N.T Wright on the Resurrection

Easter's only a few days away, so I thought I would revisit my conversation with N.T. Wright while he was lecturing at Harvard about 18 months ago. The interview was published in Homiletics (and I think I referenced it here in this blog somewhere). Just think of this as a little primer on the meaning of the resurrection before facing the Easter crowds who--if they're looking for anything--are looking for a good resurrection.

HOMILETICS: Let’s start with the resurrection. You say in one of your books that there really hasn’t been any new evidence in the past generation or two to dispel the notion that when people die, they stay dead. So what accounts for the increased levels of discussion concerning the resurrection?

WRIGHT: The word “resurrection” has commonly been used by Christians for many years now to mean effectively, “life after death.” So that when people read the Easter story they think, “Isn’t that wonderful? Jesus died, then he was raised, then he went to heaven; well, we’ll die, we’ll go to heaven and that’s pretty much the same thing. And they miss the whole point of the bodily resurrection, which has to do with “new creation,” because most Christians — and indeed many Jews in the modern world as John Levison has argued in his new book — don’t actually have in their minds a picture of what resurrection really is, which is: a new bodily life after a period of being bodily dead.

In other words, resurrection is not life after death, it’s life after, life after death. We’re talking about a two-stage post-mortem reality. A time of being bodily dead, and then — if you want to talk about going to heaven, then that’s what’s going on at that point. But then, the new heavens and new earth that were promised will form the theatre or stage within which we’ll be given new bodies to live within God’s new world.

To me, the almost amusing thing is that this was absolutely common coinage in Christianity until probably the early 18th century in Western Europe, at least. You can see it on tombstones and the way that people wrote about their future hope on tombstones.

Somewhere in the late 18th and particularly through the 19th century, this got completely overtaken by a platonic hope for simply going to heaven, and the word “resurrection” simply became a metaphor for that hope of going to heaven — which now is all that most Christians think about.

HOMILETICS: But it was also the Jewish understanding of resurrection in the ancient world.

WRIGHT: Absolutely, but not just a Jewish understanding, because the meaning of “resurrection” was clear. In the ancient pagan world, the Greco-Roman world, if someone mentioned “resurrection” — anastasis in Greek — people knew that that meant someone who is already well and truly dead coming back into a bodily life of some sort, and they knew that that didn’t happen.

HOMILETICS: So when you say that the resurrection is a “historical” problem or issue, is this what you mean? Getting back to an understanding of the word itself?

WRIGHT: Well, yes. If you say “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” and then suggest that that means, “Is Jesus still around spiritually somehow having left his body behind in the tomb?” — that’s a notion that one can understand; the ancients would have words for that — ancient Jews, ancient Hebrews, ancient Greeks would have had a word for that. But they wouldn’t have used the word “resurrection.”

HOMILETICS: So if you want to describe that position, fine. Just don’t use the word “resurrection.”

WRIGHT: Exactly. If what you mean is that you “sense his presence still with you,” “His call continues,” whatever. Exactly. Say, then, that “His call continues and I sense his presence with me.” We’ve got language to say that. The word “resurrection” does not mean that in the ancient world.

So it’s quite clear what the early Christian claim was. The early Christian claim was that Jesus was well and truly bodily alive again after a short period of being well and truly bodily dead and that they knew that this totally broke the mold. Many Jews in that day did believe in resurrection, but they didn’t believe that one person was going to be raised before all the rest. That’s a totally radical innovation. Nobody was expecting that.

Comments

[Mark Kenning]

God does work in mysterious ways. I'd sort of quit looking at Homiletics during Lent; my little church on the prairie near Fort Morgan doesn't do Holy week services, so we usually go from "Yay God" on Palm Sunday to "Yay God" on Easter and skip all the good stuff in between. So this year, we spent Lent in Holy week (and Mark), one weekday per Sunday. So we celebrated Palm Sunday on 2/10, and ended with Good Friday on 3/16. It was different.

Anyway, my Easter sermon was on how I came to honestly, deep-down-in-my-heart, believe in the bodily resurrection that Wright describes. And interestingly, it came to me as I was reading his book "What St. Paul Really Said." In a nutshell, it somehow dawned on me that if the early church - and by that I mean the 120 present in Acts 1:15 that gathered to replace Judas - didn't really believe that the resurrection had actually happened, would they have put up with all the abuse and persecution they suffered? And those that came to believe shortly thereafter (including Paul) - would they really have suffered imprisonment, beatings, being run out of town, even death (Stephen) if they were just making it up? I don't think so. None of the other messiah/itinerant preacher's groups survived their death (see John the Baptist); could Jesus's have survived if something wasn't different - like the resurrection? I have come to believe no - so it must be true.

So I find it highly ironic that today I dug out my copy of Homiletics, happened to read your back page comment on blogs (looking for the missing interview) and had a few minutes to read and found this particular blog. God does indeed work in mysterious ways.

Thanks for your work to help us preachers in the trenches. By the way, I love your alternative treatment pages!