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In Chapter 4 we have tried to understand the death of Jesus on the cross in the context of his theological life and work. In the three dimensions which we described, Jesus’ way to the cross ended with open questions: with the question of the righteousness of God, between Jesus and the understanding of law in his time; with the question of the authority of freedom, between Jesus and the religio-political power of Rome; and with the question of the divinity of God, between Jesus and his Father. Now we face the task of understanding his death and his life and thus his whole historical appearance in the context of his resurrection from the dead and of eschatological faith. Both perspectives must be reciprocally related to one another, if his truth is to be both perceived and understood. Here one cannot separate historical consideration from eschatological understanding, nor put the two things together afterwards. The historical Jesus is not ‘half Christ’, nor is the risen Christ the other half of Jesus. It is a question of one and the same person and his unique history. The risen Christ is the historical and crucified Jesus, and vice versa. The reason for the ‘differentiated connection’ of the historical and eschatological perspectives is the uniqueness of the person of Jesus and his history; because of his death on the cross, the only way in which they can adequately be described is by the double formulae ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘crucified and risen’. But what makes possible the eschatological recognition of his person, his life and death in the light of his resurrection from the dead? What justifies it?
The decisive element for primitive Christianity was not just the history of the life and death, the proclamation and the work of Jesus; it attached equal weight to the unexpected and un-derivable new factors of his resurrection by God, of the gift of the spirit and of faith among Jews and Gentiles. The union of Jesus with God and of God with Jesus was constituted for it by that event which it originally and—as we shall see—rightly called ‘the resurrection of Jesus’. The first creeds that we know speak of ‘Jesus the Lord’, and of ‘God who has raised him from the dead’ (Rom. 10:6; 1 Cor. 15:1), in the same breath. They combine a formula about a person with a formula about a work. The confession of the crucified Jesus as kyrios was grounded on faith in the God who had raised him. Conversely, this faith in God was completely and utterly a resurrection faith and concerned the person of the crucified Christ, in whom God had acted and in whom the God who raises from the dead had manifested himself. As a process and as an event, the resurrection was so to speak a light into which it was impossible to look directly. It was necessary to look at the one whom it illuminated and manifested, and that was none other than Jesus, the crucified. If the person and history of Jesus, and God’s act in raising him, are both constitutive of Christian faith, then it is not a question of establishing the life and death of Jesus as a historical fact, and regarding the resurrection, the appearances of Jesus and the Easter faith as interchangeable interpretations of that fact. That would not do justice to the rise of the Christian faith at all. Rather, the legitimate critical question is: does the primitive Christian belief in the resurrection do justice to the life and death of Jesus, or has it put something else in Jesus’ place? The true criticism of dogma is its history, remarked D. F. Strauss. We have changed that and said: the true criticism of faith in the resurrection is the history of the crucified Christ. So we must subject belief in the resurrection to the history of the crucified Christ as its true criticism.
‘If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain and your faith is vain,’ says Paul in 1 Cor. 15:14. If one calls the cross of Jesus the ‘nuclear fact’ of Christian faith, one must call his resurrection the primal datum of that faith. An analysis of the process of primitive Christian tradition confirms the fact. There was hardly any dispute over Jesus’ resurrection, but there was over the interpretation of his death on the cross in the light of the resurrection. Primitive Christian recollections of Jesus were determined from the start by the experience of his resurrection through God. That was the only reason why his words and his story were remembered and why people were concerned with him. Even today, it is doubtful whether there is any other adequate reason for being concerned with the person and history of Jesus Christ which lie so far back in the past. As a merely historical person he would long have been forgotten, because his message had already been contradicted by his death on the cross. As a person at the heart of an eschatological faith and proclamation, on the other hand, he becomes a mystery and a question for every new age.
If we are to understand the truth about Jesus according to the witness of the New Testament, we must take two courses at the same time: we must read his history both forwards and backwards, and relate both readings, the ontic-historical and the noetic-eschatological, to each other and identify the results we achieve.
Just as, historically speaking, the crucifixion precedes the Easter appearances, so for the faith of the primitive church all knowledge of Jesus (in the sense of certainty of salvation) was only possible after Easter. This applies to the one who was incarnate and crucified as well as to the one who was pre-existent and exalted. Nor must we confine this observation to the experience of the primitive church. It is a basic truth and applies at all periods. If this were not so, a theology of the Word would be quite unjustifiable.
First of all, this applies only to Christian faith. As the New Testament shows, not only in the epistles but also in the gospels, Christian faith essentially reads the history of Jesus back to front: his cross is understood in the light of his resurrection, his way to the cross in the light of the saving meaning of his cross, his words and miracles in the light of his Easter exaltation to be Lord. Even his insignificant birth is recalled and narrated in the light of his crucifixion. Ernst Bloch is right about this reading of the history of Jesus Christ in the light of his resurrection: ‘Indeed, even the end of Christ was nonetheless his beginning.’ Jesus’ resurrection from the dead by God was never regarded as a private and isolated miracle for his authentication, but as the beginning of the general resurrection of the dead, i.e. as the beginning of the end of history in the midst of history. His resurrection was not regarded as a fortuitous miracle in an unchangeable world, but as the beginning of the eschatological transformation of the world by its creator. Thus the resurrection of Jesus stood in the framework of a universal hope of eschatological belief, which was kindled in it. The first titles of Christ to be formulated under the impact of the appearances of the crucified Jesus in the light of the coming glory of God are titles of promise and hope: ‘The first fruits of them that are asleep’, ‘the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead’, the ‘pioneer of life’. That means that the crucified Christ was understood in the light of his resurrection and that his resurrection was understood in the light of his future in the coming God and his glory. Therefore his historical crucifixion was understood as the eschatological event of judgment and his resurrection as a hidden anticipation of the eschatological kingdom of glory in which the dead will be raised. The ‘future’ of which the first real anticipation was seen in his resurrection was not understood as future history and thus as part of transitoriness, but eschatologically as the future of history and thus as the pledge of the new creation. ‘Easter’ was a prelude to, and a real anticipation of, God’s qualitatively new future and the new creation in the midst of the history of the world’s suffering. So in the light of this prelude to the coming God and the coming end of this abandoned world it was also necessary to recall, understand and proclaim in eschatological terms the one who presented this prelude, Jesus of Nazareth. For the Easter hope shines not only forwards into the unknown newness of the history which it opens up, but also backwards over the graveyards of history, and in their midst first on the grave of a crucified man who appeared in that prelude. The symbol of the ‘resurrection of the dead’ which is used by eschatological belief combines God’s future with the past of the dead and expresses not only hope for those to come, but also hope for those who have passed on in God. Correspondingly, the creed of early Christian faith that ‘Jesus was raised from the dead’ expresses a certainty about the future of the Jesus who was killed and by his death was condemned to the past. The Christian resurrection hope is kindled by the appearances of Jesus; as a result it first casts its light backwards on to the Jesus who died on the cross. Only from him and through him does the resurrection hope then extend to the living and the dead. ‘For to this end has Christ died and come alive again, that he might be Lord of both dead and living’ (Rom. 14:9).
In the modern historical sense we talk of Jesus of Nazareth, because in historical terms and temporality his origin should explain his future and his beginning his end. But eschatological faith speaks of Jesus whom God has raised from the dead, and of Jesus as the Christ of God, the one who ‘reserves a place for the God who is to come’ (which is how one can interpret the title ‘Christ’), because his future determines and explains his origin and his end his beginning. The historical title ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ binds Jesus to his past. The eschatological title ‘Christ’ binds him to his future.
Are there starting points for this eschatological reading of Jesus’ history in historical thought generally? Rudolf Bultmann once remarked:
Events or historical figures are not historical phenomena in themselves, not even as members of a sequence of cause and effect. They are ‘historical phenomena’ only in the way in which they are related to their future, for which they have significance and for which the present bears the responsibility.
Unfortunately, he himself then abandoned this fruitful notion for fear of Hegelianism and replaced the ‘eschatological interpretation’ of history which is suggested here by an existentialist interpretation of the eschatological historicity of existence. But if his remark quoted above is correct, in the present case it follows that as a ‘historical phenomenon’ Jesus will be understood ‘historically’ only in the way in which he is related to his future, for which he has significance, and that the responsibility of present faith is for such a historical understanding of Jesus, together with his future. Faith’s own historicity arises only from the eschatological connection between Jesus and his future, which it perceives.
F. Rosenzweig has spoken even more aptly of history as an ‘unfinished world’:
This state of becoming and unfinishedness can only be grasped by a reversal of the objective relationships of time. Whereas the past, that which is already finished, lies there from its beginning to its end and can be narrated … the future can only be grasped as what it is, namely the future, by means of anticipation.
If history were finished and we were standing at its end, one would be able to narrate world history from the beginning to the end, and one would be able to estimate the significance of each part for the whole. But as we are not at the end, but in the midst of history, we always associate, consciously or unconsciously, recollections of the past with hopes and fears for the future, and interpret the past in respect of the future of our own present. With historical recollections we connect an outline of the whole of history, i.e. of the end of history.
W. Benjamin has expressed the dialectical identity of eschatology and history in a still more subtle manner:
Only the Messiah himself brings to consummation all historical events, in the sense that he himself resolves, completes, creates their relationship to the messianic. Therefore nothing historical can of itself want to be related to the messianic. Therefore the kingdom of God is not the telos of historical dynamis. From a historical point of view it is not the goal, but the end … Thus the profane is not a category of the kingdom, but a category, perhaps the most appropriate category, for its slightest approach.
Only the historian has the gift of kindling the sparks of hope in the past which is permeated by it; even the dead will not be safe from the enemy when he conquers. And this enemy has not ceased to conquer.
Benjamin has expressed things similarly in his picture of the angelus novus. Since for him history is fundamentally a history of suffering, it cannot itself become pregnant with a messianic future. The messianic history of life runs counter to the history of the suffering of the world which leads to death, and approaches it from the future. But in this counter-course it has a redemptive relationship to the whole history of death and the dead. This view comes very near to being an eschatological theology of the crucified Christ, if it is in a position to unfold hope and liberation in the history of the suffering of the world from the history of the suffering of the risen Christ. Thus the reversed ‘eschatological reading of history’ is not so alien among the general problems of universal history-writing as positivists might think. Rather, historical positivism is eschatological in its solemn concern to ‘end’ history by dissolving its facts and laws in positivistic epistemology. The general structural connections of recollection and hope, profanity and messianic nature, when applied to historical knowledge and historical writing in the midst of an ‘open’ history of suffering and death, do not ‘prove’ the justification of the primitive Christian eschatology of the life and death of Jesus, but they do make it more comprehensible.
We must first ask what Easter faith says and what it does not say, and begin with the situation of the eye-witnesses. Jesus was crucified in public. But at first only his disciples learned of his resurrection by God through the ‘appearances of Jesus’. After that they spoke again of Jesus as the Christ in public. What had happened to them, according to their own account? Easter faith arose among those who knew Jesus, who had gone about with him and who had experienced his crucifixion in human helplessness and abandonment by God. It arose first among those who without exception had fled from the place where he was crucified and whose faith in Jesus had been refuted by this harsh fact. The situation of the Easter witnesses was therefore determined: 1. by the preaching of Jesus and their discipleship; 2. by the crucifixion of Jesus and their faith which was shattered by it; 3. by the themes and symbols of the general apocalyptic expectation held by the Judaism of their time, under Roman domination. This sequence must be noted, so that Easter faith is not derived directly from the general apocalyptic mood of the Judaism of the time. The Easter faith was given its Christian determination primarily by Jesus’ proclamation of the righteousness of the kingdom of God which was approaching in grace, and which already represented a change from the apocalyptic pattern of righteousness. This faith was also determined by the death of Jesus as a ‘lawless man’, a ‘rebel’ and ‘one abandoned by God’. Between the eschatological Easter faith and the various forms of late-Jewish apocalyptic stood Jesus himself and his cross. If the first enthusiastic forms of Christian belief in the resurrection do not always betray a clear consciousness of this fact, the more time goes on the less it can be missed.
How did the eye-witnesses see the risen Christ? In the Easter kerygma the Easter faith is constantly grounded in a ‘seeing’. What was the structure of this seeing? The expression ὤφθη, which already occurs in pre-Pauline tradition, is presumably the earliest. It can mean that Christ was seen; it can also mean that Christ appeared and showed himself. Finally, following the passive periphrasis of the divine name which is to be found in Judaism, it can also mean that God showed him. In that case, it is a revelation formula such as also appears in theophanies in the Old Testament. The activity lies with the one who appears or with the one who makes someone else appear. The man affected by the appearance is passive. He experiences the appearance of God in his knowledge of God. It is the seeing of something which is given to someone to see. It is therefore not the seeing of something which is always there. Nor is it a seeing that can be repeated and can be verified because it can be repeated. In Gal. 1:15 Paul associates this ‘appearing’ and ‘seeing’ with the expression ἀποκάλυψις. If the group of words relating to appearing and seeing is associated with this group of words connected with revelation, then we have a very definite meaning: God is disclosing something which is concealed from the knowledge of the present age of the world. He is revealing something which cannot be known by the mode of knowledge of the present time. Now it is ‘the mysteries of the end-time’, i.e. God’s future and the righteousness of his kingdom, which are concealed and cannot be known under the conditions of the present age. The present age of unrighteousness cannot tolerate the righteousness of God, and so the righteousness of God brings about a new age. This is manifest only at the end of the unrighteous world as a ground for the new world. So too God himself will reveal himself in his glory only at the end of the old age and at the beginning of the new. But in the history of the unrighteous world there are already anticipatory revelations of his future. That is an old prophetic and apocalyptic tradition: ‘Surely the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets’ (Amos 3:7). ‘For just as with respect to all that has happened in the world the beginning is obscure but the end manifest, so also are the times of the Most High: the beginnings are visible in portents and secret signs, and the end in effects and marvels’ (4 Ezra 9:5). Anticipatory revelations of God’s future in the Old Testament are constantly associated with prophetic calls and the sending of prophets into this world. Even Paul understood the appearance of the risen Christ which he experienced as his call to the apostolate, following the pattern of the prophetic calls. But that means that in the view of those concerned, the appearances of the risen Christ had the structure of anticipatory vision, and were bound up with a call to special service of the one who was to come, in the transitory world. They were therefore not mystical transportations into another world beyond, nor were they inner illuminations, but a sight and a foretaste in the countenance of the crucified Christ of the God who was to come, a matter of being seized by the coming change in the world through God’s glory. The Easter visions had two sides: the eye-witnesses 1. had a foretaste of the coming glory of the kingdom of God in the form of Jesus and 2. recognized Jesus again by the marks of crucifixion. So we can say that the visions were a reunion in anticipation and an anticipation in reunion. The disciples saw Jesus in the glory of the coming God and the glory of the coming God in Jesus. It was a reciprocal process of identification.
This form of the Easter visons explains the return of the disciples from Galilee to Jerusalem, ‘although any other place clearly offered better protection to the adherents of the crucified Nazarene’. They had to wait for the kingdom of the crucified Christ, an anticipation of which they had seen, in Jerusalem, for in the first place he had been crucified there; and in the second place, according to apocalyptic tradition Jerusalem was the place where the expected Messiah or Son of Man would appear. When they reached Jerusalem they will have found there stories about the empty tomb and will have accepted these as confirmation of the new eschatological belief in Jesus that they had brought with them. According to this analysis of the Easter appearances and visions, the original significance of the Easter faith is that the eye-witnesses perceived the earthly, crucified Jesus of the past in the glory of God’s coming and drew conclusions from that in their experience of a call and mission. In that case it must be said that Jesus was raised into God’s future and was seen and believed as the present representative of this future, of the free, new mankind and the new creation. In that case he was not raised into heaven and in that sense eternalized or divinized. Nor was he raised into the kerygma or into faith, for both kerygma and faith are understood eschatologically as the promise and hope of what is to come. Jesus ‘rose into the final judgment of God’ to which both kerygma and faith bear witness.
Now when it is seen in terms of the hope that sheds its light backwards, that means that the glory of the coming God has been manifested in the helplessness and shame of the crucified Jesus. The final judgment has already been made in his execution. Jesus’ deliverance to men and their attitude to him are decisive for the final judgment. His forgiveness of sins is God’s law of grace. The coming God has been made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. The future of the qualitatively new creation has already begun through the history of Jesus’ suffering in the history of the suffering of the abandoned world. The judgment has been anticipated and by his death has already been decided in favour of the accused. If, as the Easter vision implies, God has identified himself, his judgment and his kingdom with the crucified Jesus, his cross and his helplessness, then conversely the resurrection of the crucified Jesus into the coming glory of God contains within itself the process of the incarnation of the coming God and his glory in the crucified Jesus. When John stresses that Jesus was glorified on the cross, the converse implication is that the glory of God was crucified in him and thus made manifest in this unjust world. The Christian belief in resurrection is the foundation not only of the transcendence but also of the immanence of this faith, because it sees the transcendent God immanent in Jesus, and conversely the immanent Jesus transcended in God.
Here we come to matters about which the Easter faith says nothing. No witness claims to have seen what happened between Good Friday and Easter. There are no eye-witnesses to the process of the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb. But in that case why did they talk of his ‘resurrection’ and not, say, of his elevation or his eternalization? If ‘seeing’ Jesus after his death had the structure of anticipation on the ground of the anticipatory vision of his future in the coming God, it then becomes comprehensible why those concerned spoke of his ‘resurrection from the dead’ and adopted this apocalyptic symbol for the new creative action of God. It is a symbol for the ‘end of the history’, of unrighteousness, evil, death and abandonment by God, and for the beginning of the new world of the righteousness of God. Is this symbol appropriate to the matter with which it is concerned?
‘Resurrection of the dead’ first of all excludes any idea of a revivification of the dead Jesus which might have reversed the process of his death. Easter faith can never mean that the dead Jesus returned to this life, which leads to death. Were that the case, then he would have to be expected to die once more like, Lazarus, who according to John 11 was raised by Christ, although his corpse was already stinking, and who then later died again. The symbol of ‘resurrection from the dead’ means a qualitatively new life which no longer knows death and therefore cannot be a continuation of this mortal life. ‘Christ being raised from the dead will never die again,’ says Paul (Rom. 6:9). Resurrection means ‘life from the dead’ (Rom. 9:15), and is itself connected with the annihilation of the power of death. On the other hand, ‘resurrection of the dead’ excludes any idea of ‘a life after death’, of which many religions speak, whether in the idea of the immortality of the soul or in the idea of the transmigration of souls. Resurrection life is not a further life after death, whether in the soul or the spirit, in children or in reputation; it means the annihilation of death in the victory of the new, eternal life (1 Cor. 15:55). The notion of ‘life after death’ can coexist peacefully with the experience that this life is a ‘life towards death’. But the ‘resurrection of the dead’, understood as a present hope in the midst of the ‘body of death’, contradicts the harshest facts of life which point in the opposite direction, and cannot leave either death or the dead in peace, because it symbolizes the future of the dead. Thus the expression ‘resurrection of the dead’, which seemed to follow from the Easter visions, does not deny the fatality of death, whether this death is the death of Jesus on the cross or death in general, with the help of ideas of a life after death in some shape or form. Nor does it reduce the new element which the disciples perceived in Jesus to a dimension of the earthly Jesus, like the continuing influence of his cause or his spirit, or to a dimension of the faith of the disciples, like their longing for their own justification despite the disappointment of the cross or their desire for hope for their crucified past. It is therefore appropriate to the two experiences—the experience of his death on the cross and the experience of his appearances in the light of the coming glory of God. But can it be used further in Christianity, once the thought-world of Jewish apocalyptic has faded far into the past and become incomprehensible? The symbol of the resurrection of the dead comes from Jewish apocalyptic and was a firm ingredient of Jewish expectations among many groups at the time of Jesus. What does this symbol convey in that context, and what does it say in the Christian context?
At the end of days God will raise the dead, and in so doing will demonstrate his power over the power of death. The end-time of the world and the beginning of the new creation dawns with the general resurrection of the dead. Now the proclamation of the Easter witnesses that God has ‘raised’ this dead Jesus ‘from the dead’ amounts to nothing less than the claim that this future of the new world of the righteousness and presence of God has already dawned in this one person in the midst of our history of death. All who hear and believe this, move from a distant expectation of an uncertain future to a sure hope in a near future of God which has already dawned in that one person. Whereas Jewish apocalyptic says that men should wait for ‘the resurrection of the dead’, Easter faith says that men should believe in ‘the resurrection of Jesus from the dead’. This is already an important alteration in the symbol of the resurrection of the dead itself. The alteration asserts that this one man has been raised before all others and that with him the process of the raising of the dead has been set in motion, to the degree that this world of death and the coming world of life are no longer set over against each other like two different periods of the world. Believers no longer live in this unredeemed world of death. In that one man the future of the new world of life has already gained power over this unredeemed world of death and has condemned it to become a world that passes away. Therefore, in faith in the risen Jesus, men already live in the midst of the transitory world of death from the powers of the new world of life that have dawned in him. There is already true life in the midst of false life, though only in communion with the one who had been crucified by that false life. ‘The future has already begun.’ Jesus’ resurrection already makes possible the impossible, namely reconciliation in the midst of strife, the law of grace in the midst of judgment, and creative love in the midst of legalism. Just as Jesus proclaimed, ‘The kingdom of God is near at hand’, so, on the basis of his resurrection from the dead, with a similar structure the early church proclaimed, ‘The day (viz. of God) has come near’ (Rom. 13:12) and ‘the end of all things is at hand’ (1 Peter 4:7). Thus the ‘night’ of false life and unrighteousness and the ‘unredeemed world’ is ‘far spent’. Over against Jewish apocalyptic we find expressed here a new eschatological understanding of time, and it is this, for all the change in cosmological ideas, that is constitutive for the eschatological faith of Christianity. Without this eschatological consciousness of time, all the things that the Christian church claims and proclaims as being present: the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation and discipleship in love, are fundamentally impossible. The attested resurrection of Jesus before all other men is in fact meant proleptically. Now according to the apocalyptic order of hope, such an anticipation of the future which was to affect all men was not expected at all. The redemption of the unredeemed world is public and universal, or it has not yet come about. Nevertheless, in the apocalyptic tradition there were also legends of a premature ascension of particular righteous men, like Elijah and Enoch. There was also the notion that great spirits of the past so to speak ‘rise again’ in their great followers. So, for example, it was asked whether John the Baptist or Elijah had ‘risen again’ in Jesus. Wolfhart Pannenberg thinks that the special feature in Christian faith, as opposed to apocalyptic, is this prolepsis. Just as Jesus proleptically claimed the distant kingdom of God and referred his claim to God for future confirmation, so Easter faith proclaimed the ‘end of history’, in which God will fully reveal himself, as ‘anticipated’ by his resurrection. ‘In the fate of Jesus the end of history has taken place beforehand as an anticipation.’ As far as the formal structure of the Easter visions and the Christian symbol of the ‘resurrection of Jesus from the dead’, together with the Easter kerygma, are concerned, that is hard to dispute. But it still does not provide any historical proof for Jesus’ claim, since in the case of the claim of the earthly Jesus and his resurrection from the dead the verification pattern of claim and confirmation has again been referred to the confirmation of his resurrection from the dead by the general resurrection of the dead. What has taken place in Jesus is for its part again referred for its confirmation to the end of history, which is here said to be anticipated. It is true that the proclamation of the ‘resurrection of Jesus from the dead’ only makes sense in the eschatological horizon of the ‘resurrection of the dead’. But an anticipation can confirm that it is an anticipation and confirm that which is to be anticipated only in the context of what has been itself anticipated. And to recognize what has been anticipated eschatologically in the sequence of historical anticipations which refer to each other and confirm each other requires faith, namely faith in what has been anticipated, which can only be recognized in anticipation. Whereas Jesus anticipated the coming kingdom by his word and was publicly crucified for it, the Easter anticipation of the resurrection was manifested in a different way. Knowledge of it led directly to faith in Jesus, to certain hope in his coming and to the actions of the apostolate. This was therefore no unpartisan knowledge established on a neutral basis, but a knowledge that engaged men, claimed their allegiance and called them to the apostolate. Thus it is removed from what in modern times is understood as a factual historical proof. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead by God does not speak the ‘language of facts’, but only the language of faith and hope, that is, the ‘language of promise’. I have therefore denoted the proleptic structure of the proclamation of Jesus and the Christian resurrection faith by the word ‘promise’. In the sphere of speech this expresses the very anticipation which for Pannenberg lies in the fact itself. There is no need here to be involved in a dispute between the expressions ‘verbal prolepsis’ (promise) and ‘real prolepsis’ (anticipatory event). Both expressions say the same things on different levels. My own view is that the expression ‘promise event’ corresponds more really to the continuing difference between the demonstrably ‘unredeemed world’ and faith in the coming of reconciliation in the midst of strife than the verbally pacifying talk of the actual anticipation of the end.
The point of difference lies elsewhere. Only the new creation in Christ and through Christ will demonstrate the new element in the proclamation of Jesus and the new element in his anticipated resurrection from the dead. This points to ‘eschatological verification’. Conversely, this means that the old, unredeemed and unchanged world of suffering, guilt and death is not capable of demonstrating the new creation, in which there will be no more sorrow, no more crying and no more tears. This ‘scandal of the qualitative difference’ between the unfree world and the free world, between false and true life, between the unredeemed world and redeemed existence, may not be brought down to a single level. In so far as and so long as the cross of Jesus is a scandal and foolishness in the world, his resurrection cannot be demonstrated to this world, except through the freedom of a faith which runs contrary to this world and is therefore constantly on trial. It lies with reality in the dispute over the future of true being. For Christians, the ‘scandal of qualitative difference’ cannot be an abstract one, which attests the dream of the other life through a ‘great refusal’. The Christian scandal of the qualitative difference lies in the cross of the Christ whom God has raised.
Let us therefore ask once again: was the proleptic feature of anticipation really the special element in the Christian Easter faith?
As Daniel 12 shows, in apocalyptic expectation the expectation of a general resurrection of the dead was an integral part of the expectation of God. God will raise the dead in the last days. But why? In the apocalyptic expectation this was no longing for eternal life. ‘Resurrection of the dead’ was not an anthropological or a soteriological symbol, but a way towards expressing belief in the righteousness of God. God is righteous. His righteousness will conquer. As the righteousness of God, it cannot be limited even by death. So God will summon both dead and living before his judgment seat. But that is only possible if he has raised the dead beforehand, so that they can identify themselves with the deeds and omissions of their earthly life at his judgment. In the judgment God returns to the past life of the dead. Hence the notion of a general resurrection of the dead arose logically from thinking through to the end the irresistible and victorious righteousness of God. The starting point was the question, ‘Why must the righteous suffer and why do the godless fare well here?’ ‘Why is Israel to the heathen given over for reproach, thy beloved people to godless tribes given up?’ (4 Ezra 4:23). The apocalyptist’s answer is: ‘Why has thou not considered what is to come, rather than what is now present?’ Now if the future is taken to heart in the question of righteousness, then God’s righteousness is put in question by the death of the innocent and also by the death of the unrighteous. Does death then set a limit to the righteousness of God? In view of the belief in the divinity of God this is inconceivable. Daniel 12:2 is therefore the first to answer this question with the symbol of the expectation of a general resurrection of the dead for the final judgment, so that the righteousness of God can assign some ‘to eternal life’ and others to eternal shame and damnation. Those here who are righteous according to the law of the divine covenant gain eternal life. The lawless and the lawbreakers come to eternal damnation. Is this symbol of the general resurrection of the dead a symbol of hope? For the unrighteous it is rather a symbol of fear. It would be better for them to stay dead. But for the righteous it is an uncertain hope, for no one can say with certainty that he is righteous. Ernst Bloch has understood better than some theologians that the hope for resurrection is not a human hope for good fortune, but is an expression of the expectation of divine righteousness; thus it represents a hope for God, for the sake of God and his right.
In the framework of the question of righteousness, which is fundamental for apocalyptic, one cannot say that the question of righteousness has become obsolete along with the ideas through which it is expressed here, and cannot now be understood by modern men. Any look at world history raises the question why inhuman men fare so well and their victims fare so badly. Only on a superficial level is ‘world history’ a problem of universal history, by the solution of which a meaningful horizon can be found for the whole of existence. At the deepest level the question of world history is the question of righteousness. And this question extends out into transcendence. The question whether there is a God or not is a speculative question in the face of the cries for righteousness of those who are murdered and gassed, who are hungry and oppressed. If the question of theodicy can be understood as a question of the righteousness of God in the history of the suffering of the world, then all understanding and presentation of world history must be seen within the horizon of the question of theodicy. Or do the executioners ultimately triumph over their innocent victims? Even the Christian Easter faith in the last resort stands in the context of the question of the divine righteousness in history: does inhuman legalism triumph over the crucified Christ, or does God’s law of grace triumph over the works of the law and of power? With this question we go beyond the formal statements about the proleptic structures of eschatological faith to the matter of Christian faith itself. We must not only ask whether it is possible and conceivable that one man has been raised from the dead before all others, and not only seek for analogies in the historical structure of reality and in the anticipatory structure of reason, but also ask who this one man was. If we do, we shall find that he was condemned according to his people’s understanding of the law as a ‘blasphemer’ and was crucified by the Romans, according to the divine ordinance of their Pax Romana, as a ‘rebel’. He met a hellish death with every sign of being abandoned by his God and Father. The new and scandalous element in the Christian message of Easter was not that some man or other was raised before anyone else, but that the one who was raised was this condemned, executed and forsaken man. This was the unexpected element in the kerygma of the resurrection which created the new righteousness of faith. Then, and probably even now, the problematical question was and is not just whether the resurrection of Jesus is physically, biologically or historically possible and conceivable, but also whether the resurrection of the crucified Christ corresponds to the righteousness of God. If God raised this dishonoured man in his coming righteousness, it follows that in this crucified figure he manifests his true righteousness, the right of the unconditional grace which makes righteous the unrighteous and those without rights.
In the context of the apocalyptic expectation of the final triumph of the law, the ‘resurrection of the dead’ is a two-edged expectation. But the resurrection of the crucified Christ reveals the righteousness of God in a different way, namely as grace which makes righteous and as the creator’s love of the godless. Therefore the resurrection hope of Christian faith is no longer ambivalent, threatened by an uncertain final judgment and its verdict; it is unequivocally a ‘joyful hope’. It shows the cross of Christ as the unique and once-for-all anticipation of the great world judgment in the favour of those who otherwise could not survive at it. Thus resurrection is no longer the ontic presupposition of the accomplishment of the final judgment on the dead and the living, but is already itself the new creation. So the Pauline resurrection kerygma contains within itself the proclamation of the new creation. In that case righteousness no longer means the rewarding of the righteous with eternal life and the punishing of the unrighteous with eternal condemnation, but the law of grace for unrighteous and self-righteous alike.
Wolfhart Pannenberg has stressed the formal structure of prolepsis in the claim of Jesus and its confirmation in the resurrection event so one-sidedly that it has become easy to overlook the significance of the harsh antithesis between the claim of Jesus and its confirmation in his cross. He has interpreted apocalyptic and christology too much in terms of their significance for universal history, so that the fundamental question of righteousness can be neglected. Finally, as a result, in his hermeneutics he has been able to contemporize the apocalyptic context in which the symbol of the ‘resurrection of Jesus from the dead’ is expressed, only by means of an anthropology of the openness of modern man to the world. It is not wrong to establish such structural analogies, since the modern anthropology of man’s openness to the world is itself derived from the influence of the history of apocalyptic and christology. But Jesus’ claim and his resurrection can easily become a mere example of a universal-historical or anthropological notion here, the truth of which is in the end independent of the history of Jesus. Only when one goes beyond the formal categories of anticipation to the material content of the proclamation of Jesus and the Christian kerygma of the resurrection of the crucified Christ does the irreplacably Christian element emerge. And only in the question of righteousness in suffering the evil and misery of the world of man does one, in my view, come up against the abiding question of apocalyptic which cannot be settled, and the answer of Jesus and his history, the scandal of which cannot be laid aside.
To sum up:
1. Apocalyptic is a syncretistic formation with more than one idea. But at its centre we do not find anthropology or universal history, but the expectation of the future victory of the righteousness of God over dead and living. The ‘resurrection of the dead’ has no significance of its own, but is thought of as a conditio sine qua non for the universal achievement of righteousness in the judgment upon righteous and unrighteous.
2. Jesus’ proclamation was apocalyptic in form, as far as, like John the Baptist, he proclaimed the imminence of the distant kingdom. In fact, however, Jesus broke through legalistic apocalyptic, because he proclaimed justitia justificans rather than justitia distributiva as the righteousness of the kingdom of God, and anticipated it in the law of grace among the unrighteous and those outside the law.
3. In form, the resurrection message of the early community was an apocalyptic anticipation of what was to come, but in content it was the proclamation of the crucified Christ as the Lord of righteousness. The scandal was not the message that one man had been raised before all others in the final judgment and the kingdom of God, but the certainty that this one man was the crucified Jesus. In form, Christian faith in the resurrection is eschatological faith. In content, this eschatological faith is Christian, because it proclaims the resurrection of the crucified Christ. The Christian belief in the resurrection does not proclaim world-historical tendencies or anthropological hopes, but the nucleus of a new righteousness in a world where dead and living cry out for righteousness.
4. The hermeneutic point for the understanding of Christian faith in the resurrection must therefore be sought in the question of righteousness in the history of the suffering of the world. This is an open question, which cannot either be answered or given up. The horizon of universal history and the depths of historical existence provide a framework to help in answering this question. The horizon of universal history makes clear the breadth of the question of righteousness in the form of the question of theodicy, whereas the existential dimension makes clear the depth of this question of righteousness in the question of justification.
5. The dispute over the resurrection of Jesus is concerned with the question of righteousness in history. Does it belong to the nomos which finally gives each man his deserts, or does it belong to the law of grace as it was manifest by Jesus and in the resurrection of the crucified Christ? The message of the new righteousness which eschatological faith brings into the world says that in fact the executioners will not finally triumph over their victims. It also says that in the end the victims will not triumph over their executioners. The one will triumph who first died for the victims and then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through the vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes what is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is neither oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.
In the light of the Easter events the community first looked forwards into the future. The one who appeared to them in the splendour of divine glory was their guarantee that the glory of God and his new creation were not distant, but near. In recognizing his ‘resurrection from the dead’, they also traced in themselves the ‘spirit of resurrection’, the ‘spirit which brings life’ (Rom. 8:11), and waited in the ‘power of the resurrection’ (Phil. 3:10) for the coming appearance of Christ in glory. They understood his resurrection as a preparatory and preliminary action of God in Jesus for the good of themselves and the world. God had answered the evil deed of men in crucifying Jesus in a glorious way by raising him from the dead (Acts 2:24). As the primitive Christian hymns show, his humiliation on the cross faded into the background behind the present experience of his exaltation to be Kyrios, to be the Lord who ushers in the end-time. The eschatological enthusiasm expressed in the early hymns was filled full of the present of the one who came in the spirit. There was no longer any need to think of the earthly way of this Lord to the cross. The spirit shone beyond the experience of the still unredeemed world. The Lord’s future weighed more heavily than his past. Nevertheless, the situation inevitably prompted the question: if Jesus is now Lord in the Spirit—who was he in his earthly life and in his suffering and death on the cross? This question is once again not only a historical question but also a systematic question for any christology.
The earliest titles which say who Jesus is come from the experience of the appearances of Jesus and have their foundation in the resurrection event. By his resurrection Jesus was made Christ, Son of God, Kyrios, by God. Formulas of adoption were used for this act: by his resurrection Jesus was adopted as the Son of God (Rom. 1:4). Enthronement formulas were also used: by the resurrection Jesus was exalted and appointed to be Lord. The purpose behind these titles was to say that by his resurrection it was not just that one man was raised from the dead before all others. At the same time, the other men were provided with a divine commission and a calling. This is the first thing that the Christ titles express. They do not so much express his exaltation, rank and status as his function, his call, his divine task and his mission. They can therefore be understood as titles of representation. The Christ of God represents God himself in a still unredeemed world. The Son of God represents the Father in a godless and forsaken world. The Kyrios is the mediator between man who is passing away and the God who is coming, that is, between the transitoriness of man the sinner, which puts him in this situation, and the holy God who comes in judgment. The adoption and enthronement of Jesus through his resurrection from the dead defines his actual and temporal role as mediator between God and man. So it is said again and again that we only have ‘access through Christ to God, the Father’. That is why in primitive Christian liturgy Jesus the Lord is invoked in time of need and God the Father is addressed in praise. According to 1 Cor. 15:20–28, God the Father has handed over the rule to his Kyrios with the resurrection of Jesus, so that after the end of his rule Jesus may hand over the kingdom to the Father, that ‘God may be all in all’. With the early christological titles, then, Jesus is designated God’s lieutenant on earth, ‘God’s representative’, who stands for God before men and for men before God. The rule of God’s Christ is limited and provisional. ‘The only goal it serves is to give way to the sole lordship of God. Christ is God’s representative over against a world which is not yet fully subject to God, although its eschatological subordination is in train since Easter and its end is in sight.’ For Paul ‘the reign of Christ’ is characterized by the fact that he—though not we ourselves—is delivered from death. ‘It is therefore defined by the two poles, his resurrection and ours, and must be described materially as the realm of the power of the resurrection in a world which has fallen a prey to death, and thus to the other cosmic powers.’ The titles coined at the appearances of the risen Jesus thus display throughout an ‘eschatological subordinationism’. Christology is at the service of the eschatology of the God who is coming and his righteousness that makes all things new.
Now we also established that the resurrection hope sheds its light not only forwards, into God’s future, by giving a foretaste of that future in the anticipations of the spirit, but also backwards, into the mystery of the suffering and death of the exalted Lord. If his future in God and his being sent into the world for the future of God are manifested in the appearances of the risen Christ, then at the same time the significance of his cross and his way to the cross must also be manifested backwards; otherwise the identity of his person would not be maintained, and resurrection faith would be a way of separating oneself from the crucified Christ and the recollection of his career. If the future of God ‘has already begun’ with his resurrection, what is the significance of his suffering and death? As the suffering and death of a righteous man it would not be a riddle, for to be unrecognized and misunderstood was the fate of many righteous men in Israel and many wise men outside Israel. Nor would it be a riddle as the end of a prophet born out of his time. There were plenty of precedents in the history of Israel. But if for Easter faith resurrection by God qualifies the person of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ of God, the question inevitably arises: ‘Why did the Christ have to suffer these things?’ (Luke 24:26). Easter does not solve the riddle of the cross, but makes Christ’s cross a mystery. The qualification of his person to be the Christ of God and his enthronement as Kyrios could not be dated from his resurrection on, as though it had not happened before, or as though the earthly Jesus was merely the forerunner of the heavenly Christ. That would not do justice to the identity of his person, but would tear it apart into two persons, one earthly and one eschatological. In fact the unity of his person requires it to be said that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth is exalted to be the Kyrios of God. Pannenberg has given a basis for this connection with the ‘retroactive force’ of the Easter confirmation of the claim of Jesus by God and has used for it the analogy of laws and regulations which are put in force retrospectively. By this he means to say that the resurrection of Jesus gives a basis to his nature retroactively, from the end of his career, and that this is not only retroactive for our knowledge, but also for his being. This is a helpful idea for understanding the resurrection faith which leads to Christian belief in Jesus. But in my view the person of Jesus who was identified through the resurrection is not expressed sufficiently clearly in the accord between Jesus’ claim and God’s confirmation of it.
One of the earliest, pre-Pauline confessions says:
Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and was buried, and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3b–4).
In his own words, Paul says: ‘Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8). We can follow W. Kramer in taking the Pauline formula as being more original, because the first, traditional formula already interprets the ‘for us’ in the special sense of ‘for our sins’. The first important thing is that at a very early stage the community understood the death of Jesus Christ as an event ‘for us’, that is in our favour, though the Pauline formula leaves it open whether the ‘for us’ implies personal representation or is understood in the cultic sense of expiation ‘for our sins’. The interpretation ‘for us’ seems to be a fundamental phrase which occurs over and over again. The more detailed and very different interpretations in terms of a theory of expiatory sacrifice or a doctrine of justification seem to be meant as a secondary interpretation of that fundamental ‘for us’. The significance of Christ’s death can affect the realm ‘for all’ and ‘for us’ horizontally. It can have the material significance of expiation for sins or the reconciliation of the world. It can be a personal expression of ‘Christ for us’ and ‘God for us’. Apart from occasional sayings which also relate the ‘for us’ to Christ’s resurrection (Rom. 4:25), the interpretation is throughout applied to the death of Christ. The formula in 1 Cor. 15:3b–4 speaks in the second line only for the fact of his resurrection and his appearance among the disciples, whereas the first line mentions the saving significance of his death. ‘Precisely in this way the material unity of the two statements is preserved. For whereas the resurrection constitutes or confirms the eschatological status of Jesus, the ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν is the interpretation of the dying of Jesus as the dying of this eschatological person’. By his resurrection Jesus is qualified in his person to be the Christ of God. So his suffering and death must be understood to be the suffering and death of the Christ of God. Only in the light of his resurrection from the dead does his death gain that special, unique saving significance which it cannot achieve otherwise, even in the light of the life that he lived. ‘The resurrection of Jesus does not relativize the cross so that it becomes a past datum of history or a transitionary stage on the way to heavenly glory, but qualifies it so that it becomes an eschatological saving event’, because only it says who really suffered and died here. So the crucified Christ has not changed into a risen and glorified figure. Rather, his resurrection qualifies the one who has been crucified as the Christ, and his suffering and death as a saving event for us and for many. The resurrection ‘does not evacuate the cross’ (1 Cor. 1:17), but fills it with eschatology and saving significance. From this it follows systematically that all further interpretations of the saving significance of Christ’s death on the cross ‘for us’ must start from his resurrection. Furthermore, when it is said at length that only his death has a saving significance for us, that means that his death on the cross expresses the significance of his resurrection for us and not, vice versa, that his resurrection expresses the significance of his cross. The resurrection from the dead qualifies the person of the crucified Christ and with it the saving significance of his death on the cross for us, ‘the dead’. Thus the saving significance of his cross manifests his resurrection. It is not his resurrection that shows that his death on the cross took place for us, but on the contrary, his death on the cross ‘for us’ that makes relevant his resurrection ‘before us’. This must be stressed, because the early Jewish-Christian idea of the dying Christ as an expiatory offering for our sins, which has constantly been repeated throughout the tradition in varied forms, cannot display any intrinsic theological connection with the kerygma of the resurrection. One can hardly talk of the resurrection of an expiatory offering, any more than one can talk of the resurrection of the Son of God who sacrificed himself to satisfy the injured honour of God. Within the framework of the idea of expiatory offerings, both individuals and the people as a whole need expiation for their sins, so that the righteousness of the law of the covenant may be restored. This expiation was offered in the sacrificial cult of the Jerusalem temple. The exemplary martyrs’ death of the righteous had atoning force for the whole community. The idea of the special expiatory power of the ‘blood of Jesus’ (Rom. 3:25; 1 Cor. 10:16, etc.) has its roots here. The phrase ‘died for our sins’ means that the cause of his suffering was our sins, the purpose of his suffering is expiation for us, the ground of his suffering is the love of God for us. It is very difficult to harmonize the resurrection of Jesus with these interpretations of his death and very difficult to harmonize these interpretations of his death with his resurrection from the dead. For the ideas of expiatory offerings move consistently within the framework of the law: sins trangress the law, expiation restores the law. By sin man falls short of the righteousness of the law and comes under the accusation of the law; by expiation he is restored to the righteousness of the law. Expiation for sins always has a retrospective character. Its future concern is the restitutio in integrum, not the beginning of a new life. Nevertheless, these ideas of expiation are important in that they show: 1. how little unrighteous man can achieve his own righteousness, how there can be no new future for him without the acceptance of guilt and liberation from it, at least through good intentions by which he only denies himself; 2. that as the Christ of God, Jesus took the place of helpless man as his representative and in so doing made it possible for man to enter into communion before God in which he otherwise could not stand and survive; 3. that in the death of Christ God himself has acted in favour of this man.
But if we want to understand the cross strictly as the cross of Christ, that is of the risen Christ, we must go beyond the ideas of expiatory sacrifice which we find here. Instead, we must try once again to read history eschatologically with a ‘reversed sense of time’ and return from the future of Christ to his past. In terms of history and its sense of time, Jesus first died and was then raised. In eschatological terms the last becomes the first: he died as the risen Christ and was made flesh as the one who was to come. In historical terms Christ can be called the anticipation of the coming God on the basis of his resurrection from the dead. In eschatological terms, however, he must be called the incarnation of the coming God in our flesh and in his death on the cross. It is one-sided and a mistaken interpretation of his death on the cross if on the basis of the proleptic resurrection of Jesus one looks only into the future of God and to the end of history. With the reversal of the noetic and the ontic order, it is also necessary to recognize in this anticipation the incarnation of the future of that redeeming kingdom in the past of the crucified Christ. In that case, what is the significance of his death on the cross? Why did the rebel, God’s lieutenant, man’s representative before God, die on the cross?
For Paul and Mark, the theological accent is placed entirely on the reversal of the noetic and ontic orders and on the transformation of the historical sense of time into an eschatological sense of time. The risen Christ is the crucified Christ. The proleptic-eschatological christology described at the beginning hangs in the air, because everyone has to ask himself, Why was only this one man raised? Why were not all men raised at the same time? This is in essence the nucleus of the Christian question of theodicy, which is usually described as the phenomenon of the ‘delay of the parousia’; why only Jesus at first, and not the whole salvation of the world at a stroke? The answer lies in the cross of Christ, just as only the knowledge of the cross is adequate to explain the so-called experience of disappointment at the delay of the parousia. Through his suffering and death, the Christ who was raised from the dead before us becomes the Christ for us, just as the ‘God before us’ becomes the ‘God for us’. The anticipation of the resurrection of the dead in him gains its saving significance for us only through his offering for us on the cross. His prolepsis forms the basis of his pro-existence and in it becomes significant for us. Only when the one who was raised proleptically takes our place and dies does his prolepsis have saving significance for us. The basic New Testament idea of Christ as the representative for us, ‘for all’, must therefore be developed systematically from the concept of prolepsis used for the resurrection. The theology of Easter hope must be changed into the theology of the cross, if it is to set our feet on the ground of the reality of the death of Christ and our own death. The reversal just mentioned makes that possible. God has anticipated the future of his liberating righteousness in this one man and sent him before in order that this one man may communicate it to others. If the resurrection has already been anticipated in him, then ‘resurrection, life and righteousness’ come through the death of this one man in favour of those who have been delivered over to death through their unrighteousness. Through his suffering and death, the risen Christ brings righteousness and life to the unrighteous and the dying. Thus the cross of Christ modifies the resurrection of Christ under the conditions of the suffering of the world so that it changes from being a purely future event to being an event of liberating love. Through his death the risen Christ introduces the coming reign of God into the godless present by means of representative suffering. He anticipates the coming righteousness of God under the conditions of human injustice in the law of grace and in the justification of the godless by his death. The countenance of the Christ raised before all the dying is, for these dying, the countenance of the one who was crucified for them. By sharing in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering they gain a share in the resurrection (Phil. 3:10–12). The coming kingdom, the certainty of which the disciples found in the Easter appearances of Christ, has then, as a result of this Christ, taken the form of a cross in the alienated world. The cross is the form of the coming, redeeming kingdom, and the crucified Jesus is the incarnation of the risen Christ. In the crucified Jesus the ‘end of history’ is present in the midst of the relationships of history. Therefore in him can be found reconciliation in the midst of strife and hope for the overcoming of strife.
Without the representative saving significance of his death on the cross, the Christ raised from the dead would be a miracle or at best a model or a forerunner of the future. But that does not help those who suffer under their own unrighteousness and that of the world, and live in the shadow of death. It is only his death on the cross that makes the meaning of his resurrection manifest for these men, for it is only through his action as their representative that the glory anticipated in him enters into their misery. Only through his death ‘for them’ does that new life begin for them which he lives by virtue of being raised by God.
The anticipation of the resurrection of the dead in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead may have a stimulating effect on men who are open to the world and to the future. But for men who are closed to the future, and without hope, for the homo incurvatus in se and for the Narcissus who is sadly in love with himself, it means nothing, for it does not reach them. Only Christ’s representative suffering and sacrifice ‘for them’ in his death on the cross brings hope to the hopeless, future to those who are passing away and new right to the unrighteous.
Therefore we must say that Christ’s death on the cross is ‘the significance’ of his resurrection for us. Conversely, any interpretation of the meaning of his death which does not have as a presupposition his resurrection from the dead is a hopeless matter, because it cannot communicate the new element of life and salvation which came to light in his resurrection. Christ did not die only as that expiatory offering in which the law was restored or the original creation was reconstituted after the fall of man. He died ‘for us’, to give us, ‘the dead’, a share in his new life of resurrection and in his future of eternal life. His resurrection is the content of the significance of his death on the cross ‘for us’, because the risen Christ is himself the crucified Christ. His resurrection from the dead can be known in his death ‘for many’. It is not that his ‘resurrection’ is a dimension of his death on the cross; on the contrary, his sacrifice on the cross for the reconciliation of the world is the immanent dimension of his eschatological resurrection in the glory of the coming kingdom. By understanding Christ’s death as having taken place ‘for many’, one can understand his resurrection from the dead as having taken place in favour of those who are still dead. If that is the case, then his death on the cross ‘for us’ can be understood as a proof of his resurrection. To understand the representative significance of his death is to understand his resurrection. In his dying for us the risen Christ looks on us and draws us into his life. In the one who became poor for our sake, God’s riches are opened up for us. In the one who became a servant for our sake, we are grasped by God’s freedom. In the one who became sin for us, sinners become the righteousness of God in the world.
The one whom the Easter kerygma proclaims as the Lord became a servant for us (Phil. 2) in order to transform us from being servants to being free lords of all things. Thus his death on the cross ‘for us’ makes us sinners and godless and at the same time righteous and sons of God. ‘The cross is his method, and lasts until his future.’
It is precisely when we understand the representative significance of his death in terms of the anticipatory form of his resurrection before us that the provisional and eschatological manner of his representativeness becomes clear. If the kingdom of Christ is limited in content and time by his resurrection from the dead, which has happened for him, but still awaits us, then his representativeness is grounded and limited in the same way. The reconciling power of his suffering and death is the power of the resurrection. However, its purpose is not to make itself superfluous, but to become the basis for new, redeemed existence, which it owes to the crucified Christ.
We conclude this chapter with the question of the concept of God which follows on the one hand from the resurrection of the crucified Christ and on the other hand from the cross of the risen Christ. In this question we can speak of two stages of knowledge in the primitive Christian tradition of the kerygma of Christ.
The first stratum in the primitive Christian theology of Easter says: ‘You killed him, but God raised him up’ (Acts 2:23; 3:15; 4:10, etc.). The mission speeches of Acts are determined by the theme of this contrast. They are speeches about Christ to Jews, and set out to say that God has raised Jesus from the dead and thus has vindicated him. This has been accomplished by the God of the covenant and the law, the righteous God. The Jews have condemned Jesus and delivered him to crucifixion because of ignorance and lawlessness, against the will of God and therefore against the law. If they now recognize the true will of God in his action in raising Jesus from the dead, they will understand God’s will in the law rightly, as it is interpreted by Jesus, and follow it, observing the twofold commandment of love. The Jewish-Christian community which spoke in this way understood itself in the form of the ‘twelve apostles’ as the people of the twelve tribes renewed in accordance with God’s will, as a Christian messianic revival movement within Israel. As can be seen in the dispute between Peter and Paul, they were therefore not concerned to go beyond the bounds of Israel and the synagogue and address themselves to the Gentiles. In the Israelite order of hope it was a question of the Jews first and then the Gentiles. Once Zion has been restored by the Messiah or Son of Man, the Gentiles will make a pilgrimage there of their own accord, in order to receive justice and righteousness. But if Gentiles already come to the Christian faith in the Diaspora, they must observe the law and be circumcised. This Jewish-Christian community spoke of the ‘raising of Jesus’. The subject of the action was God, the object of the suffering was the executed Jesus, and the event was regarded as an eschatological event. According to this belief, God had revealed himself ‘at last’, and therefore finally, in the resurrection of Jesus. For Paul, too, ‘raise’ was therefore a term used with reference to the God of Jesus Christ. According to Rom. 8:11 God is the one ‘who has raised Christ Jesus from the dead’. Galatians 1:1 characterizes God as the one ‘who has raised him from the dead’. That means that God has finally, in the end-time, defined himself through the resurrection of Jesus as the God who raises the dead. All earlier divine statements from the history of Israel, from the law of the covenant or from the state of the world in general fade into insignificance, become no more than historical statements, in comparison with this new eschatological definition given by God of himself as the one who raises the dead. Paul took up this Easter kerygma and in Rom. 4:17 mentioned the ‘God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’. Here he has drawn a conclusion from the eschatological designation of God as the one who raises the dead to the one who creates all things from nothing. And he found, as the context shows, the presence of this creative God who raises the dead in the word of the promise which creates faith.
The eschatological resurrection of the dead does not mean a restoration of the creation which has been made obsolete by human sin, but the ‘creation of the end-time’ that is now dawning. For Paul, the resurrection of the dead is no longer the ontic presupposition for the righteousness of God in the final judgment over dead and living, but is itself already the new righteousness of God and the new creation from this righteousness. This new creation goes further in the ‘spirit of the resurrection’ and in the justification of the godless, until it is completed in the appearance of Christ and his handing over the kingdom to the Father. The mass of predicates current in Judaism like ‘before the world, sole ruler, incorruptible, unstained, unbegotten’ retreat into the background in favour of the new name of God which identifies God with the new element of the resurrection of Christ: this new name is ὁ ἐγείρας Ἰησοῦν Thus at its heart the Easter message bears a new divine message. It not only contains a new divine predicate, but speaks of God as the subject of his eschatological action in Jesus; it must therefore be understood as a divine name. But this divine name has been formulated as an exact parallel to the first commandment of the covenant of Israel. There we read: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’ Here there is mention of the God who has raised Jesus from death on the cross into his glory. In each case the name of God is connected with a historical action which manifests God. In each case the historical action of God brings freedom to those concerned: in the one case it brings the people freedom from a historical tyrant, in the other it brings Jesus freedom from the tyranny of death. So in the one case there is talk of a historical event which happened in the past but which has continuing force for Israel, whereas in the other there is talk of an eschatological event which has anticipatory force for all who are seized by it.
According to this first stratum in the Easter kerygma, the eschatological action of God in the resurrection of Jesus blotted out and replaced the historical action of man in his crucifixion. This understanding of God in the light of the resurrection of Jesus matches certain strata in the Israelite understanding of God in terms of his actions in history. The only difference is that the resurrection of a dead man falls outside the framework of history, which is dominated by death and men’s dying.
Therefore the eschatological understanding of God in terms of the resurrection of Jesus emerges with a final claim. In this sense one can say that the ‘notion of an indirect self-revelation of God in the mirror of his historical action’ is finally valid here because the resurrection of Christ is an eschatological event.
But let us return again from the perspective of a history which looks from the past into the future, to eschatology, which looks from the future into the past. If we do, the question arises: What was the ‘God who raised Jesus’ doing in and during the crucifixion of Jesus? If there was here only the action of evil, ignorant men, Jews and Romans, then that God evidently did not act, but restrained himself and allowed things to happen. But why did he keep silent over the cross of Jesus and his dying cry? Had he forgotten him? Was he absent? If, like the first theology of Easter, one sees the eschatological action of God in Jesus’ resurrection only in his power over death, the cross of Jesus will be incomprehensible in respect of God and God will be incomprehensible in respect of the cross.
But in their theology of the cross and passion, Paul and Mark understood the risen Christ as the crucified Christ. This meant that they had to understand the God who raised him as the God who crucified him and was crucified. If they saw God in action in the resurrection of Jesus, they had to seek to understand God in passion, in the crucifixion of Jesus. But how can the death of Jesus on the cross be understood as God’s action, even as God’s suffering? Paul goes even one stage further in 2 Cor. 5:19ff., when he says ‘God was in Christ’. In other words, God not only acted in the crucifixion of Jesus or sorrowfully allowed it to happen, but was himself active with his own being in the dying Jesus and suffered with him. ‘If God has reconciled the world to himself through the cross, then this means that he has made himself visible in the cross of Christ and, as it were, says to man, “Here I am!”.’ Here we are confronted with a paradox. How can the almighty God be in a helpless man? How can the righteous God be in a man who has been condemned in accordance with the law? How can God himself be in one who has been forsaken by God? Must one not abandon all that has been imagined, desired or feared in respect of ‘God’ if one is to understand God thus in the crucified Christ? Can one still understand the crucified Christ on the presupposition of a concept of God imported ‘from elsewhere’? On the contrary, must one not understand this ‘God and Father of Jesus Christ’ completely in the light of what happened on the cross?
The primitive Christian theology of the resurrection saw the event of the resurrection as constituting Jesus to be Son of God. The pre-Pauline formula in Rom. 1:3b speaks of the earthly and the heavenly modes of being of Jesus: κᾱτὰ σάρκα he is son of David, κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν he is Son of God. Correspondingly, his appointment as Son of God became the interpretation of his resurrection. But Paul himself constantly associated this Easter formula of the Son of God with the sending of the Son and his sacrifice by the Father in his eschatological retrospect on the life and death of Jesus.
The sending is intended to bring the whole career and the whole of the appearance of Jesus under the heading: ‘When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons’ (Gal. 4:4f.). The foundation of the coming of Jesus is his being sent by God. The purpose of the sending of the Son of God is liberation from slavery under the law for the freedom of the children of God.
On the other hand, the giving up of the Son (Rom. 8:32; Gal. 2:20; John 3:16; Eph. 5:25, etc.) is meant to be an interpretation of the particular suffering and death of Jesus. ‘God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all; will he not also give us all things with him?’ (Rom. 8:32). The formula παραδιδόναι used here is passion terminology, but whereas there it means ‘deliver over’, ‘betray’, ‘abandon’, here it is used by Paul as an expression of the love and the election of God. ‘The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me’, Paul confesses in Gal. 2:20. If according to Rom. 8:32 it is God who acts in giving up Jesus, according to Gal. 2:20 it is Jesus himself who is active here. In both passages, and also especially in John 3:16, what is meant is self-surrendering, self-emptying love. In Rom. 4:25 (‘who was delivered up for our sins …’) it becomes clear that the reference is to the death of Jesus.
That God delivers up his Son is one of the most unheard-of statements in the New Testament. We must understand ‘deliver up’ in its full sense and not water it down to mean ‘send’ or ‘give’. What happened here is what Abraham did not need to do to Isaac; Christ was quite deliberately abandoned by the Father to the fate of death; God subjected him to the power of corruption, whether this be called man or death … God made Christ sin (2 Cor. 5:21), Christ is the accursed of God. A theology of the cross cannot be expressed more radically than it is here.
Paul certainly takes over from the tradition the conception that Jesus was constituted Son of God by his resurrection from the dead, but he sees it at work in the sending of Jesus by God and in his being given up by the Father, which is at the same time his own self-surrender. That means that Jesus as Son of God is not painted with the colours of his resurrection glory, but with the colours of his passion and his death on the cross. The Son of God is not first at work in his exaltation and glory, but in his humiliation and lowliness. The ‘Son of God’ is here the representative and revealer of God in a godless and godforsaken world. That means that God represents and reveals himself in the surrender of Jesus and in his passion and death on the cross. But where God represents and reveals himself, he also identifies and defines himself. Therefore Paul can say: ‘God (himself) was in Christ’ (2 Cor. 5:19). Logically this means that God (himself) suffered in Jesus, God himself died in Jesus for us. God is on the cross of Jesus ‘for us’, and through that becomes God and Father of the godless and the godforsaken. He took upon himself the unforgivable sin and the guilt for which there is no atonement, together with the rejection and anger that cannot be turned away, so that in Christ we might become his righteousness in the world. Taken to its final consequence, that means that God died that we might live. God became the crucified God so that we might become free sons of God. So what did God do in the crucifixion of Jesus? Whereas the resurrection of Jesus was understood as a revelation of the power (dynamis) and glory (doxa) of God and as an action that makes things new, God was not silent and uninvolved in the cross of Jesus. Nor was he absent in the godforsakenness of Jesus. He acted in Jesus, the Son of God: in that men betrayed him, handed him over and delivered him up to death, God himself delivered him up. In the passion of the Son, the Father himself suffers the pains of abandonment. In the death of the Son, death comes upon God himself, and the Father suffers the death of his Son in his love for forsaken man. Consequently, what happened on the cross must be understood as an event between God and the Son of God. In the action of the Father in delivering up his Son to suffering and to a godless death, God is acting in himself. He is acting in himself in this manner of suffering and dying in order to open up in himself life and freedom for sinners. Creation, new creation and resurrection are external works of God against chaos, nothingness and death. The suffering and dying of Jesus, understood as the suffering and dying of the Son of God, on the other hand, are works of God towards himself and therefore at the same time passions of God. God overcomes himself, God passes judgment on himself, God takes the judgment on the sin of man upon himself. He assigns to himself the fate that men should by rights endure. The cross of Jesus, understood as the cross of the Son of God, therefore reveals a change in God, a stasis within the Godhead: ‘God is other.’ And this event in God is the event on the cross. It takes on Christian form in the simple formula which contradicts all possible metaphysical and historical ideas of God: ‘God is love.’
Like Paul, Mark too depicted the divine Sonship of the risen Christ in the way of Jesus to the cross. Right at the beginning of his gospel he calls Jesus ‘the Son of God’ (1:1) and declares that Jesus became Son of God with the baptism, through the spirit of God (1:11). Consequently the sayings and miracles of Jesus are presented as sayings and miracles of the Son of God. Still more, however, the suffering and the death of Jesus on the cross are reported in his proclamation as the passion and death of the Son of God. And for Mark Jesus dies on the cross with the cry, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (15:34): the Son of God dies forsaken by God. When Jesus ‘gives up the ghost with a loud cry’ (15:39), the Gentile centurion answers with the confession, ‘Truly, this man was the Son of God’ (15:39). This seems to be paradoxical in a number of respects.
1. The eschatological cry of godforsakenness by the Son of God, directed towards the God who has left him, is followed by the human answer of faith and the confession that Jesus is the Son of God. According to Mark, this faith does not first follow in the divine act of power at the resurrection, which would have easily been conceivable against the background of contemporary apocalyptic, but at the cross of the one who has been forsaken by God. The Jesus who dies with crying and tears provoked, according to Mark, a confession that he was the Son of God and awoke the faith which changes men from slaves of the law to free sons of God.
2. The confession of faith does not come from a pious disciple of Jesus, nor even from a Jew, who might have some understanding, but from the Gentile, Roman centurion who was presumably in charge of the execution squad. Whereas only the disciples who had fled had a part in the Easter appearances, and they shared with the Jews a certain common context in which to set Jesus’ ‘resurrection from the dead’ when they began to preach, according to Mark the passion and the cross of Jesus is directed immediately towards the Gentiles. If the Easter appearances were only perceived in the utmost privacy by the disciples, and if the message of the resurrection was at first understandable only in the realm of Israelite apocalyptic traditions, this happened publicly through the crucifixion of Jesus. Indeed, it even happened outside the gate of the city of Jerusalem with its temple, and therefore outside the boundary of Israel, on Golgotha, and outside the ‘hedge of Israel’, i.e., its legal tradition. It happened, in fact, on the boundary of human society, where it does not matter whether a person is Jew or Gentile, Greek or barbarian, master or servant, man or woman, because death is unaware of all these distinctions. So the crucified one does not recognize these distinctions either. If his death is proclaimed and acknowledged as the death of the Son of God ‘for many’, as by that centurion, then in this death God’s Son has died for all, and the proclamation of his death is for all the world. It must undermine, remove and destroy the things which mark men out as elect and non-elect, educated and uneducated, those with possessions and those without, the free and the enslaved. The Gentile-Christian proclamation concerns all men, because confronted with the cross all men, whatever the differences between them and whatever they may assert about each other, ‘are sinners and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3:23). ‘Here there is no distinction’ (Rom. 3:23a). Gentile-Christian proclamation must therefore essentially be the proclamation of the crucified Christ, i.e. the word of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18). The proclamation of the cross is ‘Christianity for all the world’ (Blumhardt), and may not erect any new distinctions between men, say between Christians and non-Christians, the pious and the godless. Its first recognition leads to self-knowledge: to the knowledge that one is a sinner in solidarity with all men under the power of corruption. Therefore the theology of the cross is the true Christian universalism. There is no distinction here, and there cannot be any more distinctions. All are sinners without distinction, and all will be made righteous without any merit on their part by his grace which has come to pass in Christ Jesus (Rom. 3:24).
As the crucified one, the risen Christ is there ‘for all’. In the cross of the Son of God, in his abandonment by God, the ‘crucified’ God is the human God of all godless men and those who have been abandoned by God.
What are the implications of this move from the resurrection to the cross of Christ for the concept of God?
1. ‘Without Jesus I would be an atheist,’ remarked the Ritschlian J. Gottschick. If God’s being is manifest in the passion and the death of Jesus, through Jesus’ suffering and death ‘for us’ and for our salvation, he is known by that faith which is called freedom. The God of freedom, the true God, is therefore not recognized by his power and glory in the world and in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus. The gods of the power and riches of the world and world history then belong on the other side of the cross, for it was in their name that Jesus was crucified. The God of freedom, the human God, no longer has godlike rulers as his political representatives. If the crucified one is the ‘Son of God’, then Pharaoh and Caesar are no longer ‘God’s son’, though this may be what they have called themselves. If the crucified one is Kyrios, then the Caesars must renounce the tide. These divinized rulers belong more on the other side of the cross of Jesus, for he was crucified in the name of those like them. ‘Without Jesus I would be an atheist,’ remarked Gottschick. But ‘atheist’ is a relative term and a polemical expression. We must therefore use a more pointed expression and say, ‘For Christ’s sake I am an atheist,’ an atheist in respect of the gods of the world and world history, the Caesars and the political demigods who follow them. ‘Only a Christian can be a good atheist,’ I once remarked to Ernst Bloch, turning round his remark ‘Only an atheist can be a good Christian’. He accepted this offering. But a ‘good Christian’ is like the Gentile centurion who said of the crucified Jesus, ‘Truly this is the Son of God,’ and for whom as a result the world, the history of the world and the rulers of the world have been de-divinized.
2. ‘If I did not find God in Jesus, I would have to take God for the devil,’ Zinzendorf remarked to his Community of Brethren, taking up Luther’s: ‘You might just as well pray to the devil if you have to have any God but Jesus.’ For the Christian there is no gradation between the crucified Jesus and the gods, as though God were less evident in the world, world history and world politics, and more evident in Christ. This notion of a gradation between a natural theology and a Christian theology can easily be unmasked as the ideology of a state church which seeks to set itself up on the existing political religion of a society as its higher consummation and thus seeks to be its supernatural justification, or holds itself to be the ‘crown of society’. Between ‘God in Christ’ and the gods outside and in other representations there stands the cross of that God, and with it the alternative ‘aut Christus—aut Caesar’, just as Elijah once posed the alternatives ‘either Yahweh or the Baals’. Hence Luther and Zinzendorf did not speak of other gods or other revelations of the same God, but of ‘God and non-God’, of ‘God and the devil’. The cross of Jesus marks a divide between the human God who is freedom and love and the ‘counter-God’ who keeps men under his sway and dominated by fear, like demons, and sucks them up into nothingness. However, the ‘crucified God’ here cannot be interchanged with the ‘God of Christians’, for by the terms of a psychological or sociological analysis the God of the Christians is not always the ‘crucified God’. Only rarely is this the case. Even for historical Christianity the cross, if it is understood radically and down to its final consequences, is a scandal and foolishness. The freedom of faith in the crucified God is not ‘everyone’s business’ just because the human God is there for everyone. For who wants to be ‘everyone’ and ‘all sinners together?’