SECTION VIII

the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ

(Comp. 1Co 15:1-58)

When we speak here of the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we can, according to the christological view which guides us, mean only the truth of His historical resurrection, only the reality of His resurrection. Even those who are not able to apprehend this reality, are yet, for the most part, willing to acknowledge the resurrection in some sense, only not in the great historical sense in which it forms the centre-point of the world’s history. Since the doctrine of the God-man, and especially the doctrine of the glorification of His body, culminates in the resurrection of Christ; and since that doctrine is in its very starting-point, in the birth of Christ from the Virgin, contested by the hostile spirits of Ebionitism and Gnosticism; it is quite natural that these spirits should be specially anxious to obliterate from history the reality of our Lord’s resurrection, with its great and clear view of Christology.

We recognize the Ebionite view of this matter in all the views which grant indeed that the Crucified continues to live in the Risen One in the sense of individual existence, but only under the condition that His continued life falls more or less under the category of common reality. This tendency, however, takes a twofold direction. The leaders in the one direction seek to persuade themselves and others that Christ only assumed the appearance of death,¹ or that He really was apparently dead,² but was rescued from actual death by special and happy dispensations of Providence. In that case, the Risen One is only an apparently risen one, a pale and sickly human form tottering to the grave, liable to the reproach of permitting the double semblance of His death and of His new life to be taken for reality, or rather, indeed, of representing it as such;—a meet comforter for them who in matters of religion are inclined to take moonshine for sunshine, that is, mere glimmer, whose pale ray enlivens nothing, for the creative and enlivening sight of the spiritual sun. The leaders of the other direction accept the truth of the death of Jesus, but they reduce the announcement of His resurrection to this, that Christ’s disciples in some way or other received certainty of His continuing to live in the other world, and of His blessed entrance into heaven, either by combinations, inferences, visions, or ghostly appearances, from which it cannot be determined whether they were subjective intuitions of the disciples, or objective manifestations of Christ Himself from the other world.³ In both cases, not only the actuality of Christ’s resurrection, but in that its ideal pre-eminence, its divineness and world-overcoming power, are sacrificed to the suppositions of the old reality of the Adamic sphere.

The Gnostic spiritualistic view, again, is inclined here to hold as firmly as possible the spiritual significance of Christ’s resurrection, but can under no condition be brought to understand and appreciate the resurrection in its proper sense, as the new life of the Crucified One. It even imagines that it makes an improvement on the doctrine of the resurrection, while it speaks of a mere revival and continued life of the Crucified One in supposed visions of His disciples,⁴ or in only furnishing them with a supply of the Spirit of Christ.⁵ But this gnosticizing view also fails to make due acknowledgment of His true body and actual life in the light of Christology. A spirit is referred to which remains powerless behind appearances, and which is as far different from the Spirit of Christ as any of the most sickly and wan forms of Heathenism from the blooming life of Christianity in the apostolic Church.

It is characteristic of modern criticism in its most degenerate followers, that it has ventured to dispute the reality of Christ’s resurrection from the fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians.⁶ Because Paul classes the appearing of Christ to him with the other manifestations of Christ to His disciples, it is said that all these manifestations should be judged in entire accordance with that made to him, although he himself suggests the difference, 1Co 15:8. But further it is said, that because the state of mind for seeing visions was developed in the case of Paul when he saw the Lord, this appearance of Christ was nothing but a figment of his inner life, although the biblical idea of vision infinitely surpasses this caricature; to say nothing of the idea of such a vision in which the state of mind for seeing visions is to be considered as only the medium through which a heavenly appearance shows itself.⁷ And finally, because Paul’s vision must have been a mere illusion, so also must have been the experiences of all the disciples, in which they thought they saw the Lord. How decidedly has Paul, with all his Christianity, his faith, his testimony, and his citation of the witnesses of the resurrection, contended and guarded himself most solemnly against this view which they seek to attribute to his word!

An attempt has been made to find in John also support for a spiritualistic view on this point,⁸ against which his testimony is most distinctly directed. Recourse has been had to the idea of death itself, in order to contend against the idea of a personal resurrection.⁹ And indeed, if we must conceive of the body as only the externality of the soul, and of the soul as only the internal of the body, and death as the raising up of the soul by the dissolution of the body, we could not speak of the resurrection of a dead person.¹⁰ Modern Pantheism, which takes the liberty of calling itself modern cultivation,¹¹ first confounds the real essential body, the eternal plastic force always immanent in the human soul, with the material, corporeal form. And in the same way it confounds the sensuous breath of life, the mere animal vitality, with the free spiritual power which rules over the body, and which cannot, be considered as merely the ideal or dynamic unity of its powers; for it is able to surrender and sacrifice this animal life, and so maintain its own freedom in contrast to it. But little as this Pantheism understands the body or comprehends the soul, just as little does it know of the real nature of death; and how then could it recognize the miracle of the resurrection? To the modern ‘critic’ this fact is unreal just because it is a miracle;¹² for according to him a miracle implies a contradiction. It certainly does imply that contradiction which obtains between the power of a higher principle and a subordinate sphere of life, and which is shown by that principle breaking through this sphere.

However, when one has acknowledged the miraculous in the life of Christ in general, he has arrived at the conviction, that the individual miracles spring from the development of this life, and that they were therefore nothing but foretokens which must necessarily culminate in the great miracle of His resurrection. The first pledge for the truth of His resurrection lies in the types and prophecies of the Scripture, the second in His own predictions, the third in His life, the fourth in His death, the fifth in the testimony of His disciples who beheld Him after He rose, the sixth in the outpouring of His Holy Spirit, and the seventh in the life of His Church! Now, none of these pledges guarantee to us His rescue from apparent death, or the certainty of His immortality, or His appearing as a spirit, or the continued prevalence of His Spirit in His disciples; but they guarantee to us the truth of His resurrection and the mystery of His new life.

If we would reduce all these propositions to one, we would say that the resurrection of Christ is the culminating point of theocratic history, and the deepest foundation of the Christian view of the world, and so the centre-point of the whole world of living faith in God. And as, on the one hand, this whole world is sealed by the resurrection of Christ, so, on the other, it must, with every pulse of its life, give testimony to the truth of that resurrection.

But we must limit ourselves here to setting forth the historical testimonies to the resurrection of Christ. It is a fact which needs no discussion, that the disciples of Jesus belonged to the noblest spirits of mankind, that they were the chosen organs of the divine word and life, that they offered their lives for the truth as champions of the truth, and sealed, or were ready to seal, their testimony with their blood. We can by no means allow the assumption, that a company of such men, the very aim of whose life was to seek the truth, deceived themselves in the most important question of the world’s history, that they were able by a gross illusion to transform the idea of the resurrection into its reality. This assumption is quite inadmissible in three respects, when we see that these men were conscious of the distinction between the idea of the resurrection and its reality, and that they found upon the latter, and by it alone are inspired with confidence to announce the truth of the resurrection.

But were the disciples of Christ, in their frame of mind after His death, any way inclined to ponder and promote the idea of the resurrection until it could take the form of an (illusory) vision? We see the very opposite. They had a threefold prejudice against the thought of the real resurrection of Christ. The risen Lord had to break through and remove their fear of spectres, their comfortlessness, and their spirit of doubt, before He could get a quiet hearing from them.¹³ If the disciples had been inclined to impose upon themselves by fancied visions (which as fancied would have been far from equal to real visions) for the purpose of asserting the resurrection of Christ, they would not have held the message of the women to be idle tales; Mary could not have believed that she saw the risen Saviour in a gardener, or conversely the gardener in the risen Saviour; the disciples who walked to Emmaus could not have held an unknown man to be Him, or for a long time beheld in Him a stranger; and finally, the assembled disciples would not have trembled before the Lord as before a spectre, instead of rejoicing at His appearance. Neither, in this case, would it have been necessary for the Lord to convince them of the certainty of His return in the body from death, by partaking of their meal, and showing them the marks of His wounds.

The testimony of the disciples to the resurrection of Christ, is a quite conscious testimony to a quite definite reality—a testimony which forced its way through all kinds of doubt concerning the resurrection and attempts to explain it away. And in this form it is the testimony, not only of the Twelve, but of the collective membership of the first Christian Church.¹⁴ But the inward spiritual truth of this testimony rests on a threefold certainty which interpenetrates all assurance of Christian spiritual life, and manifests itself in its unity and completeness as the certainty of the glory of the risen Lord.

The first certainty is this, that the human soul is beloved of God and chosen in His eyes, and so always existing in him as a divine thought and capable of life, bearing in itself the capability and model of corporeity as an energy always tending to embodiment, rejuvenescence, and renewal; in short, it is a sovereign principle in the world of appearances, which cannot be consumed by the canker-worms of the lower world, but is always capable of recovering and renewing itself in God for the purpose of drawing energies of earthly origin into the circle of its embodiment, and making them serviceable for manifesting itself; and so, finally, it is an essence which death from without can approach only in the form of death-like rest and transformation; but real death can be produced only by itself admitting into itself with sin a falling away from God, who is the source of its primal capability of life.

The second certainty consists in this, that the grace of God is the power which can and will eradicate sin, that is, death in its proper sense, from the heart and soul of man by coming to judge and rescue, and by renewed communications of the peace and spirit of God, and of the divine element of life; and that by the working of this grace in the soul of man the foundation is laid for the quickening anew of this soul, for the renewal of its body, extending even to the resurrection of the flesh.

The third certainty is, that Christ is the Son of God, and as the Son of God He is the express image of the Father, in which the life of the Father reveals itself in its eternal self-certainty, and which, therefore, as being the life of the Father Himself, is in death superior to death.

As the Son of God, Christ is the elect among elect men, the form on which the Father’s eye always rests, the thought of God in which all His thoughts are one, the only beloved in whom it must become evident that the love of God to His elect is stronger than death, and more stedfast than hell (compare Son 8:6); for in Christ’s life outward death manifested its original destination as a transmutation of the essence of man from the old life into the new. As Mediator of the grace of God, He Himself is the divine ray of life in life; that is, the divine ray of love which mortally wounds and destroys death in death, i.e., the sin of man; therefore He Himself is the very element of the resurrection, which necessarily had to fight with greater force against death and destroy it the more quickly and suddenly, the more violently death made its attack; which, to speak with the prophet, could not but be the plague of death and the destruction of the grave (the world of shadows): Hos 13:14. But because He, as the Son of God, presents in living unity the two qualities of the elect holy Son of man, and of the Godhead in the might of its grace, His victory over death had to bear the mark of both—the human as well as the divine nature had to manifest itself in this victory.

And Christ’s victory over death really does bear in it the lineaments of the human as well as of the divine life, and that in all its stages-in its foundation, progress, and completion. Christ conquered death in its root, its deepest foundation, the guilt of mankind, by penetrating as the holy Son of man into all the depths of human death, and offering Himself to God for mankind, having passed through death to the Father, and by removing, as the holy ray of God’s grace, the guilt of mankind in the peace of His spirit, which broke through and dissolved the terrors of death, transforming them into the bright form of union with the Father in His perfection. Thus the foundation for His resurrection was laid at the same time with His death, and began from it. This victory of Christ necessarily unfolded itself in accordance with its nature. As the holy Son of man, Jesus must have awakened on the day of the resurrection of all who sleep in death on earth, as He was the Mediator of their resurrection. But as Mediator of divine grace, He had to break the bands of death immediately and appear in the new life. Hence in the unity of the divine-human life He rose again on the third day. The time that His death-sleep continued expressed the human need of His nature to accomplish the rest of the grave and the human development of His new life, while the shortness of its duration revealed the divine power with which this life burst through the limits of time.

Finally, the two sides of His divine-human being are revealed also in the form of His victory. We see how He, as the glorified holy man, still bears on Him the tokens of His hardest human conditionality, the marks of His death-wounds; how He can freely enter into fellowship of every human conditionality with His people, can partake of their food; but we also see how He, as the Son of God, has attained to full possession and enjoyment of unconditionality, of His divine life, moves freely over the earth and presents Himself as the moving-centre, the power of all powers in heaven and on earth. In this unity of the divine and human He presents Himself as the living resurrection of mankind. He is not merely the risen man, not such an one as must die again; but He is also not simply the awakener of the dead, who Himself knows nothing of death. He continues, through fellowship of His spirit with men, to enter into the death of men and into the life of His people here; and by the divine power of His Spirit He continues to raise them up from death unto life, preparing them for the resurrection.

Now this influence of the risen Saviour is perpetually experienced by His Church, and it is just this which forms the unity of the threefold certainty which runs through her whole spiritual life. She knows that Christ is the Son of God; that the grace of God in Him abolishes the sins of men; that souls transformed by His grace appear as the chosen children of God and heirs of eternal life. She knows all this in the one certainty that Jesus lives as the Risen One, as the power of the resurrection of the world.

They who would represent the Lord as only passively risen, as merely a risen individual, renounce the enlightening and enlivening knowledge of the majesty of His being; for them, His appearance shrivels into the pale and flickering form of one continuing to live beyond the grave, or fortunately reviving in this world, or of one hovering like a shadow between both worlds; or He dissolves, for them, in the cloud-light of a false vision, or in the brilliancy of the spiritual effects which followed His disappearance, but Himself, the true Risen One, they have not. But they who are certain of the power of His resurrection are also certain of the fact that He has really and corporeally risen from the dead.

The former, in losing Christ, lose in Him the key of all ideality of the world; they see the matter of the world gaining a continual victory over the spirit, and the worm monads ruling over the royal monad of psychical life; they see the devastations of sin triumphing over the hope of life, and the dust of death overspreading the glorious centre of personal being. The latter are in the Risen One certain of the principle of the transformation of the world. They have recognized in Him the King of spirits; for them, spirits are transformed in His light to kings of psychical life; souls are ideal bodies, eternal potencies of embodiment; and the full life which tends to manifestation in the children of God is an ideal, predominating principle, which is able, in Christ’s strength, to draw over the whole world from the service of vanity into the glorious liberty of spiritual life (Rom 8:21). Therefore, every new ray of light and life by which the world is enlightened, spiritualized, and transformed, becomes for them a new testimony to the reality of the resurrection of Christ.

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Notes

1. According to Strauss (596, 638), with whom Weisse here agrees in substance, the pretended sights by which the disciples convinced themselves of our Lord’s resurrection were concocted while they resided in Galilee, and far away from His sepulchre. We can easily see the motive which these critics had for making Galilee the birth-place of these illusions. For, in the case of such self-deception in Jerusalem, the possibility of convincing themselves of the contrary by a visit to His sepulchre could have at any moment undeceived them. At the same time, we see how flatly they contradict the accounts given in the Gospels, and have not once thought of Christ’s disciples in Jerusalem who lived near His tomb, and were bound, in the case which the critics imagine, to oppose and correct the ideas of the fanatical Galileans. On the same ground, Strauss thinks that the disciples did not need to return to Jerusalem so soon as Gospel history says they did. Weisse, who makes Christ’s resurrection to be not a resurrection from the grave into a new life, but an ascending from hades into heaven (379, 414), thinks that the disciples at first believed only in a resurrection of Jesus in that sense, and that this gave the Jews occasion to declare that the disciples had stolen Christ’s body out of the grave, and this again gave the disciples ground for assuming that His tomb was empty, and consequently that He had risen in the body (ii. 344); and that the result of all this was, that they invented apocryphal stories of a corporeal resurrection, which they found useful in contending with such false teachers as maintained, that the only true Christ was He who, as the Risen One, showed Himself by incorporeal appearances, but that ‘the Jesus who suffered the death of the cross under Pontius Pilate, was a different person from that Christ, and only inspired by Him’ (391). This hypothesis needs only to be mentioned. The apostolic church which it supposes is a most wretched caricature.

2. Strauss argues (625) against the possibility of restoring a dead person to life, and especially from the assumption, that with the very entrance of death the change in the body begins which leads to dissolution. ‘Thus, if a departed spirit could of itself, or compelled by another, revisit its former habitation, the body, it would at once find it uninhabitable in its noblest part, and incapable of being used.’ This argument decides nothing whatever against the resurrection of Jesus, when we recollect that the agency which immediately followed His death operated in a quite opposite direction to it, and necessarily brought on that change whereby He was kept from ‘seeing corruption.’ Besides, that the life which was in Christ was possessed of positive power, able to assail and overcome corruption itself, is involved in the idea of its relation to corporeal things. If it can bring back the soul into the visible world by infusing life into its inward body, why could it not do that by means of the former body, using it as only material for manifestation, which, according to need, the soul in its becoming visible assimilates to itself, by a powerful and sifting process which may reject all the useless matter?

1) Thus Bahrdt. See Strauss, ii. 627.

2) Dr Paulus. See Strauss, ii. 628.

3) See Weisse, ii. 411.

4) Strauss, ii. 633

5) Baur, 179.

6) See the above-cited passages of Strauss.

7) Compare my Worte der Abwchr, 35. It is high time for theology to learn to distinguish more strictly than it has hitherto done between subjective illusions and true visions, which are always to be considered as coming from God, and as the consequence of spiritual intimations, and no longer let the confused dreamings of exaltation be adduced as visions, as Strauss still ventures to do, 634. Compare Hug, 236.

8) See Von Baur, and Schweizer, 215

9) See Strauss, ii. 623

10) See Strauss, ii. 624.

11) See Strauss, ii. 626. Compare Ebrard.

12) Von Baur.

13) See my Osterboten, i. 42.

14) This was undoubtedly formed by the 500 Galilean disciples in conjunction with the apostles. Kinkel thinks (Stud, und Krit. iii. 607) that since the number of the disciples who waited in Jerusalem for the outpouring of the Holy Ghost amounted to only 120, we must assume that the manifestation to the 500 brethren took place after Pentecost, when the number of disciples had increased. But this does not take into account that many of the Galilean disciples might not be able to go to Jerusalem, and that the number given Acts i. 15 refers to only one particular assembly.