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Windsor, England – A Confrontation Over the Meaning of Resurrection
On one stop near the end of my lecture tour of Europe during this summer, I confronted a person whose question drove me back to the series I had been developing in this column about what the Bible actually says about the resurrection of Jesus. It thus helped me to re-orient myself to the discussion on the Bibles’ resurrection narratives and thus to re-enter my ongoing world.
This lecture was sponsored by the Maidstone Chapter of the Progressive Christianity Network of the United Kingdom. This organization was birthed and nurtured during its early years by The Reverend Hugh Dawes, one of the most creative clergypersons I have ever known. Cambridge trained, but now retired, Hugh spent his entire career as an academically-oriented parish priest, relating the world of Christian scholarship to the men and women who gathered for worship on a Sunday morning. He became aware that there were many church-goers who could not twist their brains into first century pretzels sufficiently to continue living inside the traditional patterns of Christian worship. That is what moved him to create a new structure that he called “The Progressive Christianity Network.” This network took the form of people from a variety of religious backgrounds, Anglican, Catholic, Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian and Reformed, as well as a sprinkling of those who called themselves agnostics or atheists, meeting together from once a week to once a month to read and to discuss scholarly Christian books, the kind most of them had never read before. For many of its participants, PCN is the only thing that keeps them either rooted in or related to religion generally or to Christianity in particular. They are sometimes excited by new visions of Christianity, but generally bored by the church. Today, active PCN chapters are in almost every city across the UK. A quarterly newspaper keeps its various chapters informed about and related to each other. That journal also acts as a forum in which ideas, books and knowledge about potential speakers can be shared.
My particular lecture was set for 2:30 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon at Holy Trinity Church in Windsor, a lovely town about 20 miles west of London, known for Windsor Castle on one end and the international headquarters of Legoland on the other. There were 120 or so people in attendance that day. Some had come from as far away as Birmingham by public transportation. Those not familiar with the roads and trains in England need to understand that all roads and trains lead to London. So, anyone taking a train from Birmingham to Windsor, has to go to London and then back out to Windsor, making the journey far longer than one might imagine, given the actual distance between the two cities. Still they came in great numbers.
The lecture was well received. I spent most of my time outlining the way the Christian story grew between the life of Jesus and the creation of the New Testament. Miracles, for example, did not enter the Jesus story until the 8th decade in Mark. The Virgin Birth was an early ninth decade addition in Matthew and later in Luke. The idea of resurrection as a physical resuscitation was also added to the developing Christian tradition in the ninth decade. The account of Jesus’ ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost were both tenth decade additions from the book of Acts. John’s gospel, in the late tenth decade was the first to assert “identity” between God and Jesus. These biblical facts are generally undisputed in the citadels of Christian learning, but many people in the pews of our churches have never heard of the evolving nature of Christianity. They rather hold a homogenized version of this faith, which assumes that the Bible dropped from heaven, fully written, divided into chapters and verses and very probably in the King James’ Version.
The two-hour session at Windsor was divided about equally between lecture and questions. I follow a format in which every other question must come from a woman. It is my way of trying to redress the grievances of the past in which the voices of women were seldom heard in places of worship. I also urged those asking questions to try to avoid making speeches under the guise of asking a question. This admonition seldom works!
Near the end of the question period a man came to the microphone. His white hair was rather long around his shoulders. He began his “question” with a challenge and a long biblical analysis. After at least five minutes of his oratory, I interrupted him to inquire as to the nature of the question he had yet to ask. He responded with some irritation, but continued to explain for another two or three minutes. I interrupted again and said I hear and understand your preamble, but can you state your question. He then said that resurrection was all over the Old Testament, that Elijah raised the dead and that I was simply wrong to say that understanding the resurrection of Jesus as bodily resuscitation did not enter the Christian tradition until the ninth decade. His concern was finally clear, but his question was still not actually stated. I nonetheless decided to try to address his concerns first with some factual data from the Bible. Belief in life after death, in a personal and meaningful way, did not become prevalent in Judaism much before the period of the Maccabees in the second century BCE. The growth of this idea was fueled by persecution in which a number of young Jews, faithful to their religion, had chosen to be put to death rather than renounce or violate their faith. The justice of God seemed to demand that God grant to these victims the compensatory reward of life after death. Prior to this time, the only Hebrew concept of an afterlife was what they called “Sheol,” a bleak, shadowy place to which all the dead went. It was not a place of reward or punishment, but only an abode of the dead.
My questioner, however, was saying that since both both Elijah and Elisha were said to have raised people from the dead, then resurrection as a physical phenomenon was known long before the time that I was suggesting. Then he added Jesus raising Lazarus from his tomb as his final argument. One recognized quickly that this gentleman was not inquiring or seeking to understand, he was challenging, committed to showing me how wrong I was. That is not a problem; I have been wrong many times. Being challenged is the way the life of scholarship evolves. What was also clear was that he was not willing to entertain anything I said.
When he finished talking, however, I began my response first by assembling the biblical data. There are two stories in the Old Testament where someone is said to have been raised from death back into life. Elijah raised to life the only son of a widow. Elisha raised to life a child who had died. In the New Testament, there are five narratives giving accounts in which Jesus raised someone from the dead. Three of the five are various accounts of the same event. Jesus was said to have restored to life the daughter of a synagogue ruler named Jairus (Mark 5:21ff, Matt 9:18-26, Luke 8:40-58). The fourth one occurs only in Luke where in the village of Nain, Jesus raised to life the only son of a widow (Luke 7:11ff). The last one occurs only in John. It is the story of Jesus calling to the deceased Lazarus to walk out of his tomb (John: 11).
Biblical scholars over the last two hundred years have raised many questions about the literal accuracy of any of these narratives. In the case of the Old Testament, the accounts of Elijah and Elisha raising the dead were written long after the events were supposed to have occurred. Did the stories grow in supernatural power during these years? Were these people really dead or were they only unconscious or even asleep? Is the similarity in attributing to both Jesus and Elijah the ability to raise from the dead “the only son of a widow” just a coincidence? Does the similarity between Elisha raising a child from the dead with Jesus raising a child from the dead mean they are related? Is there any evidence that Elijah and Elisha stories have simply been wrapped around the memory of Jesus? Is there any possibility that the story of Lazarus being raised from his tomb four days after his burial, told only in John, is history? Could such a public and dramatic event, if it had actually occurred, have escaped anyone’s notice for 65-70 years before it was mentioned for the first time in the Fourth Gospel?
It is important to distinguish between these biblical stories and the resurrection of Jesus. Every raising from the dead story in the Bible, other than that of Jesus, portrayed a person being restored to his or her previous physical life, from which presumably someday they would have to die again. This is not the claim made for Jesus in the earliest parts of the New Testament.
In 54 CE, Paul, writing to the Corinthians, suggests that Jesus was raised not back into life, but into the presence of God (I Cor 15). In 58 CE, in the Epistle to the Romans, Paul says, Jesus, having been raised from the dead, “dieth no more, death hath no more dominion over him.” That is not resuscitation, that is an attempt to describe an entrance into a new dimension of life or eternity. The author of Colossians, probably writing within a decade of Paul’s death, says: “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” When Colossians was written, the story of Jesus’ ascension was still some 20 years away from being written. The resurrection of Jesus was originally not about being restored to this life from death. It was about transcending the boundaries between life and death, about entering the eternity of the life of God. My questioner could not hear this distinction. He departed, suggesting that I should get out of the church since I did not affirm “the true faith!”
Idolatry comes in many forms. Biblical fundamentalism and creedal expressions that pretend to capture “the true faith” are only two of them. Christianity is a journey into the mystery of God. To that journey I invited my fellow travelers in Windsor, England. Many came to join the journey, but you can’t win them all!
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
John Rice from Victor Harbor in South Australia writes:
Question:
Why is it that religions, notably Christianity and Islam, want to convert all non-believers into their particular fold?
Answer:
Dear John,
Religion is part of the human security system that serves to bank the fires of anxiety. This anxiety was born in the breakthrough from consciousness to self-consciousness in our evolutionary journey. It was that breakthrough that made human life as we know it possible. As self-conscious creatures, we embrace questions of meaning and finitude and thus we enter the state of chronic anxiety that marks all human life. Self-conscious human beings also embrace the reality of living in time. When we were merely conscious creatures, we were driven only by our biological needs. Conscious animals are born, eat, grow, reproduce and die in endless cycles. They do not ask whether life has meaning. They do not anticipate or worry about dying. They do not embrace mortality or prepare for coming future events. So it is self-consciousness alone that creates in us human beings that state of chronic anxiety that is alone the hallmark of human life.
We human beings deal with this chronic anxiety in many ways. We use drugs. Animals do not do that. Human beings use caffeine as a stimulus to get us started each day and we use alcohol to slow us down. We use tranquilizers so extensively that we have created a billion dollar pharmaceutical industry to supply our demands. We use tobacco to recreate the security of nursing and we create religion to answer the questions of meaning and mortality. Religion cannot serve this function if it is only “relatively true.” Security demands that religion be made ultimately true with no doubts allowed. That is why the Pope has to be infallible. That is why the claim must be made for the Bible to be inerrant. That is why we assert that our religion is the only “true religion.” It is out of these claims that the need arises for us to impose this “one true faith” on all people. The conversion mentality is simply part of that. In my opinion, this need for security is an aspect of retarded growth in what it means to be human, and the religion that it produces so often seeks to keep us in a state of childlike immaturity.
Beyond this childlike quest for security, I believe we need to discover one other dimension of self-consciousness. It is the one that beckons us to grasp a new maturity. In this dimension of self-consciousness we do not need to be “born again,” we rather need to grow up. Maturity comes not in our constant pretending to be secure, it comes, rather, when we embrace the fact that it is human to be anxious and then to dare to embrace that reality. To live with integrity in a radically insecure world is, I believe, the meaning of the Christian life.
As long as any religion, Christianity and Islam included, believes that it possesses the ultimate truth, it will traffic in security-giving tactics and panaceas. When each religious system recognizes that ultimate truth is not something we possess, but something toward which we walk but never achieve in the human pilgrimage, then a new integrity will come to those traditional faith circles. The need to convert another to my “true religion” will cease. This conversion idea today repels more people than it attracts, a sure sign that it is dying. Whether a new stage of religious maturity is being born to take its place is not quite as clear. That, however, is where the future of Christianity lies.
Thanks for asking.
~John Shelby Spong
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