The REALITY of the RESURRECTION
By Carl E. Braaten

The ecumenical movement has not yet reached its goal; Christianity is still badly divided. However, the deepest divisions are no longer denominational, say, between Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Reformed, Evangelical and mainline churches. The deepest fault line appears where faith and unbelief meet within the churches, among their theologians, bishops, and pastors. Nowhere is this more evident than in the matter of the resurrection of Jesus.

Prior to the Enlightenment, Christian theologians were not vexed by the question, "Did the resurrection of Jesus really happen?" What Paul said placed the question beyond dispute: "If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain." (1 Corinthians 15:14, NRSV). For many post-Enlightenment Christians, Paul's words no longer seem to settle the matter.

For example, A.J.M. Wedderburn, New Testament professor at the University of Munich, concludes that Paul's argument is thoroughly flawed. In his book Beyond Resurrection, he writes: "Paul's logic simply cannot hold water today. His rhetoric has led him astray." The title of his book is also its thesis: The results of modern historical criticism have placed the resurrection of Jesus beyond our capacity to believe that it really happened.

Take another example. Robert W. Funk tells about how he once formulated the proposition that the resurrection was an event in the life of Jesus, then presented it to members of the Jesus Seminary. In his book Honest to Jesus, he writes: "My proposition was received with hilarity by several Fellows. One suggested that it was an oxymoron.Others alleged that the formulation was meaningless, since we all assume, they said, that Jesus' life ended with his crucifixion and death. I was surprised by this response. I shouldn't have been. After all, John Dominic Crossan has confessed 'I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.' That's fairly blunt. But it squares with what we really know, as distinguished from what many want to believe. Sheehan is even blunter: 'Jesus, regardless of where his corpse ended up, is dead and remains dead.'" 

Some years ago I wrote an editorial for Pro Ecclesia entitled "Can We Still Be Christians?" (Fall, 1995, 395-97). It was prompted by Gerd Luedemann's book, The Resurrection of Jesus, in which, like Wedderburn, he reconstructs Christian belief apart from the resurrection. That question, "Can we still be Christians?" was originally asked by David Friedrich Strauss after he had dissolved the entire life of the historical Jesus, from the incarnation to the resurrection, into a Christ-myth. Strauss's answer was simply and honestly a brazen "No." Luedemann's answer, exactly opposite, was an emphatic "Yes." We modern Christians, unlike the deluded Christians of earlier times, may not be able to believe that the resurrection is an event that really happened to Jesus, but 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. The conclusion of my editorial was that Strauss was right, and Luedemann wrong. Without the confession that God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day, Christianity has mutated into a different religion.

Meanwhile, I have learned that Gerd Luedemann has reconsidered his answer; he has renounced the Christian faith. There is something tragically clarifying about that decision, one that the likes of Bishop John Spong, Marcus Borg, and a host of others lack the insight or courage to make. The motto of the Enlightenment was "sapere aude!"-have courage to use your own reason. Luedemann apparently has finally acquired the courage, like Strauss, to reason that there's no point in calling yourself a Christian if you don't believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. The Christian faith stands or falls with the reality of the resurrection, and it's time theologians took the courage to say it to their colleagues who pretend otherwise.

The resurrection and the identity of God
For Christians, the question of the identity of God was given a definitive answer in the event of 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. How is it then that process theology, the one school of thought that boasts of the distinction of being "made in America" (all the others being somehow imports from Europe), produces tomes about a God who looks so different from the one "who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist" (Romans 4:17).

In dismissing the resurrection, Schubert Ogden, one of the majordomos of process theology, confesses 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, or that American technicians have at last been successful in recovering a nose cone that had first been placed in orbit around the earth." Considering that Ogden had a long career as a seminary teacher of future United Methodist pastors, can you imagine the joy the gospel according to his theology would bring the faithful on Easter Sunday? This explains why so many of us have had a difficult time seeing the resemblance between the God of American process thought and the God of the classical Christian tradition.

Christians believe in God because he raised Jesus from the dead, and they believe in Jesus for the same reason. When 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 old story then as now, but with this difference: now the scoffers-many of them-are to be found inside the churches, among them ministers, seminary professors, and parish pastors.

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 as the Savior. If Jesus had not been raised, his special claim to divine authority to forgive sins would have been discredited by his crucifixion. A new event was needed to confirm Jesus' claim to stand in for God, to do the things that only God can do. Jesus had spoken and acted as though he were on the inside of God's will for the world. His encroachment on the authority of God, as the Jewish leaders felt so keenly, was blasphemy unless his claim was to be legitimated.

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.

What really happened on Easter morning?
Can we know what really happened on the morning of Easter? There were no witnesses to the event itself. We have stories of the empty tomb, and we have witnesses to the risen Christ. Do they tell us what kind of event the resurrection was? So far we have only said that we must speak of the resurrection of Jesus as an act of God. 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.

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 Lazarus, who returned to life three days after his death. But Lazarus had 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 Paul; it is a soma pneumatikos, a spiritual body. Yet there is continuity between the old and the new body; it is precisely the earthly mortal body that is transformed into a new mode of being, an immortal spiritual body.

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 a hallucinating imagination of faith. The appearances of Jesus were the cause of faith, not its product. Paul was not a believer but an enemy when Christ appeared to him.

A lot of ink, both polemical and apologetic, has been spilled over the empty tomb. Does it prove the resurrection? Did someone steal the body? Was the story made up to bolster the faith of the doubting Thomases? I will not rehearse the arguments pro and con here. I only want to say that the arguments advanced by people like Hans F. von Campenhausen and Wolfhart Pannenberg have been sufficiently persuasive that we can accept the stories of the empty tomb in the spirit in which they were written. The tomb was empty because Jesus 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 resurrection and world mission
We have said there can be no authentic Christianity without belief in the resurrection of Jesus. There can be no greater heresy in the modern church than the outright denial of this article of faith.

But we should not exaggerate the problem of the resurrection in our time. Many of the Areopagites in Athens could not believe the good news of the resurrection. Perhaps it was no more credible in ancient times than today. The Hellenistic worldview was not amenable to the Easter gospel; it was foolishness then and it will always remain such except for those who see through the eyes of faith. Why do some believe and others don't? We have no answer. Resurrection faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit of God, and it's not something we can generate with all the intelligence, will, and emotion we have at our command. But perhaps we can and should do something about the state of theological education, which remains for the most part undisciplined. When Van Harvey quit teaching at a seminary because he could no longer profess basic Christian beliefs, and instead opted for a religious studies program, that made a lot of sense and exemplified something to be encouraged across the church at all levels of leadership. A good place to start would be to remove bishops from office who relegate the resurrection story to mythological status.

The most telling effect of the loss of resurrection faith in the mainline churches is the collapse of the world missionary movement. All the resurrection narratives are a summons to mission and bestow authority on the apostolic office. The apostles who saw the Lord and believed all became missionaries. The risen Lord commissioned the church to go and tell the gospel to all the nations. The missionary nature of the church from the beginning until now is grounded in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. In the encounter with the risen Christ, the apostles were authorized and empowered to continue what Jesus began in his earthly ministry. The content of the church's missionary proclamation can be none other than Jesus Christ crucified and risen. If we don't believe in the reality of the risen Lord, there is no compelling commission and no mission. We are off the hook. Missionaries can stay home; and that is exactly what is going on.

How else can we account for the great uncertainty in the churches regarding whether it is imperative to preach the gospel to people of other faiths? Do not all religions say the same thing, only in different idioms? Are not all religions equally salvific? If Jesus is the risen Lord, that makes him different from all other putative messiahs, prophets, and religious founders. There is no need to be mission-minded if we do not believe that Jesus' resurrection is God's unique way of reclaiming the whole world for himself, and that he is the one and only way of salvation for Christians and people of other religions and no religion alike. The very reason for the church's being includes engagement in the mission of Christ to the nations. The church is the only witness and instrument that God has elected to win back the world. He has promised to be with his church to the close of the age, always accompanying his people in the power of his Spirit. When we talk about the resurrection, we are not talking merely about a historical event, of something passé, but we are talking about the present tense reality of what God is doing through the mission of the church, opening the way for all humankind to inherit the future of eternal life.

Carl E. Braaten is cofounder of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, and is the author of Mother Church: Ecclesiology and Ecumenism. The following is adapted from "The Reality of the Resurrection," by Carl E. Braaten, Chapter 7, of Nicene Christianity: The Future For a New Ecumenism, edited by Christopher Seitz, Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2001.