the Christian church and its mission, and faith in God is in turn shaped by faith in Jesus and related events.”70 Jesus’ resurrection thus had a far-reaching effect on the early church’s worship and theology.
Jesus’ resurrection was interpreted as revealing that God’s love is greater than sin and evil, so that it came to be seen as a source of hope against various forms of suffering and alienation. As God’s vindication of Jesus as a victim of violent injustice, Jesus’ resurrection revealed that God’s love is ultimately greater than forces of oppression that bear down on people from without. Interpreted as involving forgiveness for those who deserted him,71 Jesus’ resurrection also shows God’s love as able to overcome the damaging effects of one’s own actions to one’s identity. The saving significance of Jesus’ resurrection also extends beyond history and human relations. For Paul it promises the coming of a transformed existence in which sin and death are no more (1 Cor 15: 22). Its eschatological character “makes it an event of significance not only for Jesus’ person but for the whole of reality.”72 Theologians concerned with the environmental crisis have seen in the resurrection of Jesus’ body a promise of salvation for the whole creation73 and a call for faithfulness to the earth. As the cross symbolizes all that negates God’s presence and alienates people and creation from their divine destiny, Jesus’ resurrection is a source of an all-embracing hope.74 Its soteriological meaning reaches out to encompass virtually every form of alienation, suffering, and evil.
Jesus’ resurrection by itself has indeterminate meaning in relation to particular social conflicts within history. It only becomes concrete as a source of hope through the memory of his public activity that led to his death. The memory of his public ministry, which was vindicated by his resurrection, gives definition to its saving significance,75 so that Jesus’ resurrection brings hope to the poor and oppressed for liberation. More generally, it brings hope for a life beyond death to creation as a whole.
Conclusion
As an eschatological event with objective and subjective dimensions, Jesus’ resurrection does not have any one fundamental meaning. It has many. It receives a different interpretation in each of the Gospels and throughout other books of the New Testament. These share themes and emphases, but they cannot be reduced to one common denominator. Jesus’ resurrection formed a dynamic center of meaning in conjunction with preceding Jewish traditions, the memory of his ministry and death, and subsequent experiences of the Holy Spirit. It gave rise to the faith, after his death, that he is the Christ. In the next chapter we will examine how this faith developed over the subsequent centuries, so that this Jewish “rabbi” came to be affirmed by Gentile Christians as the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, at once fully human and fully divine.
1. Becker, Jesus of Nazareth, 345, 354; Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 428.
2. Albertz, History of Israelite Religion, 2:575–97, 592.
3. Ibid., 597.
4. Levenson, Resurrection and Restoration, 200.
5. Meier, Marginal Jew, 3:438–44.
6. Pannenberg, Jesus, 67.
7. Williams, “Between the Cherubim,” 91–92.
8. The narrative accounts of the empty tomb and appearances of Jesus should be not be understood as objective accounts but as testimonies or witness to “a concrete singular event” that they invest with an absolute character (Schüssler Fiorenza, Foundational Theology, 30).
9. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 482; Perkins, Resurrection, 19.
10. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 483.
11. Ibid.
12. Carnley, Structure of Resurrection Belief, 224. While Mark’s Gospel does not describe an appearance, knowledge of a Galilean appearance seems implied in Mark 16:7 (Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 494).
13. Jeremias, New Testament Theology, 301.
14. Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection, 24–25.
15. Brown, Introduction to New Testament Christology, 169.
16. Segal, “The Resurrection: Faith or History?,” 134.
17. Pannenberg, “History and the Reality of the Resurrection,” 68–70.
18. Haight, Jesus, 135.
19. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 496.
20. Ibid.; Dunn, Christianity in the Making, 1:861–62.
21. Collingwood, Idea of History, 239–240.
22. Schüssler-Fiorenza, Foundational Theology, 31.
23. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 504.
24. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 332.
25. Taylor, Secular Age, 695.
26. Moltmann, Crucified God, 223–24.
27. Collingwood, Idea of History, 240.
28. Ibid., 241.
29. Fuller, Formation of Resurrection Narratives, 169.
