Risen Indeed?
Three Views of the Resurrection
by Robert M. Price
Introduction
In the present situation of pluralism in Protestant
theology, there is perhaps no more-debated issue than that of the
resurrection of Jesus. To any outsider, this would have to seem rather
startling, since at least according to some estimates, this doctrine is
supposed to be the basis for everything else in Christian theology. Most
of the debate rests on the common assumption of the centrality (or at
least indispensability) of Jesus’ resurrection. The bickering concerns
the way in which this agreed-upon importance is to be articulated or
accounted for. The present essay will survey three options on the
contemporary theological horizon. These are the resurrection theologies
of conservative John Warwick Montgomery, liberal Gordon Kaufman, and
moderate Walter Künneth.
1. John Warwick Montgomery: The
Resurrection as an Apologetical Guarantee
We begin our survey on the extreme theological right. John Warwick
Montgomery is an incisive and informed exponent of an essentially
eighteenth century Lutheran orthodoxy. In his many articles and books he
brings the weapons of historiography, bibliography, and linguistic
philosophy to bear on modern theology, which he plainly detests. Though
seemingly fully abreast of the latest theological developments,
Montgomery is satisfied with the apologetic defenses of yesteryear. His
are the proofs from prophecy and miracle. Most students encounter these
only in their studies of historical theology, but in Montgomery’s
writings they are alive and well.
In reading much conservative theological
literature, one may be struck by the paucity of theological significance
given the resurrection. This at first seems exceedingly strange, since
conservatives are unflagging in their insistence that the resurrection
of Christ be maintained as true in every nail scarred particular. It is
almost reminiscent of a museum curator who is eager to preserve an old
cannon in perfect condition--no use can be made of the piece any more,
but it is indispensable to the collection. Critic James Barr has sought
to explain this kind of surprising gap. He believes that conservatives
care very little about “theology,” i.e., a worked-out rationale for
under standing faith. Instead, they are interested only in
"doctrine,” a list of self-sufficient tenets whose only necessary
relationship is their common membership in such a list of
"Fundamentals."
But for John Warwick Montgomery, the doctrine of
the resurrection does have a clear connection with at least one other
tenet of faith. And it is a surprising connection! Jesus’ resurrection
functions chiefly as a guarantee for the Warfield doctrine of "biblical
authority.” As formulated by Montgomery, this argument has six steps.
First, "The historical value of the New Testament
records about Christ is, when considered from the objective stand-point
of textual scholarship, nothing less than stellar."1
Montgomery uses various arguments to establish the "reliability of the
gospels.” Chief among these is the claim that the gospels stem so
directly from eyewitness testimony that it becomes unrealistic to
suggest that faith has substantially altered the sayings and deeds of
Jesus.
Steps two and three are concisely summarized as
follows: “And in these attested historical documents the Divine claims
of Jesus Christ and the Resurrection by which He validated those claims
are set forth in the most lucid and persuasive terms.”2
Montgomery asserts that Jesus simply "claimed to be God," which is
vastly to oversimplify the matter, even if one credits the historical
Jesus with every saying attributed to him in the canon. Further
ingenious exegesis on Montgomery's part yields the conclusion that Jesus
also predicted that he would rise from the dead in order to verify his
"claims to be God." The longer Matthean version of the "sign of Jonah”
pericope is probably in mind here, perhaps along with Luke 16:31.
Needless to say, Montgomery must read into such texts his notion that
Jesus intends to put on the line his "claims to be God." All this
constitutes step two.
Step three, contained in the last
quote, is the assertion that the resurrection of Jesus is attested
incontrovertibly from the "historical evidence" of the gospel texts. And
if Jesus did rise from the dead right on schedule, then he must have
been God, just as he claimed. Montgomery thus thinks to leap Lessing’s ugly ditch with a single bound.
With step four, we reach the real significance of
the resurrection for Montgomery. “The historical validation of a Divine
Christ leads to the establishment of the Scriptures as Divine
revelation.”3
Here we deal with a two-pronged line of defense. On the one hand, “When
one examines, purely on historical grounds, the attitude of Jesus toward
the Old Testament, one finds that He regarded it as no less than God's
revealed Word.”4
And “if Jesus was in fact God incarnate as He claimed and as His
Resurrection evidences, then His evaluation of Scripture is no mere
human, fallible judgment, but the exact truth.”5
And so, therefore, is Montgomery's. "And” on the other hand "the same
veracity attaches to His promise to His Apostles that His Spirit would
give them 'total recall’ concerning his teachings, thereby guaranteeing
that the New Testament documents, subsequently written by them and by
their close associates (under Apostolic guidance), would have revelatory
value also.”6
Again, there are problems. The texts Montgomery alludes to, John
14:26-27 and 16:12-15, say nothing about the production of inspired
texts and could just as easily be pressed into guaranteeing papal
infallibility ex cathedra. Also, Montgomery would have a devil of
a time proving that the apostle Paul was in the upper room at the time
of this promise. And as for the parenthetic authorization of
"revelatory documents" from apostolic associates like Mark and Luke,
Montgomery may wish such a thing had been spoken by Jesus, but even he
can quote no text to this effect.
What is the upshot of all this? "Thus can the
authority of the Christian Scriptures be established on a solidly
empirical, historical footing.... For Christ Himself has settled the
authority issue once and for all.”7
As far as Montgomery is concerned, the main role of the resurrection of
Christ is an indirect epistemological one. Even if this connection could
be made as strongly as Montgomery thinks it can, we would still have a
sense of some thing missing. Is no more substantial theological
significance to be attached to the event of Easter?
2. Gordon Kaufman: The Resurrection as a
Historic Hallucination
Moving considerably to the left we come
next to
consider Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufman. Though Kaufman's
theology of resurrection is not
particularly distinctive among contemporary Liberal theologians,
his
unequivocal bluntness makes him a helpful model. Reading his
works, one receives the impression that he has said in plain
words what many others have obscured through diplomacy.
Kaufman begins his discussion with a quick
statement about the significance of Easter:
The resurrection... means that God is Lord
despite all that men believe and do to the contrary. Even though men
rejected Jesus of Nazareth... apparently removing all possibility of his
further historical effectiveness, God "raised him up'! ... and made him
after his death the mighty transformer of history.8
And without the resurrection, Kaufman agrees with
Paul, our faith would be in vain. This would be so because God's
revelatory act would then dead-end at the crucifixion, "and the meaning
of human existence revealed in that occurrence taken simply by itself
is bleak tragedy and death.”9
Whether Kaufman's version of the resurrection justifies any alternative
assessment of the cross is a question we will consider presently.
Kaufman has often made plain his distaste for any
concept of the miraculous and does not indulge in supernaturalism here.
He is forthright in saying that "these alleged appearances were in fact
a series of hallucinations”10
and that "Contemporary belief... will not necessarily involve the
conviction that the crucified Jesus became personally alive again."11
To most people, all this might sound as if Kaufman no longer believes in
the resurrection. And indeed he has quite a time trying to justify his
continued use of the term. "Basically, he seems content to say that
Jesus' influence, or cause, lived after him. “God's act begun in
him was a genuine historical act which still continues and was thus
becoming an effective force in human history; in this sense... Christ
himself was raised from the dead.”12
Kaufman really means simply that "the love, mercy, and forgiveness" that
had existed among the followers of Jesus (did it? –cf. Mark 9:33-34,
Matthew 20:24) continued on in the early church and is still experienced
today.
Such continuity, Kaufman admits, is not the
personal continuity of Jesus before and beyond death envisioned by the
early Christians. Granted, faith today is exercised in a different
plausibility structure. So what if we accept the "resurrection" for
different reasons? It is true, Kaufman admits, that if the original
disciples had realized, as he does, that the Easter appearances could be
adequately explained as non-miraculous hallucinations, they would have
gone back to fishing and tax- collecting for good. But we know better
than they about the positive value of creative hallucinatory experiences
and so can value theirs for the insight it produced. And this is the
real value of the resurrection--on Easter morning the mirage of Jesus
triggered a "disclosure situation" (Ian Ramsey) wherein the nature of
God and his purpose for man became known, i.e., love and forgiveness. We
accept this "revelatory insight" encased by the not-quite-earthen
vessels of hallucination.
As intriguing as this schema may be, it seems to
run into serious problems, even according to Kaufman's own criteria. For
instance, though he tries to draw a distinction between the appearances
and the resurrection as an hypothetical factor anterior to them,13
he finally locates the "resurrection" as an insight posterior to the
appearances. In fact, this technical inconsistency opens an even larger
question. Kaufman claims to have faith in the resurrection itself as
revelatory of God:
faith will say that through these appearances
("hallucinations ") the almighty God was making himself known... Why
would faith say this? Simply because, as a matter of actual historical
fact... it was the experience of these appearances that gave
birth to the faith that in and through the crucified Jesus God was
acting decisively on human history.14
But the disciple s only saw God J s hand in it all
because of their (mistaken) belief that Jesus had actually "become
personally alive again." It seems that Kaufman accepts an event as
revelatory simply because someone else did, and despite the fact that
they were technically mistaken in so doing. He removes the original
rationale for calling it "revelatory" and substitutes for it the mere
fact that someone did think it was revelatory. Ultimately, Kaufman finds
the faith of the early church, not any resurrection, to be revelatory.
He in effect embraces the caricature -version of Bultmann's dictum that
"Christ rose into the kerygma." Bultmann never meant to idealize and
exalt the religious experience of the community as such, but
Kaufman seems to do this on purpose.
But the above quote raises a second problem,
pointed out by Clark Pinnock. Kaufman's rhetoric about God's "acting
decisively in history” requires a different sort of resurrection. “The
resurrection was preeminently an event in the history of meaning,”15
yet Kaufman expects that the history of events will ultimately
turn out God’s way (in a return to the old Social Gospel optimism). A
real transformation of the world is in the eschatological offing (see
Chapter 22, “The Consummation of History" in his Systematic Theology:
A Historicist Perspective). Kaufman seems suddenly to have abandoned
his reticence to speak of God miraculously doing things that will change
the outcome of natural processes. He forbids any interference by God in
the course of events in the case of Jesus, but not in history as a
whole. And since the resurrection of Jesus (an event in the history of
meaning) is held to be the first fruits, or proleptic anticipation, of
the eschaton, why isn't the eschaton also a nontemporal eschaton “of
meaning,” as in Tillich’s theology?
Finally, we must raise the question of whether
Kaufman's resurrection can justify any positive significance for the
cross. If there was no resurrection-victory of the same kind as
the cross-defeat, how can we speak of a divine reversal of the
rebellious rejection of Christ by men? Didn't they achieve their purpose
after all? It seems safe to say that the early Christians (especially
Luke) saw God's victory in the resurrection because it reversed the
murder (the personal death) of Jesus by making Jesus personally alive
again, a notion disavowed by Kaufman. Yet Kaufman does seem to see
things in terms of vindication (or lack of it). He warns that the
resurrection must not be seen as the undoing of the cross, since on
Golgotha,
ultimate reality is not to be understood in terms
of the all-too-human conceptions of worldly power… On the contrary, in
the cross were found meekness and submission, nonresistance to evil,
self-sacrifice; and the resurrection meant that just this cross was the
very revelation of God's innermost nature.16
Mustn't this mean, then, that God's last word is
nonresistance to evil? And without the prospect of vindication (dropped
by Kaufman with the personal resurrection of Jesus), doesn't this amount
to throwing in the towel? Isn't the cross in the final analysis a
picture of "bleak tragedy” in Kaufman's words? With Kaufman's version of
Good Friday and Easter, why should the meek feel particularly "blessed"? They have no guarantee that they will
inherit the earth.
3. Walter Künneth: The Resurrection as
Theologically Central
Our third theologian, Walter Künneth (The
Theology of the Resurrection), is a conservative Lutheran, but of a
considerably different stripe than John Warwick Montgomery. Actually one
might discern some kind of second cousin relationship, since Künneth
teaches at Erlangen, as did Ethelbert Stauffer from whom Montgomery received much of his
inspiration. Künneth is definitely to be placed on the conservative side
of the spectrum. But his conservatism has been forged in the heat of the
controversy over Bultmann’s demythologizing, and it has been positively
as well as negatively influenced by that debate. In fact for someone who
has come out so “anti-Bultmannian” in the heresy controversies in
Germany, Künneth sounds amazingly Bultmannian! Künneth has marked out a
happy alternative to both approaches considered so far. First, he
supplies solid and material content for the doctrine of the
resurrection. Second, he blends many of the concerns of conservatives
and liberals in a creative manner. Künneth shows that much of the
Bultmannian perspective can be assimilated into a supernaturalist
framework, as alchemical as that may sound. Though his effort is not
quite successful at some points, it is quite significant.
Surprisingly, Künneth disagrees with Montgomery and
agrees with Bultmann on the is sue of historical verification (or "historicality")
of the resurrection.
If the resurrection is an event on the plane of
history, then it also participates in all that determines the nature of
history. The resurrection event is then a relative fact in the context
of the phenomena and life of history, stands in continuity with a
multitude of other known and unknown factors belonging to this world, is
an element in historical existence and as such possesses no absolute
validity but is subject to conditions and thus to the uncertainties and
probabilities of all history. To insist upon the historic character of
the resurrection has the result of objectifying it, ... that means...
that the assertion of its historicality leads to an irresistible
process of dissolution, which ominously threatens the reality of the
resurrection itself. 17
In other words, Künneth sees what Montgomery fails
to see, that the applicability of a set of verification criteria
implies that the thing so verified does not transcend the criteria since
it can be matched with, or included in, them. And since criteria for
historical verification are based on the principle of analogy, any
resurrection which falls in their purview must be analogous to ordinary
experience, i.e., not miraculous! Ironically, it was the attempt to
"verify" the resurrection in this way that resulted in the formation of
the rationalistic “Swoon Theory" (i.e., Jesus was alive after his
crucifixion, but in a "verifiable” or "explainable" way) detested by
Montgomery and other apologists who use essentially the same
methodology, albeit inconsistently.
Künneth’s agreement with Bultmann is visible in the
above quote: "To insist upon the historical character of the
resurrection has the result of objectifying it." To bring the
resurrection into the flux of ordinary events, to make it merely another
this-worldly object, is to make it mundane. It thereby loses its
transcendent character. It is no worthy object of faith, has no
redemptive power. We see Bultmannian concerns echoed here. Künneth feels
that to ask for historical verification is basically inappropriate to
the qualitatively unique message of the resurrection. The only
appropriate criterion is faith, receptive encounter with the revelation.
In only slightly different terms we have here Bultmann's kicking away of
the "objective” props of faith, the cognitive “works” promised by
historical apologetics. They are merely worldly attempts to attain
security by capturing the resurrection in human terms. Künneth speaks
in terms of inappropriate standards of verification, but the point is
much the same, since any application of “historicality” robs the kerygma
of its transcendence.
Here, incidentally, is an important clue to
Bultmann's intent. He has often been criticized for providing no
reason for the effectiveness of Christ's cross, i.e., no theory
of atonement. The answer is that so to make the cross applicable by
accounting for it in terms of general categories is to drag it down into
the realm of worldly thoughts and concepts. Even so for Künneth,
historical proof “fundamentally destroys the uniqueness of the
resurrection and thus fails to grasp the basic newness of the witness to
the resurrection.” For this reason, “The tradition has no desire for a
'historical proof of the resurrection.'" With an apologetic like that,
Künneth reasons, who needs attacks? The “the attempt falls prey to the
historical levelling process.”18
It is important now to notice the strategic point
of difference between Künneth and Bultmann Künneth is able to avoid objectifying apologetics
and rationalizations without demythologizing. He is able to achieve much the same end by adopting
something' like Barth's insistence that though the event of the
resurrection truly occurred in our world, it "transcends" historical
causality and thus is (fortunately or unfortunately) undetectable by the
historian's methods. Thus as long as one renounces apologetics, there is
no need to renounce "myth,” i.e., the supernatural And here Künneth's
disagreement with Bu1tmann comes to the fore. He rejects demythologizing
for more reasons than its lack of utility. He thinks it is positively
dangerous. Ironically, for all of Bultmann's admirable concern to
preserve the gospel from being dissolved into historical generality,
Künneth thinks that his use of myth errs in much the same way: “The
application of the concept of myth to the resurrection of Jesus means a
levelling down of the particular to the universal, the changing of the ‘revelatio
specialis’ into a general revelation.”19
While this comment would be right to the point if Künneth were talking
about, say, Alan Watts's Myth and Ritual in Christianity, it
shows a misunderstanding of Bultmann.
Beyond this, Künneth thinks that
demythologizing is a mistake because it confuses "mythology" with
"pictorial language" which is in reality indispensable to human thought
and speech. As such, language surrounding the resurrection of Jesus may
indeed be relative and limited, but surely all language is similarly
limited.
Concepts like God, heaven, the spatial designation
"above" for the eternal and divine, the spatial designation "below" for
the earthly, transitory and the dead, and likewise "resurrection" as
denoting the transition from "below" to "above, " from death to the life
of God, are technical terms of biblical religion; and while they do
share in the fragmentary character of all earthly representations of an
unconditional reality, which means they can comprehend it only in a
pictorial space-time pattern, yet at the same time they are valid and
appropriate for every world-picture, since even an advance in scientific
knowledge of the world does not free us from the need to use spatial and
temporal forms of expression. 20
What does Künneth think Bu1tmann is proposing?
Künneth's own explanation of "picture language” is very nearly the sane
as what Bultmann means by myth. Künneth might do well to read Ogden's
defense of Bultmann's concept of myth in Christ without Myth. All
that Bultmann asks is that such "picture-language" be interpreted, not
that it be stripped away and discarded. In Tillich's terms, myth is irreplaceable as the language of religion,
though it must be "deliteralized." Künneth does not seem to realize
just how close to Bultmann he is.
Unlike Montgomery, Künneth does not rest content to
find in the resurrection the merely preliminary concerns of apologetics
and epistemology. Rather he goes on to show the "dogmatic significance"
of the resurrection. Indeed, he makes it central to Christian
theological thinking. We will only touch on a few aspects of this here.
According to Künneth, the resurrection is crucial to the Christological
enterprise, forming the foundation of the exaltation motif. He sees
resurrection/exaltation to divine "Kyrios” status as the only way to
conceive of the divinity of Jesus so as not to compromise monotheism.
The installation of Jesus as Lord means the same as
the conferring of divine majesty. This grounding of his
divine majesty in the resurrection rules out... any speculative,
non-historic metaphysic of the intrinsic divine nature of Jesus. . . .
There must always come an alteration in the monotheistic concept of God,
however, when Lordship is conceived... to be already an inherent
property of Jesus. 21
But at the same time, to locate Jesus' divinity in
his exaltation is to prevent the classical Liberals' location of it in
Jesus' earthly life, his openness to God and others, etc. The value of
this distinction is apparent in a mirror image fashion from those
"historical Jesus" Christologies such as Hans Küng's, for which the
resurrection is really superfluous.
Künneth seems to come close to Pannenberg (in
Jesus: God and Man) at this point. Both theologians locate Jesus I
divinity at the point of resurrection. Pannenberg says that Jesus' life
thereby "retroactively” becomes messianic. Similarly, Künneth says that
since the resurrection, the words of the Rabbi from Nazareth
"retrospectively” become the words of the Lord. They lose their
conditional time-bound character and assume universal validity. Here,
incidentally, is the one place Künneth seems to be in sympathy with
Montgomery's epistemological approach, whereby the resurrection
authorizes Jesus' words. Yet Künneth contradicts himself later on,
claiming that such time-bound pre-Easter historical data must remain
irrelevant to faith! Shades of Bultmann!
22
In terms of atonement and salvation, there is much
to be said about the resurrection, since it is the other side of the
cross, that which makes the cross a victory. Without the resurrection,
the cross could only enshrine and deify masochism, as Joachim Kahl the
bitter anti-theologian says that it does
(in The Misery of Christianity). A cross
followed by a resurrection proclaims not death but new life. And in such
a cross, one is able to rise as well as die with Christ. Merely dying
with him could be no real salvation. Künneth invokes the Lutheran
dialectic of "at the same time sinner and justified" to make his point. With no resurrection, God must only
judge sin. But if Christ rises "for our justification," the double-edged
act of God in judging and saving is secured. It is the
resurrection which makes the death on the cross a reconciling death.
Künneth says that the resurrection (combined of course with the cross) "creates
a new situation”23
of reconciliation, yet his choice of other terms like "proves” and
"reveals” make it somewhat unclear whether the resurrection actually
effects or simply manifests God's saving forgiveness. But
Künneth does not demonstrate the connection between
cross/resurrection and salvation. One may suspect that there is a good
reason for this, i.e., that like Bultmann, Künneth may reason that a
theory of atonement would make God’s act explicable to man and thus
place it among worldly possibilities, removing its transcendent salvific
value.
Applying the resurrection of Christ to
the doctrine of creation, Künneth borrows the Irenaean theme of the
resurrection as a recapitulation of creation which at the same time
brings creation to its originally intended (but never yet achieved)
telos. Seen this way, Christ not only restores creation but completes it.
Not surprisingly, resurrection applies to
eschatology as well as to protology. It is the first fruits of the
future. It marks the pivot of the ages, from which point the aeon
kata pneuma can be distinguished by faith from the aeon kata
sarka, the Kingdom of Christ in the midst of the Kingdom of
Satan. For a time the two run parallel, but this state of affairs is not
to continue indefinitely. Eventually, the resurrection’s
judgment/victory will be made manifest to all. But we cannot say just
how. With admirable restraint reminiscent of Reinhold Niebuhr, Künneth
reminds us that an eschatological consummation would be wrongly
described in any this-worldly terms literally understood. We must be
content to describe the significance of the eschaton. His language is at
length forthright: “Nor is it the task of theology to force the
irrationalities of Christian eschatology into a logical system, but on
the contrary to expound their meaning.”24 And among those “meanings,”
Künneth finds hope for eventual universal salvation. Künneth himself
cannot resist a little systematizing, since he is at least able to tell
us that the resurrection is proleptically central to eschatology. More
examples could be given, but enough has been said to show that Künneth
makes the resurrection of Christ materially central to theology, and not
only formally central as Montgomery does.
Conclusion
In our quick sweep of three options in
today's discussion about the resurrection, we have seen in the
approaches of conservative John Warwick Montgomery and liberal Gordon
Kaufman some of the weaknesses besetting the theological camps they
represent. Neither is able to relate the resurrection to the rest of
Christian theology in any but an oblique way. One might say that it is
their concern with the supernatural (whether to verify or to eliminate
it) that leads both men astray. By contrast, we found the approach of Walter Künneth a refreshing change,
dealing effectively with questions of verifiability, but then moving on
to impart to Easter morning a material and wide-ranging dogmatic
significance. Embodying as it does a serious attempt to preserve
both conservative and liberal concerns in a workable synthesis, we
suggest that Künneth's theology of the resurrection merits more
attention than it has received as a new way forward for Christian
thinking today.
---------
NOTES
1 John Warwick Montgomery, The Suicide of
Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship,, 1975),
p. 38.
2 Ibid., pp. 38-39.
3 Ibid., p. 39.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 40.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Gordon D. Kaufman, Systematic Theology: A
Historicist Perspective (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968),
p. 415.
9 Ibid., p. 416.
10 Ibid., p. 422.
11 Ibid., p. 426.
12 Ibid., p. 429.
13 Ibid., pp. 421-422.
14 Ibid., p. 423.
15. Ibid., p. 433
16 Ibid., p. 432
17 Walter Künneth, The Theology of the
Resurrection (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1965), pp.
24-25.
18 Ibid., p. 30.
19 Ibid., p. 57.
20 Ibid., p. 7l.
21 Ibid. p. 133.
22 Ibid., compare p. 141 with p. 149.
23 Ibid., p. 165.
24 Ibid., p. 284
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