Part II: Resurrection in Paul

Resurrection in Paul (outside the Corinthian correspondence)

Again the findings of this chapter are conveniently summarized at the end (271-276).

1. Paul’s ‘richly variegated, but fluently integrated’ understanding of resurrection comprised three basic moments: ‘the bodily resurrection of Jesus the Messiah; the future bodily resurrection of those who belong to the Messiah (along with the transformation of the living); and ‘the anticipation of the second, on the basis of the first, in terms of present Christian living, to which “resurrection” language applies as a powerful metaphor in line with the metaphorical usage available, alongside the literal use, in Judaism’ (271-272). He also adumbrates in different ways an intermediate state: those who die go to be ‘with the Messiah’ or they are ‘asleep in the Messiah’.

2. The main development in Paul’s writings is from an early conviction that he would be among those who are alive when the Messiah returned to the later view that he would probably die before the end.

3. Paul’s understanding of resurrection remained grounded in Judaism but is a development of Jewish belief in seven respects: i) he believed that the ‘age to come’ had already begun; ii) his understanding is much more sharply defined than anything in Judaism, particularly with regard to the emphasis on transformation; iii) there is a subtle rethinking of the tradition from within (eg. a reapplication of the language of Dan.12:1-3 to describe Christian witness); iv) Paul grounds his belief in the resurrection as the work of the creator God in the actual resurrection of Jesus; v) he developed a new terminology to articulate his distinctive beliefs, most notably the distinction between ‘flesh’ and ‘body’; vi) he developed a modified two-stage doctrine of final judgment, parallel to the two-stage doctrine of resurrection, according to which condemnation had already taken place on the cross; and vii) perhaps most striking the idea of resurrection pervades Paul’s writings in a way that is quite unprecedented in Jewish thought. ‘In all these ways, Paul kept both feet firmly on the soil of his own Jewish tradition, while making significant developments and modifications, not at all in the direction of a paganization of the concepts and beliefs, but by rethinking them in the light of the Messiah’ (274).

4. Likewise Paul’s entire worldview remained firmly grounded in Judaism but was rethought around Jesus and his resurrection. i) He used the foundation stories of creation and exodus to speak of the new creation and new exodus. ii) The various aspects of his apostolic praxis (Gentile mission, prayer, vocation to suffering, collection from the Gentile churches) arise out of a Jewish, Pharisaic worldview but have been reordered by the gospel and especially the resurrection. iii) The symbols of his work (proclamation of the gospel, baptism) are closely tied to the death and resurrection of Jesus. iv) Paul would answer the worldview questions as follows: we are ‘in the Messiah’; we are in the ‘good creation of the good God’, which is still subject to decay but is already under the lordship of the Messiah; what is wrong is that the world is still under the control of sinful and idolatrous forces; the solution is resurrection in the metaphorical sense in the short term and in the literal sense in the long term; the ‘age to come’ has been inaugurated but the ‘present age’ still continues.

5. Finally, there is an urgent historical question: ‘If Paul was indeed drawing so thoroughly upon the Jewish beliefs and hopes about resurrection, what could have caused him to speak of it in this way?’ Resurrection as envisaged in the prophets and later Jewish traditions had not happened: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, et al., had not been raised to bodily life; Israel had not been ‘resurrected’ metaphorically from oppression. So why did he make resurrection as a past event so central to his theology? The answer is simply that he believed that it had happened.

Resurrection in Corinth (1): Introduction

This chapter examines passages in 1 and 2 Corinthians that touch on the theme of resurrection apart from the two key passages in 1 Cor.15 and 2 Cor.4:7-5:10. Wright concludes:

These two letters, omitting for the moment their most important sections, have returned the same answer to our questions as the rest of the Pauline corpus:

(1) In terms of the ancient spectrums of belief about life after death, Paul is with the Jews against the pagans, and with the Pharisees (and the majority of other Jews) against the Sadducees and against any who looked for a disembodied immortality.

(1a) He saw the Spirit in the present as the guarantee of the resurrection to come, in which believers would have new bodies.

(1b) These letters say nothing much about an intermediate state, but offer nothing to contradict the view we gleaned from the others.

(1c) The continuity and discontinuity between the present Christian life and the future resurrection life is all-important, though in subtly different ways, in both the Corinthian letters. It is the point on which many of his arguments in the first letter rest, and the point which enables him, in the second letter, to interpret his apostolic ministry as one of paradoxical glory.

(1d) Several times he hints at the larger picture (new covenant, new creation) within which what he says about resurrection makes sense.

(2) He develops substantially the ‘present’ meaning of resurrection in both letters, making sustained and subtle metaphorical use of the concept, to denote aspects of present (concrete) Christian living and apostolic work while connoting their rootedness in the (concrete) resurrection of Jesus and their goal in the future (concrete) resurrection of believers, to the last of which the language continues to apply literally.

(3) Paul seldom addresses, in the passages we have studied here, the question of what precisely happened at Easter, of what Jesus’ own resurrection actually consisted in. However, since he uses Jesus’ resurrection again and again as the model both for the ultimate future, and for the present anticipation of that future, we can conclude that, as far as he was concerned, Jesus’ resurrection consisted in a new bodily life which was more than a mere resuscitation. It was a life in which the corruptibility of the flesh had been left behind; a life in which Jesus would now be equally at home in both dimensions of the good creation, in ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’. (310)

Resurrection in Corinth (2): the key passages

1 Corinthians 15 makes it clear that Paul’s understanding of resurrection is grounded in a creation-theology. What this text adds to the other statements is ‘a detailed account, unprecedented in the Judaism of the time, both of the two-stage rising of the dead (the Messiah first, then his people when he returns), and of the mode of discontinuity (focused on the corruption/incorruption distinction and on the two types of humanity with the Spirit as the agent of the new one)’ (360). Both innovations derive from what he believes about the resurrection of Jesus.

The main argument with regard to 2 Cor.4:7-5:10 is that the later passage constitutes a change of perspective rather than a change of mind: Paul simply now recognizes the possibility of his own death before the new age arrived in its complete form.

A number of general concluding remarks are made concerning Paul’s views on resurrection.

i) His beliefs are fundamentally Jewish and Pharisaical rather than pagan:

He believed, that is, in the future bodily resurrection of all the true people of the true God, and he cautiously explored, here and there, ways of referring to the intermediate state which was the necessary corollary of such a belief. He believed that Israel’s God, being both the creator of the world and the God of justice, would accomplish this resurrection by his Spirit, who was already at work in the Messiah’s people. (372)

ii) His beliefs are a development of Jewish eschatology in two important respects. First, he believed that resurrection had become a two-stage affair with Jesus’ resurrection preceding that of the people of the Messiah. Secondly, he believed that the resurrection would not only be bodily but would also entail a transformation of the body, understood principally in terms of a new creation:

Though Paul does not refer to the tree of life in Genesis 3, his controlling narrative is constantly pointing to the way in which the creator finally brings his human, image-bearing creatures, and indeed the entire cosmos, through the impasse of the fall, of the thorns and thistles and the whirling, flashing sword, to taste at last the gift of life in all its fullness, a new bodily life in a new world where the rule of heaven is brought at last to earth. (373)

iii) Paul uses the language of resurrection in a metaphorical sense to denote ‘the concrete, bodily events of Christian living, especially baptism and holiness’. This was a development of the metaphorical use of resurrection language in Judaism to speak of the coming restoration of Israel and return from exile.

iv) ‘The question any historian must ask, discovering such a nest of intricate ideas, at once so Jewish and so unlike anything any Jew had said before, is obvious: what caused these developments-from-within, these newly articulated resurrection-beliefs?’ The only explanation for this mutation is Paul’s belief in Jesus’ own bodily resurrection.

The Damascus Road vision of Jesus

Briefly, Wright argues in this section that for Paul the revelation of Jesus on the road to Damascus was proof that YHWH had ‘vindicated Jesus against the charge of false messianism’ (394). From this certain things follow:

He is to be seen as Israel’s true representative; the great turn-around of the eras has already begun; ‘the resurrection’ has split into two, with Jesus the Messiah as the first-fruits and the Messiah’s people following later, when he returns. And if he is Messiah, then it must follow, from those biblical roots we set out earlier (Psalm 2, Daniel 7 and so on), which are reaffirmed in the New Testament as central to the church’s developing view of Jesus, that he is the world’s true lord. He is the kyrios at whose name every knee shall bow. He is the ‘son of man’ exalted over the beasts, Israel’s king rising to rule the nations. But every step down this road… takes us closer to saying that if Jesus is the kyrios now exalted over the world – a deduction, we repeat, from his Messiahship – then the biblical texts which speak in this way are harder and harder to separate from the texts which, when they say kyrios, refer to Israel’s god, YHWH himself. Jesus, the Messiah, is kyrios. (395)

Luke’s telling of the event is designed to evoke Old Testament theophany scenes: the vision of Daniel 10, the revelation on Mount Sinai, and the opening vision of Ezekiel. The primary meaning of the vision is that Jesus has been designated ‘son of God’ in the messianic sense. But the setting of the vision within a prophetic framework suggests that there is more to it than this:

Since prophetic calls were perceived as coming from Israel’s god, albeit sometimes through intermediaries as in Daniel 10, the revelation of Jesus as the messianic ‘son of god’ hovers precariously on the edge of the new, previously unthinkable belief: that this messianic title might contain much more than anyone had previously imagined from reading either Psalm 2 or 2 Samuel 7. Paul’s own use of Psalm 110 echoes its use in the synoptic tradition: he discovered that David’s son was also David’s lord.

Wright then tentatively sketches a process  by which this discovery might have come about. Paul came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah as a result of an experience that seemed to him very much like the biblical theophanies: perhaps he discovered that the figure on Ezekiel’s ‘throne-chariot’ was Jesus. As he prayed to Israel’s God, he found that the phrase ‘son of God’ took on a new meaning. running parallel to ‘the other notions in which Jews had invoked the presence and activity of the transcendent, hidden God’ (397). As the memory of the Damascus Road vision and the practice of prayer interacted in Paul’s mind, he

had an increasingly clear sense that this God was to be known as the one who sent the son and the Spirit of the son (Galatians 4.4-6); the one who shared his unshareable glory with this new Lord of the world (Philippians 2.9-11); the one  in whom the invisible God was reflected (Colossians 1.15); the one whose very Lordship provided, through the multiple possibilities of the word kyrios, a way of distinguishing between ‘one God, the father’ and ‘one lord, Jesus Christ’, while simultaneously, and with the same words, affirming Jewish monotheism over against pagan polytheism (1 Corinthians 8:6). (398)