Grammars of Resurrection: A Christian Theology of Presence and Absence
456
Grammars of Resurrection: A Christian Theology of Presence and Absence
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Overview
This comprehensive study situates Jesus’ resurrection at the center of theological reflection and explores its implications for Christian imagination, discourse, and practice. Drawing upon broad array of theological and philosophical resources, it examines issues related to textual analysis, history, memory, embodiment, violence, forgiveness, aesthetics, and spirituality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780824523701 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PublishDrive |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | PUBLISHDRIVE KFT |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Brian D. Robinette is assistant professor in the department of theological studies at Saint Louis University. He teaches and writes in the areas of Christology and theological anthropology. He lives in Webster Groves, Missouri.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CONDITIONS OF THE POSSIBILITY
THE HISTORICAL APORIA
Contemporary studies of Jesus' resurrection typically linger around a single question, as if answering it from a historical point of view exhausts the task of engaging it: "What really happened on Easter morning?" Whether asked by those who would attempt an alternative explanation for Easter belief, and thus the rise of Christianity itself, or by those who would attempt a defense of its historicity and credibility against its "cultured despisers," studies of the resurrection continue to be dominated, as they have since the eighteenth century, by historical criticism and apologetics.
It is not just that Jesus' resurrection raises all sorts of challenging questions about what is metaphysically possible, what constitutes a historical event, what could possibly be the nature of a risen body, and the like. It is also that the complexities and incongruities of the resurrection narratives endlessly supply historians, exegetes, and theologians alike those historical, textual, and conceptual problems that have become standard features of resurrection studies. It is well known, for example, that the diverse thematic emphases and chronological orderings of the events in the gospels resist complete harmonization. Inconsistencies in detail related to time, place, visual phenomena, witnesses, reactions of witness, and exchange of dialogue remain basically insoluble. No doubt the casual reader of the gospels will experience some confusion as to the actual status of the risen Jesus. Sometimes he is portrayed in a most earthly fashion, suddenly appearing in the midst of the disciples, eating with them, breaking bread, expositing scripture, delivering discourses, and presenting his wounds to incredulous fingers. At other times a most unearthly Jesus is flanked by blazing white angels, an elusive and nimble presence capable of walking through walls and closed doors, later ascending into heaven out of view.
In what is widely regarded as one of the oldest strands of resurrection kerygma in the New Testament, Paul "hands on" a tradition"of first importance" to the Corinthians that he himself received: "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3–4). What at first blush seems straightforward quickly becomes complicated, not only because Paul's subsequent list of witnesses differs from other such lists in the New Testament, but the analogies and metaphors he uses to explicate the tradition, especially that of the "spiritual body" (soma pneumatikon), present the reader with what many regard as some of the most complex and semantically turbulent of his writings, so much so that scholars still take wildly diverse stances on his meaning. The centrality of the resurrection in the New Testament is beyond question, as is the broad coherence of its proclamation; but taken as a canonically bound whole, the diversity of its presentation proves difficult, if not impossible, to master. There appears a marked contrast, observes C. F. Evans, between the centrality of the resurrection in the New Testament and the "almost fortuitous character" of the narratives, metaphors, and kerygmatic traditions that support it. "Whatever the Easter event was," Evans speculates, "it must be supposed to be of such a kind as to be responsible for the production of these traditions as its deposit at whatever remove." And with this statement — one that expresses as much theological intrigue as it does exegetical exasperation — we find our point of departure.
In what follows, I do not attempt to straighten out all the historical and exegetical problems associated with the resurrection, as this is the chief preoccupation of many works written on the subject in the past several decades. This is not to say that I am uninterested in historical criticism as one (though necessarily limited) methodological aid. The results of historical criticism will at various times be taken up as helpful for arriving at a deeper appreciation of the New Testament witness. Neither is my interest here to justify resurrection belief and language by demonstrating that the reality of Jesus' resurrection fulfills the existential question and transcendental desire of the subject, which is what anthropological starting points typically hope to achieve. These approaches have some merit (as do other "correlational" strategies in theology) and will be invoked occasionally throughout the rest of our study, though primarily for purposes of thematic explication, not apologetics. Our interest here is quite different: we seek to discharge the air, to "prepare a way" for an impossible event, to initiate an act of intellectual purgation so that we may allow the echoes and traces of Jesus' resurrection to be heard and felt in their eschatological givenness, above all in their narrative presentations. Ours is a fundamental theology in reverse, an unapologetic theology. I adopt this phrase from William Placher, who writes:
When the Christian story is told most persuasively, then the sweep of that epic gives our own part in it far greater meaning, not less, in a way that becomes most clear not through some argumentative analysis but precisely in the power of the narrative in which the general movement and the character of individual episodes illuminate each other. Christian faith sorts out the world by seeing a pattern in things. One does not "prove" such a way of looking at the world, if "proof" means a series of syllogisms from universally accepted premises. Yet Christians want to claim that these really are the patterns of reality.
The point here is that while Christians believe their story is true, its truth cannot be guaranteed by external criteria but only discovered within the narrative itself, which becomes the framework for interpreting the rest of reality. For Placher, this does not lead to a kind of collective solipsism or vicious circularity. It does not lead to an indifferent or exclusivist attitude toward other narratives and truth-claims. It is convinced that conversation in our pluralistic context will become fruitful only once we acknowledge and speak out of the particularities of narratives and worldviews rather than assuming they can be adjudicated from a position of "nowhere," a neutral and universally valid standpoint that acts as the ultimate "foundation." Such an ideal is one of the hallmark "myths" of modernity. And so, rather than elaborating arguments (historical or transcendental) to arrive at the resurrection as our endpoint, we unclasp the hands of our reflexive need for "foundations" and become open to that which gives itself to thought and language by way of the Gift, as that which saturates and potentially transforms our pre- established horizons of expectation and intelligibility.
Let me introduce this endeavor with the following questions: What sort of event could Jesus' resurrection from the dead possibly be, if indeed it is an "event" in any ordinary sense? Is there something about its peculiar irruption that generates of necessity the very kind of turbulent forces in thought and language to which I have alluded? What is it about the resurrection that might make the historical, textual, and conceptual ambiguities found in the New Testament an unavoidable outcome? Might it be that the ambiguities of the resurrection narratives are uniquely disclosive as textual traces of an event whose eschatological character necessarily exceeds and overwhelms the capacity of representation, thereby reflecting something of the dynamism and historical ambiguity of the resurrection itself? Rather than submitting the apparent textual problems to the Procrustean bed of an explanatory framework, which is what so much historical criticism is wont to do, whether of a skeptical or apologetic stripe, might we attempt to "read off" their emergent complexity as signifying a "presence" whose unique manner of self-giving is also, and for that very reason, an "absence"?
"But where scholarship returns again and again to an historical aporia," writes Rowan Williams, "the theologian may be pardoned for taking this as matter for reflection." Noting that scholarship constantly founders on the paradoxical shoals of Jesus' resurrection, which as both historical and trans-historical produces a history of effects, but is never itself only one historical event among others, Williams suggests that the remarkable diversity in historical critical approaches to the resurrection itself reflects, willy-nilly, the inability to master the sovereign presence of the crucified and risen One. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the indeterminacy in scholarship mirrors the indeterminacy of the resurrection narratives themselves. "The central image of the gospel narratives is not any one apparition but the image of an absence, an image of the failure of images, which is also an absence that confirms the reality of a creative liberty, an agency not sealed and closed, but still obstinately engaged with a material environment and an historical process."
With this historical aporia as our focus, we will adopt a phenomenological style of reflection, particularly in the next chapter, so as to become hospitable to the peculiar givenness of Jesus' resurrection from the dead in our history. This will involve a strategy quite different from those ardently determined to submit the narratives and metaphors to an explanatory framework, usually with a firm set of presuppositions (an implied metaphysics) about what constitutes a proper and meaningful event in advance. The "condition of the possibility" for thinking and speaking of the disturbing presence/absence of Jesus' resurrection comes, rather paradoxically, through the progressive dismantling of those very conditions.
THE ESCHATOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE
Nearly every modern treatment of Jesus' resurrection begins with discussion of the difficulty the "modern mind" has believing in it. We would be mistaken to suppose however that the conceptual difficulties in its consideration are unique to modern people. They abounded for the early church as well. Apologetic features pepper the New Testament, evidencing doubt, misunderstanding, and outright denial at the very inception of Christian faith. In the "longer ending" of Mark, Mary Magdalene tells the disciples of Jesus' appearance to her, but "they would not believe" (Mark 16:11). Matthew assures his reader strict orders were given to secure the tomb with guards, "otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, 'He has been raised from the dead'" (Matt. 27:64). Such insistence in Matthew, not evident in the earlier Marcan account, indicates that some early critics of Christian faith would make the precise claim that the disciples stole Jesus' body from the grave. Paul's readers either had difficulty believing in the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:12–19), or at least properly understanding its nature and implications (1 Cor. 15:35–58; 2 Tim. 2:18). That John's story of the "doubting Thomas" has reached the level of cliché only further confirms the point (John 20:24–29). If all of this is true of the early church, how much more so in subsequent centuries of Christian doctrine and practice? How much more so today, two millennia removed?
A well-known quote from Rudolf Bultmann will do as well as any to outline the contemporary challenge:
Man's knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world — in fact, there is no one who does. What meaning, for instance, can we attach to such phrases in the creed as "descended into hell" or "ascended into heaven?" We no longer believe in the three-storied universe which the creeds take for granted. The only honest way of reciting the creeds is to strip the mythological framework from the truth they enshrine — that is, assuming that they contain any truth at all, which is just the question that theology has to ask. No one who is old enough to think for himself supposes that God lives in a local heaven. There is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense of the word. The same applies to hell in the sense of a mythical underworld beneath our feet. And if this is so, the story of Christ's descent into hell and of his Ascension into heaven is done with. We can no longer look for the return of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven or hope that the faithful will meet him in the air (1 Thess. 4:15ff.).
The greatest challenge to the Christian affirmation of Jesus' resurrection, argues Bultmann, is that we no longer inhabit the symbolic cosmology presupposed by the New Testament. The crudely spatial imagery which may at one time have provided a meaningful framework for understanding is incoherent in a post-Copernican view of the world. This shift in cosmology does not necessarily require the simple rejection of the Christian kerygma, though it will require sophisticated interpretive strategies ("demythologization") to distill from the New Testament what is existentially meaningful and abiding. The language of resurrection, whatever sort of "event" it intends to describe, cannot refer to a "historical" event in any modern sense. Imagining that it does leads to the unseemly conclusion of a resuscitated corpse, which raises the specter of mythology outright. Bultmann is willing to grant that something "happens" in the resurrection, as it were, though it is unclear how it takes on any sort of event-character in itself, independent of the subjectivity of the Christian who proclaims the saving import of the cross. And indeed, that is the extent of its signification and meaning: "faith in the resurrection is really the same thing as faith in the saving efficacy of the cross, faith in the cross as the cross of Christ." The resurrection, one might say, is not eventful in itself but the ongoing proclamation of God's forgiveness of humanity in Jesus' self-sacrifice. Karl Barth once summarized Bultmann's position as asserting Jesus is "risen into the kerygma," to which Bultmann replied: "I accept this formula. It is completely correct, given only that it is correctly understood. It presupposes that the kerygma itself is an eschatological event; and it means that Jesus is truly present in the kerygma. ... To believe in Christ present in the kerygma is the essence of the Easter faith." In what amounts to the conflation of signified and signifier (the kerygma is the event), Bultmann avoids altogether, he thinks, the historical aporia of the resurrection, which he rather presumptuously states "is not of interest to Christian belief." Having thus extracted the resurrection entirely from the category of history — again, because he seems incapable of imagining how any reference to history avoids the implication of mere resuscitation — Bultmann insists on its existential meaningfulness. It affords us "an opportunity of understanding ourselves," it "opens up for men the possibility of authentic life."
It is well known that Bultmannn's adoption of existential language is indebted to Martin Heidegger. But it is at least as reflective of the Kantian "turn to the subject," particularly in its embrace of Kant's critique of knowledge. Kant's critique of metaphysics continues to haunt contemporary considerations of the resurrection, especially those taking up the question of its historicity and intelligibility. Concerned to outline the proper limits of human knowledge — "the conditions of its possibility" — Kant argues that we are not the passive recipients of objective knowledge from a meta-empirical reality, a noumenal realm "out there." The sort of cosmocentric and objectivist character of classical metaphysics is no longer tenable. Rather, the human subject, conditioned as it is by the categorical (spatio-temporal) realm within which it exists, actively constructs the data of experience into objects of knowledge. To humanly know is not to know the thing-in-itself, but to know according to the strictures of the knower. All knowledge is necessarily restricted by the transcendental conditions of common experience, e.g., space and time, unity, cause and effect, etc. The intellect actively constructs knowledge in and through these categories, giving conceptual shape to sensual experience. Like a key made to fit a specific keyhole, all knowledge conforms to the power and makeup of the knowing subject.
The job of philosophy is to think through these transcendental conditions and set knowledge upon a secure and rational ("scientific") ground. Doing so requires a systematic and radical critique, one that must reign in the boundaries of knowledge far more tightly than allowed by traditional metaphysics, which has long been willing to freely speculate about things-in-themselves, including such meta-empirical realities as "God," "heaven," and the "soul." Because rational knowledge may only rightly be concerned with empirical realities, the terrain traditionally occupied by metaphysics and theology must be considered largely beyond the proper limits of reason. It may be that the human intellect seeks to unify experience into more and more comprehensive frameworks of understanding, thus reaching out to an unconditioned and utterly simple ground for all experience and knowing; still, that ground, which we might call "God," cannot itself be a proper object of knowledge since all knowing is conditioned by the categories of experience (phenomenality) while "God," by definition, is not. Kant may in fact believe that his critique of traditional metaphysics leaves room for faith, but it is clear that he sets up an almost insuperable dichotomy between the phenomenal (experience, history, empirical knowledge) and the noumenal (God, the soul, revelation).
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2009 Brian D. Robinette.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
PART ONE,
Introduction,
1. CONDITIONS OF THE POSSIBILITY,
2. THE IM-POSSIBLE GIFT,
3. BODIES IN ABSENTIA,
4. I WILL BE MY BODY,
PART TWO,
5. SUFFERING, MEMORIA, AND VINDICATION: RETRIEVING THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION,
6. TRANSFIGURING THE VICTIM,
7. MIMESIS, SCAPEGOATING, AND THE CRUCIFIED,
8. THE GIFT OF THE FORGIVING VICTIM,
9. THE GRAMMAR OF FULFILLMENT AND CHRISTOLOGY,
10. ORIGINAL PEACE, DIVINIZATION, AND BEAUTY OF FORM,
Notes,
Scripture Index,
General Index,