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dialoy 9 WARIO) sinter. TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF “. . . IS RISEN” By Robert W. Jenson* . The message with which “apostles” and other ‘missioners raced across the Mediterranean world, and which at least some of them called “the gos- pel,” was most various in its religious impact and ethical and theosophical reasoning—so_ various that New Testament scholars deficient in analyti- cal rigor are sometimes led to say that “message” above should be plural. Yet all apostles—or all whose work fed into the community that has con- tinued to include us—made the same factual claim: “One, Jesus the Israelite, has risen from the dead.” Their gospeling occurred as interpretation ‘of and by this claim by and of their and their hearers’ antecedant hopes and fears; and so was necessarily as religiously and conceptually various as were they and their hearers. But the claim was ‘one, in the most straightforward sense. “The gos- pel,”” as we now tend to use the phrase, can only denote that final interpreting pronouncement of “Jesus is risen” by which the hopes and fears of all created history will be given sense. Therefore it is Christian reflection’s key task to understand this claim, to inquire what is said when Jesus is said to be “risen.” Just so, the inquiry is the last—and not the first—assignment of a theologi- ‘cal career. Hoping to write afew pages after these, There offer only assorted preliminary bits of an un: derstanding. The above distinction of the gospel’s claim from the gospel itself as interpretation by this claim, is the first “Gettysburg Theological Seminary HHuATTMTINEHENEENUENEANANELATTEENEE u HNTAMUEATNUHEUTTAEEMANAEEEENATEEREEE The second piece is an attempt to isolate what may be called the “gospel-minimum” components of the resurrection-claim. These are what must be said by “Jesus is risen” for the claim to be able to function as it actually does in the apostolic mis- sion, as we see this in the New Testament and as | have just described it. First. If Jesus is risen, he must now be alive; i.e., whatever is the minimum differentium of a live human.rom a déad one must ndw be predi¢able of him. | suggest: the minimum difference between a live person and a dead one is that the live one can surprise us. Your life is one life, it makes a personal unity, in that after the fact the rest of us are able to grasp each new act of yours as dramatically coher- ent with what we already know of you, are able to say, “That's Jones, alright.” But your act is that of a living person in that before the fact it is in some way unpredictable. If you are alive, then just when we have you all figured out you may undo all our reckonings. When you become too predictable, we say, “What ails Jones? All the life is gone out of him.” And when you die, we begin writing biogra- phies, i.e., descriptions of an object that will hold still for analysis, It is this liveliness of life that the Bible and the biblically influenced parts of western intellect tradition name “spirit.” Guided by the 32 word's uses, I may venture a last formulation of the present point: you are alive if and only if you come to us from the future Jesus lives. l.e., we may and must expect events in our world, identifying themselves as his acts and dramatically coherent with our record of his past acts, that will surprise us, that will undo our attempts to figure him out. There is a spirit present in our lives—amid the swarm of such spirits—that is his spirit: he comes to us not merely from the remembered past in Palestine but from the threatening and promising future. Second. The preceding discussion was cast in terms of “you” and “we.” This was not merely pedagogical; there is no other way to say what was to be said. For “surprise,” “future” and “spirit” are categories of communication,.indeed of commu- nity. It is the word—in all its modes, verbal and more-than-verbal—that has all along been the object of our analysis. You live in that you sur- prisingly address us; your act that can escape our calculations from past acts is your word-act, your act that somehow speaks. As for spirit, personal spirit is the spiritedness of communication; a spirit that is not the spirit of some address, that moves ‘our hearts “directly,” wordlessly, is not personal spirit, it is demonic: Jesus lives. I.e., there are addresses made in our world, identifying themselves as his addresses to -us, that are spirited, that gladden and amaze, that “open the future.” These addresses are the telling of that very message we called “the gospel;” Jesus is risen in that the claim that he is risen does in fact interpret our antecedent hopes and fears in ways that liberate and transform us. Jesus lives in that he is present in.spirit, in that he comes as from the future; but this spirit is the spirit of the word of the gospel. That “holy spirit” that short-circuits the word, that moves our hearts from the back or side of our straightforward hearing, can be no one’s spirit and so also not Jesus’ Third. If Jesus is risen, he must have been dead fnevertheless he now lives, he lives with death in the past tense. The resurrection was not a resuscitation; it is not as if Jesus merely resumed life as before, to die again afterward. The very point of the resurrection-claim about Jesus is that death is not in his future. Here we have a compo- nent of the resurrection-claim that is not a similar- ity to some phenomenal description of our present lives, as were the first two, but a dissimilarity That for Jesus death is past and not future, means that the future from which he comes is the last future, that the spirit in which he is present is the Breath of the Kingdom, that the gospel-word that is his address is an eschatological judgment. For whereas all the promises we make one another are rendered conditional by the future of death, Jesus’ resurrection makes his intention’ for us unconditional. All my commitments are iffy, for | commit a future I do not surely have. Jesus’ com- mitment to us is rescued from conditionality and cannot but triumph utterly; such a triumph, vice versa, must be the conclusion of the entire human enterprise, That the gospel’s eschatological judgment is good news, the eschaton it promises (the “King. dom,” Jesus’ spirit a Breath of life) depends of course on who this Jesus is: that, e.g., he is an Israelite, a prophet, a friend of sinners. Here we come upon Christian theology's other main task: identification of the Eschaton and so of God by the recollected particular personhood of Jesus. But that is not the task of this paper. Fourth. Since Jesus was and is who he is, ”.. risen” must be good news to be predicable of him. But for a life to be good for other lives, it must— am about to argue—be embodied. Therefore, anyone is risen in the sense here wanted, he must be bodily risen. A good life must be an émbodied life because were | only so alive for you, as to appear in your life as a “pure” spirit, my presence would be enslaving. In order for you to be free in being addressed by me, you must in turn be able to address me, | must be the possible object of your subjectivity and not only you of mine; you must be able to locate me. Thus | must be body in, your world and not only spirit; for that is what we mean by "body": a person's locatable reality. “Jenson lives (disembédied)” can be no happy tidings (there of course may be those who think that also...) Jesus lives; and this fact is a blessing. Therefore Jesus must now be a possible object of our inten- n, locatable by the coordinates of time and space. I.e., he has and is a human body. His pres- ence is not that of a spook or a mental pressure. “Jesus lives in the life of the community he founded,” or “Jesus lives in his continuing influ- ence in our hearts,” are not equivalent to “Jesus is risen.” We can point and be pointing to the man Jesus. Or if we cannot, he is not risen. So far four things must be claimed when it is claimed that Jesus is risen. Perhaps there are others. If there are, I do not know them and have anyway more than enough in these four to be going on with, Whether, e.g, “Jesus is risen” must claim that the tomb was‘ emptied, that he now is a collection of cells in organic continuity with a material mass once buried, depends on how we understand “body,” and this in turn on how we understand time and space. It is therefore a matter, of the problem next on our agenda, and not an immediate component of the gospel-claim. Doubtless there are also things in fact claimed by “Jesus is risen” that we nevertheless would not have to claim to predicate “is risen” of him, even supposing a negative decision on the.question just posed, the emptiness of the tomb is one such. ‘These are not my present concern. PM mL Aunt HHRMA Of the four determinants above, it is the fourth that is the modern world’s special problem. Stating the problem baldly is the third bit of understand ing offered here. We—nuclear physicists and all— ‘are no whit less superstitious than our forebears, and have no trouble believing in spooks and demons of all kinds. But we do have a problem with a bodily resurrected person. The difficulty is simple and unavoidable. To be a body is to be lo- catable. So where is Jesus? ‘Once the answer was easy: Jesus is in heaven. In pre-modern theology, heaven was a space—or at Teast a realm analogous to a space—and so was, spatially—or at least analogously to spatially— related to our space, to the world. When Jesus went to the Father's right hand, he got there by ascending, i.e., moving through’space in the defi- ‘nite direction that leads to our space’s boundary with the heavenly space. And therefore we could point to Jesus, by pointing up. Heaven’ was the part of creation God made for his own dwelling in his creation, and was just so necessarily located by the coordinates of time and space that define crea- tion. ‘The unrefuted heart of Bultmann’s demand for ““demythologizing” is that no one exposed to tech- nology or modern schooling does or can think so. Copernicus has left no space for heaven. “Up” may be a permanently necessary metaphor, of transcen- dence; but that is nothing to our difficulty—a metaphorical space will hold only a metaphorical body. | know fundamentalists who claim to think that Jesus is up there; but | know none who really do. Otherwise, there would be more funda mentalist-subsidized rocket research. And if that last crack seems crude, that is the very point. Itis not merely that astronauts bring back nega~ tive reports; the proviem is conceptual. In all pre- Copernican western cosmologies, space had an absolute center, and therefore space could be divided into definite regions and these distinctions then given metaphysical significance. Thus in the Christianized version of Aristotle, space is a nest of hemispherical regions, each more enveloping hemisphere being less infected by temporality than the next within, until the outermost hemis- phere is so little temporal as to be a tolerable dwelling for God, the created heaven. If we could travel upward through all the inner hemispheres— which in our frailty we cannot—we would by our journey arrive in God's presence—as Dante and others did in visions and poesy. In Copernicus’ cosmos, such structures are inconceivable. Nor do we conceive them; which is why serious, assertion of the resurrection is now so uncommon, Our mental map of time and space includes no region that could contain Jesus’ present body. And 0, whatever orthodox formulas we may repeat, ‘our actual preaching and teaching proceeds as if, there were no present body of Jesus: the concep- tion that operates in the thinking of “liberals” and “conservatives” alike is of Jesus’ continuing “spiritual” or historical influence. l.e,, by any responsible rendering of “. . . is risen,” the whole modern church proceeds as if Jesus were not—and will so proceed until a post-Copernican way of locating Jesus’ body is proposed and becomes ecu- menically influential nnGHTANAANEENANENAATEEEINNEEETNTHAEA Nv. MEMEEEAAEENNAAAEAREEEEAEEHNT To only one of our theological fathers could Copernicus have been a help rather than a hin- drance (and he, ironically, thought Copernicus a nut), Martin Luther regarded the very notion of heaven as a place and of pointing to the risen Jesus by pointing up as theologically ridiculous. Yet, as we will see, hevhad no trouble specifying spatial coordinates for Jesus’ location. If we can erasp how he did that, maybe we can begin to do it too, ‘An interpretation of Luther is thus the fourth frag- mentary offering of this essay. It was, of course, over against the Swiss Refor- mation’s understanding of the Supper, that Luther took up the question of Jesus’ current location. Le., it was over against the christological-sacra- mental situation left by removing the hierarchical church from the medieval theological structure while retaining the rest of the structure unchanged. If heaven is a place related by spatial distance and direction—or by anything analogous thereto—to St. Anastasius’ Church, and if the risen Jesus is located in heaven, then Christ indeed cannot be in St. Anastasius’ Church. But the Bible says he is there nonetheless, when thanksgiving is, offered there in his nante with loaf and cup and these are eaten and drunk. The medieval church accepted the impossibility, and posited a produci- ble miracle to overcome it: when and where authorized persons say, “Here is Jesus’ body,” there it is, possible or no. Just so, the medieval church put itself in the role of authorized miracle- worker. When this role was rejected, those who left medieval theology otherwise intact were left 33, with the initial impossibility. Jesus’ body, said Zwingli—and Calvin too! —is in heaven and there- fore not on earth, though his spirit of course reaches us everywhere. Luther thought anyone's spirit without his body, Jesus’ included, would be a demon, for the same reasons we have already noted. So Luther could not just abstract the church from the structure of medieval theology. He said, in fact, to defy tradi- tional theology’s whole way of conceiving Jesus’ risen location. In his Vom Abendmah! Christi, Bekenntnis of 1528," Luther experimentally adopted a_late- scholastic distinction between three ways of being located. An entity may be someplace “cir- cumscribably,” i.e., so that the boundaries we draw to locate it aré the entity's own boundaries; material masses are thus located. Or an entity may be someplace “definitively,” i.e., so that although the entity has itself no spatial boundaries it can be located by boundaries; in this fashion we may say that an idea is in someone's head. Or an entity— actually, only God—may be someplace “repletive- \y;" ice., God is at any given place because he is separated from no place, he is anywhere you like because he is bounded in no way. Working with this set of distinctions, Luther next asserted that the risen Christ is not located in the first way at all. That must mean: Luther denied that Christ's risen body is a particular material mass. He is not subject to Newtonian geometry and requires for his location no region of space, heavenly or earthly. “Circumscribably,” it is indeed impossible for Jesus to be at once in heaven and in St. Anastasius’. But, said Luther, this is an objection quite beside the point; since Jesus is located at neither place in this mode Yet Luther did not by this denial intend at all to mitigate the risen Jesus’ embodiment—it was, after all, to vindicate Jesus’ bodily presence in the Supper that Luther launched the whole argument. Luther's denial of “circumscribable” location to the risen Jesus incidentally escapes the Copernican difficulty; but it has nothing whatever iri common, with the spiritualizing to which Copernicus has driven the rest of us. Rather, Luther intended straightforwardly to assert the risen Jesus’ located- ness. In the Bekenntnis, he achieved this by at- tributing to the risen Jesus a specific combination of the other two modes of location. . According to Luther, Jesus the man, Jesus as a body, participates by virtue of the Incarnation and Resurrection in God's “repletive” location. 1.e., the embodied Jesus is omnipresent. Luther did not, of course, mean that Jesus’ body is infinitely extended—it is God's omnipresence that is at- tributed to Jesus, which, as we have noted, con- sists in the absence of extension. But what then did he mean’? Two considerations may help. First, we may note that Luther says this mode of Jesus’ presence to us is by itself soteriologically in- sufficient;- because in it, although Jesus is there with us, he is not there for us. Let me switch to m jargon and push the interpretation a little. In thi mode, we are Jesus’ object but he is not ours. He is where we are in the way | am present to those | see and address. Just so the tradition had in fact inter- preted ‘God's omnipresence: the creation is one object for him, with which he, as the subject that knows and wills it, is thus instantaneously present. But though Jesus is in this mode with us as a sub: ject, by participation in God's intention of his creatures, he is not available to us as our recipro- cal object: as | now sit at my desk and cast about me, ! do not find either him or God. Merely as omnipresent, Jesus would be a “pure” subject over against us ‘Second, Luther has specific reason to insist that it is the embodied human, Jesus, who as subject thus has all creatures as his simultaneous object; the reason is his unwillingness to posit a separation of deity and humanity at any point. Whatever might have been, itis in fact as the man Jesus that God is an object for us; and therefore a presence of God that was not also a presence of the man Jesus would be a sheer subject-presence, enslaving ‘and demonic. Nor would this be changed by posit- ing that God's presence includes the presence of Jesus merely as, human subject, merely in his human spirit; this would but add a created demon to the uncreated one. Of God's presence that is not a presence of the whole human Jesus, Luther had only so much to say: “Mir aber des Gottes nicht!”? We may well ask how the embodied Jesus can be omnipresent, even in this way. If indeed Jesus is omnipresent, does not this merely as such divide is spitit— conceivably present to all things—from is body—not conceivably so present? Luther was inclined to leave this difficulty to faith. But the once most speculative and most faithful of his disciples, Johannes Brenz, had a go at it, and most suggestively: A body, he argued, need not be “in” any place to be a body; for the whole creation, the great body, precisely contains all places and so is itself in no place.*. This “omnipresence” belongs to the creation in that itis located by the simultane- ous intention of God. Thus if Jesus shares God's presence as subject to all things, then also for him all the places where he could locate himself as body are but one place: “For neither.are all those places which are distinct in our human eyes and separated by distance, so many and such in the eyes of divine Majesty, but just as all times are as a moment for him, so all places are as one place for him... When we join Christ's humanity to his ods a ? eae deity, we thus do not extend the latter. .., but rather attribute this very Majesty 10 him... .”* Again pushing the interpretation somewhat, we ‘may put it so: for God's intention, all creation is at ‘one place, the place where he intends it; and God —and with him Jesus—locates all creation at that place where they see Jesus’ body. The considerations of the last paragraph granted, it still remains true that if Jesus’ presence as subject over against all creation is indeed to be that of an embodied human, i.e., if he is to be there also as our object, then we must in fact have him somewhere as our object, then we must be able to locate him. If the omnipresent Jesus is to be embodied, mere omnipresence, as we have already noted, will not do. Or rather, Jesus’ embodied omnipresence must include a presence locatable by others. We come to Luther’ assertion of Jesus’ “definitive” presence in the Supper—and in the preached word and all the “sacraments.” Although the embodied Jesus is not bounded by spatial coordinates, he can be pointed to spatially, where—and only where—he intends us to find him, Guided, therefore, by his actually spoken in- tention, we look to the bread and cup, and just so look at and to Jesus; ie, these are his locatability, his body. Jesus’ share in divine “repletive” omni- presence is the possibility of this “definitive” pres- ence, and the fact that the omnipresent Jesus is a body is the necessity of it We should note one last—startling—point. Ac- cording to Luther, there is no one material mass that is the risen body of Christ. Nor are the “reple- tive” omnipresence of Jesus’ body and the “definitive” presence of that body in the Supper two different phenomena; for without the latter the former would not in fact be the presence of an embodied person. Thus we must say: for Luther, there is no worry about how the body of Jesus is related to the bread and cup—or the bath or the mutual physical presence of-believers or the sound of the gospeler’s voice—for these simply are alll the body of the risen Jesus has or needs, to live as a fully embodied human over against God and us. HHuEEHTUATEEATEELAENEEMAMAEUAUNATAREEENEL v. HTAHTTATANANETTTAAUNEMAEEEENANUEAKURE Luther's propositions about Jesus’ location set our heads in a metaphysical whirl. They are either arrant nonsense, or the start of a theological and philosophical revolution. Moreover, vital connec- tions and explications are missing. To make sense of Luther, a major effort of metaphysical creativity is wanted—an effort so great that it is worth at- tempting only because of the hope that in its course we may again be saying”. . . is risen” with some content. This article's last offering is thus a preliminary statement of that metaphysical task, Let us summarize Luther. AS subject, the risen Jesus intends us, regards and addresses us, from “the right hand of the Father,” from the “place” of God's transcendence over space, from the source of the Creator's creating intention, that just be- cause it is no-place is not distant from any place. As object, the risen Jesus is intended by us at the bread, cup, water-bath, etc. Jesus as subject and Jesus as object are not two realities; they are one and the same person. And finally, we are able to intend Jesus at the bread, cup, etc., because he— again, as subject—addresses us calling us thither. These propositions can all be true only if God's ‘omnipresence, and indeed his transcendence as such, are very different than we have ordinarily conceived them. For the propositions can be simultaneously true only if the “place” of God's transcendence, from which he creatingly intends us, is the actual occurrence of the word of the gospel, of the gospel that is God-as-subject’s ad- dress to us, and that calls us to its own embodi- ment as to God-as-located-object. From where does God, and so the man Jesus, stand omnipresently over against all creation? From between any two or three who speak the gospel among them. Saying such things, we expunge the last remnant of ‘spatial analogy—not necessarily of spatial metaphor—from bur notion of transcendence, All the transcendence God, and so the man Jesus, has or needs is the transcendence of the word, the miracle of interpretation. Every right word—verbal or more-than-verbal— somehow grasps the world that already is, some- how involves a description. The tentacles by which our conversation grasps actuality are subtle and a puzzle to philosophers, but in life triumph over every pseudo-Kantian qualm. But every right word also interprets the world, and just so admits possibility into the world. For in that the world appears in an interpretation, it appears as a world that could have differently ‘interpreted. Thus the word is the “place”—the quotation marks are getting darker and darker—of the mysterious dif- ference and the mysterious union between past and future, That we are what the past has made us and yet may and must be what the future opens, ‘occurs in the converse between us and is the great miracle of being Itis this transcendence that belongs to the bibli- cal God. That we were and will be, and are free in between, is our participation in the miracle that he is. And, God's, and so Jesus’, transcendence over against distinctions of space is not, therefore, that of any infinitely distant—and so infinitely near— other place, but simply that of an infinitely certain 35 coming moment. The ambiguity of the word “present is not accidental; it isa clue to the struc- ture of reality. Space is the field of “presence;” i.e, it is precisely the “present,” that which is bracketed by past and future. God, and so Jesus, thus transcends space in that their moment is the coming final moment, the moment of Judgment. From the last moment, all points of the present, i.e,, all spatial locations, are equidistant and so equinear. “Where” is Jesus? | have only adumbrated some requirements for an answer. But perhaps we will have come some way, by drapping the last re- liance on space-analogies of transcendence, and answering: Jesus is where the Father is. The moment from which they intend all the present places where we might seek them, and from which they address us, calling us to those places where by their creating intention we may in fact locate them, is the moment of the Last Word; i.e.—for 1 have’ not left: my earlier assertion—it is the moment of the gospel, which is God's uneondi- tional and therefore unsurpassable word. Footnotes 1. WA, 26, pp. 3271 2 Ibid, p. 332. 3. Johannes Brenz, de personali unione duarum naturarum in Christo, 1561, p. 7a 4. Ibid., pp, 76-88. See also the further analyses and biting Copernican polemic in Brenz’ Von der Majestaet unsers lieben Herr und einigen Heilands Jesus Christi, 1562,

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