Davide's Notes

Since I am currently studying modern interpretations of the Resurrection, I just can't avoid blogging on this one.

Prof. Richard Swinburne apparently said that the probability that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead is 97%, according to this article on ReligionNewsBlog. The article says that prof. Swinburne has substantiated this computation in one of his books, that at this point should go onto my ever-growing list of books to read. (I wonder what the margin of error is. As one of my professors used to repeat ad nauseam in a Physics Lab course, measurements only make sense if three things are specified: data, error, and unit of measurement. And of course the measurement must be reproducible, according to some well-specified method.)

Statements like "there was a one in 10 probability that the gospels would report the life and resurrection of Jesus in the form they do" seem to me fairly generic and difficult to support, but maybe it's all explained in detail in the book referenced in the article.

Benjamin Myers (Faith and Theology) is right to the point in his post Why is Theology Boring? The problem, as I see it, is a general one.

I like teaching and giving presentations. My professional field is mostly computer science, and my theology skills are amateurish at best; but regardless of the field, I try to regard myself as a continuing student. One thing I learned from experience (as teacher and student), is that knowledge is in itself always mediated through other knowledge and interpretation. There is no such thing as an arid subject, but there may well be an arid teacher (or student). The boredness comes in when you are not able to communicate (for example, as a speaker) or see (for example, as a hearer) the beauty, perhaps hidden, of the subject.

Read this: The art of Teaching straight from the Heart. It is a presentation given at a scientific conference, and as such it was mostly conceived for a technical audience. But it seems to me that many of the things that are said there are applicable to, say, theology as well. Actually, as I wrote already in the past, I believe that, as Aquinas said, manifestum est, secundum omnem modum, [sacram doctrinam] digniorem esse aliis [scientiis]; because of this, I think that the following statement, taken from the presentation referenced above, should be maximally true for theology:

[Students] must develop a hunger and thirst for more knowledge, straight from their heart. Their eyes must be watchful and a mirror of their soul. Their mouths must speak of the subject in words of benefit, interest and beauty, and finally, their mimics, their gestures and the whole rest of their bodies must reflect that they feel challenged and yet at ease with the subject.

While pondering about Tillich's ideas of Jesus as "an image", I stumbled across Re-visioning Jesus: The Quest to Universalize Christ, by Dirk Dunbar (Quodlibet, July 2003).

Dunbar sketches five ways of interpreting Jesus: the "orthodox" version (which he calls the "mythologized version"), a "reconstructed Gnostic version", one that is "demythologized", one that is "remythologized", and one based "on the findings of the Jesus Seminar". The article provides a reasonably clear summary of the interpretations of the person of Jesus Christ that are seen the most.

I shall only say here that the very term "universalize Christ" sounds to me like a patent attempt to build yet another myth. Indeed, the very concept of myth is linked to an horizon that is beyond historicity, striving to embrace broader, or more universal, truths. While this seems like an obvious conclusion, I think it is the source of the major theoretical flaw of any pretense to deconstruct Christ's figure into mythical vs. non-mythical components (or, historical- vs. faith-related) in the quest to universalize its significance. (á la Tillich, for example.) Dunbar himself admits this when he says, "I realize that the notion of a global, cosmic, and universal Christ—to which I subscribe—is a modern and contemporary invention." (italics mine.)

I then read N.T. Wright's The Historical Jesus and Christian Theology. One of the points that charachterized many of the scholarly debates on the historical Jesus is the idea that Jesus must be freed of his apocalyptical overtones (in reaction to Schweitzer's "consistent eschatology", for example; cf. J.D. Crossan and the Jesus Seminar). Wright answers to this by noting that apocalypticism should really be regarded, given Jesus' context, as the "symbolic and richly-charged language of protest, affirming that God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven—not in some imagined heavenly realm to be created after the present world has been destroyed." I think this is an excellent point, and links apocalypticism well with Jewish wisdom and prophecy. I should explore the liaison Jesus/Jewish prophecy more in detail. (the main bibliographic reference in Wright's article is Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, Fortress Press, 1985.) The key concept is the difference between an eschatological prophet and a visionary teacher. Out of the strict academic context, this dualism provides an interesting way to verify how we regard and live our own faith, whether more according to the former, or to the latter; and we should then consider the comparison also with our understanding of faith as a social reform movement.

Wright himself proposes (more fully in his New Testament and People of God - another book to read) a general "worldview model", here applied to Jesus, based on the following points:

• Praxis: Jesus understood himself as a prophet, was seen by others as acting as a prophet, was associated with a prophetic guild. This praxis is manifested especially in the parables. (many times seen as an allegedly privileged way of getting a glimpse into the "original" Jesus.)
• Story: to what extent and in which way Jesus' stories are alternative to similar contemporary kingdom stories? And what are their perhaps distinctive points? (Wright suggests to consider Jesus' anti-nationalism linked to his political involvement.)
• Symbol: think about the use that Jesus made of common Jewish symbols and how he proposed an alternative set. Wright notes how Jesus gives a different twist to common symbols like Family (who is my mother, and who are my brothers?), Land (abandon riches, i.e. at the time mostly land; this can be easily linked to family), Torah (cf. the debates over Sabbath and food, and in general against artificial rigorism), Temple (to be destroyed and rebuilt; this can be easily linked to the Torah). A very interesting point is that all this needs to be seen within the context of Judaism, not opposed to it. ("an inner-Jewish debate") An easy application to our own life is in checking how much inner-debate, prompted by Jesus' words, deeds and history, there is, if any, within our communities. And another thing that I believe is important is, rather than thinking about an abstract de-mythologized and de-symbolized Jesus, to consider how fundamental it is that symbols (and awareness thereof) take part in our life. As they did in Jesus' life and time.
• Question: the "five major worldview questions", namely Who are we?, Where are we?, What time is it?, What is wrong?, and What is the solution? ("I am"), are answered by the preceding points of praxis, story, and symbol. How are these five questions present in our life? (are they, actually)

This "I am" which summarizes the answers to all the questions above, is incarnated, so to speak, in Jesus' message of YHWH returning to Zion through him; he would be the Temple to be destroyed, he would be the one enacting the final Exodus: "I am". According to Wright, this is the key to Christology and to the gospels. If this is right, it seems to me, there is simply no place for a universalistic mythological interpretation on the one hand; nor for an arid study of the Jesus of history, on the other. The two points, universal myth (or, perhaps better, conveyance of a salvation path) and earthly life seem inextricably interwoven in the essentia of Jesus.

Wright concludes with some remarks on the relation between history and theology. His considerations on the resurrection being real since it is the only event that could have ever made sense of the death of the messiah-Jesus, and that could justify, from the point of view of an historian, the continuing existence of his movement, are probably simplifying the issue a bit. For example: the thesis that the reality of the resurrection is somewhat proved to an historian because of the continuing existence of Christianity seems similar to me to the thesis that the existence of God is proved to an historian because of the continuing existence of the humanly insignificant Israel. But they are interesting nonetheless. Indeed, I would be keen at this point of reading more about the fate of the leaders of messianic movements that were close in time to Jesus - and about the fate of the movements themselves, of course.

But the other point of Wright's that rings a loud bell to me is his statement that "the story of Jesus does not generate a set of theological prepositions [... but] a set of tasks." The "solution", the "I am", is interpreted as the final answer, the victory over what is wrong, but at the same time the actual "implementation" (or "incarnation") of this victory in everybody's life is left to renewed and personal praxis, stories, symbols, and questions/answers: "For Jesus’s followers, finding out who Jesus was in his historical context meant and means discovering their own task within their own contents."

It seems to me that this is The Quest, a quest that is sourced and constantly fuelled by the essence of Jesus the Christ, but an existential, rather than a theoretical, or scholarly and merely intellectual one.

I am thinking about Hunsinger's comment that, for Tillich,

[i]f resurrection meant no more than spiritual regeneration (first in time, then in eternity), and this experience was all that made Jesus savingly significant (along with the hope for immortality), then regeneration was logically possible first without reference to his bodily resurrection and finally without reference to him. (Christ's resurrection in recent theology, p. 7)

Reading The New Being by Tillich, and specifically chapter 2, it strikes me how this sermon (one should not forget that this is a sermon, of course) makes so little explicit reference to the meaning of the resurrection of Christ in the context of the definition of the New Being. Actually, all is said of resurrection here is that it is "the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow." This New Being is the effect of a New Creation, which "is manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ". (italics mine.) It seems to me then that the dispensability of Jesus mentioned by Hunsinger is paired here with the dispensability of religion, which is the focus of the entire sermon. The sense I get is of an existentalist, humanistic, quasi-illuminist ("The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality") conception of religion.

Notes on Is the New Quest Docetic? by Paul J. Achtermeier, Theology Today, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1962.

When the author discusses the failure of the "first quest" for the historical Jesus, he points out that scholars realized that it was not possible to go beyond the kerigma. ("It became axiomatic in New Testament circles that the task of synoptic research exhausted itself in reproducing the kerygma.")

Achtermeier then says that "This meant, in turn, that the significance of the Gospels was to be sought in the reports themselves, not in the events that lie behind the reports."

This is a part that I find troublesome to understand. I don't clearly see the logic behind this conclusion. What type of narrative flow or what literary devices do we expect before we can term a report an historical report? What parallel report can we show, in a first century Judaic framework, that passes our criteria of "historical report"? Perhaps the reports of the Gospels, as we have them, were indeed considered historical enough by their authors to portray the events in a meaningful way (for them, at least; and they do report both Jesus' actions and sayings). What ground do we have to say that the events were not significant because the Gospels do not fulfill our expectation of what is an historical report?

But let's move forward. Bultmann maintained that the true kerygma was hidden behind a mythical superstructure, which was only meaningful to men living in the first century. Therefore, demythologizing the kerygma became the order of the day. Now, this presumes that the "existential truths" of the Gospels can be expressed without recurring to "myths". Here we touch, it seems to me, a couple of interrelated problems:

• the assumption that the Gospel can refer to these "existential truths" regardless of linkage to historical conditions (and calling these "myths" seems generic enough); this means assuming that the message of the Gospel can be expressed in abstract, philosophical ways without losing its specificity;
• the assumption that we have clear ideas and ways on how to convey ideas pertaining to communicating trasncendental ideas in a meaningful way. This reminds me of the old debate of how one can meaningfully speak of God, without resorting to metaphores only, on the one hand, or to creatural, earthly images only, on the other.
  

This is different from one of the main issues mentioned in the article, namely that one of the perceived flaws of the Bultmannian process was that it would have completely lost any sense, had we discovered that there was nothing beyond the myth, i.e. had we discovered that an a-mythical kerigma did not exist at all; and that this perceived flaw was what gave rise to the second quest for the historical Jesus.

When the article says that in the New Testament the Christian faith understood itself in terms of its historical roots, it seems to state an obvious fact. But the important point, I think, is not so much the discovery of how historic Jesus was, but rather the more general question, once the historicity of the man/God Jesus is assumed, of how the Christian faith, in the first century, now, and in the future, should understand the historic event of the incarnation. In this regard, the quest for Jesus' self-understanding is tangential. It is very important, of course, but isn't it secondary to the investigation of why, as Chalcedon has it, the full God was manifested as a full man? (assuming Chalcedon is a legitimate theological understanding of the figure of Jesus - at least we can say it is the product of some 4 centuries of reflections of an actively searching community.) And has kairos (that point in history) any meaning in this manifestation?

It is indeed Chalcedon that makes me think that the author is right in saying there is something docetic in the "second quest" for the historical Jesus. On the one hand, "it is generally agreed that in order to make sense the kerygma demands as its presupposition the activity of the earthly, "pre-Easter" Jesus"; but on the other hand, it is as if this earthly Jesus is treated in this second quest as an indifferent substrate, a sort of indifferentiated matter to be informed by the divine Christ. The Kierkegaardian position of history being insignificant for faith, brought to the extreme, has the effect of denying the importance of history in the context of the Christian faith. When one says that "in faith, as contrasted to thinking, content plays no part", we are imagining an abstract faith, substantially different from the faith of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Finding "the enduring significance of Jesus of Nazareth in the preaching about him, the hearing of which opens for the hearer the possibility of authentic existence" seems very similar to Tillich's dispensability of Jesus: dispensability effected through the individual, or through a Church somewhat indipendent of the historic Jesus. I find very right then the conclusion of the article:

[T]he future of a theologically and historically legitimate quest of the historical Jesus depends upon the success with which the view of the Church inherent in the total New Testament kerygma can be delineated.

Barbaric and antihuman. No other words.

Referring to my previous post, this is an example of a combination of inner-historical and suprahistorical evil. Non praevalebunt. (Matt. 16:18)

Let's pray for the victims, their families, and humanity.

Notes on Ultimate Concern - Tillich in Dialogue by D. Mackenzie Brown: Fifth Dialogue, on "Christianity and the Dialogue with Judaism and Islam." (actually almost nothing is said about Islam, exception made for Tillich's comment that Islam seems to him rather orthogonal to the idea of progress and transformation.)

Tillich uses Justin's idea of the logos spermatikos to suggest the universality of the Christian faith, and a possible approach in a dialogue with Judaism, which would have been easier had we retained this "Hellenistic concept" typical of the early church.

This reminds me of Prices' article on Hellenization and Logos Doctrine in Justin Martyr, which I mentioned a while ago. Looking at both Price and Tillich, it seems then that perhaps the "hellenistic concept" of Logos adopted by Justin was really a Judaic concept born within Hellenistic Judaism, which accounts on the one hand for Justin's failure to deal in details with the Incarnation or the doctrine of grace (Price); and which on the other hand allowed a relatively smooth cultural migration from Judaism, and also some early forms of "dialogue" (Tillich). Cf. here Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, e.g. chap. XII on Jews violating the eternal law.

At the same time, I don't think one can so easily identify Justin's logos doctrine with Tillich's symbolic ideas (Tillich stresses the fact that the universal term "Anointed One" would be more correct than the historically charachterized "Christ"). For example, Justin seems to attest very clearly to the real resurrection of Jesus ("... you will perceive that the Lord is called the Christ by the Holy Spirit of prophecy; and that the Lord, the Father of all, has brought Him again from the earth", Dialogue, XXXII). And for Justin the term "Anointed One" does take significance only in the person of Jesus: for example, in chap. XXXV, he speaks of men "confessing themselves to be Christians, and admitting the crucified Jesus to be both Lord and Christ [...]". Or in chap. XXXIX, Trypho says, "Now, then, render us the proof that this man who you say was crucified and ascended into heaven is the Christ of God". The doctrine of the logos spermatikos, it seems to me, is applied by Justin in the Dialogue simply to prove that what Judaism was looking at in the Mosaic institutions was really the hidden manifestation of the one Christ who was born as a man. The dialogue with the Law, one could say, happens for Justin only when it is centered in the recognition that the man Jesus is Christ. Chapter XLVII is illuminating here: in it, Justin affirms that, as long as people "have confessed and known this man to be Christ", it is perfectly acceptable (even if "through weak-mindedness") to keep on following the institutions given by Moses (circumcision, Sabbath, etc) -- as long as this is not required of other Christians as well.

Actually, Justin is adamant in saying that he cannot prove that "Christ existed as God before the ages", or that he "existed formerly as Son of the Maker of all things" (chap. XLVIII). The only thing he does is to prove that "this man is the Christ of God", and that the OT was in prophecies and in figures pointing to the Christ, born of the virgin Mary. For example, he says that "Christ being Lord, and God the Son of God, and appearing formerly in power as Man, and Angel, and in the glory of fire as at the bush, so also was manifested at the judgment executed on Sodom." (chap. CXXVIII)

Back to Tillich, he said,

This Logos spermaticos appeared as an empirical, historical person in the Christ, but revelation and salvation were always operating in history even before the empirical embodiment of the Logos in Jesus. And even this is not the end. After the historical event, the power of the Logos continued and continues in terms of new insights and new revelatory experiences Under the guidance of the Spirit.

This interpretation of the "power of the Logos" is perhaps a legitimate symbolic one, but looking e.g. at Justin (i.e. just the early church that Tillich says it was "much more universal than it proved in later centuries") it does not seem to be possible to disentangle the historical event from salvation, which is apparently what matters to Justin the most: "If, then, you have any concern for yourself, and if you are eagerly looking for salvation, and if you believe in God, you may--since you are not indifferent to the matter -- become acquainted with the Christ of God, and, after being initiated, live a happy life." (chap. VIII) In other words, what Tillich terms the "Logos idea" is here quite different from a universalist, eternal, purely symbolic, and platonic-like concept.

Tillich's conclusion that "[e]very belief in an inner-historical fulfillment leads to metaphysical disappointment — not only psychological disappointment, but a much more fundament disappointment, namely, disillusionment with any belief in something finite which was expected to become something infinite" seems to be very appropriate in Tillich's immediate context (the book where this dialogue is taken from was written in 1965, and he explicitly qualifies himself as a "religious socialist"), and it also captures a valid general point, but it is not yet clear to me to what extent it is applicable to the understanding of the figure of Christ. In particular, early church history, consider e.g. A Diognetus, or the Justin I've discussed above, seems to be rather consistent throughout its development in combining inner-historical with suprahistorical fulfillment. (Chalcedon perhaps being one of the most important synthesis of this difficult combination.)

Notes from G. Hunsinger, The daybreak of the new creation: Christ's resurrection in recent theology, SJT 57(2): 163-181 (2004).

Christ's resurrection is intended in three main ways:

• spiritual -> "no longer a bodily event that happened to Jesus but a spiritual event that happened to the disciples." The main question is one of meaning. (Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Tillich) Christ's resurrection is intended above all as a matter of interiority.
• historical -> the main question is one of knowledge.
• integrate divine transcendence into history (Pannenberg)
• transcendence on the margins (Wright)
• eschatological -> the main question is one of uniqueness. Jesus really was raised bodily from the dead, but history is not adequate for describing the nature of this event. (Moltmann, Frei, Barth)

On the Bultmannian approach: the focus is on 4 points, namely:

• the significance of the resurrection for the disciples
• its significance for Jesus
• its impossibility as a historical event
• its mediation to the present by the Word.

Christ's resurrection is to be regarded as "the rise of faith" in the disciples (Bultmann). Again Bultmann: "the resurrection simply cannot be a visible fact in the realm of human history." (cf. Kerygma and Myth.) "Jesus is risen in the kerygma."

Jesus here is more the source than the object of faith.

Tillich stretches this further, positing the dispensability of Jesus himself. In the words of Alister McGrath, for Tillich "Jesus of Nazareth symbolizes a universal human possibility, which can be achieved without specific reference to Jesus." Husinger says, "[Jesus] was therefore materially decisive, but not logically indispensable."

For Tillich, the man Jesus was a sort of an actor, representing the New Being; this New Being has appeared in one personal life, that of Jesus of Nazareth. Tillich wrote, "The New Being is not dependent on the special symbols in which it is expressed. It has the power to be free from every form in which it appears." Hence, we have an interpretation of Jesus' resurrection as supremely symbolic: "[Jesus] is present wherever the New Being is present [...] But this present does not have the character of a revived (and transmuted) body [...] it has the character of a spiritual presence."

And here I stop for now. I need to go and read something more about this.

I just read Between the Scylla and Charybdis of Faith and Fact: A Theological Reflection on the Relation of Christian Faith to Gospel History, by Edward Krasevac, O.P. (Logos 5:4, Fall 2002, 109-123).

The usefulness of the article is for me at this stage above all in the clarity of the questions that are asked. (a real discussion is obviously left to other, more complete works.) There is a general introduction briefly discussing Lessing's position and his famous broad, ugly ditch, which is actually three ditches:

• the epistemological, or temporal, ditch. No certainty can be attained about facts that happened such a long time ago.
• the metaphysical ditch. How could a transcendent God intervene in mundane historical events?
• the existential ditch. What relevance do facts that happened (if they happened) two thousand years ago have for me today? What is their meaning to me?

The really fundamental question, Krasevac maintains, is the one dealing with the metaphysical issue:

In what sense can God be said to "act in history"? and, Does God choose to be revealed in the ordinary events of human life, or
rather in the extraordinary ones?

How do we (can we) classify the events described in the gospels? Are some events to be treated differently than others?

The distinction between a Bultmannian position (God did not and does not act in history according to the ways of secular history: one should rather look for existential meanings generated by mythological descriptions) on the one hand, and a fundamentalist positon (literal historicism of the Bible) on the other, is well explained (albeit briefly).

I found it interesting to read of caution in the interpretation of events that popular opinion sees instead in a rather fixed, or dogmatic, way. A case in point is the Catholic view of the virginitas in partu. One of the footnotes of the article mentions an instruction of the Holy Office, dated 1960, cautioning against discussing the issue on the biological, rather than the theological, value. To be honest I am not sure I find the same caution in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cf. art. 496ff). In particular, art. 496 is quite explicit:

From the first formulations of her faith, the Church has confessed that Jesus was conceived solely by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, affirming also the corporeal aspect of this event.

On the other hand, art. 498 seems to offer some space for interpretation:

The meaning of this event is accessible only to faith, which understands in it the "connection of these mysteries with one another" in the totality of Christ's mysteries, from his Incarnation to his Passover.

And Krasevac's note that

The ground of Jesus’ identity as divine Son of God is the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in the person of the Word, not a certain mode of conception. Jesus was not the product of some kind of sexual union between the Father and Mary, which union made Jesus to be the Father’s son.

supported by this quote of the then Cardinal Ratzinger

According to the faith of the Church the Sonship of Jesus does not rest on the fact that Jesus had no human father: the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage. For the Sonship of which faith speaks is not a biological but an ontological fact, an event not in time but in God’s eternity.

(in Introduction to Christianity, 1969) seems appropriate to me to point out that one needs to distinguish between acts (events) that are essential to the faith, and acts (events) that are not. The study of the pervasiveness of theologumena in the New Testament seems an interesting field for me to explore. Krasevac suggests Raymond Brown's The Birth of the Messiah and Meier's A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus: Roots of the Problem and the
Person.

Back to the fundamental question of the way God chose to act in history (in ordinary vs. extraordinary events), Krasevac offers three examples for reflection:

• How do we view the life of the Holy Family?
• How much did Christ know?
• What do we think of Crossan's thesis that "the body of Jesus after the crucifixion shared the same fate as the bodies of the vast majority of others who were crucified by the Romans: it was not allowed to be buried, but rather was left on the cross to be eaten by dogs"?

The way we (attempt to) answer to these questions gives us a direction in identifying theologumena vs. purely historical events. Excellent thinking material for me.

This is my first attempt at phrasing. My experience so far has been that this is a useful device, for several reasons:

• it forces you to work on the Greek text. This has the benefit of helping to consolidate points of grammar, meaning of words, etc.
• it might help to see literary devices, theological points, and the overall context (to some extent, at least).
• it is a slow process, dynamic, and not necessarily converging all the time. This reflects, it seems to me, the attitude one should have toward reading God's word. Haste is not helpful, and it's good to recognize that this is and should be hard work, like in all meaningful relationships.
• it forms a basis for further meditation on the text.
• it is personal. (where personal hopefully does not mean arbitrary.)

I am (more or less) following the phrasing method outlined in Mounce's A Graded Reader of Biblical Greek. Here, I am experimenting with colors and styles to see if they help me in some way. For example, in the passage below I put terms in direct opposition in italics, or I used the background color to group together verses sharing something in common (for example, 1:6.8.10 all have a negative connotation). Suggestions from readers of this blog are welcome, of course.

On the technical side, the use of an HTML editor facilitates the effort enormously. As I blogged a few months ago, I use the open source editor NVU (available for Linux, Mac, and Windows), which by the way has very recently reached the important milestone of version 1.0.

Note to Bloglines users: it turns out that Bloglines does not always preserve indentation in the table below (I don't know about other blog readers/aggregators), so the table is best looked directly on the website.