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Thursday, June 07, 2007

Wright, N. (2003) The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God) 

What is more, the developments in his view of what ' resurrection' meant, developments from within the Jewish view but going to places where no Jew had gone before, indicate that he thought he knew something more about what resurrection was, something for which his tradition had not prepared him. Resurrection was now happening in two stages (first Jesus, then all his people); resurrection as a metaphor meant, not the restoration of Israel (though that comes in alongside in Romans 11), but the moral restoration of human beings; resurrection meant, not the victory of Israel over her enemies, but the Gentile mission in which all would be equal on the basis of faith; resurrection was not resuscitation, but transformation into a non-corruptible body. And the only explanation for these modifications is that they originated in what Paul believed had happened to Jesus himself.
pp276

There is thus no suggestion in this passage that he is intending to explain the resurrection body within the framework of 'astral immortality'. As we saw when discussing Daniel 12 and Wisdom 3, this concept will in any case not work for those Jewish texts that, like Paul here, see the future beyond death in two steps or stages. Nor does Paul suppose that there is a 'soul' which corresponds, in its material make-up, to the stars; if that had been his intention, he would hardly have spoken in verses 44-6 of the present body as the 'soulish' one, the soma psychikon. Nor is the problem he faces the same as the one Plato and Cicero dealt with in their exposition of 'astral immortality'. They were eager to escape the prison-house of the body; but for Paul the problem was not the body itself, but sin and death which had taken up residence in it, producing corruption, dishonour and weakness. Being human is good; being an embodied human is good; what is bad is being a rebellious human, a decaying human, a human dishonoured through bodily sin and bodily death. What Paul desires, to take his terminology at face value, is not to let the soul fly free to a supposed astral home, but to stop the 'soul', the psyche, from being the animating principle for the body. Precisely because the soul is not, for him, the immortal fiery substance it is for Plato, he sees that the true solution to the human plight is to replace the ,soul' as the animating principle of the body with the 'spirit' - or rather, the Spirit. And that takes us into the next section.

346

The point is not, in other words, that the new humanity will exist in a place called 'heaven'. Rather, it will originate there, where Jesus himself currently is in his own risen and life-giving body; and it will transform. the life of those who are presently located on earth and earthy in character (ek ges choikos, verse 47). The whole argument runs in the opposite direction not only to Philo but to all kinds of Platonism ancient and modem. The point is not to escape from earth and find oneself at last in heaven, but to let the present 'heavenly' life change the present earthly reality. Heaven and earth, after all, are the twin partners in the creation which, at the heart of the passage Paul has in mind throughout this chapter, the creator had declared to be 'very good'.

1 co 15 355

The creator wil therefore make a new world, and new bodies, properto the new age to the new age. From one point of view the new world, and the new bodies, are the redeemed, remade versions of the old ones; that is the emphasis of Romans 8. From another point of view the new world, and the new bodies, are 'stored up in heaven'. We should not play these off against one another; the latter phrase means, among other things, that they are safe in the mind, plan and intention of the creator God. 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

For many centuries it has been assumed in western Christendom that the ultimate point of being a Christian was to 'go to heaven when you die'. Though one tradition (that of Rome, different in this respect from both Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism) inserted a time-lag into the process ('purgatory') for all except the utterly holy, the picture still remained: a place called 'heaven', where god and the angels lived, into which god's people would be admitted either immediately upon death or at some stage thereafter.` This picture was hugely reinforced in the medieval and renaissance periods by such masterpieces as the writings of Dante on the one hand and the paintings of Michelangelo on the other. 417



1 Peter 1.3-9

to a modem western reader, seems straightforward enough. The soul (psyche, verse 9) is what is saved, and this salvation will take place in heaven (verse 4). But there are three signs that this, though 'obvious' to many today, is not at all what the author intended.

First, the 'salvation' is 'to be revealed in the last time' (verse 5). This sounds more like the picture in Colossians 3 or 1 John 3: at present, the heavenly dimension is unseen, but one day it will be unveiled?' If salvation consisted simply of going off to the heavenly dimension and staying there while earth went on its way to destruction, the writer could not have put it like this. The reward of faith and perseverance will be unveiled, not when the recently departed arrive in a disembodied heaven, but 'at the revelation of Jesus the Messiah' (verse 7). This language belongs much more naturally with the idea of 'heaven' as the place where the creator's future purposes are stored up, 'kept safe' (verse 4) until they can be unveiled in the promised new world, than with the dualism which seeks to escape from earth and to arrive, safely disembodied, in 'heaven'.
465

Powerful, perhaps; but of course frequently misunderstood. The picture of
the heavenly city in the last two chapters of Revelation has often been inter-
preted through the lens of later western piety, imagining that this is simply
the 'heaven' to which Christians will go after their deaths. But that view is
not simply somewhat deficient; it is failing to read the text. In Revelation 21
(and elsewhere; this vision dominates the whole book, not just the ending)
the heavenly city comes down from heaven to earth. That is what the narra-
tive is all about. As Christopher Rowland has insisted, the end of Revelation
offers an ultimate rejection of a detached, other-worldly spirituality in
favour of an integrated vision of new creation in which 'heaven' and 'earth',
the twin halves of created reality are at last united. Always intended for one -
another, they are by this means to be remade, and to become the place where living god will dwell among his people for ever. 470


What matters is the soul, not the body. The latter is cheerfully left behind, not wanted on the final voyage. Here we have truly turned a corner, losing sight of virtually all the texts we have studied in this chapter, never mind the New Testament. We are back once more in the world of ancient Platonism.

533

The central argument of this Part of the book is now complete. The future hope of the early Christians is focused, in a thoroughly Jewish way, on resurrection; but it has been redefined beyond anything that ' at Judaism had said, or indeed would say later.
553

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