The weekly Theological Reflection
Theological reflection for Easter – Resurrection – Physical or Spiritual?
The time around Easter is often the time when newspapers or the BBC carry out some sort of survey and then proclaim in headlines the suggestion that only half of all Christians believe in the resurrection. To me, belief in the resurrection is a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith and a much more sensible question would be to ask what you understand by the resurrection.
If we study the resurrection as set out in the New Testament, then we can discern two clear lines of thought – as expressed in the Gospels and in the letters of Paul. According to Matthew and Mark, when the women returned to the tomb to care for Jesus they found the tomb empty with the heavy closing stone having been moved away. According to Matthew but only hinted at in Mark, Jesus appeared to the women and then later, in Galilee, to the disciples. According to Luke, the women found the tomb empty and told Peter who went to check for himself. Later on in Luke we read of the appearance of the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus and then in Jerusalem in the upper room when the disciples were gathered all together. In the Gospel of John, the emphasis is on the universal nature of the Church which is represented by the net containing 153 known varieties of fish and indeed throughout John there is an emphasis on resurrection with the words of Jesus being the words of resurrection. A number of differences there but, of course, each of the Gospel writers was writing from a different perspective and each provided a different ending to their version of the Good News as they tried to answer the question “Where is Jesus now?”
If we now look at St.Paul, who it should be remembered composed his letters significantly before the Gospels were completed. Just to remind you, Paul’s earliest letters were written in the late 40’s AD whilst the earliest Gospel – that of Mark was probably written down about 70AD. The earliest references to the resurrection are therefore contained within the writings of St. Paul.
Paul devotes the whole of chapter 15 of his first letter to the Corinthians to the resurrection, initially, confirming the historical correctness of the resurrection experience. But then we come to the nub of the question of the nature of the risen Christ, the great high priest. On the nature of the risen Christ Paul is quite explicit – it was a spiritual body. Reading from verse 43 “It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.” This is the approach that I prefer – that the resurrected body was a spiritual body which cannot be explained totally in rational terms. Though, of course, we could say that spiritual body is a contradiction in terms rather like referring to a square circle; however, I think we can get round that problem by saying that it is raised as Spirit. I would also add that this approach accords well with many of the accounts of religious experience that in my involvement with the University of Wales Lampeter Religious Experience Research Centre, I have had the opportunity to read. Let me now try to bring this all together.
First, the resurrection was no mere resuscitation of Jesus’s earthly body. This was the view of the Church of England House of Bishops in 1986. Their statement recognised that irreversible physiological changes would have occurred swiftly after death leaving this option an impossibility. So, no resuscitation. However, a re-creation in one form or another was a possibility. And this is of course what many believe. After all, if God is so omnipotent that he created the cosmos, then he could have recreated Jesus.
Secondly, the resurrection is more than the mere survival of the spirit of Jesus, for this would deny the true role of Christ explained in the words of St.Paul, expressing the central affirmation of Christianity, “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.” Jesus was or rather is the representative man, the Son of Man, the Messiah whose future was interlocked with that of his people who by “faith, baptism and the Holy Spirit are in him in the sight of God, united with him so fully and finally that it can be said that he died for their sakes and that they died and rose in him.” (Rom 6:3f & Gal2:20)
The essence of faith in the resurrection is therefore the belief that Jesus was made one with God, being translated immediately without reservation to glory. It is that through the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ is both one with the Father in glory and one with his people on earth. In other words, the risen Christ is the one who unites us with God.
This, of course, leaves the question “Where do we meet this risen Christ?” The theologian and Priest H.A.Williams tackled this problem head on and suggested that like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus we travel part of the way with the risen Christ but, unlike them, we do not perceive who he is. But in reality, his spiritual presence makes us what we are, establishing our personal identity, enabling us to participate in this world as agents of God endeavouring to create goodness wherever possible. Endeavouring is, I believe, the important word here because in life, as I mentioned in last week’s reflection there is inevitably suffering. However, we begin to recognise the power of the resurrection when all “that separates and injures and destroys is being overcome by all that unites and heals and creates.”
Coming back now to the original question – is the resurrection physical or spiritual? As you will have surmised from the above, I believe in a spiritual resurrection – as one who originally trained as an engineer and scientist, I find it very difficult to believe in a physical recreation. But one of the fascinating things about theology is that there are no absolute right or wrong answers – so the choice is yours when you answer the question I posed at the outset of this short article – what do you understand to be the meaning of the resurrection.
And my own thought, to reiterate: we recognise the power of the resurrection when all “that separates and injures and destroys is being overcome by all that unites and heals and creates.”
Ref: Williams, H.A. The True Resurrection. Continuum. New edition (First published 1972)
Brislington Community News 