and Greek, bond and free, male and female disappear or his hymn to love in I Corinthians where “faith, hope and love abide” he says, “but the greatest of these is love.”
It is not possible in a question and answer format to lay out with any kind of detail or comprehensiveness either of “the theology of Paul,” or even what the message was that Paul was preaching. That would take an entire book or at least a series of ten to twenty columns. What I can do, however, is to pass on to you and to my readers what I regard as the best book on Paul that I have ever read. It is the work of four brilliant scholars from the Jesus Seminar published by Polebridge Press, the publishing house of the Seminar, in 2010 under the title, The Authentic Letters of Paul. The four authors are Arthur J. Dewey, Roy W. Hoover, Lane McGaughy and Daryl S. Schmidt. They also worked from the original Greek text and brought a fresh and challenging translation to the Pauline corpus.
Blessings on your thoughtful ministry.
John Shelby Spong
Read Online and Share Here

Announcements

Bishop Spong speaks at Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center in Bangor, PA, June 10th - 12th, 2016.

In this conference, as in the book by the same title, Bishop Spong will seek to recreate the original Christ experience that opens us to walk into a New Christianity, one that sees biblical fundamentalism as a Gentile heresy. 

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