Historical experience of nothing real

Before we consider the gainsayers, let us address some issues that contextualise our discussion. We should begin by acknowledging that the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead is made in faith. It attests at the very least to the believer’s experience that Jesus, though he died a brutal and ignominious death by crucifixion and was buried in a tomb, was rescued from death by God, who raised him up and glorified him, bringing him into eternal life as the ‘first fruits’ (1 Cor. 15:20) of the resurrected life that through him would be shared with believers. This experience and its proclamation gave birth to the Christian tradition. The first resurrection experiencers would not have thought of themselves as ‘Christian’, a sense of identity that emerged later in the first century, decades after their first claims for the resurrection.Footnote ² Nor is it likely that they would have imagined Jesus’s resurrection as anything but a saving act of God in the long history of God’s faithfulness to the people of Israel (i.e., as an event Jewish in meaning).

The claim developed in the early tradition from Paul’s beliefs in particular. Christ’s visionary appearance to the apostle who was once a persecutor of the church of God (1 Cor. 15:9) led Paul to cosmopolitan claims about the resurrection’s saving effects in which the Saviour’s gift of eternal life was for Jew and Gentile alike. And the universal scope of the Christ event led Paul to imagine a salvation Jewish in its bodiliness, though now a bodiliness transformed beyond sin and death and that radiated Jesus’s own glorified state in heavenly life. These Pauline beliefs became normative for the later tradition. Such early claims for the resurrection possessed extraordinary authority both for their originality and for the ways they came to be engrained in a canonical scriptural tradition that believers embraced as the inspired word of God. Yet, one did not have to be one of these early believers to have this experience. Christian faith throughout the ages simply is the experience of Jesus as the resurrected Lord.

There is nothing exceptional about claiming the historicity of the Christian experience of the resurrection of Jesus. Let us reiterate our definition of ‘historicity’ as a quality of events and experiences that transpire in time and space, and so are defined to some degree by the spatio-temporal conditions under which events occur in the universe. Experiences are inner events that take place in the subjective life of a biological agent. When human experiencers try to capture the ‘whence’ of meaningful subjective events, they might imagine the experience happening in their ‘mind’, their ‘heart’ or their ‘soul’. Scientifically explained, these experiences are chemical reactions in the brain. A religious experience like Christian faith in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is such a subjective event and, like all experiences, possesses historicity. Like all experiences, the experience of Jesus as the risen Lord is defined by the same spatio-temporal conditions that set the existential context for human life in which experiences arise. We are accustomed to trust an experiencer’s verbal report that this or that kind of experience is taking place in their inner life, even if the report leads us to judge that the experience is delusional and utterly divorced from a correspondence claimed to events in the objective world. Still, the experience itself possesses historicity simply because it takes place under the conditions of time and space. This is all to make the point with which this paragraph began – there is nothing exceptional about claiming the historicity of the Christian experience of the resurrection of Jesus.

The issue at stake in modern assessments of the resurrection is not whether the experience of the resurrection possesses historicity, but whether it corresponds to an objectively real event (i.e. the resurrection of Jesus from the dead), and then, for believers who affirm its reality, whether that real event should be affirmed as an historical event (i.e. an event that can be located in time and space). Let us first consider the minimalist response.

David Friedrich Strauss was the first modern critic of note to deny the reality of the resurrection while acknowledging that Jesus’s disciples yet had an (objectively baseless) experience of it. Strauss’s massive work, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835), follows the arc of the Gospels’ narrative and so addresses the resurrection of Jesus late in its pages. Strauss begins by examining the discrepancies in the resurrection stories of the four Gospels, discrepancies which, for him, seem to be more evidence of the resurrection narratives’ unreliability than of their redaction-critical differences. Strauss advances his analysis by offering disjunctive alternatives for where the evidence leads. ‘Hence the cultivated intellect of the present day has very decidedly stated the following dilemma: either Jesus was not really dead, or he did not really rise again’.Footnote ³ Strauss has little patience for the claims of some rationalist critics that Jesus was entombed after his crucifixion still alive, that he recovered and then presented himself duplicitously to his disciples as one miraculously resurrected. Such an elaborate and unlikely contrivance simply wilts when compared with the far more reasonable conclusion that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead simply never happened.

Strauss, though, is happy to acknowledge that the disciples eventually came to experience the resurrection of Jesus. The disciples of Jesus ‘had before them as a fact merely the death of their Messiah, – the notion of a resurrection on his part they could nowhere gather, but must, according to our conception of the matter, have first produced it’.Footnote ⁴ Strauss regards the originality of their predicament – producing the experience of the resurrection – to be a difficulty that superseded Paul’s later visionary experience, which finally, Strauss suggests, derived from theirs. During their time with Jesus in the last years of his life, the disciples became convinced of his Messianic status. Jesus’s death ‘for the moment annihilated this belief’. But then, ‘after the first shock was passed, the earlier impression began to revive: there spontaneously arose in them the psychological necessity of solving the contradiction between the ultimate fate of Jesus and their earlier opinion of him’.Footnote ⁵ This entailed on their part the idea of a suffering and dying Messiah. And since he remained the Messiah even in death, Jesus had to transcend death in a resurrection that they could actually experience:

And once this psychological state of resurrection faith took hold, it had to be narrated into objectivity, ‘surrounded and embellished with all the pomp which the Jewish imagination furnished’. Stories of the empty tomb, angels, witnesses, and appearances of Jesus in this place or that were all ways of cementing the historicity of the experience of the resurrected Jesus, which could never validate the historicity of the event that believers claimed to experience.Footnote ⁷

Several scholars closer to our own time have offered thicker descriptions of the resurrection experience as a purely psychological phenomenon. Integrating social-scientific perspectives into his historical account of early Christianity, Gerd Lüdemann has proposed that resurrection faith had its psychological origins in guilt – the guilt of Peter, the betrayer of Jesus, and the guilt of Paul, the persecutor of the church of Christ.Footnote ⁸ Their experience of Jesus in glorified life became a way of negotiating what they judged to be egregious failures in their relationships with Jesus, respectively before and after his death. The philosopher of religion John Hick explained resurrection faith from another psychological perspective. Hick likens early Christian experiences of the resurrected Christ to near-death experiences in which the resuscitated recount seeing loved ones or religious figures in a supernatural state. Along the same rationalising lines, Hick proposes that the appearances of the resurrected Christ are bereavement visions – the experience of those in deep grief that their beloved departed has appeared to them.Footnote ⁹

The theology of Sallie McFague provides our final example of affirming the historicity of the experience of the resurrection while denying its historical reality. McFague’s psychological interpretation moves in exactly the opposite direction from Lüdemann’s and Hick’s, which tried to name very specific variations of grieving emotion. McFague generalises the psychological state of the disciples of Jesus into a theology that gave rise to, and continues to flourish in, the church. ‘The resurrection’, she states, ‘is a way of speaking about an awareness that the presence of God in Jesus is a permanent presence in our present’.Footnote ¹⁰ Any literal understanding of the resurrection conveyed by the empty tomb narratives encourages believers to imagine their own bodily resurrection as an otherworldly transport that in turn encourages them to diminish their experience of the divine here and now. Arguing for the value of her metaphor of the world as God’s body, McFague thinks it better to understand the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and his graceful effect on believers, ‘not as the bodily translation of some individuals to another world – a mythology no longer credible to us – but as the promise of God to be permanently present, “bodily” present to us, in all places and times of our world…’.Footnote ¹¹ This metaphorical explanation of the resurrection captures what the first Christians experienced in their resurrection faith but which they falsely objectified as a historical event in which Jesus’s corpse was miraculously re-animated. Believers in the tradition have followed along the same mythological path. But now, she claims, the task of theology is ‘how to remythologize the Christian’s cry of affirmation “Christ is risen!”’ to express its core experiential meaning – that resurrection is the utterly universalised event of God’s loving presence to all physical bodies.Footnote ¹²

A real event beyond history

Let us move to another position quite common among believing modern theologians, namely, that the historicity of the experience of the resurrection corresponds to a real event – the resurrection of Jesus from the dead – but that this event did not unfold within the conditions of history. Rather, it was an event transcending time and space, though no less real – and perhaps even more real as a redemptive miracle – than an event possessing historicity. It is important to state that this position is implicitly a re-interpretation of the most common understanding of the resurrection among believing Christians throughout history to our own day. That common understanding is the literalist view that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead was a historical event that transpired in time and space and that is evinced in the empty tomb stories with which all four Gospels end, as well as in New Testament reports of appearances of the resurrected Christ to Jesus’ disciples. Affirming the reality of the resurrection while denying its historicity is an apologetic gesture in the face of the critical sensibilities of modernity shared by believers as well as Christianity’s cultured despisers. Affirming the reality of the resurrection while denying its historicity is a way of avoiding the problems posed by a literalist understanding of the Easter event. Let us consider two representative examples of this modern theological interpretation.

Offering his own assessment of his two-volume masterpiece on Christology, Edward Schillebeeckx noted a fundamental heuristic that guided his interpretation. ‘Christianity is not a message which has to be believed’, he avers, ‘but an experience of faith which becomes a message, and as an explicit message seeks to offer a new possibility of life experience to others who hear it from within their own experience’.Footnote ¹³ The interpretive priority that Schillebeeckx accords to experience, rather than to the objectivity of divine revelation, enables his broader theological project of translating the Christian message to a secular culture wary of authoritative claims but perhaps capable of being grasped by the experience that transformed the Easter witnesses.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead ‘is God’s eschatological saving activity, accomplished in Jesus’.Footnote ¹⁴ This definition makes it clear that the resurrection is a real event wrought by God that possesses its own objectivity. Indeed, Schillebeeckx explicitly repudiates any view that claims that ‘resurrection and belief in the resurrection are one and the same thing’.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet, he prefers to stress the resurrection as an event that transcends history, appropriated by believers at once as an experience of the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus. In ‘the New Testament affirmation’, he states, ‘resurrection, exaltation and “being invested with power” denote one and the same undivided reality, where resurrection is the terminus a quo and exaltation the terminus ad quem of the selfsame event’.Footnote ¹⁶ The purport of this identification is twofold: first, the single eventful arc from resurrection to exaltation draws the eschatological occurrence into the mystery of God’s saving action, and second, this event can only be apprehended by the eyes of faith and not by the senses.

For Schillebeeckx, New Testament affirmations of the historicity of the resurrection are narrative details that developed in later oral and literary traditions to give expression to the Easter experience. The formula that Jesus’s resurrection occurred ‘on the third day’, he explains, does not express the temporality of a historical event. There are numerous Old Testament references to the formula ‘the third day’ that do not specify ‘any chronological qualification’ but ‘simply … indicate the day of important salvific events or of sudden, overwhelming calamity’.

Schillebeeckx makes the very same point about other historically specific New Testament claims about Jesus’ resurrection.

Any number of early Christian traditions, such as those of the maranatha Christology or Wisdom Christologies, he argues, did not require imagining Jesus’s exaltation into new life as a consequence of an initial event of resurrection. But both in later Judaism and in early Jewish Christian belief, ‘life after death (for the righteous) began more and more to assume the form of belief in physical resurrection…’. Thus, in the first Christian generations, a development occurred that witnessed the ‘gradual ascendency of the resurrection idea over other ways of conceiving of the actual form of an “assumption into heaven”’. Yet, the development of the tradition toward the experience of resurrection-exaltation, he insists, did not require claims for the historicity of the resurrection as an event:

A hostile reader might conclude from these words that Schillebeeckx denies not only the historicity of the resurrection but also its reality as an event. But that would be unfair. Resurrection, he maintains, was a way of imagining the initiation of the core Easter event, which he very much affirms as real – that Jesus was brought up from death into the divine life. But though Schillebeeckx affirms resurrection-exaltation as real, he does not view it as an event that took place within time and space.

A second example of the affirmation of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus as an event while denying its historicity is found in the theology of Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann deals with the resurrection of Jesus in many of his works, but principally in his Christology, The Way of Jesus Christ.Footnote ¹⁹ In the gospel message, he insists, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are ‘mutually related’, for it ‘is only in this correlation that the cross acquires its special saving meaning’, and ‘only in this interrelation that the raising [of Jesus] acquires its special saving meaning’.Footnote ²⁰ Yet, these saving events ‘are not two happenings belonging to the same category, which can be listed one after another’. ‘On the contrary’, he affirms,

For Moltmann, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is an event that is both utterly real and, in its reality, utterly efficacious in its capacity to transform history from a realm of sin and violence into God’s new creation. But precisely in its transformative power over history, the resurrection transcends the conditions of historicity.

This is the typical distinction that modern, critical theologians make in order to affirm the truth of faith and yet explain that truth in a way that might begin to be intelligible to non-religious epistemological expectations. For the claims of faith about the resurrection to be true, the resurrection cannot be reduced to an experience or a metaphor itself expressive of faith. Resurrection faith must correspond to the actual event of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. But that event, the distinction assures, is an event different from those that transpire in history and that are accessible to and verifiable by common sense.

Like all theological interpreters of the resurrection, Moltmann offers his own understanding of the event and its experience in the early church. Unlike Schillebeeckx, he thinks that Jesus’s resurrection, rather than his exaltation into heavenly glory, was at the core of the disciples’ faith. Like Schillebeeckx, he thinks that narratives of the empty tomb were later developments in the still incipient tradition.Footnote ²² Moltmann makes much of the visions of the resurrected Christ reported by Paul and the Gospel writers. He ascribes historicity to these experiences and regards them as apocalyptic encounters with the new creation inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus. As the Christophanies gradually disappeared, the gospel message took their place.Footnote ²³ Having asserted that the resurrection of Jesus is not a historical event, Moltmann is yet concerned to align the resurrection with the events of history. ‘The experience of reality as history’, he maintains, ‘presupposes hope for its future’.Footnote ²⁴ But that hope derives from a remembrance of the past that stirs hope’s expectation for the vindication of the past. The past, present, and future – what we call ‘history’ – are always intermeshed in the human desire for justice in history that embraces both the living and the dead, and to which the resurrection of the dead speaks.Footnote ²⁵ ‘Seeing history in the perspective of resurrection’, he claims, ‘means participating through the Spirit in the process of resurrection. Belief in resurrection is not summed up by assent to a dogma and the registering of a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God’.Footnote ²⁶ History is the realm of the resurrection’s efficacy, even though the resurrection of Jesus itself was not a historical event.

The resurrection as a historical event

We have already noted that throughout the Christian tradition, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead has typically been understood as what moderns would call a ‘historical event’. The ancient world was accustomed to imagining supernatural realities that transcended the limits of historical existence, whether they were Plato’s ‘forms’ or the divine nature of the creator God. But the Christian claim that Jesus is the Saviour seemed to require that his resurrection, though the work of God, be affirmed as having occurred historically. Jesus, after all, was a human being who lived a life in history, in a particular time and place. The reality of his life – his words and deeds, to say nothing of his tragic death – unfolded in history as his own personal history. Christians believe that this man is the Saviour, the Christ, the Son of God. Whatever the Christian claim for bodily resurrection means, it certainly affirms the wholeness of personal continuity into heavenly life. The resurrection of Jesus was experienced as yet another event in the history of Jesus’s personal continuity, an event, as Moltmann insightfully observed, closely bound up with the event of Jesus’s terrible death. Moreover, the historicity of the event of resurrection simply declared its reality, a reality testified in the Gospels’ empty tomb stories and in their increasingly physicalist portrayals of Jesus’s resurrection appearances (Luke 24:36–43; John 20:26–29; 21:1–15).

These physicalist portrayals of the resurrected Jesus in what became the Christian canonical scriptures cemented the tradition’s regard for the resurrection as what moderns would call a historical event and what premoderns would simply regard as a real event. Hans Frei has charted the birth of that very distinction in his study of the rise of biblical criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In early modernity, he argues, traditionally realistic readings of the Bible were ‘eclipsed’ by critical readings that took the scriptural words to refer to something other than their plain meaning.Footnote ²⁷ Such critical readings might be hostile to Christianity, taking the biblical words to express aberrant psychological states or broader philosophical truths about the human condition. Or such critical readings might be motivated by a modern Christian desire for secular intelligibility that assumed the saving events narrated in the text could not have occurred as they were literally described and so referred not to ‘historical’ events but instead to more sublime meanings that conveyed a higher, and more reasonably accessible, Christian truth. Post-Enlightenment theologians took their stand on either side of this interpretive divide: conservatives stalwartly committed to a pre-critical reading of the Bible that regarded its saving events as historical, and critical-mediating theologians typically affirming the meaning of the saving events that was not validated by their historicity.Footnote ²⁸ As a point of comparison for my own defence of the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, let us consider the position of Wolfhart Pannenberg, a critical theologian who yet insists on the historical eventfulness of the resurrection.

Pannenberg addresses this issue in his monograph on Christology, translated into English as Jesus – God and Man.Footnote ²⁹ Christology, Pannenberg insists, is decidedly not a function of soteriology. Outliers in the interpretive tradition such as Kant, Schleiermacher, Bultmann, and Tillich have defined the person of Jesus in light of his work, but one can only speak of Jesus’s saving significance in light of the universal significance of his person, his unity with God, which Pannenberg portrays as God’s presence in and to Jesus rather than in terms of the essentialist notion of divinity delineated in the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon.Footnote ³⁰ This presence of God to Jesus, his divinity, flourished throughout his life in his words and deeds. But this divine presence could only be confirmed, Pannenberg insists, by Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. ‘The Easter event’, he avers, ‘points back to the pre-Easter Jesus insofar as it has confirmed his pre-Easter claim to authority. Jesus’ unity with God, established in the Easter event, does not begin only with this event – it comes into force retroactively from the perspective of this event for the claim to authority in the activity of the earthly Jesus’.Footnote ³¹ Since the resurrection definitively reveals who Jesus is and inaugurates the eschatological reign of God, it is the event that grounds the very truth of faith.Footnote ³² For this reason it is crucially important for Pannenberg to portray the reality of the resurrection in historical terms.

It is hardly surprising that Pannenberg would expect historians to be ‘obligated to reconstruct the historical correlation of the events that has led to the emergence of primitive Christianity’. But it is indeed surprising to modern sensibilities that Pannenberg continues by castigating the historian who would rule out the possibility of the resurrection’s reality:

Pannenberg’s distinction between the visions of the disciples and the appearances of the resurrected Jesus is a distinction between experience (visions) and real event (Christophanies). Like Schillebeeckx and Moltmann, Pannenberg could speak of the resurrection as an event objective in its reality without expecting that its reality would have historicity. Yet he presses the reality of the resurrection in terms of its historicity:

These words seem to stretch the typical, modern understanding of ‘historical event’ from an occurrence in time and space into a hermeneutical category that makes cultural pre-understandings the measure of eventful historicity. If an eschatological belief, he proposes, is the historical setting for an understanding of early Christianity, then eschatological events claimed within that culture are authentically judged to be historical events. The self-standing reality of such events seems not to be at issue, initially at least, in this semantic play. Pannenberg, however, presses further.

Arguing against those who would deny the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection on the grounds that it violates the laws of nature, Pannenberg claims that knowledge of the laws of physics is ever partial and that natural science ‘must declare its own inability to make definitive judgments about the possibility or impossibility of an individual event, regardless of how certainly it is able, at least in principle, to measure the probability of an event’s occurrence’.Footnote ³⁵ Historicity, he thinks, is not a bargaining chip that the theologian can offer scientific understanding in negotiating the intelligibility of Christian faith. ‘If we would forgo the concept of an historical event here’, he insists, ‘then it is no longer possible at all to affirm that the resurrection of Jesus or that the appearances of the resurrected Jesus really happened at a definite time in our world. There is no justification for affirming Jesus’ resurrection as an event that really happened, if it is not affirmed as an historical event as such’. And lest one interpret these claims solely as the expression of faith, Pannenberg continues by asserting that ‘whether or not a particular event happened two thousand years ago is not made certain by faith but only by historical research, to the extent that certainty can be attained at all about questions of this kind’.Footnote ³⁶

The context thus far for Pannenberg’s discussion of the historicity of the resurrection has been the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus as recounted in Paul and the Gospels. Pannenberg completes his discussion of this issue by observing that one’s ‘decision about the question of the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb is not without significance for the final conclusion’.Footnote ³⁷ Pannenberg undercuts the scholarly position that the empty tomb stories are later, legendary accretions to the earliest testimonies of Christophanies, superfluous to the primitive form of Easter faith and narrative stylings whose only purpose was to affirm the reality of the resurrection. To the contrary, Pannenberg views each of these traditions – appearances and empty tomb – as true reports of actual historical events and maintains that these traditions developed independently of each other. Even more, he contends, their independence strengthens their claims to historicity. ‘If the appearance tradition and the grave tradition’, he concludes, ‘came into existence independently, then by their mutually complementing each other they let the assertion of the reality of Jesus’ resurrection … appear as historically very probable, and that always means in historical inquiry that it is to be presupposed until contrary evidence appears’.Footnote ³⁸ For Pannenberg, the historicity of the resurrection seems to point to far more than the nuanced hermeneutical category with which he began his discussion.

Grace, time, and historicity

If Pannenberg’s efforts to secure the reality of the resurrection motivated his insistence on its historicity, then there is good cause for his proposal. An epistemological standard is always at stake in any Christian affirmation of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. For their faith to be consonant with the biblical tradition, believers need to affirm the reality of the resurrection. To be true, their experience of the resurrection must correspond to an event that possesses its own objective reality. As we have seen in the case of Jesus’s resurrection, reality can be configured either as a historical event that occurs within the conditions of space and time or as a supernatural event that transcends the conditions of space and time. In a rather unusual gesture for a theologian of critical sensibilities, Pannenberg chooses the former. His choice only seems to be governed by the epistemological concern that the reality of the resurrection be clearly affirmed, even to the point that he judges New Testament literary evidence to be historically probable.

Meeting the epistemological standard of faith’s correspondence to reality in the way that Pannenberg does is well-intentioned but misguided, requiring as it does the canons of historical evidence and judgement to be bent by the expectations of Christian faith and hope.Footnote ³⁹ I do think that the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead should be affirmed, but not simply on epistemological grounds that, we have seen, can just as readily be met were the resurrection configured as a supernatural event. Rather, there are theological reasons for insisting on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus that are suggested by a consistent understanding of grace and time.

It might be interesting to place the eventfulness of the resurrection of Jesus in the context of twentieth-century developments in the Roman Catholic theology of grace. In his ground-breaking work Surnaturel, the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac presented a most effective critique of the Baroque theology of grace that had widespread acceptance in the Catholic tradition from sixteenth-century interpreters of Aquinas to twentieth-century Neo-Scholastics.Footnote ⁴⁰ In that theological imaginary, the supernatural realm from which grace originated hovered above the natural realm of creation. The realms constituted two, clearly distinguishable orders of existence. Through God’s providence, discrete and rather narrow channels of grace flowed from above to below, in the Christ event and in the sacramental mediation of the church. In order to preserve the freedom of God, the gratuity of grace, and the integrity of human free choice in assenting to the gift of grace, the Baroque theology introduced the notion of natura pura to describe how creation, and especially created human persons, were originally brought into being by God. In this phrase, the word ‘pure’ delineated certain limitations to God’s primordial creation of human nature, and by implication, all the natural world. Pure nature was graceless. In this Baroque imaginary, the natural realm, and specifically human nature, was brought into existence in a graceless state and then, through divine agency, later graced as God deemed appropriate.

De Lubac believed that this conceptualisation, even as it distinguished nature and supernature, falsely configured the natural and supernatural realms with respect to each other. No more than a remainder concept, a placeholder to solve a perceived theological problem, natura pura obscured the possibility of imagining a divine transcendence of ‘unique splendor’ capable of showering creation with God’s graceful immanence.Footnote ⁴¹ In a later work that pressed further the argument of Surnaturel, de Lubac decried the supposed theological value of a hypothesised state of pure nature:

In de Lubac’s judgement, natura pura is an empty concept because nature – and especially human nature – never dwelt in an ungraced state. Grace pervades nature from its very beginnings. Although there are extraordinary means of grace, grace is not gifted only through such means. Nor does the prevalence of grace in any way compromise its gratuity or God’s freedom in choosing to grace nature from its incipience.

In his claim for a world full of grace, de Lubac in effect proposed a new spatial imaginary that challenged what he pejoratively described as the ‘nominalist’ character of the Catholic Baroque tradition.Footnote ⁴³ That tradition portrayed grace as extrinsic to nature, a foreign gift that reminded its recipients of its origin in supernatural otherness. De Lubac insists that creation is always already graced and so imagines the supernatural and natural intertwined in God’s intimate omnipresence to creation. God and creatures, of course, are not the same. But God’s graceful embrace of creation is not tardy for even a single moment, nor is grace ever less than thoroughly immanent.

Even though the Catholic Baroque tradition antedated the rise of modernity, it is ironic that there is a certain homology between the imaginary of the Baroque theology of grace and the Enlightenment imaginary that was hostile to it and, indeed, to traditional Christianity in general. Both assumed that there was a diremption between the natural and supernatural orders, and that that disjunction was crucial for understanding the world and the place of human persons in it. For the Catholic Baroque tradition, the separation of the orders, captured in the notion of natura pura, affirmed human receptivity and God’s graceful prerogatives. In many respects, the Protestant Reformers’ dialectical understanding of grace, which served a postlapsarian anthropology of utter human fallenness, instantiated the diremption of the two orders from its own confessional perspective. For Enlightenment deists, the separation of the orders assured divine distance from a natural world that functioned on its own according to the laws of nature, devoid of miracles and subject to the historical initiatives of the autonomous human will.Footnote ⁴⁴

Let us apply this shared two-orders worldview to the typically modern theological understanding of the resurrection of Jesus, namely, that the resurrection is a real event, though one that is not a historical event. Clearly, denying the historicity of the resurrection is an apologetical gesture toward post-Enlightenment canons of reason and intelligibility. As we have noted, the resurrection of Jesus is the primordial Christian miracle. Jesus is raised from the dead by God; his entombed corpse is drawn up into a new state of glorified life. Resurrected, he does ordinary things that seem to take place under the natural conditions of time and space, like walking with travellers (Luke 24:13–27) or eating a meal (Luke 24:42–43) or preparing a breakfast for his friends (John 21:9–15) or inviting a doubting disciple to touch the identifiable traits of his pre-mortem body, marked by the wounds of crucifixion (John 20:26–29). And yet all these seemingly spatio-temporal events are enacted by a dead man brought back to life. By the same token, this resurrected person appears and disappears miraculously to disciples in his resurrected state, doing so in a way that utterly violates the natural conditions of time and space (1 Cor. 15:5–8; Acts 9:3–8; Luke 24:31; John 20:19, 26). What better way for a modern believer of critical sensibility to affirm the reality of the resurrection of Jesus and to escape all the problems posed by ascribing historicity to the resurrection than by regarding it as a supernatural event, and, as such, an event that transcends the conditions of time and space? This affirmation satisfies faith’s epistemological standard of objective truth, while configuring the resurrection as an event beyond the natural order. Thus sidestepped is the Enlightenment assault on miracles that violate the natural laws set by the conditions of time and space and apprehended by reason. In this Christian apologetic, the resurrection reports in Paul and in the Gospels are taken to be metaphorical accounts of the supernatural event, as Frei explained so well in his study of modern biblical hermeneutics.

This modern way of imagining the resurrection, itself a response to the Enlightenment worldview, also dovetailed perfectly with the two-orders Christan worldview that flourished in Catholic Tridentine and mainline Protestant theology. The Enlightenment co-opted this post-Reformation Christian worldview by distancing the supernatural from the natural realm even further, denying divine acts of graceful intervention here below and secularising the goodness of human persons. The Christian worldview’s own commitment to a two-orders configuration was in this way oddly reinforced by the cultural ascendency of the Enlightenment’s two-orders worldview. That strange conflation set the stage for a disjunctive theological response to the Enlightenment critique of miracles – a response that reflected both Christian and Enlightenment assumptions defined by their shared commitment to a two-orders worldview.Footnote ⁴⁵ Either the resurrection is affirmed as a historical event, as conservatives claimed (in which case modern standards of science and intelligibility are denied or ignored, to say nothing of all the explanatory difficulties engendered by a literalist understanding of resurrection); or the resurrection is affirmed as a real event, but one that transcends time and space, as modern, critical theologians, perhaps with the exception of Pannenberg, claim in their accommodating and yet defensive response to the Enlightenment critique.Footnote ⁴⁶

One might question whether apologetical interests should so thoroughly shape the representation of an event as fundamental to faith as the resurrection. That is not a question I will pursue, however interesting it might be. My question concerns rather the adequacy of the Christian two-orders worldview to configure a resurrection imaginary. If the denial of the historicity of the resurrection has been an attractive position because it draws on the spatial assumptions of the Christian two-orders worldview, itself a natural conversation partner to Enlightenment sensibilities, then do the limitations of that worldview, exposed by the nouvelle théologie of grace, skew the representation of the resurrection of Jesus?

De Lubac’s critique of the two-orders worldview and his theological vision of a creaturely world always already permeated by grace became normative in post-conciliar Catholic theology. Indeed, one could make the case that his theology of grace was validated as doctrine as it came to authoritative expression in the teachings of Vatican II. This widespread reception, reflecting the truthful resonance of this understanding of grace in Christian experience, raises questions about the adequacy of the modern, apologetic imaginary of resurrection. The two orders typically imagined in the Christian Baroque were time (nature) and eternity (grace), with eternity regarded as a feature of the entire supernatural realm. Situating the event of resurrection beyond time, and so beyond history, fixes the event beyond any literal representation of the primordial miracle. Positioning the resurrection in the eternal realm assures that it remains pristinely ineffable. Its timeless reality is affirmed even as it is historically inaccessible. As noted, the scriptural Christophanies are here regarded as metaphorical renditions of an otherworldly event, or, in the manner of the Baroque two-orders model, as episodic interruptions of the grace of resurrection into the natural world. Let us reconfigure all this differently along the lines of de Lubac’s important contribution.

We have seen that de Lubac’s theology of grace offers a new spatial imaginary to the Christian worldview. But his theology of grace also has implications for how time is imagined.Footnote ⁴⁷ In effect, de Lubac’s rejection of the notion of natura pura insists that there is never an ungraced moment in all of creation. Time, without interruption, is permeated by grace from beginning to end. Time, this view seems to declare, is thoroughly eschatological. The Protestant exegete C. H. Dodd had claimed the eschatological resonance of time in a more circumscribed way later in the twentieth century. Christianity, Dodd asserted, properly espoused an understanding of graceful time that he called a ‘realized eschatology’. The Christ event, culminating in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, had already inaugurated the eschaton, the power of eternal life, in history.Footnote ⁴⁸ Eternal life, Dodd insisted, was not solely a post-mortem state but very much a present reality, initiated as grace was poured into history through the Easter event. By comparison, de Lubac offered a more sweeping notion of eschatological time by making creation itself, and so all worldly time, God’s graced reality. If that vision of grace has won the hearts and minds – the faith and hope – of contemporary Christians, then what specifically theological motivation would lead them to extirpate the resurrection from a history rife with grace, a history which the Saviour, as the mediator of grace, completely embraced in the incarnation? The answer to this rhetorical question, of course, is that there is no theological motivation, only an apologetical one. Christian sensibilities, which affirm time as eschatological, are quite different from Enlightenment sensibilities on time, which regard history as a kind of temporal natura pura, though one now celebrated as a humanistic liberation from the heteronomy of grace. Moreover, and by way of analogy, must we not see the relegation of the resurrection of Jesus to a supernatural realm above and beyond the realm of history not only as a reflection of the very two-orders worldview that de Lubac’s critique exposed as false but also as conveying an extrinsicist understanding of the resurrection’s eventfulness, itself the graceful source of eternal life? A theology of the resurrection should be the consistent paradigm for a theology of grace that explains its saving effects, a maxim that we have defined by proceeding inductively from effects to cause.

Elsewhere, I have attempted to carry de Lubac’s banner further by proposing that time, including eschatological time, stretches beyond what is typically called history, ‘time now’, into an unending ‘time forever’ in resurrected heavenly life.Footnote ⁴⁹ This imaginary eschews the common Christian assumption that heavenly afterlife is eternal. God alone is properly affirmed as an eternal being, timeless and changeless, and all creation, on earth and in heaven, is properly regarded as temporal. ‘Time now’ is a tragic time, coursing in the powers of sin and death, and ‘time forever’ infinitely measures the ever-increasing joy of redemption as resurrected persons continue to live into God’s grace. But all time – time now and time forever – is a continuum. Since all time is eschatological time, grace, though distinguishable from nature, ever is present to nature as the embrace of God’s inalienable love. Indeed, I propose that Christians would do well to imagine time, and the created eventfulness that time configures, as the sacramental mediation of God’s grace. Just as creation ever courses in time, creation ever courses in grace. In such an imaginary that recognises the temporality of all of creation, there is no difference between time now and time forever with respect to time’s receptivity to the giftedness of grace and time’s capacity to mediate grace. There is no other spatial realm that, by virtue of its eternity or some other sort of transcendental otherness, can provide a supposed safe haven for the event of resurrection, rescuing it from the vicissitudes of history and the criticism of historical sensibilities.

From the perspective of Christian faith and hope, there is no ‘history’ that is allergic to grace or to God’s incarnational embrace of time in the event of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, itself the promise of eternal life to humanity and indeed to all of creation. To say that Jesus’s resurrection from the dead is a historical event is to affirm, theologically and doctrinally, the immanence of grace to nature, and to claim what might otherwise be called history as God’s graceful time in which the entire Christ event transpires – not only the life and death but also the resurrection of Jesus. The teaching of the Council of Chalcedon – that the Saviour possesses the complete nature of God and the complete nature of humanity united in one person without confusion, change, division, or separation – itself seems to eschew the two-orders Christian worldview and require the resurrection’s occurrence in time, lest the humanity of the Saviour be diminished or compromised. By way of comparison, it is interesting to consider that the relegation of the resurrection to a supernatural realm seems to be consistent with monophysitic christological sensibilities that have always endured in Christian history, despite the teaching of Chalcedon.

Whether one espouses a high or low Christology matters not for our argument in behalf of the historicity of the resurrection. As expressions of faith and hope, these christological perspectives properly affirm that the resurrection is a real event. We have seen that faith in the resurrection must correspond to an objectively real event in order to be true. Even though that epistemological standard can never be relinquished, how it is affirmed is theologically important. Pannenberg is instructive on this point. Although firmly committed to the reality of the resurrection in his claim that it was a historical event, Pannenberg supported his judgement through rather literalist readings of the New Testament resurrection accounts and seemed to conclude that any reasonable historian, presented with the same literary evidence, could come to the very same conclusion about the resurrection’s reality as he; or, at the very least, in the absence of contrary evidence, the historian could not fairly refute Pannenberg’s Christian conclusions. Pannenberg ventures a theology that attempts to be, broadly speaking, scientific in its claims.Footnote ⁵⁰ Ironically, his defence of the historicity of the resurrection tries to meet a rational standard of intelligibility but in a way that Enlightenment sensibilities would judge to be indistinguishable from fundamentalism.

In these pages, I argued that apologetics is not the proper approach to the issue of the resurrection’s eventfulness. The doctrine of grace, its critique of the Baroque imaginary, and its implications for an eschatological understanding of time brought us to the conclusion that the resurrection is most consistently imagined as a historical event, assuming, of course, that its historicity is understood as the grace-laden time suggested by de Lubac’s nouvelle théologie. Thus, our proposal meets both the epistemological and doctrinal standards that should measure an Easter imaginary. Affirming the historicity of the resurrection in this way need not require the believer to explain how the New Testament resurrection accounts literally transpired, any more than it is incumbent on the believer who affirms biblical inspiration to harmonise the discrepancies among the four Gospels into a single, consistent plot. The historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is a faith claim about how graceful time mediates the miraculous event that fulfils creation’s eschatological orientation to eternal life.Footnote ⁵¹