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Ask NT Wright Anything
S2E15 NT Wright on the Resurrection: History, Theology & Why It Still Matters with Tom Wright and Mike Bird
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- [00:00]
N.T. Wright
Ask nt Write Anything is sponsored by Logos. Start going deeper in the Bible with a free trial at logos.com NT@New Balance.
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Tom Wright
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- [00:39]
Mike Bird
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Aletheus Anesthesia
Well, hello and welcome to a special Easter episode of Ask nt Write Anything. Christos Ernesti, I say to you, Tom.
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Tom Wright
Christos Ernesti to you, Aletheus Anesthesia.
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Aletheus Anesthesia
This is where I'm going to show off, because every Easter, I like to recite the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, who. Who said Christos esd eknachron thanaton thanatopatissas ktoisintos minas in zoin carusamenos. I could have been a deacon in the Greek Orthodox Church if I can sing Greek like that. But that's. That's Greek for Christ has risen, trampling down death by death and giving life to those in the grave. For me, that's what I think about in Easter. Tom. Tom, what do you think about for Easter? Is it. I know Easter bunnies, nice eggs.
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Tom Wright
Bunnies and eggs aren't really where it's at for me. I think particularly of the privilege I've had of being part of one or two communities where they do the whole thing in the dark. And they start off in a church with only one candle for somebody to read bits of the Old Testament by and then to move outside where there's a bonfire and. And the Easter fire is lit. And then you light the paschal candle from that and you process into the church or the cathedral or whatever it is, with the deacon singing Christ is Risen and so on, and actually sings the Light of Christ and you respond thanks be to God, and then the great proclamation of the gospel. Those moments are very special. And when I've done baptisms and confirmations on Easter morning, I've always had the sense that the people who are baptized and confirmed at a service like that will never forget it. And that's a wonderful thing to be able to look back and think about the new fire and the new light and the dawn breaking on a new life. So all of that is clustered around my Easter memories, though. I've celebrated Easter in many different places and in many different ways. But those of the stand up, it.
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Aletheus Anesthesia
Sounds a whole lot more spiritual and Christian than just gorging yourself on chocolate bunnies. And as happens in many places around the world, I think reading the Gospels by candlelight, saying alleluia at dawn. Yeah, I think I'd rather do that myself. But when it comes to Easter, Tom, there's many historical and theological questions. And one of the historical questions that just won't go away is the fact that dead people don't come back to life. And you know, there's always been a bit of skepticism about the resurrection of Jesus, I think, you know, going back into the first century, because as you well know, Tom, people in the ancient world knew that generally speaking, dead people did not come back from life. This is not something we discovered, you know, in light of modern medicine or we enter the, the enlightenment or the phase of modernity, dead people tend to stay dead. And I always go back to that famous quote, it may be apocryphal, it may be a rumor, where the German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann supposedly said in an interview that if Christ's bones were discovered tomorrow, that Christianity would be unchanged because the resurrection is not a historical event. It's all about Jesus who rose into the kerygma. He rose in our hearts to become the proclamation of God's life, reaching us in our own existence. And the decision of faith we got to make in the here and now, I mean, there's still a little bit bit of that kind of belief going on. Tom, do we still need history when we talk about the resurrection, or do we, do we put it in a category of being beyond history or it's super historical? Do we still have to wrestle with that nutty old chestnut of history when it comes to the resurrection?
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Tom Wright
Yeah, we really do. Because the way that the Gospels are written, it's clear that the people who wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and indeed the beginning of Acts as well, and then Paul writing about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians and Romans, they all really did believe quite straightforwardly from one point of view, that Jesus of Nazareth, having been thoroughly dead, was then bodily alive again, even though the body into which he rose seems Somehow to have been changed. It's still very much what we would call physical, but it seems to have different properties. And I'll come back to that because really important, but. So I think our problem partly today is that so many people in Western Christianity have been taught in churches that resurrection as a statement of the final Christian hope is not about our bodies being raised, but about our spirits or our souls going to heaven. And people have construed the word resurrection in the creed. I believe in the resurrection of the body. They've construed that as meaning I believe that there is an afterlife, that we will go to heaven. There was an article in one of our newspapers in Britain just a few days ago by an American journalist whose father had died at a great age in 104 or something like that. And he talked about him being a devout man who believed in the afterlife and all of that sort of thing. And throughout the whole article, though, he kept coming back to that theme. He never once mentioned resurrection. And I was at a funeral the other day of a wise and good Christian pastor who had taught faithfully the Bible and the faith throughout his working life. And he was a lovely man. And at that funeral, the word resurrection never occurred. And I came away thinking, that is such a shame, because this was a church that probably, in theory believes in it, but it's all about going to be with Jesus, or it's all about the heavenly hope, or it's all about gone home at last. And so, because we've mistreated the word resurrection when it comes to our own future hope, we then have been able to play it back and say, well, maybe after Jesus died, his followers had a sense that his spirit was still with them or his cause still continued, or something like that. And I want to say very clearly, this just doesn't work historically. A point that struck me, oh, 25, 30 years ago, and really that year enabled me to preach the Easter message much more excitedly, I think, than I had the previous few years, was the realization that in roughly 100 or 200 years, either side of the time of Jesus, there were lots of Jewish messianic movements or prophetic movements. There were sometimes whole families involved, whole little mini dynasties that were involved. And routinely, those movements ended with the violent death of the founder. And we know exactly from Josephus, the Jewish historian, we know what happened next. If the person that you followed, who you thought was the great prophet, or the coming Messiah, if that person got killed, you had a choice either give up the movement, supposing you've escaped with your skin or find yourself a new Messiah, a new leader, which in some cases they did from the same family. There is that dynasty running from Judas the Galilean right through to the rebels who finally died on Masada in the early 70s after the fall of Jerusalem. Now the fascinating thing is here that after Jesus death, his own brother James became the great leader of the church in Jerusalem. He was a man of prayer, he was respected by the Judean authorities, he was a great teacher, he was the kind of anchorman in the very center of Christianity. While Peter and Paul and all the others went off doing their own thing in different directions. Nobody ever said that James was the Messiah. They referred to him. Josephus refers to him as the brother of the so called Messiah. I don't think Josephus believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, but he was known as the so called Messiah. And James is the brother of the Messiah. He's not the Messiah himself. The only explanation for that must be if everyone in the early church knew perfectly well that Jesus himself was the Messiah because he'd been raised from the dead. Historically, it's fascinating because we can see how the early church sees upon certain biblical texts which hadn't really been expounded this way before, so far as we know, particularly in 2 Samuel 7, when God says to David, I will raise up your seed after you. Now the word for I will raise up there in the Septuagint version is kai anastesso tospermosu. I will resurrect your seed. Nobody before that time had said, oh well, the Messiah is obviously going to be resurrected, because nobody had imagined that the Messiah would be crucified or any such thing. But the early church, in the light of Jesus resurrection, said, oh my goodness. According to scripture, this validates the claim, which we had assumed was there anyway, that he is really the Messiah. So that context tells us that actually when they said resurrection, they meant resurrection. I mean, if you imagine after, say, one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance in the late 60s, who is then taken off to Rome to be dragged along by Titus and Vespasian in the great triumph at Rome, he is then put to death in almost a kind of a ritual execution. And supposing a day or two later, one of his friends or followers had said to one of the others, do you know, I think that Simon or whoever it was, I think he's been raised from the dead. And they would say, what on earth do you mean? We saw him being executed and fate said, oh no, I think his cause continues, or I feel his presence with me, or any of those other things that people in our day have said, maybe that's what happened about Jesus. Then their friends would have said, well, if you think his cause continues, we better find a new leader. If you think that his presence is somehow with you, well, that sounds vaguely like some of the things we have in the Psalms. Why don't you pray some Psalms? But please don't say he's been raised from the dead, because he obviously hasn't been. And so for the early church, that sense was so strong, Jesus himself was bodily raised from the dead. Now, there are lots and lots of historical questions about that. I've addressed them in many different places. But that for me is at the heart of it. When we're talking historically, you have to imagine yourself in that world, in that culture. And then the word resurrection means not John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave while his soul goes marching on. Nothing in the New Testament about souls going marching on. Rather, it's the body is given a new life. And not that it's not a resuscitation. It's not like the raising of Lazarus where he comes back into this same life and poor chap has to die again. And indeed people are plotting at the end of John chapter 11 to do precisely that, to kill him. But rather Jesus seems to have gone, so to speak, through death and out the other side into a new kind of physicality for which there was no precedent and of which as yet, there remains no subsequent example. Though the whole New Testament says all the early Christians for the first 200 years of Christianity say very emphatically that is what God is going to do by his spirit for all of us who belong to the Messiah, one day we will be raised as he was raised. And that's my. I'm going on too long. But that's my final point about history, that when we look at the history of different people's views of what happens after death, it is very striking that all the early Christians right through to the end of the second century, when you then get the rise of a movement called Gnosticism, which uses the word resurrection to mean a spiritual disembodied survival, which is a distortion of the original meaning, all the early Christians right through they take the same view that we are going to be raised from the dead bodily. Which granted the wide diversity of views of afterlife possibilities in the pagan world and in the Judean world, it is a remarkable fact historically that the early Christians stick with this one, the reason they give is, well, because that's what happened to Jesus. Now, I would say as a tailpiece. This isn't the kind of knockdown argument where if you don't accept it, you're obviously stupid or malevolent or something. It is simply a forcing back of the question against the skeptic to say, well, how do you explain this particular set of phenomena? When I wrote my big book on the resurrection, I gave it to my erstwhile philosophy tutor, who is a lifelong atheist and skeptic, and he read it and he said, you've made a great case for believing in Jesus Resurrection. He said, I haven't got an answer for it. I simply choose to believe that there must be some other explanation for the rise of Christianity, even though I can't think at the moment what that might be. That's an honest position. He's not a dishonest man. He's a very clear thinker. But he simply chose to believe that because he realized that. The question then is, I might have to recognize that maybe there is a creator God who, having made the world, is going to remake it, and that that's really where we move from history towards theology. But we'll come back to that.
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Aletheus Anesthesia
Yeah. I always thought that the best argument for the resurrection was the fact that the empty tomb alone would not have generated resurrection belief. They could have simply said that his body was taken up to heaven, or, you know, something else happened to it. Because there's a. There's a writing called the Testament of Job where a building falls in and Job's children die in it and they can't find the bodies, and nobody says, oh, well, they must have been resurrected. Similarly, the resurrection appearances alone may have been interpreted as visions of a ghost or an apparition or. Or a case of mistaken identity or encountering a heavenly doppelganger. They could use a whole bunch of different language. It's the empty tomb plus the resurrection appearances together, which not merely made resurrection possible, it made it necessary. And it made it necessary despite the fact it seemed odd, weird and strange to say that one person had been raised up in the middle of history when the Jewish tradition, its eschatological tradition, or those who shared in it, were expecting all of Israel, all the righteous, to be raised at the end of history. It was a kind of weird mishmash of different options for the future, the vindication of God's people, who the Messiah is. It was not the way most people thought it was going to be, either about the Messiah the hope of Israel and, and how it had encroached upon the present. So it's the sheer oddness and weirdness of, of, of the story itself that for my mind makes actually the most sense of the details we're given in the Gospels, in Paul's letters and in the very birth of Christianity. That's what I found. I've convincing when I've read your books on this topic, Tom.
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Tom Wright
Good, glad. And, and of course I agree with, with what you've said. We're, we're very much converging there. And this confluence of different arguments comes together in a way which nobody, and the point that you just made, nobody was expecting this. If you'd said to people, what is the resurrection? We have that scene in Mark 9 where Jesus says after the transfiguration, don't tell anyone the vision until the Son of Man be raised from the dead. And they say, what is this resurrection of the dead all about? Because Jesus is implying that he is going to be raised from the dead and they will still be around in the present life to talk about it. And that's simply not the way in which the great majority of the texts were seeing resurrection, as you say, as the large scale, last minute hope of all God's people, not for one person in the middle of history. There's a quote I love from Ed Sanders, who is a colleague of mine now sadly gone to his rest. But Ed was, I think, fairly skeptical in much of his own personal belief. But when Ed was talking about the resurrection narratives in the Gospels, he says in one of his books on Jesus, he says that the way they tell these stories sounds as though they're desperately trying to tell a story which they firmly believe, but know that they don't have good language for. And I think that's a really shrewd point, that something had happened that was so unexpected that they didn't have linguistic resources to be able to say, oh, it was precisely this, or oh, it was precisely that. And that itself tells you the story. They're not simply having a new religious experience and then using old language to talk about it. They're something dramatically new, something, dare I say apocalyptic, has happened and is happening.
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Aletheus Anesthesia
If I remember correctly, Sanders uses the phrase that the disciples experienced excited bewilderment about the events that had taken place. And that's, that's probably a good way to describe what it was. An exciting bewilderment is the best way to explain what they saw and what happened to them at the first Easter.
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Tom Wright
Yep, great.
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Aletheus Anesthesia
Well, we can discuss historical questions about the resurrection all day. And I think it's true in every age you've got to wrestle with questions of history. The skeptics do need to have their right of reply. They've got to be taken seriously. But it's not just the resurrection as a fact. It's the resurrection of something that has continuing meaning. And it's not just that God's cause lives on or that there is an afterlife. There has to be more to it than that. And the more to it is what we're going to discuss right after the break. This episode is brought to you by Logos. I have been using Logos for years. Whether I'm preparing a lecture for class, working on my latest book, or doing some sermon preparation, I never do it without Logos because it gives me an instant digital research assistant right in my very hand. Whether I want to check out various Bible translations, the Dead Sea Scrolls and English or Hebrew, or look at various Christian writings like the Apocrypha, or if I simply want a platform to read theological books and commentaries, Logos is the number one place to do it. It is the necessary digital tool for doing Bible study and sermon preparation today. I don't know how you can do this without Logos, so make sure you go check out their new offering where you've got plans starting at 9.99 per month. So visit logos.comnt to get started for free with an exclusive extended free trial. That's logos.com NT start your adventure in the world of digital Bible resources today.
- [21:41]
N.T. Wright
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Mike Bird
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Aletheus Anesthesia
Welcome back to the Easter episode of Ask Anti. Right. Anything. We've just finished talking about the resurrection as history. Now I guess we need to talk about the resurrection and theology or the resurrection and its many meanings and implications. Now, I used to think that the main purpose of resurrection was to prove there is a kind of life after death. So for me, the tradition I belong to Easter is really about Good Friday. That's where we get the atonement. That's where we get, you know, in my place. Condemned he stood, as the old hymn says. And resurrection was just the sort of icing on the cake. But then I did my honest thesis on Romans 4:25, a little verse nested at the end of Romans where Paul says that Jesus was handed over for our sins and raised for our justification. And that got me thinking, how can the resurrection be the basis for our justification? I thought, we're justified by his blood, we're justified at the cross. How does the resurrection possibly figure in? And well, Tom, that sent me down a very deep rabbit hole exploring how the resurrection is not just the after dinner mints for Easter Friday. It is very much the important part of the Christian life. The Christian message and even our ability to be forgiven, to be right with God, depends on, on the resurrection of Christ. We cannot be saved, redeemed or justified if Christ is still in the tomb. Tom, what does the resurrection then have to do with theology, broadly conceived?
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Tom Wright
Wow, huge question and I'm absolutely with you on what you just said. Of course, when we think about resurrection and theology, the first thing that comes to my mind, which is perhaps not the first thing that jumps into everybody's mind, is about God as creator. And the fact that the world God has made, the world of space, time and matter, is good. The resurrection is, as it were, the underlining and the reaffirmation of Genesis 1 and 2. God saw all that he had made and it was very good. And then, okay, all sorts of things go horribly wrong. There are thorns and thistles, there are earthquakes, there are terrible things happen and all sorts of wickedness and violence and so on. But does that mean, oh well, the world God made was really a pretty shabby old place. And actually if there is a God, he's going to rescue us from this world or he's going to throw this world into the trash can and do something quite different instead. Many, many Christians have believed something like that, and particularly when faced with the so called secularist movements of the 17th, 18th, 19th century, which I see as part of the retrieval of the ancient philosophy of epicureanism, the idea that if there is a God or gods, they're a long way away, and our world just makes itself and rumbles on under its own steam. That whole secularizing movement which has affected so much Western thought and life, the church, in order to answer it, has regularly gone for Plato, the Greek philosopher, from 500 years or so before the time of Jesus, for whom the world was not exactly a horrible or wicked place, it was just secondary and shabby, and one day, thank goodness, we would escape it. And for Plato, the idea was that the soul had to be trained to go to a different world, namely heaven, where it really belonged. And through the 19th century and early 20th century, many, many Western Christians faced with the rise of secularism, have said, no, no, no, you're concentrating on this world. We're concentrating on a future world. And so that's where we're going to go. And the result is there's been either a denial or certainly a downplaying of the goodness of creation. And the first thing that resurrection says to me is that God the Creator, is reaffirming the goodness of creation in the very person of his Son, Jesus of Nazareth. That the. The human body of Jesus being raised from the dead, is the beginning, the seed, the starting principle of God's whole new creation. Because, to put it in a nutshell, According to Romans 8, God is going to do for the whole creation in the end what he did for Jesus at Easter. And that vision, which I now see as absolutely central to New Testament Christianity, is sadly lacking for so many Christians in our world today. I've heard sermons and read books which seem to dodge all around that or ignore it or even deny it, but that's absolutely essential. Creation and new creation. Now, along with that, the idea of creation is one thing, but when the world goes wrong, the Old Testament is emphatic that God is the judge who is going to put everything right. There's a problem about the word judge, because in Western culture we hear that it's often very negative that God is going to smash the whole place up because it's so wicked it just deserves to be punished. But if you go back to the psalms, like psalms in the 90s, for instance, the Lord is king, and the Lord is ruling and is going to take his power and reign, and the heavens and the earth and the sea and the sky and the trees in the field and the sheep in the field and the sea, that they're all going to Sing for joy. Because Yahweh is coming to judge the world. He's coming to put it right. This relates to your point about Romans 4:25, that the resurrection of Jesus is the putting right in principle of the human race. And because humans are designed by God to be his vicegerents over the created order, when God puts humans right, he does so in order to put the world right. There's a line on there to Romans 8 again. And so here's the thing. When God promises to put the world right, he promises then to put us right. And that's where justification comes in. God will one day put the whole world right in the present time by grace through faith. He puts us right with him in order that we can then be part of his putting right project for the world. And that, at a stroke, cuts through any suggestion that there might be a radical difference between justification, which you might have imagined was all about how we get to go to heaven, and justice, which is about God putting things right in the present world. No, it's all about God putting the world right. That God puts us right so that we can be part already in the present time of his putting right purposes for the world. So creation and justice. But then emerging gloriously out of this is the wonderful Christian word, love. Because when John says God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, he gave his Son out of that love for the world. God's reaffirmation of the world, we have to remind ourselves, and I think you and I, Mike, have talked about this once or twice before, that in the ancient pagan world, the idea that there might be a God who would love me or you or us or the world, that wasn't on the radar, that the gods played games with the world, they played their own power games and sometimes made favorites of this or that human being, or used them as soldiers to fight their battles or whatever. But the idea that this God, and if there's only one God, then the true God, the only one to whom the word God really applies, actually loves the world. And each individual, you and me and each one of us, that is a totally new thing. And it goes with this affirmation of creation in the resurrection. And so the results of that, as you quoted from 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says, if the Messiah is not raised, your faith is futile and you're still in your sins. Because if death has not been defeated, there is no sign that sin was defeated on the cross. Conversely, if when Jesus died on the cross, he did Indeed, take the weight of sin upon himself and defeat it. Then death itself, which is dependent on humans turning away from God in sin, death itself is defeated. And the sign of that, and the launching of that is the raising of Jesus from the dead. So resurrection means God's victory over death, signaling God's victory over sin. On Good Friday, the two go so closely together. I was amused that you said, like many people do, Easter Friday. I grew up as a good Anglican, whereas it's Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and the word Easter is only applied from the Sunday onwards. But I know that in many parts of the world that language is now pulled apart this way and that. So in the middle of all of this, of course, God as creator, God as judge, God as lover, God as winning the victory over sin and death. The. The theological picture of Jesus in the middle of this is as Messiah and Son of God. And this comes rushing together in Thomas's confession in John chapter 20, where Thomas faced with Jesus and with the wounds in his hands and his side. Thomas says what nobody in John's Gospel has said from the very opening verses of the Gospel to this point. My Lord and my God. That this is the recognition that Jesus is not only embodying, as it were, the whole human race coming through death and out the other side, as in John Chrysostom's famous prayer which you quoted, but Jesus is embodying the return of YHWH to Zion. God coming in human form to take sin upon himself, to win the victory and to launch new creation. Jesus messiahship. Jesus. Incarnation is therefore at the very heart of the theology of resurrection. And then as a result of all of that, and this is another thing that we'll get to in a different session, the Church is then launched as the people empowered by the Spirit to take God's project from its launch pad at Easter to its final conclusion, when the earth is full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And that task of the Church in the power of the Holy Spirit completes the trinitarian meaning of resurrection.
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Aletheus Anesthesia
That's a great way to put it, Tom. And I think you've shown, and I hope our listeners appreciate, that resurrection is not just the epilogue to the cross. It's not simply a afterword about, well, good news after your sins are forgiven, there is also an eternal life awaiting for you. A whole world, the renewal of the world, the renovation of creation, the identity of Jesus, our own revelation of sons and daughters of the living God, all that is bound up together with the resurrection of Christ. I think you've put that really well, Tom, but I think that's all we have time for this week. In our next episode we're going to return to our normal routine of taking in your questions. So please do send us your questions@askantyright.com we would love to hear them. If you've got any questions you want to ask Tom about what you've heard in this episode, we would love to hear it. But we're also happen to any questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. And don't forget as well that if you go through former episodes, there's a lot of great stuff you can find looking in the back catalog. Some real interesting Jewish juicy stuff that may pique your interest will be something that you're into. But anyway, I hope that the light of Christ shines upon you all this Easter and you have a blessed celebration of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. So it's a happy Easter for me.
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Tom Wright
Mike Bird, and a happy Easter for me, Tom Rice.
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Aletheus Anesthesia
Until the next episode of Ask NT Wright Anything. God bless you and take care.