International Journal of Systematic Theology

Volume 6

Number 4

October 2004

The Resurrection of the Son of God

A Review Article on N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God. London: SPCK, 2003, xxi + 817pp. 55.00 hb., 35.00 pb. STEPHEN N. WILLIAMS*

It seems like a light year since a bishop of Durham pronounced that the resurrection was about more than an empty tomb, and not a conjuring trick with esh and bones. Presumably, no Christian had ever doubted the former, even if the more was often insufciently emphasized, or had ever maintained the latter, even if beliefs were often crudely expressed. With the present bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, the story is different. In a submission over eight hundred pages long, the third volume in his series on Christian Origins and the Question of God, he offers an account of the meaning of resurrection, a theology of the resurrection of the son of God and a defence of the substantial historicity of the canonical accounts of the empty tomb and bodily appearances of Jesus.1 Comment on the quality of Tom Wrights work, and this project in particular, is quite superuous, except to say, from the very outset, that we are dealing with a magnicent contribution to an enterprise of singular excellence and signicance for modern biblical study, theology and the church. Profoundest gratitude, as well as admiration, is in order. This frames all that follows. The thesis and line of argument is clear, worked out on a comprehensive scale and in great detail. It is legitimate for the historian who inquires into Christian origins, to investigate the assertion that Jesus rose from the dead. On no plausible understanding of history can the question be debarred. And on one point, we must be crystal clear, for it is pivotal: resurrection means bodily life after death and not mere post-mortem existence. When it was denied in ancient paganism, this was what was denied. Belief in life after death was one thing; in resurrection, another. Various ways of conceiving life after death are found in the Old Testament and post-biblical Judaism. Here, resurrection certainly can have a metaphorical meaning. Its concrete referent in such a case is the longed-for return from exile and vindication of the people of God. But, when not used metaphorically, it is never used to denote life after death per se, but a return to bodily life, life after life after death. There is
* United Theological College, 108 Botanic Avenue, Belfast BT7 1JT. 1 N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003).

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a spectrum of beliefs on life after death in Second Temple Judaism, and when resurrection appears on it, that is its meaning. The author hammers home this point. Puzzle: the word resurrection is used in the same way in the New Testament and in the early patristic era, excepting texts such as those we nd at Nag Hammadi, conspicuous by their re-casting of the vocabulary and concept. There is, of course, a metaphorical usage in the New Testament that corresponds to that in the Old, applied, by Paul, to baptism and holiness, to being risen now with Christ, and we come across other metaphorical usage in the evangelists.2 What is puzzling, or demands account, is the remarkable clarity and unanimity of the testimony to the fact that Christian witness clusters around the resurrection spectrum of Second Temple belief, that the whole notion has moved from the circumference to the centre (C.F. Evans) and that witness is now being given to a resurrection that is past, the resurrection of Jesus. When it was literally believed in Second Temple Judaism, it was future. Hope for the future resurrection of the people of the Messiah is reafrmed in the New Testament, and we nd introduced in its pages a rened theology of the continuity and discontinuity of the body. But another stage, a past stage, is inserted into the scenario: Jesus, Gods Messiah and son, is risen from the dead. This is an afrmation of the created order and an afrmation of lordship fraught with implications for the political order. Further, the vocabulary of messianic sonship is developed in a direction that puts the spotlight on the nature of a monotheism where the Son shares the throne of YHWH. So what accounts for the pivotal underlying claim about resurrection? Ultimately, nothing except what we are offered by the four evangelists. From a historical point of view, you can make no sense of the rise of belief in the resurrection, except on the assumption that the earliest stratum of witness maintained that the tomb was empty and that Jesus appeared to his disciples. And, from an historians point of view, the assumption is hard to account for, unless the witness is valid. If so, from a theological and philosophical point of view, the historians conclusion must be afrmed according to the binding force of the evidence for it. In a way consonant with the most rigorous application of historical science, and rigorous philosophy of critical historical realism, the outcome of historical investigation entails the construction or reconstruction of our world-views. I leave it to the readers imagination to gure out the relation of my precis to hundreds of pages of detailed scholarship, not to mention trenchant reasoning and lively writing. A volume as comprehensive as this carries the risk that readers will quarrel over this point or that, and exploit putative difculties to soften the force of an argument whose bold line might actually still remain intact. There was scarcely any way of avoiding that risk while accomplishing what the author has accomplished. The principal claims and argument seem to me to be, for the most part, as persuasively as they are carefully argued. Indeed, as I read this work, there were portents of the self-respecting reviewers worst nightmare, which is to work through a volume of over eight hundred pages on a matter of highest signicance,
2 And see Romans 11:15 as well.
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and nd oneself persuaded not just on so much of the substance of the argument, but also on so much of its detail. But it has come to something when this is the stuff of nightmares in the community of faith; those of us who are persuaded need to reect on the importance of what is advanced. Rather than do that here, however, I want to turn to aspects of the case where I am not persuaded. Bishop Wright strongly and insistently makes the claim that Jesus risen body is the model or prototype of what ours will be. Although he may be allowing in principle for at least some difference between the form of the body in which he appeared prior to the ascension, the body in which he appeared to Paul, and the body of the parousia, his argument depends on the belief that there is no signicant difference here. The body of the risen Jesus can be considered in any one of these three modes if they differ at all to be the prototype of ours. The discontinuity between Jesus risen and crucied body is certainly emphasized: the former is the bearer of properties that the other is not, eminently incorruptibility. But it is emphatically physical, and in physical continuity with the crucied body. This is an important issue for the author. It explains Christian origins, and it involves a quite fundamental theological afrmation about the Creators restoration of creation through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some theologians will doubtless see it as their business to weigh in here to consider the implications of the belief in the continued embodiment of Jesus. And while Tom Wright is not averse to alluding to attendant philosophical problems, as he puts it in relation to a different question (p. 349), he does not see it as his remit to deal with these in relation to Christology.3 I do not want to go beyond this remit. His argument requires that the account of the body that is offered in 1 Corinthians 15:35ff. applies to Jesus, until the point where Paul brings in nal Adam (p. 46). So, of the body of Jesus, the truly Human One, we must say that what he sowed did not come to life until it died; that he planted not the body that would be, but just a seed, perhaps of corn or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined; that it was sown a soma psuchikon and raised a soma pneumatikon. (Throughout the volume, omicron and omega, as epsilon and eta, are not distinguished in transliteration.) But this line of reasoning is surely problematic. At two points, the author cautions against setting Luke and Paul on a collision course over sarx. The Lukan text that generates the caution is the report of Jesus words in Luke 24:39: A spirit doesnt have esh and bones as you see I have. In relation to Pauls seeing Jesus, Tom Wright comments: As with Lukes esh and bones language . . . producing a surface tension with Pauls denial of esh and blood entering the kingdom in 1 Corinthians 15.50, the most we can say is that Luke was not concerned either to imitate Pauls language or to pursue his agendas (p. 390). Then: Flesh and bones here must not be played off against Pauls phrase esh and blood . . . Luke is not wedded to the special Pauline terminology in which esh (sarx) always designates that which is corruptible, and often that which is rebellious (p. 658).
3 I am collapsing theological and philosophical here.

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But the problem is less terminological than conceptual. Does the continuity that Luke portrays (along with the discontinuity) t with the discontinuity (along with continuity) on which Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15:35ff.? Clearly, it is hard to be precise enough to offer comparisons condently. While the surface of the Lukan language does not look congenial to description in terms of Jesus not planting the body that is to be, but God giving the seed a body, we can not dogmatically aver inconsistency. We can not squeeze out of the seed analogy very precise delineations of identity and transformation. And we, reading the Lukan narrative as a whole, might visualize and be struck by the continuity between the crucied and risen bodies (while granting discontinuity) where all the evangelists and rst witnesses (while afrming continuity) are struck by the discontinuity. Nevertheless, we are dealing with more than a surface terminological tension. Tom Wright glosses the Lukan account: His hands and feet . . . are the same hands and feet as before (p. 658) and he alludes to Jesus eating of sh (Lk. 24:42). Yet, in commenting on the passage in 1 Corinthians 6:1220 which appears to afrm present and future bodily continuity so strikingly, he says: There is that about the body which will be destroyed . . . in the non-corruptible future world, food and the stomach are presumably irrelevant (p. 290). The author is not seeking to harmonize straightforwardly all that Paul and Luke say; the four evangelists offer their separate renderings of what is, nonetheless, the basic story transmitted to and believed by Paul. Yet, on Tom Wrights account of things, Paul and Luke appear to be pulling in opposite directions signicantly more than the author grants. On this account, there is also a problem with the relationship between Pauline and Johannine theology. Wider christological issues arise here which go back to Bishop Wrights previous volume in this series, Jesus and the Victory of God. In this volume, he expressed his concern that we do not allow the developed categories of the trinitarian tradition to get in the way of our grasping aright the evangelists witness to Jesus. I suggest . . . that the return of YHWH to Zion, and the Templetheology which brings it to focus, are the deepest keys and clues to gospel christology. Forget the titles of Jesus, at least for a moment; forget the pseudoorthodox attempts to make Jesus of Nazareth conscious of being the second person of the Trinity; forget the arid reductionism that is the mirror-image of that unthinking would-be orthodoxy.4 Pseudo-orthodoxy aside, I fear that, in practice, this means: Forget the second person of the Trinity. The force of that injunction depends on whether we assent theologically to the belief that Jesus was God incarnate, as a rst-order ontological statement. It is importantly right to allow the appropriate Jewish framework to instruct us as to evangelical meaning, and to disallow the imposition of traditional dogmatic categories, where they are imposed just as a matter of principle. But,
4 N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996) p. 653. Tom Wright kindly pointed out to me the omission of a line in my quotation from this text, in my initial submission of this article review, egregiously distorting his meaning. I trust that there nevertheless remains a substantive issue at stake here, which is worth consideration.
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logically, if the one spoken of by the evangelists was the second person of the Trinity, God incarnate, and if the aim of the exercise in this volume is to understand Jesus as he was, then we can and should not forget the second person of the Trinity in trying to understand Jesus life and ministry, irrespective of what the evangelists are emphasizing at that point and of the utter propriety of hearing their voices aright. If I discover a few decades after his death that the present Bishop of Durham was, as a matter of blood and inheritance, the Crown Prince of an Arab principality, I ought to read his previous academic and present ecclesial career in that exotic light without dimming other shining lights. One response whether telling or not is that this is the case only if the Bishop of Durham knows himself to be such. And we encounter the following statement in Jesus and the Victory of God: Jesus did not . . . know that he was God in the same way that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate an orange an hour ago. His knowledge was of a more risky, but perhaps more signicant sort: like knowing one is loved. One cannot prove it except by living by it (p. 653). I think that this conclusion is underdetermined by the evidence that the author considers but, in any case, its validity requires adjudication on the question of the status and weight of Johannine testimony. And this question is explicitly disregarded (p. xvi). Yet those who framed the trinitarian doctrine of the church were dependent on it, though not on it alone. So it can be alleged that forgetfulness of the second person of the Trinity turns out to be: Forget John. Although it looked as though Tom Wright wanted to integrate the Johannine data into his account of things later in the project, I wonder if successful integration inasmuch as that involves a demonstration of the coherence of New Testament theology will force some revision. But in any case, the methodological issue remains. Johns witness to the resurrection is treated in the present volume, but a prima facie problem with it is glossed over. In his Contra Celsum, Origen, whose theology of resurrection the author considers, actually makes much of the Johannine text: Destroy this Temple, and I will raise it up.5 Tom Wright alludes to this text (e.g., pp. 4417). But he does not comment on its potentially contra-Pauline force. In his interpretation of Paul, he emphasizes that, as God raised Jesus, the human one, so he will raise us. A principle of anthropological vitality such as John speaks of here we can call it the ego, if we do not confuse the grammatical with the metaphysical subject, he who is the resurrection and the life appears to introduce distinctions between John and Paul, as Tom Wright understands Paul, that are not really mentioned. While uncommitted on the point, Bishop Wright thinks that Jesus may well have said something along these lines (p. 411). My point at the moment is that a Johannine theology of the resurrection which gave full force to the sayings about raising up the temple, about Jesus having authority to lay down and take up his life and his being the resurrection and the life, would yield an account of Jesus

Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) III.32; cf. II.10 and II.16 on Jesus power to lay down and take up his soul.

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humanity in relation to ours that is different from the Pauline theology, as understood by Tom Wright, with its soma psuchikon common to Jesus and ourselves. But is an account of Pauline theology required, which invites these difculties? It seems to me that Tom Wright plays down the extent of the contrast in 1 Corinthians 15 between the body that is now and the body that is to be. He renders verses 39 and 40 as follows: Not all esh is the same kind of esh, but there is one sort for humans, another sort for animals, another for birds, and another for sh. There are physical objects in the heavens, and there are physical objects on the earth . . . (p. 344). In a prefatory comment, this rendering is glossed with the words: There are different types of body or esh . . . But the Greek surely conveys a different, though not a contradictory, sense of things. Having talked resolutely of soma all the way from verse 35 onwards, Paul introduces a conspicuous change to the language of sarx in verse 39, applicable to humans, animals, birds and sh. What Tom Wright translates as physical objects in verse 40 are somata. The Pauline implication, however, seems to be that earthly somata are eshly; heavenly somata not. Ascription of physicality may not be denied to the heavenly somata and Tom Wright will say that only by oxymoron could we deny it but what is emphasized seems to be the contrasting composition of that which is compounded of sarx and that which is not. A more radical discontinuity between the present and future body than Tom Wright suggests, appears to be indicated by the sarx/soma contrast at this juncture. I question whether the evidence warrants such a tight connection between Jesus risen body and ours. Surely we can maintain the physical continuity between Jesus crucied and resurrected pre-ascension body, without insisting that it be the pattern for ours. This is not to deny that we have some form of future embodiment; it is to avoid seeing in Jesus risen physicality, prior to his ascension, its model. Although Jesus resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:111 grounds the fact of our resurrection, Paul nowhere specically says that the body seen between resurrection and ascension grounds its exact form. The parousia body of Jesus may ground its form (Phil. 3:21) though, even in this area, I doubt if the houtos of 1 Thessalonians 4:14 can bear the weight of meaning an exact model, even if it is not an adverb of inference (p. 215). Loosening the connections that Bishop Wright makes here threatens neither the reliability of the evangelists accounts of Jesus resurrection and appearances or belief in the renewal of creation and of humankind in some sort of bodily future. And the continuities between what we are now and what we shall be can still ground ethics.6

On p. 737, n. 42, the author alludes to his debt to Oliver ODonovans book, Resurrection and Moral Order, as he has indicated before. For my own reservations about ODonovans connection between resurrection and ethics, see Outline for Ethics: a Response to Oliver ODonovan, Themelios 13.3 (1988) and Evangelicals and Eschatology: a Contentious Case, in A.N.S. Lane, ed., Interpreting the Bible: Historical and Theological Studies in Honour of David F. Wright (Leicester: Apollos, 1997).
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Three questions remain on my account. Firstly, is there a tacit attempt to separate physicality from bodiliness in the case of Jesus eschatological appearance or our somata pneumatika? (Tom Wright coins the word transphysicality to capture the discontinuities between present and future.) We do not have the conceptual armoury to account for what is possible in the way of soma. Just as we might insist on the theological possibility of God as non-embodied and personal (an oxymoron in some peoples books) so it is theologically possible to be agnostic on whether our future beings should be characterized as bodily, yet not physical. The rumour of angels might warn us of this. But, Tom Wright insists, Paul distinguishes humans from angels, and what grounds have we to suppose that he could conceive of something bodily, but not physical, whatever the relation of his thought to the traditions of Jesus resurrection? No very secure grounds, I think; I nd Tom Wright quite persuasive here. At the same time, I think that Paul at least allows for a distinction between the physicality of our future existence and the physicality of Jesus pre-ascension body that is more radical than I nd in this account. Secondly, how can we account for Pauls account of matters in 1 Corinthians 15:35ff., if it is not a theological commentary on the Easter narratives presented, in their different ways, by the evangelists? I do not know the answer to this, but do not nd it a particularly troubling question. For all I know, Paul reected on the now hoary question of what happens to dismembered bodies, as well as what happened to the risen body of Christ. Others have a competence that I do not have in guring out the parameters of his world of thought. Thirdly, is it my suggestion that Paul and John are pulling in irreconcilably opposite directions? No: my point is that the contrasts are very striking if we insist that the Corinthian description of our soma psuchikon is a description of Jesus embodiment as well. If it is not, then the tension with John that I have mentioned, is diminished. To say that it need not be a description of Jesus embodiment is not to deny that much said of our embodiment must be said of Jesus embodiment as well, still less to court Apollinarianism. It is simply not to commit Pauline anthropology in 1 Corinthians 15:35ff. as tightly to the humanity of Christ, as does Tom Wright. But the matter is hard to pursue beyond this point, because it would take us back to the issues that surface in Jesus and the Victory of God on account of its omission of Johannine evidence, and take us forward all the way to the nal unfolding of this project, d.v., in a resolution of the matter of Christian Origins and the Question of God. All that can be ventured here is the remark that I think that we can give the unusual Johannine I will raise a higher theological prole than Tom Wright does without pitting it in opposition to God raised (something that Tom Wright, of course, does not do). And surely we must, if we are to do justice to the Johannine witness to the resurrection of the son of God. Bishop Wright may disagree on this point but, as far as I am concerned, the questions I raise are about modifying the thesis, not changing it. In general, I wondered whether the authors anxiety to secure the meaning of resurrection against detractors of that standpoint, has led to an overshooting of the mark (to pick up an early metaphor of the authors own). My comments hitherto might be tted
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under that rubric, but there seems to me evidence of this in far smaller ways, of which I give two examples. The rst is where, in his discussion of Lukes account of the ascension, Tom Wright says: Nor is Lukes story to be assimilated to the strange story of Elijah in the Old Testament. Elijah did not die; he was taken up to heaven directly (p. 655). If by assimilation is meant the threat of confusing Jesus bodily resurrection after death, and his ascension, with Elijahs mysterious non-resurrectional by-pass of death, I agree. But it is surely hard to avoid the conclusion that Luke is stressing rather strongly the connections. The turning-point in his narrative comes at much the same juncture as in the other synoptists, though earlier in his corpus, shortly after the transguration. As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem (Lk. 9:51). The vocabulary echoes the Septuagint in its account of Elijahs being taken up into heaven (2 Kgs 2:111); the incident following this verse harks back to an incident involving Elijah in the previous chapter in 2 Kings (1.10ff.) and, of course, we have just had the transguration. (Interestingly, the word idou in Lukes tranguration account, which Tom Wright points out is a Matthean favourite (p. 640) somehow connects Moses and Elijah (Mt. 9:30) with the two shining men at the tomb (Mt. 24:4) and the two gures attending the ascension (Acts 1:10).7) Tom Wrights main point is unaffected, but are potential theological possibilities being closed down here, in order that we do not weaken the case for Jesus resurrection by its false assimilation to the ascension of Elijah? The second is his dismissal of Maurice Wiles position. Tom Wright takes it that, for Wiles, resurrection is virtually synonymous with life after death, a way of speaking about the dead person being alive (p. 31, n. 75). But this is not what Professor Wiles was saying; rather, belief in resurrection is a form of belief in life after death, not a straightforwardly substitutable statement of it. When he spoke of hope in resurrection, in the sense of life after death, he did not mean that the terms are virtually synonymous; he was distinguishing between this sense and the sense of resurrection as present, as being raised with Christ now. On Tom Wrights account, it would be equally true to say that, for Maurice Wiles, immortality of the soul is virtually synonymous with life after death. But, for Professor Wiles, immortality and resurrection are alternative, not identical, ways of conceiving of life after death. If both immortality of the soul and resurrection were virtually synonymous with life after death, they would have to be virtually synonymous with each other.8 They are not, and if A is not identical with B, then it can not be that both A and B are identical with C. Conversely, Tom Wrights own distinctions between word and concept, picture and idea, in relation to the resurrection, are not as clean as they might be. An illustration of this is found on p. 164, where we move from the concept of immortality to the word immortality and the rather opaque claim is made that [b]y
7 8 A detail worth noting is that what is reported as two men in Lk. 24:4 is a vision of angels in 24:23, which broadly aids in the harmony of synoptic accounts. The theoretical exibilities of virtually do not affect us here.
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itself, the word simply means a state in which death is not possible . The notion of a word by itself is difcult to grasp in this context. As far as I can judge, the main lines of the argument survive all this perfectly well. But a lengthy volume like this makes demands on us: when surveying the New Testament data, all the way through to the evangelists accounts, we have to keep in our heads the detailed arguments offered earlier from Homer, Plato and company through to The Epistle to Rheginos and The Gospel of Philip. So it may be that something that I have missed hangs on my queries about formulation. Finally, what of faith and history, the big question, for dwellers in the realms of Systematics? The authors position ies in the face of what has long been fashionable, but it is carefully constructed particularly if we take the previous volumes into account and free of naive evidentalism.9 It might be objected that Tom Wright does not sufciently allow for the fact that his putative conclusions, as a historian, run up against what we might need to afrm or deny about God on other grounds, that is, the historians limits qua historian are exceeded. But the author has been alert to this question from the beginning and I think that the objection is hard to sustain as a matter of principle. One might query the very occasional formulation where the distinction is elided between what we can say as historians and what we should say as persons or as theologians, on the basis of historical work, but the authors handling of the matter in question, especially in the last chapter, makes this either a distinction without a relevant difference or a distinction which is implicit anyway, so it amounts to a mere quibble.10 Almost. The strongest statement in modern times of the believers innite passion and interest in relation to historical truth, is surely that of Kierkegaard in his Concluding Unscientic Postscript.11 Kierkegaard powerfully resists the historical approach, which he thinks can only yield approximation and which he links with illicit speculative objectivity. My head is, for the most part, with Tom Wright, rather than Kierkegaard, on this one. But one feels the force of a Kierkegaardian riposte when Tom Wright is throwing the gauntlet of historical explanation before us at the close of the books penultimate chapter. On the question of whether the evidence leads us to embrace the belief that Jesus was indeed raised from the dead, he says: It is, of course, perfectly possible to say that one cannot decide. But for those who prefer not to live on such a knife-edge for ever . . . the challenge is: what alternative account can be offered? (pp. 717f.). For Kierkegaard, the whole issue must be set up as a matter of existential urgency from the beginning, for who can abide on the knife-edge? Tom Wright, I believe, agrees, as his remarks on self-involvement show. But (gratuitously? cravenly? pettily?) seizing on this remark of his, in light of Kierkegaard, is a way in to asking whether there is something about the historical approach to Christology and resurrection that at least
9 10 11 See here the rst volume in the series, The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992). One place where this question arises is on p. 211. I use Kierkegaard as shorthand for the pseudonymous author of this work.

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potentially endangers a theological approach. This is where Hans Frei comes into things. Tom Wright cites Frei as an inuential example of a position that he wishes to reject: that the historical study of the resurrection to which he aspires should, for theological reasons, not be undertaken.12 I greatly regret that space forbids commenting here not only on his tentative interpretation of Hans Frei, but also on that of the editors of Freis Theology and Narrative.13 Let me just note Hans Freis short Response to Narrative Theology: An Evangelical Appraisal . His struggle here, intellectually unresolved so late in his academic life, is with categories. If categories of historical reality and fact are deployed in relation to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Hans Frei afrms the empty tomb and literal resurrection. But can they be straightforwardly deployed? Is Jesus Christ . . . a fact like other historical facts? Should I really say that the eternal Word made esh, that is, made fact indeed, is a fact like any other? I can talk about Jesus that way, but can I talk about the eternal Word made esh in him that way? I dont think so . . ..14 In light of what follows, it would be easy to think that Frei is thinking in terms that Tom Wright discusses elsewhere, that is, of the Troeltschian difculties with a historical approach to events that have no analogy. But something more is going on here, and here I must resort to the kind of gnostic allusiveness in which folk sometimes feel entitled to indulge in relation to a Doktorvater, assuming merry immunity from the possibility of falsication. Actually, what matters is the point made, not whether I am right or wrong about Hans Frei. One thing underlying the theological intuition and literary striving of which George Hunsinger speaks, with characteristic penetration, is the fact that Frei was in a manner haunted by the person of Christ, if that word is not taken to imply knowledge of anothers soul. His writing on Christology bears witness to this, though without necessarily reecting directly what was being wrestled about. Deeply sensitive to the tragedies of human existence, to the rough edges of human and Christian life, and equally sensitive to the impression made by the canonical Jesus Christ on the believer, he found it impossible to believe that a dispassionate historical investigation would conduct the soul to the vicinity of faith.15 What we are dealing with in this person, Jesus Christ, that makes him Saviour, eludes the empirical claw. We must, I think, honour this realization. To learn that Jesus, Gods Messiah, was raised from the dead, and to what purpose, is crucial. But to learn in the depth of our persons who he is in the depth of his person, the profound truth of an identity that can not merely be formally described, is another matter. However important the des historica, des salvica is born of illumination, of the operation of Spirit, and trades in a dimension that the historian can not remotely attain, qua historian. I do
See especially pp. 21ff. Hans Frei, Theology and Narrative, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 14 Frei, Theology and Narrative, p. 211. 15 The point is methodological; it might do so in a given case.
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not for a moment claim that Tom Wright believes or implies anything contrary to this. And if The Resurrection of the Son of God nevertheless generates my train of thought, that may be partly the function of pondering this volume without a perpetually lively sense in mind of the detail of the previous one, with its sustained exposure to Jesus. Tom Wright mentions that his earlier omission of discussion of resurrection had the unexpected result that some reviewers of JVG accused me of not being interested in, or not believing in, Jesus resurrection (pp. xvf.). He must now have the frustrating or depressing sense that you cant win if, now, a reviewer is perhaps not just asking about what may come in subsequent volumes, but also worrying about forgetting what came in the last. Having said that, taking my cue from Hans Frei, though regardless of whether I have got him quite right, the deep human and soteriological questions must be so rmly lodged in the believers consciousness, that we can give no quarter to the view that historical resolution and explanation takes us to the forecourt of faith. Adamantly, with Tom Wright, and against the stream, investigation of the resurrection of Jesus is possible and necessary; its results positive and vital. But precisely its success will conrm what others will maintain who deem the issue less certain than does the author: that, having learned as historians of the resurrection of the Son of God, and even of the rich connections between his messiahship and his lial sharing of Yahwehs throne, we still, in one respect, have not begun to penetrate his identity.16

16

My thanks to Eddie Adams, of Kings College, London, for his comments on this article.

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