19 If for this
life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
20 But in fact
Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. 21
For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead
has also come through a human being; 22 for as all die in Adam, so
all will be made alive in Christ. 23 But each in his own order:
Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 24
Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father,
after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. 25 For
he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The
last enemy to be destroyed is death.
I
Corinthians 15:19-26 focus upon the importance of the Easter event in Jesus and
therefore for us as well. It reminds us that doubting whether the resurrection
of Jesus represents truth is nothing new.
19 If for this life only we have hoped
in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied (eleeinoteroi pantwn anqrwpwn). Paul takes it for granted in this whole passage that the
resurrection of the dead belongs to the core of Christian faith. If there is no
such thing, the preaching and faith of the early church are invalid, according
to this passage. Denial of resurrection means the destruction of Christian
hope. Christians would lead a pathetic life if this hope were not true. Paul is
not afraid of the charge of offering, “pie in the sky, by and by.” The Christian hope overcomes the misery and
evils of this life. The scope of God's saving work in Christ goes way beyond
what we can see now. Hope that only encompasses what Christ means for the
present life is pitiable hope. It is small hope. Paul calls the church to
greater hope. Yet, what he finds interesting is that this message is so
incredible to his Corinthians audience that he has to prove its right to
receive a hearing. Paul is arguing that what God has done in Christ in rising
him from the dead is not an exceptional case. Paul has argued that his death
was “for us,” and now he argues that his resurrection has implications “for us”
as well. Modern theology has tried to go another direction, basing the hope of
life beyond death on the fellowship of believers with Christ now. Our present
experience of Easter as a symbol is more important than whether God physically
raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. Truth becomes a matter of personal
belief and preference. The fact that Easter occurs in the spring is not
helpful, for the reduction of the message of Easter to the repeated cycles of
nature is tempting. The symbol shields us from the stark uniqueness of the
event of Easter.[1]
The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is a specific instance of a universal
human promise and possibility. Yet, the presence of Jesus in resurrection is
more radical and unique by virtue of the way he influences the way the world
is.[2]
Clearly, the emphasis upon this fellowship is important for the continuation of
the influence of Christ upon the world. Yet, the basis of such hope relies upon
the prior demonstrated power of God to overcome death.[3]
Truth is event rather than a pious longing or illusion.
According to Paul, without the
resurrection of Jesus all who thought themselves part of the new dispensation of
grace, freed from sin and death, remain locked in the prison of the old
dispensation: Gentiles are not part of the kingdom promise. It is the fact of
the resurrection that gives meaning and weight to every other issue according
to Paul. Hence, even more important than proper practice is proper
proclamation.
I Corinthians
15:20-26, in a segment that extends to verse 28, deals with the theme of
accepting the consequences of the resurrection, applying the resurrection of
Jesus to the resurrection of humanity.
20 Nevertheless,
in fact, God has raised Christ from
the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. Paul reasserts
his claim with no hesitation. Significantly, the idea of rising from the dead
to a new and eternal life has its roots in Jewish eschatological hope. For
passages like this, we have the idea of the resurrection of the just as a
transition to eternal life. It was clearly not a return to earthly life. It
calls Christians to righteous, hopeful and faithful living. The verse implies a
bodily resurrection. Note the shift to a
joyful note. Christ is the first fruit
of human resurrection. The mood shifts
to triumphant. In what sense could Paul
say that Christ is the "first fruits?" It might refer to the Passover, since the
ceremony of the first fruits occurs during that week. In Deuteronomy, God
commands for an offering the first fruits of the crop with a profession of
gratitude to God for deliverance from Egyptian bondage and the possession of
the fruitful land of Palestine. Christ is the first fruits of a new redemption.
Having shown that claiming there is no resurrection of the dead is an untenable
theological position, Paul confidently asserts what he believes to be the
correct belief. Christ’s resurrection marks the beginning of a great harvest
season during which those who have died God will also eventually raise. He
places the resurrection of Jesus in a temporal frame. For those who might claim
their libertine rights in a Christology and eschatology that views resurrection
as fully realized in the present, Paul demonstrates that God will reveal more.
This is a process, like the harvest, in which there is an early, promissory
crop. Christ's resurrection is like that crop. This is good news indeed for any
age, and offers a power of living that lifts the believer beyond and above any
pressure of life.[4]
Paul does not seem
to think that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is a matter of
indifference. He does not invite Christians to believe it or not to believe it.
Rather, he suggests that if you take it away, the whole picture is different.
The go-to prophets of our time could be right about Christianity. Karl Marx
could be right in accusing Christianity of offering a future illusion of
happiness that makes them ignore their present suffering at the hands of
capitalists and thus impedes their willingness to change their situation.
Sigmund Freud could be right in saying Christianity is nothing more than a
wish-fulfillment belief that invites people to ignore their harsh reality.
Friedrich Nietzsche could be right in saying Christianity is only for the weak.[5]
Belief in the
resurrection of the body is a leap of faith, to be sure. Yet, I would like to
invite you to a brief bit of speculation. If we are ensouled bodies, as Karl
Barth and many other theologians have come to believe, then the resurrection of
the body involves admirable consistency within the biblical witness. Today, we
think of the soul as “within” the body. The resurrection of the body may well
envision a time when the body will be within the soul. The means by which we know
bodies and the world will change. We have an analogy of this in our experience
of memory. Our memory of past events keeps alive the painful and joyful events
of our past. Memory may well be a feeble anticipation of the future
resurrection of the body, in which soul (memory) will now embrace body. In
philosophy, one can affirm that the Infinite and Eternal embrace the finite and
the temporal. As space-time is “in” God, so our little, insignificant, and
individual space-time will be “in” soul. The new heaven and new earth will be
the same, yet, not the same. Such speculations can only be that. The Bible
itself is largely poetic about eternal life with God will be like. However, the
resurrection of Jesus and the creedal affirmation of the resurrection of the
body understandably invite us to such speculation. We are wondering,
questioning beings, after all. What would happen if the sensuous life rose from its
death to new life in the soul? We would then have a powerful image of Christian
hope for the redemption of all that God has made.[6]
I do understand the
difficulty in believing the apostolic witness concerning the resurrection of
Jesus and its implication for us. Death is final. We can go to any cemetery and
see how final death is. The finality of death confronts each of us. When death
comes, that is it. You log off. Screen fades to black. Game over. Beyond that,
our science confronts us with the
cold, death-like existence of the universe. It no longer thinks life is
everywhere in the universe. Life, if we do find it somewhere, is not in the
Milky Way galaxy. So far, the galaxies
in our neighborhood of the universe do not appear to have life. While such
reflections can be depressing, they also provide a context for the nature of
the hope contained in the witness to the resurrection of Jesus and its
implication for our lives. Such a discussion can feel like diverting attention away from
life here and now. Yet, it can also deal with the practical question of whether
death has the final word. If death is that final word, do our lives have an
ultimate meaning or purpose?
Frankly, if we view
ourselves as isolated individuals, meaning and purpose will be impossible to
find. Connecting our lives with eternity assures us that we are accountable for
the way we live our lives. Our lives are not simply about temporality. Our
individual lives have meaning only in the context of the story of our lives,
and the influence that story has on the lives we touch. The story that other
people tell intersects with our story, and influences us. Our individual lives
have meaning in such webs of relationships, where we influence each other far
more profoundly than we imagine. Even then, our lives will have little meaning,
for most of us influence the lives of a relatively small number of persons.
Within our immediate families, after a few generations most will not know our
names. They will not know what we did with our lives. Our Jesus from the dead. As hard as
it may be at times for me, here is the truth to which I cling. I do not pretend
to understand the nature of the resurrection of Jesus .
I do have the confidence that this connection between Father and Son is a
connection Jesus established with
humanity. In Jesus Christ , we learn that death will
not have the final word. The final word belongs to God, and that word is life.
Paul now (v. 21-22) offers the
consequences of accepting the resurrection. 21
For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead
has also come through a human being; 22 for as all die in Adam, so
all will be made alive in Christ. In writing to the Christians in Corinth,
Paul talks about the resurrection of the dead, apparently in response to some
who were saying there is no such thing. This sounds like today, does it not? We
like to think we have come up with new questions, and in some cases, we have
done so. However, it was no easier to believe that God raised anyone from the
dead back then than it is today. In particular, of course, it would be less
likely that God would raise from the dead one whom political and religious
authorities deemed worthy of crucifixion.
Yet, Paul argues that there is such a thing as the resurrection of the
dead, and for proof, he points to the resurrection of Jesus. Paul is making a
simple point. If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few
short years, we are a sorry lot. However, the truth is that Christ has been
raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the
cemeteries. There is a nice symmetry in this: Death initially came by a man,
and resurrection from death came by a man. Everybody dies in Adam; everybody
comes alive in Christ. However, we have to wait our turn: Christ is first, then
those with him at his Coming, the grand consummation when, after crushing the
opposition, he hands over his kingdom to God the Father. He will not let up
until the last enemy is down -- and the very last enemy is death! Paul talks
about those who trust Christ eventually leaving cemeteries. That reminds us of
those words from Revelation about death being no more. One of the places we
sometimes hear those words read aloud is at cemeteries when we gather around an
open grave, about to lower the casket containing the body of a loved one into
the ground. At the graveside, with the chilling winds of winter whipping around
us and the icy cold of the snow-covered earth seeping into our feet -- where we
are huddling together trying to find a different kind of warmth, one that has
nothing to do with air temperature -- we need to hear this promise from God:
"See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell
with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will
wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and
pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Revelation
21:3-4)
"The first things have passed
away." Another way to say that is that the fallen world has passed
away.
For Paul, the
resurrection of Jesus was vital because it validated the essential goodness of
God’s creation. Resurrection meant that God was not abandoning the creation
project that he had been working on since Genesis, despite the desire of
humanity to engage its own failed self-indulgent and self-destructive project.
In the resurrection of Jesus, Paul says, God was doing nothing less than
beginning to reverse the curse of sin and death that entered the world through
human sin. Paul states categorically that Christ was indeed human, and that
through him God will bring resurrection to other human beings. The resurrection means participation already
in the salvation of eternal life. Although stories of resurrection abound in
Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments, it would not be natural even for
Jewish believers of this time, much less recently pagan believers, to easily
accept the notion that all ordinary human beings could be raised from the dead
simply through their sheer belief in Christ. Paul transcends experience and
reason. He declares boldly the new
relation between humanity and Christ, and between Christ and God. In order to
argue further for belief in Christ’s full humanity, Paul returns to the comparison
between the legacy of sin and death left to humanity through Adam and the
legacy of grace and life left to the church through Christ which he also
included in his letter to the Romans. Both death and eternal life entered this
world through human agents. Paul presses
the historical frame backward to its origin. Adam, evoking the story of God's
creation and the human betrayal of God's order in the Garden, represents death,
and Christ represents life. In Adam, Paul claims, as he does in Romans 5:12-21,
humans die. In the graphic words of John Calvin, in his commentary on this
passage, he says that Adam did not die only for himself, but for us all. Yet,
Christ “did not rise for himself alone; for he came, that he might restore
everything that had been ruined in Adam.” In Christ, God makes humans alive.
Paul may have had the issue of some believing that Jesus only appeared to die
on the cross. Christ was human, and through him, God will bring resurrection to
other human beings. Interestingly, it is Adam, and not Eve, whom Paul lifts up
as the originator of human sinfulness.
He makes the philosophical parallel between Jesus, as the quintessential
“Son of Man,” or representative human being, and Adam, the paradigmatic human
of Genesis 1. One represents the
corrupted image of God. The other
represents its restoration.
23 However, each in his own order: Christ the first
fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Christ is merely the
first of those who will rise from the dead.
As the representative human being, he represents the best of all of
us. He is the human equivalent of the
“first fruits,” the first and best example of the crop that ancient Israelite
farmers were to offer to God. This new
strain of humanity, this new crop, has as its first example the very Son of Man
and Son of God himself. The implication
is that now the strain of this crop has altered. It is now a new creation, and every example
of this species in the future will be heir to eternal life. Christ will arise first, and then, at his
coming, those who belong to him. This
implies that the general resurrection of the dead will take place only at the
return of Christ at the end of time. I
Thessalonians 4:13-18 goes into greater detail, saying that those who have
already died in the faith will rise first when Christ returns, and then those
who are alive will be taken up to join them.
In verses 24-26,
the universe in its entirety, at present under the control of evil forces, will
ultimately have its reconciliation with God.
24 Then comes the end,
when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every
ruler and every authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he
has put all his enemies under his feet, referring to Psalm 110:1. 26 The last enemy to be
destroyed is death. The resurrection of Jesus was thus a prototype and the
beginning of the resurrection to come for all of us in “the end” when Jesus
returns, destroying the forces of evil, and God sets his good creation right in
the way that it had always been intended. Paul has an enthusiast and inspired
conviction that Christ is to bring things, not to a destructive disintegration,
but to a completion in which God will achieve God’s goal, namely, life, order,
and peace.[7] Christ will nullify all aggregations of
opposition to the rule of God and will assign this victory to God the Father.
Paul does not seem to experience any tension between his Jewish monotheism
heritage and his present affirmation that Jesus is Lord. Instead, the lordship
of Christ is the continuation and fullest expression of the creative power of
God.[8] As
John Calvin put it, in rather picturesque language, the world is like a stormy
sea. The human condition is one full of uncertainty. Christ will lead us to a
safe harbor.
Hence as the world will
have an end, so also will government, and magistracy, and laws, and
distinctions of ranks, and different orders of dignities, and everything of
that nature. There will be no more any distinction between servant and master,
between king and peasant, between magistrate and private citizen. … Bishops,
teachers, and Prophets will cease to hold these distinctions, and will resign
the office which they now discharge.
The life of faith believes that
Christ’s present rule makes action worthwhile and puts real power on the side
of good over evil. Yet, in this present
world, this passage recognizes that the conflict is continuing and commitment
allows no rest.[9]
These
verses describe the final phase of Paul's understanding of God's plan for
salvation. Albert Schweitzer outlines his view of Jewish apocalyptic
expectations.[10]
According to W. D. Davies, his mistake is to try to force passages of Paul too
tightly into that framework. The passage before us is an example. Schweitzer
said that those who denied the resurrection at Corinth were an
“ultra-conservative” party who thought that only those alive at the time of the
Messianic age would experience its joys.[11]
For Davies, when verse 24 says, “Then comes the end,” refers to the final
consummation. In contrast to Schweitzer, however, he thinks that it means a
short interval will follow the Parousia the resurrection and the
judgment that will usher in the final consummation. For him, Paul simply does
not teach a prolonged “messianic age” that precedes the final consummation of
all things. The eschatology of Paul is simple in comparison to the structure
into which Schweitzer wants to put it. It contains no reference to a Messianic
Kingdom such as is contemplated in Baruch, 4 Ezra, and Revelation when there would
be a final judgment, a general resurrection of the righteous dead, the
transformation of the righteous living and ensuing upon all this the final
consummation, the perfected reign of God, when God would be all in all. In
contrast to all this, for Paul, the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits.
This image implies that the full harvest will follow. In the resurrection of
Jesus, Paul saw the beginning of the end. The powers of the age to come were
already at work in his time and place. It was along these lines that Paul
participated in the reconstruction of the eschatology of the early church. Now,
the background for this reconstruction was Judaism, in that it had already
expended much thought upon the problems involved in the notion of resurrection.
Such Jewish speculation influenced early church thinking in this regard.[12]
Bultmann
thinks this passage has no connection with the goal of creation, in which God
will be “all in all.” Rather, it derives from Gnostic cosmology and
eschatology.[13]
Whether one can tie the terminology to Gnostic teaching, I doubt. Yet, I find
it reasonably clear that this phase is charged with traditional apocalyptic
expectation of the defeat of human powers (governments, economies,
judiciaries), as well as other powers (sin, disease, death). Paul’s reason for
the delay in the resurrection appears to be a belief that Christ must first
vanquish evil in the world before God will raise the faithful dead. If the last
enemy God must conquer were indeed death, this would make perfect sense. Resurrection cannot take place until God has
destroyed death. Paul obviously
envisioned this battle taking place on earth, at the end of time. Only when Christ defeats this last enemy can
Christ’s followers join him in triumph in their new resurrection existence. For
Paul, as for many Jews of his time, this expectation represented the ultimate
faith in God's sovereignty over creation. While the current age does not
entirely reflect God's power, God has not revealed the totality of God's
purposes for human history. Jewish teaching maintained belief in a sovereign
and single God through a deferred expectation of the complete revelation of
God's power in the world. Paul's organizes his understanding of this epic,
however, around the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is Christ, Paul
argues, citing Psalm 110:1, who will put all enemies under his feet. Christ
will deliver the kingdom to God.
The
statement that death is the last enemy of all living things is powerful. In the
death of Jesus, God has seen the enemy that death is for humanity, and has made
it the enemy of God. We no longer face the judgment contained in death, because
God has embraced this judgment in the death of Christ.[14]
Fear of death pierces deep into life. It causes us to make an unrestricted
self-affirmation, regardless of the finite quality of our lives. Yet, it robs
us of the power to accept life. Either way, sin and death have a close link. In
part, sin makes us fail to accept our end. In part, fear of death pushes us
more deeply into sin.[15]
None
of this, for most people, is easy to believe as truth. One difficulty for us is
that the weirdness of Jewish apocalyptic seems to find partial confirmation in
the resurrection of Jesus. Yet, I ask a simple question. What would happen in your
life if, out of all the cultures and beliefs of the known and future world
history, God chose to unite with humanity in the Jewish flesh of Jesus of
Nazareth in the first century? God would be saying Yes to this hope for the
final victory of justice, peace, and life. The end is not nothingness or death.
The end is the victory of God, and therefore the victory of justice, peace, and
life. It would mean a new coming of Jesus Christ, for he came as Jesus of
Nazareth, he came to his followers and Paul after his death, he came in the
power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and he will come in a new way at the
end. I still cling to that hope, even with all the doubts and questions.
The point of
Easter is that this world, God’s good creation, matters. What we do and how we
live, as people created in the image of God within creation, has ultimate
significance when we understand ourselves to be part of God’s mission of a “new
creation” (II Corinthians 5:17). We care for ourselves, we care for each other
and we care for the earth because we know that God has not and will not abandon
this creation project but will ultimately make it whole again. As we wait for
that great day, we are to spend our lives not giving into death but embracing
the goodness of life. The point of the gospel is not that we go to heaven to be
with God but that God comes here to be with us: “Your kingdom come … on earth
as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).
Most human beings struggle
to find their place in life. We have that sense or intuition that the struggle,
suffering, and pain of life need to trend toward meaningfulness. Biological
striving to exist is not enough for most of us. At some level, we want our
lives to mean something unique and purposeful. The suffering, sin, evil, trial,
and death in this life point us toward an end beyond this world and this life.
For Christianity, what lies beyond is not an endless round of this life. I like
to think of it this way. We begin a fellowship with Christ in this life that
begins a process of change in our lives toward what God intends for us. Since
human life always presses to the future and the improvement of our lives, we
know that life here will not attain what God intends for us. Eternity is that
dimension of our life with God in which we become what God intends. This belief
or faith has its foundation in what God has done in Jesus, in raising him from
the dead. God finds something so valuable in us that God wants to spend
eternity with the unique persons we have become.
The work of God in the resurrection
of Jesus occurs in a fallen world. The resurrection releases the beautiful and liberates the world from its bondage to sin and death. It dissipates the shadows of
nothingness and death that haunt creation.[16]
I want my life, I want the life of the church, to be part of dissipating
such shadows that lie across all creation.
First, we do not
know now if something is part of the fallen world or part of the beautiful
world struggling to emerge. I wonder how many of us could say that some things
we thought were bad at one time in our lives were now, upon reflection, good
and beautiful. Our perspective has changed. We know better today than we did at
the time. God can transform and redeem things we once thought of as bad into
beautiful things.
Second, the work
of God in the resurrection of Jesus reminds us that the events of today are not
the end of our story. Our lives are stories we are still writing. Even today,
if we think our lives reflect more of the fallen world than the beautiful and
good world, we especially need to remember that the story of our lives is not
over. The same is true as we ponder world history. The future remains unknown
to us. Much will depend upon our openness to the future God has declared as
truth in the resurrection of Jesus.
Third, we can
certainly bring more of the truth, goodness, and beauty that the resurrection
of Jesus focuses upon into the world by living, as much as in us lies, in the
way he lived. We can live with compassion, bringing healing, wisdom, and
liberation where we can in our words and deeds. Living in this way will relieve
the bondage and dispel the shadows of nothingness and death that creep across
individual lives and embrace our world.
Fourth, we can
resist fallen power structures. Cultural forces ridicule the beliefs and values
of the church. Economic forces bind people in the envy and greed of
materialism. Political ideology blinds people to the truth that may be in the
positions of others. It leads to new forms of hate toward people and violence
against opposing groups. This attempt to locate evil in a particular group,
whether one identifies it in Left, Right, one percent, and so on, is
particularly dangerous today. Evil runs through the heart of each of us. If we
get rid of the group we have come to hate, we will still have to face
ourselves. We can see this struggle in the shadow that terrorism has brought
into the world and into our lives.
Fifth, the
resurrection of Jesus means we do not allow a fallen world to define who we are
as individuals and as world. As we present ourselves to Christ, we steadily
learn what it means not to allow a fallen world to conform us to its image. We
slowly learn what it is like to think and do in a way that discerns the good,
acceptable, and perfect will of God (Romans 12:1-2). We are slowly becoming
citizens of a coming new world in which Christ will rule. Thus, we slowly learn
to live by its rules, ethics and values. Our worship, fellowship, and serving
as a community of faith today helps us to see the deception into which we can fall
by the shadow of this fallen world.
Sixth, the shadow
of sin, nothingness, and death impinges upon our lives. Shakespeare records a
befuddled Hamlet pondering his existence in his famous “To be or not to be”
soliloquy:
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a
sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and
the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir
to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be
wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance
to dream: aye, there the rub;
For in that sleep of
death what dreams may come,
When we have
shuffled off this mortal coil.
(Hamlet,
III.1.61-68)
William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)
regards death as something akin to lying down on the couch for a nap. The
closing lines of his poem, Thanatopsis, go like this:
So live, that when
thy summons comes to join
The innumerable
caravan, which moves
To that mysterious
realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the
silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like
the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his
dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering
trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps
the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies
down to pleasant dreams.
Yet, the
resurrection of Jesus is the reminder of God that while the shadow will cause
sorrow, it ought not to lead us to despair as those who have no hope (I
Thessalonians 4:13). Death is a powerful and at times and overwhelming word.
However, in Christ, we know death does not have the final word.
When
Christians gather on Easter Sunday, they do celebrate a miracle that happened
to Jesus around 30 AD. Yet, we also gather because of how that event in Jesus
of Nazareth affects each of us as well. His resurrection defines our destiny.
He came and he is to come. He comes to release this world from its bondage to
death and push back the shadows of evil, nothingness, and death through a
well-founded hope in the coming fullness of the rule of God over the world and
therefore over our lives.
[2]
Peter Hodgson (Winds of the Spirit,
p. 274) The risen Jesus becomes “a co-determining factor in the present
constitution of the world,” at least, when his “Christ-gestalt” takes shape in
the world. For him, the identity of Jesus of Nazareth is borne through history
by this gestalt. However, this identity is so intense that Jesus himself is
felt to be personally present and active in the work of liberation involved in
reconciliation. This takes place through the power of God. God contains within
the divine life both the individual self and the world in which the risen self
is newly emobodied. In rising into the world we rise into God.
[3]
Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 3, p. 534)
[4]
W. D. Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 106)
[6]
Lewis, C.S., Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. G. Bles: 1964, 121-22, 158.
[7]
Orr and Walther, Anchor Bible.
[8]
John D. G. Dunn
[9]
Dunne (Christology in the Making, p. 182)
[10]
Schweitzer (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, 65-68)
[11]
Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 290)
[12]
Davies (ibid., p. 295)
[13]
Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, Volume
1, p. 228)
[14]
Barth (Church Dogmatics, III.2 p. 600, [47.5])
[15]
Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p. 273)
[16]
"Christ is not here to illuminate the deformity of a fallen world but
rather to release a beautiful and holy world from bondage; most of all to
release the human person from bondage and dissipate the shadows that lie across
all creation." –Timothy Joyce (1868-1947)
Liked this, of course. There is no doubt that the resurrection, a bodily resurrection, is the core of Christianity. Liked the 5 points you made in the closing and think they are all true. This is , indeed, how we should be living our lives. If I pastored, I would make every Sunday a celebration of Chrit's Victory. Thi should be the central theme in all we do.-Lyn Eastman
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