MysteriousFaith

Book Review: The Resurrection of the Son of God

Wright’s analysis is almost entirely couched within his argument for the truth in historical events as recorded in the Gospels, and he does a superb job arguing for the reasonableness of believing in their historical weight. But Wright is attempting to answer a question of meaning by downplaying philosophy and reality, and relying only on history (similar arguments can and should be pointed out by those whose arguments are entirely couched within science, logic or philosophy). Where Wright trivializes the epistemology of reason, he does so at great cost to his argument.

Book Review: NT Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God

Having just finished NT Wright’s seminal work on the resurrection of Jesus, The Resurrection of the Son of God, I am intellectually challenged, mentally exhausted, but constructively directed in the form my questions about the historicity of the event of Christ’s resurrection should take. There is a quality to Wright’s writing that reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s dense language, logic and use of facts in books like his Fateful Triangle. People who come to Wright’s work with a presupposition towards believing in the Resurrection will be edified as they see within the layers of his argument the impossibility of any other reasonable explanation than the historical accuracy of the Gospels. People who come to the book with the presupposition towards doubt will go away (if they choose to finish it!) frustrated at being unable to penetrate Wright’s analysis in a way that seems to simply bring his arguments down around him. The complexity, depth and breadth of his scholarship will leave skeptics with only their doubt (a point I will return to later on in this review). For those, like myself, who are genuinely seeking truth about the historicity of the Resurrection, this book will more fully form the caution Thomas Cahill urged in his superb Desire of the Everlasting Hills: the World Before and After Jesus. In this book Cahill is unwilling to call Christ divine - no doubt because of the obvious questions we children of the post-Enlightenment age have over dead people coming back alive - but pointedly remarks that it must be acknowledged something significant happened to make the formation of the early Christian Church come alive as it did.

I found The Resurrection of the Son of God, the third in Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God (COQG) series, the easiest to read and most forceful; however, at times I did not feel he allowed dissenting voices to suggest other options for reasons I will elucidate later on in this review. Before going much further, the reader should take notice of my own caution about my review: I am no scholar - Wright is. I am a well-read, auto-didactic seeker. I am wholly in over my head doing any more than pointing out the questions I have in the analysis and conclusions Wright comes to. Where Wright can use his own knowledge of koine Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, I must rely on secondary sources whose scholarship my own analysis and conclusions ride on. My attempt in this review is to ask several questions that I have upon reading and struggling with the ideas in this book, presenting at the end of this review the place I find myself relative to what I hold as “belief” in the Resurrection of Christ. In doing so, I have attempted to never be disrespectful or to suggest that Wright’s argument is foolish - I know my own place before scholars of this magnitude as I do my own place before my Creator.

Wright’s work is best understood as an indirect apologetic for the historicity of Easter that is one of the best responses to those who would attack the historical accuracy of the Resurrection on the basis of allegorizing the early Christian Church’s view of the concept of Resurrection itself. Wright’s analysis leaves quite literally no room for those who would attempt to construct the motives behind the Church’s formation as being belief in a non-literal or spiritual Resurrection. As a reviewer on Amazon.Com said, the question of whether or not the Resurrection actually occurred is a separate argument that Wright addresses at the end of this 700+ page magnum opus. To his credit, he allows this argument to come last as the natural conclusion to his primary argument, namely that early Christians held literally and vociferously to the reality of a crucified Christ that was raised from the dead.

Through Wright’s three volumes of COQG, he shows a willingness to set aside the belief that the only two options for interpreting the Bible are the fundamentalist literalism and the liberalist allegory. He chooses what I will call a middle-way, what he calls his critical-realist perspective which essentially allows him to view Scripture as holding authority because it was written by people who experienced the events and can be trusted as a result. This position sets aside the fundamentalist Christian perspective that human beings transcribed the Bible in the same way a court stenographer records a trial. Wright also couches the respective Biblical sources within their culture, arguing for what they meant when they used the word, not for what we read back into the literature afterwards. This raises my first set of questions: of particular difficulty to me is that when I see what we now hold as Holy Scripture to change its ideal or revelation of supposedly Divine truth, I question whether or not we are dealing with real revelation or the end result of culture and tradition shaping man-made belief. As one example, Wright argues for the multiple definitions of the Resurrection in an attempt to once and for all deny the truth of those who would say first century Jews did not have a formulated understanding of an after-life, so their understanding of Jesus’ resurrection must have been non-literal. His argument is possibly the central part of this book, and to me, it makes the question of what we hold as divinely revealed truth that much more acute. Wright states quite clearly that: “The old half-truth [Jews … believed in resurrection, while Greeks believed in immortality] had got hold of something which is in itself quite remarkable. As we have seen, the Bible mostly denies or at least ignores the possibility of a future life, with only a few texts coming out strongly for a different view; but in the second-Temple period the position is more or less reversed. The evidence suggests that by the time of Jesus, roughly in the middle of the period we are now examining, most Jews either believed in some form of resurrection or at least knew that it was standard teaching. Comparatively few remained skeptical.” (page 129) This to me begs the question of why God, in a theophany to Moses, would choose to talk about stoning rebellious children or making sure if your brother died you (if you are a male) knock up your sister-in-law over the much more profound questions of life, death, and an after-life. I think this is a fine line Wright falls off more than a couple of times when he bends to contemporary historical criticism by agreeing that Jewish Scriptures show transmuted beliefs, but then sharply limits what other role culture and sociology may have played.

As with most of Wright’s work, his history is superb, but I am at such times left a bit perplexed at the logical foundations he builds upon. Within this text it seems to me we have to deal with the reality that the Bible (a work of Divine authorship according to Christianity) leaves out to the covenant people of Israel a defined understanding of the after-life. This is a significant omission that from my perspective suggests something of significance. I will propose one meaning, namely, that the early Jewish lack of doctrine on the after-life in a world obsessed with the after-life (the Hellenistic wrestling with the immortality of the soul and the Egyptian Book of the Dead are just two examples), coupled with the early Jewish monotheism in a pantheistic world could be best explained sociologically by people who for deeply national and perhaps anthropological reasons chose to define outsiders on the basis of what beliefs they did not hold in common. Again, I am no historian and so I submit this idea respectfully and quite carefully. Within the immense datum and history cited in Wright’s book, I can not say I understand how we are to justify fundamental omissions or changes in doctrinal teaching within the greater truth Wright is arguing for. It seems to me the underlying truth which will need to be kept sharply in focus as this review is completed is that tradition and culture shaped that which coming generations would hold as truth more than Divine intervention. Wright does an excellent job responding to arguments against the Resurrection predicated on the position that Jews had no such beliefs on the potential for a Resurrection at all; but in doing this, he sets the stage for the more important point of what is of God and what is of man.

As I said earlier, Wrights critical-realist position on Scripture is a profoundly worthwhile position to take when interpreting Scripture, but I for one would like to see Wright be more respectful when he incorporates historical reality with what we know about reality in our day and age; essentially Wright seems to say that we should argue for the best synthesis of knowledge on the basis of their knowledge in that day, but not our own. This is a fundamental issue that Wright treats minimally. He occasionally mentions the implications of the Enlightenment realization that “dead men stay dead”, but always believes that the historicity of the events he is arguing for is sufficient to cause people to set aside the inevitable doubts that come when encountering the Resurrection: “But it is worth noticing that the ‘modernist’ conception of ‘religion’, within which framework a good deal of critical scholarship has been pursued, has thought a priori of ‘religious experience’, including all reported experience of revelations from another world (e.g. ‘heaven’), as of necessity ‘internal’. That is part of the classic post-Enlightenment paradigm in which, following eighteenth-century Deism, anything to do with ‘God’ or ‘religion’ was removed by definition from contact with the world of space, time and matter. Thus, whenever someone constrained by this worldview comes upon a report of a heavenly vision, they are bound to classify it as ‘internal’. That is all it can be - for them.” (page 377) Wright is of course accurate as to his history; he is also right to argue for how else man is to know something historically actually happened is within the framework of recording it. If something supernatural occurred, how else are we to pass down its happening but by recording it and sending it forward to a time when it may be disbelieved if the event fails to happen again. Wright’s analysis is almost entirely couched within his argument for the truth in historical events as recorded in the Gospels, and he does a superb job arguing for the reasonableness of believing in their historical weight. But Wright is attempting to answer a question of meaning by downplaying philosophy and reality, and relying only on history (similar arguments can and should be pointed out by those whose arguments are entirely couched within science, logic or philosophy). Where Wright trivializes the epistemology of reason (I would like here to use stronger words as this portion of the book and one recorded lecture I have listened to of him makes me think he would do well to stop pushing aside the implications of the Enlightenment he is so critical of - his dismissal of the implications of the Enlightenment will ultimately weigh very heavily on how his work is received outside the church - something I would think he cares very much about), he does so at great cost to his argument. But again here we have to remember that Wright’s central point is that the historicity of the Resurrection can be maintained, regardless of its seemingly ridiculous claims.

Wright’s emphasis on the historicity of the Resurrection is another way of saying the only way we can say we know whether an even actually happened is to evaluate the evidence of the supporting claims, and he is right. But he is also profoundly wrong: how else are we to make sense of our reality if not by what we know does and does not happen? My other writing will show that I put reason before faith for the simple reason that we all come to belief through reason first, then get to a point where we say “I believe” before ideas we do not understand and are not explainable. Can we hold to both points? I will suggest that we can not, and that our language needs to change. Here I will get in trouble with both my Christian and agnostic readers as I am willing to say I hold out great hope that the Resurrection actually happened. But even after finishing Wright’s book, I am still not willing to say “I believe” it actually happened. I see quite clearly that the early Christians believed it happened, but rest comfortably in the hope that my life will be judged by what I did and not a set of abstract ideas or events several thousand years ago to which I attached great importance.

I will lastly turn to one of the final arguments Wright puts forward, that “‘the birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church … remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.’” (pages 478-479). Wright (here quoting Moule in a footnote) is of course again profoundly right, but when we speak to why an organization comes to a unique historical place do we not have to take into account not only the historical events around which it was built, but also the motives of its leadership, and the larger question of why religious belief develops at all - a question best answered by sociologists, anthropologists and psychiatrists. Wright attempts in what I hold is the poorest argument (by no accident perhaps also one of his briefest) in his book, to argue against any sort of sociological belief construct like what would be suggested by the latter group I would propose must be incorporated into this analysis. By given primary credibility to historians and no real credibility to the sociology of religious belief, he is sidestepping the core resistance to modern peoples’ belief in the historicity of the Resurrection. Wright’s books are best seen as responses to the Jesus Seminar and the resulting quasi-scholarship that has arisen around the Gnostic Gospels, the use of “Q” to downplay the accuracy of the Gospels, and the attempts by pseudo-scholars to argue that ideas like that of the Resurrection were not capable of being produced by first-century Jews and as such much be the result of later Christian Church malfeasance. At the end of the book, Wright’s discussion of what he calls the ‘cognitive-dissonance’ argument against the historicity of the Resurrection - “…the hypothetical state, studied within social psychology, in which individuals or groups fail to come to terms with reality, but live instead in a fantasy which corresponds to their own deep longings …” (emphasis mine - page 697) comes up short. Wright couches his argument within Leon Festinger’s 1956 and 1957 work which attempted to take the events of Easter and explain them as the result of a small group of believers who underwent the cognitive dissonance explained above. Wright dedicates four pages to responding to this and does so by attacking the study Festinger used (and again, Wright’s analysis of the study itself is probably accurate - but the greater question of whether another sociological study of religious belief Wright holds as being un-true [say Mormonism] would suggest is left unaddressed). Wright then turns the last one and a half page of his response to using his historical argument - “They were not refusing to come to terms with the fact that they had been wrong all along. On the contrary, they were indeed coming to terms with, and reordering their lives around, dramatic and irrefutable evidence that they had been wrong.” (page 700) To me, Wright has a bit of circular reasoning impacting his logic, but more importantly, is he asking the right question, specifically what the believers in Christ would have been doing if the Resurrection had not happened? Because Wright never accommodates this possibility, it seems he misses the ability of Festinger’s analysis to answer the question of Christian origins - that a group of deeply touched but also primarily marginalized people wrestled with what their experiences of Jesus meant if they did not do something with his life and death.

Wright’s overarching analysis, the lynch pin of it, is that Christianity rose because the Resurrection can be proved as having been believed to be historically real by the early Jewish believers. If we can, let us strip this down to its more logical skeleton: a movement’s growth can only be explained if their teaching was historically accurate. Wright very, very briefly touches on people who attempt and marginalize Christianity by making it equal in supposed “truth” statements to Buddhism and Islam. His larger point is overly simplistic - that Buddhism and Islam have few, if any, statements that suggest they should be accepted because of certain historical events. Islamic theologians would disagree by stating that Muhammad’s night journey to Mecca is believed to be a literal event that served to establish the Divine authorship of the Koran and also to serve as reason for Islam to have been believed. Because Buddhism is about spiritual transcendence and not religious doctrine, it asks few if any questions of historical significance (Buddhism going so far as to say that if you encounter the Buddha on your journey you are to kill him - the point being that Buddhism teaches personal transcendence by something other than belief in the historicity of Buddha). I feel this part of Wright’s analysis needs more wrestling with: we have only the last 150 years to look at the formation of Mormonism and its explosive growth to suggest that a number of factors play into how religion comes to be accepted as being historically true. The recent nature of the Mormon church allows some to look at the lives of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and say they are worthy of not being trusted, but time has caused us to hold no such questioning over the founders of the Christian church. My point here is only to suggest that if we are to assume the only explanation for religious growth is that something of real historical significance happened, we must wrestle with similar explanations in other faiths regardless of Wright’s attempt and downplay these implications in relation to said faiths.

Last evening after having finished Wright’s book I was profoundly thankful for him. I am honored to live in a time when I can have access to such a man and his teaching. I also hope that my questions, while pointed and suggesting I feel some areas of his argument need to be further explained, do not make me sound as if I do not recognize the significant truths he is arguing for. More importantly, I again bow (as I did last evening in my hotel room) to a creator God much, much greater than I am. If Jesus was His revelation then my questions have answers I do not understand. I hold out great hope that Christ was resurrected, but choose to carefully acknowledge the questions I have as being caustic enough to ascribe caution to what I say I believe. I will live a life that honors the teachings of Christ, and that recognizes my responsibility to be gracious, merciful, forgiving and loving. It is my great hope that this will be sufficient for whatever purposes God has for my life in His creation. Perhaps this is because Christian belief seems to have proven so unhelpful in changing the world, and perhaps it is because I hold out some illegitimate resistance to ideas of Divine Lordship. Only God knows. But I rest in my desire to do the best I can with my limited ability to believe, but my much more impactful ability to act - that He has ensured we are all capable of.

previous post: What Do We Mean When We Say “I Believe”?
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• May 1, 2005

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One Response to “Book Review: The Resurrection of the Son of God”

1. Scandblue Says:
   May 4th, 2005 at 12:26 am

   Ben,

   Again, another profoundly thought-provoking essay. Thank you

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