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Since 'resurrection' collides with our human experience of death - dead men are not known to live again - there are those
who seek refuge in other interpretations of the resurrection event to avoid its downright embarrassment.
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Some of the material in this essay is obsolete. Please refer to the The Searching for Sister Ann's Bishop Who Thinks Ann is Nuts An Episcopalian's Perspective -- AN ONLINE ESSAY -- By Daniel R. Porter |
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Part 1: Introduction Sister Ann had said, "the resurrection was a miracle." She paused to gauge our reaction before continuing. "Then again, maybe it wasn't." To make sure people on her side of the table heard what she said, she leaned far forward and looked back into each person's eyes. "If it wasn't a miracle, then it was a good story to explain some feeling the disciples had: maybe that Jesus was alive in their hearts - or some other such explanation that theologians like to think up." Again she paused. Had her words registered? "If we believe that it is only a story, then we must decide what the story means. There are those for whom the resurrection story is a metaphor for cherished, traditional interpretations. And there are those for whom the story is a metaphor for some newly understood meaning." Ann was an Episcopal nun. Once a week, Ann and several other people met at a local diner for coffee and discussion. We called our meetings, 'Ann's Seminar.' The meetings had started out as simple social gatherings following weekly Al Anon meetings at a nearby church. Over time, for those who were interested and many of us were, it evolved into Ann's Seminar. Ann, who was visiting in our city for several months, had joined our Al Anon group. Al Anon, a support group for those who have loved ones who are alcoholics, cherishes anonymity and Ann chose never to use her real name1. "What you believe about the resurrection," Ann had continued, "puts you into one of three groups." The first group - Ann had called it the Tom Wright school - accepts the resurrection as a real, physical and historical event. N. T. Wright is a prominent Anglican historian and theologian who has significantly advanced the argument for the historical plausibility of physical resurrection (and many other New Testament events) by emphasizing an understanding of Jesus in the context of a first century Jewish setting and language. Doing so requires going well beyond the biblical evidence and relying on extant extra-biblical texts and archeological evidence. While many people see such literal belief in the resurrection as fundamentalism, it is far from being that. One need not believe that trumpeting and shouting brought down the walls of Jericho or that Jesus walked on water to believe that the resurrection event really happened. Evidence suggests that an earthquake may have brought down the walls of Jericho. But, evidence, as this group sees it, is substantially supportive of physical resurrection2. A problem for those who think this way is that prevailing worldviews generally favor science over history, no matter how strong and objective the historical argument. How often have we heard the phrase "it's an exact science" to describe something as methodically and conclusively correct. But we never hear this of biblical or ancient history, for such history is always interpretive. The four Gospels, in that they contradict each other cannot be exact history. But they are not intended to be. They are reflective biographies. In them, there is no clear literary demarcation between metaphors, such as the parables, and actual events. This is so with all "historical" documents written about the same time, including Paul's letters, Gnostic gospels, critical assessments of Christianity, and some very early creeds. All such documents are written with a point of view and none of them are objective histories by the standards we now expect. The best that can emerge, when they are all understood together, is that the resurrection is historically plausible, maybe even probable. Tom Wright is amazingly good at arguing this notion based on the language as it was used and ideas as they were understood in the first century Jewish culture. This is bolstered by the realization that something very special must have occurred for the church to develop as it did. Another problem is that others, who share Wright's methodology (known in academic circles as the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus), arrive at completely different interpretations and conclusions with the same material. So in the end we fall back on modern sensibilities. Conclusions, affirmed by history and favoring physical resurrection, bump up against prevailing scientific understanding. Resurrection simply seems implausible to our modern sensibilities. History may say "it seems to be so" but science says "it can't be." No matter how good the history, one must accept a priori the possibility exceptions to science - miracles - can and did occur to accept the Tom Wright arguments. For many of us, this is difficult. A second group - we might call it the Marcus Borg school - does not readily accept a physical bodily resurrection event. Such thinking is widespread among Christians and not at all new. One need only look at the academic landscape of the last two hundred years of the evolving "questing" for the historical Jesus - from H. S. Reimarus to Albert Schweitzer to Rudolf Bultmann to John A. T. Robinson to Marcus Borg - to see how many notable scholars question physical resurrection. These scholars, in varying degrees, have sought to demythologize Christianity while retaining the value of the transcendental language of the New Testament. Ann called it "believing in the meaning," something she described it as a level of Christian truth that is safe from enlightenment supposition. The resurrection is thus myth and those of us who think this way prefer to characterize the resurrection as symbolic, allegorical, metaphorical, or possibly something of a spiritual occurrence outside the realm of understandable space and time. It was with this group that I most closely identified (and still do). In my early twenties I had discovered John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, a wonderful book that articulated the demythologizing of Christianity in a way I could accept. In Robinson's work I found intellectual justification for an inexplicable faith; a faith I could not shake despite my strong skeptical view of the world. Now, nearly forty years later, I am an avid reader of Marcus Borg who is, in my opinion, the most articulate and thoroughly interesting contemporary scholar of this group. The Borg group generally does not accept miracles, at least not as C. S. Lewis defined them: being "rare exceptions to the ordinary laws of nature." Therefore, alternative explanations are needed for the resurrection. Dr. George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his book, Canterbury Letters to the Future, accurately characterizes this group's notion of the resurrection: Since 'resurrection' collides with our human experience of death - dead men are not known to live again - there are those who seek refuge in other interpretations of the resurrection event to avoid its downright embarrassment ... A third group goes well beyond demythologizing biblical events including the resurrection. Not only is the historical resurrection event rejected, so too are traditional interpretations. John Shelby Spong, the former Episcopal bishop of Newark, is this group's most prominent thinker and writer. So prolific, well published, articulate and charismatic is Spong that this group, at times, seems to be a one-man group. It is not. Spong's ideas are well accepted by a large body of modern day Christians. As Sister Ann saw it, this group tries to reshape contemporary Christianity, not only by demythologizing it to conform to enlightenment sensibilities, but by making it conform to what Ann called the "second enlightenment: a presumptively correct, postmodern and pluralistic view of the world." One must be careful with the word postmodern. It has many meanings. Ann was talking about a Rortian philosophical definition (Richard Rorty), one in which there is subjective agreement (solidarity) among members of a community on a commonly accepted humane moral vision and shared belief "caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance.3" The resurrection seems irrelevant here. To make it fit the collective vision Spong argues that the early church got both the story and the meaning wrong and the church has continued to get it wrong for the better part of two millennia. He points out that Paul never mentioned an empty tomb, so the accounts in the Gospels, written later, must be later invention. In that the Gospel accounts of the burial and post-resurrection appearances are contradictory, they are also wrong. Spong writes: ... the miracles of physical resurrection, the angels who roll stones away from tombs, and the bodies that appear out of nothing must be dismissed for the legends that they are. But life that transcends every human limit is a powerful portrait. Death, which opens all things to new possibilities; love, which triumphs over hatred; being, which overcomes nonbeing - those are the truths to which Easter points4. This, it seems, is a noble effort to create belief from presumptive meaning. Is it that Easter points to these "possibilities" or is it that Spong begins with the possibilities and tries from them to redefine Easter? Elsewhere, Spong writes: The idea that somehow the very nature of the heavenly God required the death of Jesus as a ransom to be paid for our sins is ludicrous. A human parent who required the death of his or her child as satisfaction for a relationship that had been broken would be either arrested or confined to a mental institution5. Such phraseology resonates with widely accepted societal values. But the argument is populist-style chicanery. Spong asks us to reject the resurrection story by implying that its traditional meaning is simply a primitive theology of substitution. He ignores atonement. Spong asks us how can we possibly imagine that God the Father (or Mother) is such a bad guy by using societal values as a benchmark. He doesn't ask if God incarnate - the Son - is a good guy. "He speaks of a ransom and not a gift," said Ann.
1 Al Anon is modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. Such a seminar, following the meeting, was probably inappropriate. No one to my knowledge objected. The quotes attributed to Ann are reconstructions and I hope I have done justice to her words and insights. 2 Ann's characterization may be too confining. There are those, for instance, for whom philosophical arguments, such as those of Richard Swinburne or C. S. Lewis, make sense. There are others who simply trust the opinion of others or choose not to analyze their faith and simply accept the resurrection. There are some who have 'experienced' Christ in their lives and find it this sufficient reason to trust in a physical resurrection. The definition of the group is nonetheless suitably illustrative - those who believe in a historically real physical resurrection. 3 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 4 Spong, John Shelby, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998) 5 Re-quoted from an essay, "Modernity or Christianity? John Spong's Culture of Disbelief" by C. FitzSimons Allison in Can A Bishop Be Wrong (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 1998). Original quote is from The Bishop's Voice, October 1996. Dan Porter is an Episcopalian and a member of Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City. He may be contacted by email at porter@shroudstory.com or by mail at 20 McIntyre Street, Bronxville, NY 10708. (c) Copyright 2001, Daniel R. Porter. All Rights Reserved. This article may be reproduced in full for any non-commercial purpose without further permission.
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