Two scholars battle it out over the resurrection

The Resurrection of Jesus is a central event in Christianity upon which hangs how we understand the nature of God, the basis of faith, and how Christ is present to His Church.

But what kind of event was it? The answer to this question falls into two quite different camps; those who insist that Jesus shrugged off his grave clothes and walked out of his tomb to meet his disciples as he would have before his death, and those who believe that the Spirit of Christ remained with them after his death as it remains to the Church to this day.

The first view asserts that he was raised from death to return to this world but never to die again. It must be said that this is a traditional interpretation that is enshrined, for example, in the third Article of Religion of the Church of England: "Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man's nature." It is also fiercely defended by the Roman Church and evangelical churches of all denominations.

Thus the nature of the Resurrection of Jesus is still a burning issue surrounded by vigorous debate. At the risk of misinterpretation, I will call these two views of the Resurrection, the physical and the spiritual.

N.T Wright, in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), takes the physical view which means that it may be investigated by secular historians in the same way that any other historical event may be investigated, i.e. the Resurrection may be perceived without the eyes of faith. This effectively excludes the activity of the "Spirit as a datum of Easter Faith".

Wright takes this physical view from the traditions of Israel. He asserts that Jews of the time of Jesus could only perceive of the Resurrection as the physical raising of bodies from the dead, a heritage of Second Temple Judaism. He rejects any talk of "spirit" as being foreign and unwelcome contamination from Greek thought, particularly Platonism. This makes much talk of the Spirit in the New Testament problematic and would seem to exile the third Person of the Trinity. Wright clings to a narrow dictionary definition of the word "resurrection" and refuses to deal with the spread of Greek thought throughout the civilised world.

There is now a growing consensus that rather than Platonism taking over Christianity, it was the case that Church fathers took what they needed from Platonism. For example, they could affirm the unity and transcendence of the Logos while rescuing the material world from being mere shadows of the Ideal. As Boersma has written: "The Platonist-Christian synthesis made it possible to regard creation, history, and Old Testament as sacramental carriers of a greater reality."

Peter Carnley, erstwhile Anglican Archbishop of Perth, entered the discussion of the nature of the Resurrection with his book The Structure of Resurrection Belief (1987). This appeared early in his time as archbishop and was the occasion of much dispute not only among Evangelical Anglicans but also with those of more traditional persuasion. The spur for a new book: Resurrection in Retrospect: A critical examination of the theology of N.T.Wright (2019) is, as the title suggests, a response to Wright's support for the physical view.

Carnley's book is a detailed and systematic taking apart of Wright's view and awaits a second volume to complete his study. I have to say that I found such taking apart laughably easy. Carnley first attacks the relevance of a dictionary definition of Resurrection attributed to Second Temple Judaism. He demonstrates that Platonism penetrated the consciousness of the early Church, including the thought of the earliest Christian writer, St Paul. It becomes evident to the reader that the early Church borrowed what it needed from Judaism and Hellenism and that its understanding of the Resurrection was the product of both. This explains, to some extent, why texts regarding the Resurrection are ambiguous and often contradictory.

Carnley leads us into the maze of biblical texts that deal with the Resurrection, many of which are at cross purposes, even to themselves as to the nature of Jesus' risen body. For example, the appearance of Jesus in the locked room in John 20:19-28 both affirms the bodily reality of the risen Christ as the one bearing the wounds of crucifixion and, in contradiction, one who can appear and disappear at will. Similarly, the lovely story that Luke gives us set on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) allows the risen Jesus to walk and talk with his disciples on the road without them recognising him and he vanishes after he reveals himself in the breaking of the bread.

These two texts seem to want it both ways, that the risen Jesus is the crucified one and that he is also non-material. None of the resurrection appearances deals with the reality of Jesus being alive again, having to sleep somewhere, sustain himself and have continuous contact with his disciples. All of the appearances of the risen Jesus are episodic and have puzzling aspects. They are also loaded with theological meaning in a way that ordinary events are not, such as the Eucharistic reference to the breaking of the bread in the Emmaus story.

It is obvious that there has been a period of development in the resurrection tradition from Paul, who does not seem to know about the empty tomb, to the earliest Gospel of Mark in which there is only the empty tomb but no appearances, to the more fully blown accounts of meetings with Jesus in the later gospels.

There is certainly an effort in the gospel according to Matthew to support the physical view in that a narrative is inserted in the text about guards being posted at the entrance of the tomb to counter the rumour that the disciples had stolen the body and duplicitously announced that Jesus had been raised from the dead. This stands as strong evidence that among the writers of the New Testament there were some who were committed to the physical view.

The more we journey with Carnley through Wright's conclusions, the stranger they become. For example, Wright is wedded to the view that the risen Jesus' body is an immortal body because of Paul's "For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality(1Cor.15:53). It is this body that meets with his followers. Wright invents a new word "transphysicality" to describe what God has done to Jesus. It is this transformed, immortal body who ascends to sit at the right hand of the Father, presumably with the wounds of crucifixion intact.

The more Wright extends his thesis, the more puzzling it becomes because we must think of a body that is "more physical than physical" ascending to a presumably physical seat next to the Father. We might ask whether Heaven, under this scheme, becomes a physical place whose existence may be verified by any secular astrophysicist.

It is the contradiction between what is physical and what is spiritual that finally makes Wright's thesis unthinkable. What is the difference, we might ask, between the experience of the physical body of Jesus to early believers and our experience of the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic Christian community?

When, before his death, Stephen looks up and sees "the glory of God and Jesus standing at his right hand" (Acts 7:56) what did he see? Is this a private vision or could those with him see it as well? Why was Paul's Damascus road experience so different from those who earlier had met the risen Jesus? Was it because Luke's time line of events placed the Ascension before the appearance to Paul? This would make it impossible for Jesus to appear as a body to Paul because it had already ascended. Of what then did Paul's Damascus road experience consist and why did he lump this "appearance" to him with the other appearances to his followers in 1Cor. 15:3-8.

By ignoring both the development of the texts about the Resurrection and the fact that early Christian theology was a synthesis of Platonic and Jewish thought, Wright has painted himself into a corner from which there is no escape from grave contradiction. First and foremost, theology must be thinkable; it must make sense. Faith may not be confused with gullibility, and blank cheques cannot be written on the power of God to do anything. The real mystery of God is to do with how God reveals himself to us, something that is out of our control and that escapes the nets of our determination.

Wright's thesis lacks a Trinitarian framework. God acts to raise Jesus from the dead without the aid of the Spirit. It is a central tenet of Trinitarian theology that the actions of the Persons are indivisible. The Son (Jesus) can only act in his relation to the Father in the power of the Spirit. Wright has Jesus raised without the Spirit and believers come to believe without the Spirit. The evidence of a nature miracle is all they have to support belief, a support that is found wanting because it exists as a datum that constantly recedes into the past leaving an absence in the present. These are some of the reasons that any systematic theologian would find Wright's thesis unsupportable.

These difficulties may be eliminated by understanding that the event of the Resurrection was based on the experience of the first Christians of Jesus being present according to Paul, as a "life-giving spirit" (ICor.15:45). Carnley makes the point that it was this experience that engendered the understanding of God as Trinitarian:

The nature of this relationship which Paul described as "communion", the communion of the Holy Spirit inclusive of all the baptised in any particular location, and which Christians enter into at baptism, and share together most intentionally as the worshipping Eucharistic community, provided the experiential context for the development of the doctrine of the Trinity by the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century. Basil of Caesarea, for example, appealed to the concept of the inter-personal relationality when he spoke of the unity of the Persons of the Trinity, as "Three Persons and one Communion" (p280).

Wright has done us a service and a disservice. His service is compounded by his reputation. Here is a famous biblical theologian with many well received publications under his belt doing his best to push the physical line on the Resurrection and ending up with speculation, contradiction and the reduction of faith to belief that a nature miracle has occurred in the distant past. He damagingly substitutes the power of the redemptive action of the incarnation with our assent to an event that may be identified with any event in human history.

Without Wright's book Carnley would not have been spurred to write a refutation and in the process assert a properly theological understanding of this centre of the faith.