Two scholars battle it out over the resurrection

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.