182. review article on n. t. wright's res. of son of god

The Resurrection of the Son of GodA Review Article on

N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God. London:SPCK, 2003, xxi + 817pp. £55.00 hb., £35.00 pb.

STEPHEN N. WILLIAMS*

It seems like a light year since a bishop of Durham pronounced that the resurrectionwas about more than an empty tomb, and not a conjuring trick with flesh and bones.Presumably, no Christian had ever doubted the former, even if the ‘more’ was ofteninsufficiently emphasized, or had ever maintained the latter, even if beliefs wereoften crudely expressed. With the present bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, the storyis different. In a submission over eight hundred pages long, the third volume in hisseries on Christian Origins and the Question of God, he offers an account of themeaning of ‘resurrection’, a theology of the resurrection of the son of God and a defence of the substantial historicity of the canonical accounts of the empty tomb and bodily appearances of Jesus.1 Comment on the quality of Tom Wright’swork, and this project in particular, is quite superfluous, except to say, from the veryoutset, that we are dealing with a magnificent contribution to an enterprise ofsingular excellence and significance for modern biblical study, theology and thechurch. Profoundest gratitude, as well as admiration, is in order. This frames all thatfollows.

The thesis and line of argument is clear, worked out on a comprehensive scaleand in great detail. It is legitimate for the historian who inquires into Christianorigins, to investigate the assertion that Jesus rose from the dead. On no plausibleunderstanding of ‘history’ can the question be debarred. And on one point, we mustbe crystal clear, for it is pivotal: ‘resurrection’ means bodily life after death and notmere post-mortem existence. When it was denied in ancient paganism, this was whatwas denied. Belief in life after death was one thing; in resurrection, another. Variousways of conceiving life after death are found in the Old Testament and post-biblicalJudaism. Here, ‘resurrection’ certainly can have a metaphorical meaning. Itsconcrete referent in such a case is the longed-for return from exile and vindicationof the people of God. But, when not used metaphorically, it is never used to denotelife after death per se, but a return to bodily life, life after life after death. There is

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA.

International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 6 Number 4 October 2004

* United Theological College, 108 Botanic Avenue, Belfast BT7 1JT.

1 N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003).

a spectrum of beliefs on life after death in Second Temple Judaism, and whenresurrection appears on it, that is its meaning. The author hammers home this point.

Puzzle: the word ‘resurrection’ is used in the same way in the New Testamentand in the early patristic era, excepting texts such as those we find at Nag Hammadi,conspicuous by their re-casting of the vocabulary and concept. There is, of course,a metaphorical usage in the New Testament that corresponds to that in the Old,applied, by Paul, to baptism and holiness, to being risen now with Christ, and we come across other metaphorical usage in the evangelists.2 What is puzzling, ordemands account, is the remarkable clarity and unanimity of the testimony to thefact that Christian witness clusters around the ‘resurrection’ spectrum of SecondTemple belief, that the whole notion has moved from ‘the circumference to thecentre’ (C.F. Evans) and that witness is now being given to a resurrection that ispast, the resurrection of Jesus. When it was literally believed in Second TempleJudaism, it was future. Hope for the future resurrection of the people of the Messiahis reaffirmed in the New Testament, and we find introduced in its pages a refinedtheology of the continuity and discontinuity of the body. But another stage, a paststage, is inserted into the scenario: Jesus, God’s Messiah and son, is risen from thedead. This is an affirmation of the created order and an affirmation of lordship fraughtwith implications for the political order. Further, the vocabulary of messianic sonshipis developed in a direction that puts the spotlight on the nature of a monotheismwhere the Son shares the throne of YHWH. So what accounts for the pivotalunderlying claim about resurrection?

Ultimately, nothing except what we are offered by the four evangelists. From a historical point of view, you can make no sense of the rise of belief in theresurrection, except on the assumption that the earliest stratum of witness maintainedthat the tomb was empty and that Jesus appeared to his disciples. And, from anhistorian’s point of view, the assumption is hard to account for, unless the witnessis valid. If so, from a theological and philosophical point of view, the historian’sconclusion must be affirmed according to the binding force of the evidence for it. In a way consonant with the most rigorous application of historical science, and rigorous philosophy of critical historical realism, the outcome of historicalinvestigation entails the construction or reconstruction of our world-views.

I leave it to the reader’s imagination to figure out the relation of my precis tohundreds of pages of detailed scholarship, not to mention trenchant reasoning andlively writing. A volume as comprehensive as this carries the risk that readers willquarrel over this point or that, and exploit putative difficulties to soften the force of an argument whose bold line might actually still remain intact. There was scarcely any way of avoiding that risk while accomplishing what the author hasaccomplished. The principal claims and argument seem to me to be, for the mostpart, as persuasively as they are carefully argued. Indeed, as I read this work, therewere portents of the self-respecting reviewer’s worst nightmare, which is to workthrough a volume of over eight hundred pages on a matter of highest significance,

422 Stephen N. Williams

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

2 And see Romans 11:15 as well.

and find oneself persuaded not just on so much of the substance of the argument,but also on so much of its detail. But it has come to something when this is the stuffof nightmares in the community of faith; those of us who are persuaded need toreflect on the importance of what is advanced. Rather than do that here, however, Iwant to turn to aspects of the case where I am not persuaded.

Bishop Wright strongly and insistently makes the claim that Jesus’ risen bodyis the model or prototype of what ours will be. Although he may be allowing inprinciple for at least some difference between the form of the body in which heappeared prior to the ascension, the body in which he appeared to Paul, and the bodyof the parousia, his argument depends on the belief that there is no significantdifference here. The body of the risen Jesus can be considered in any one of thesethree modes – if they differ at all – to be the prototype of ours. The discontinuitybetween Jesus’ risen and crucified body is certainly emphasized: the former is thebearer of properties that the other is not, eminently incorruptibility. But it isemphatically physical, and in physical continuity with the crucified body. This is animportant issue for the author. It explains Christian origins, and it involves a quitefundamental theological affirmation about the Creator’s restoration of creationthrough the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Some theologians will doubtless see it as their business to weigh in here toconsider the implications of the belief in the continued embodiment of Jesus. Andwhile Tom Wright is not averse to alluding to ‘attendant philosophical problems’,as he puts it in relation to a different question (p. 349), he does not see it as his remitto deal with these in relation to Christology.3 I do not want to go beyond this remit.His argument requires that the account of the body that is offered in 1 Corinthians15:35ff. applies to Jesus, until the point where Paul brings in final Adam (p. 46). So,of the body of Jesus, the truly Human One, we must say that what he sowed did notcome to life until it died; that he planted not the body that would be, ‘but just a seed,perhaps of corn or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined’;that it was sown a soma psuchikon and raised a soma pneumatikon. (Throughout the volume, omicron and omega, as epsilon and eta, are not distinguished intransliteration.) But this line of reasoning is surely problematic.

At two points, the author cautions against setting Luke and Paul on a collisioncourse over sarx. The Lukan text that generates the caution is the report of Jesus’words in Luke 24:39: ‘A spirit doesn’t have flesh and bones as you see I have’. Inrelation to Paul’s seeing Jesus, Tom Wright comments: ‘As with Luke’s “flesh andbones” language . . . producing a surface tension with Paul’s denial of “flesh andblood entering the kingdom” in 1 Corinthians 15.50, the most we can say is thatLuke was not concerned either to imitate Paul’s language or to pursue his agendas’(p. 390). Then: ‘ “Flesh and bones” here must not be played off against Paul’s phrase“flesh and blood” . . . Luke is not wedded to the special Pauline terminology inwhich “flesh” (sarx) always designates that which is corruptible, and often thatwhich is rebellious’ (p. 658).

Resurrection of the Son of God 423


3 I am collapsing ‘theological’ and ‘philosophical’ here.

But the problem is less terminological than conceptual. Does the continuity thatLuke portrays (along with the discontinuity) fit with the discontinuity (along withcontinuity) on which Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15:35ff.? Clearly, it is hard to beprecise enough to offer comparisons confidently. While the surface of the Lukanlanguage does not look congenial to description in terms of Jesus’ not planting thebody that is to be, but God giving the seed a body, we can not dogmatically averinconsistency. We can not squeeze out of the seed analogy very precise delineationsof identity and transformation. And we, reading the Lukan narrative as a whole,might visualize and be struck by the continuity between the crucified and risenbodies (while granting discontinuity) where all the evangelists and first witnesses(while affirming continuity) are struck by the discontinuity.

Nevertheless, we are dealing with more than a surface terminological tension.Tom Wright glosses the Lukan account: ‘His hands and feet . . . are the same handsand feet as before’ (p. 658) and he alludes to Jesus’ eating of fish (Lk. 24:42). Yet,in commenting on the passage in 1 Corinthians 6:12–20 which appears to affirmpresent and future bodily continuity so strikingly, he says: ‘There is that about thebody which will be destroyed . . . in the non-corruptible future world, food and thestomach are presumably irrelevant’ (p. 290). The author is not seeking to harmonizestraightforwardly all that Paul and Luke say; the four evangelists offer their separaterenderings of what is, nonetheless, the basic story transmitted to and believed byPaul. Yet, on Tom Wright’s account of things, Paul and Luke appear to be pullingin opposite directions significantly more than the author grants.

On this account, there is also a problem with the relationship between Paulineand Johannine theology. Wider christological issues arise here which go back toBishop Wright’s previous volume in this series, Jesus and the Victory of God. In thisvolume, he expressed his concern that we do not allow the developed categories ofthe trinitarian tradition to get in the way of our grasping aright the evangelists’witness to Jesus. ‘I suggest . . . that the return of YHWH to Zion, and the Temple-theology which brings it to focus, are the deepest keys and clues to gospelchristology. Forget the “titles” of Jesus, at least for a moment; forget the pseudo-orthodox attempts to make Jesus of Nazareth conscious of being the second personof the Trinity; forget the arid reductionism that is the mirror-image of that unthinkingwould-be orthodoxy.’4

‘Pseudo-orthodoxy’ aside, I fear that, in practice, this means: ‘Forget the secondperson of the Trinity.’ The force of that injunction depends on whether we assenttheologically to the belief that Jesus was God incarnate, as a first-order ontologicalstatement. It is importantly right to allow the appropriate Jewish framework toinstruct us as to evangelical meaning, and to disallow the imposition of traditionaldogmatic categories, where they are imposed just as a matter of principle. But,



4 N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996) p. 653. Tom Wrightkindly pointed out to me the omission of a line in my quotation from this text, in myinitial submission of this article review, egregiously distorting his meaning. I trust thatthere nevertheless remains a substantive issue at stake here, which is worth consideration.

logically, if the one spoken of by the evangelists was the second person of the Trinity,God incarnate, and if the aim of the exercise in this volume is to understand Jesusas he was, then we can and should not forget the second person of the Trinity intrying to understand Jesus’ life and ministry, irrespective of what the evangelists areemphasizing at that point and of the utter propriety of hearing their voices aright. IfI discover a few decades after his death that the present Bishop of Durham was, asa matter of blood and inheritance, the Crown Prince of an Arab principality, I oughtto read his previous academic and present ecclesial career in that exotic light withoutdimming other shining lights.

One response – whether telling or not – is that this is the case only if the Bishopof Durham knows himself to be such. And we encounter the following statement inJesus and the Victory of God: ‘Jesus did not . . . “know that he was God” in the sameway that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate anorange an hour ago. His knowledge was of a more risky, but perhaps more significantsort: like knowing one is loved. One cannot “prove” it except by living by it’ (p.653). I think that this conclusion is underdetermined by the evidence that the authorconsiders but, in any case, its validity requires adjudication on the question of thestatus and weight of Johannine testimony. And this question is explicitly disregarded(p. xvi). Yet those who framed the trinitarian doctrine of the church were dependenton it, though not on it alone. So it can be alleged that forgetfulness of the secondperson of the Trinity turns out to be: ‘Forget John’. Although it looked as thoughTom Wright wanted to integrate the Johannine data into his account of things laterin the project, I wonder if successful integration – inasmuch as that involves ademonstration of the coherence of New Testament theology – will force somerevision. But in any case, the methodological issue remains.

John’s witness to the resurrection is treated in the present volume, but a primafacie problem with it is glossed over. In his Contra Celsum, Origen, whose theologyof resurrection the author considers, actually makes much of the Johannine text:‘Destroy this Temple, and I will raise it up.’5 Tom Wright alludes to this text (e.g.,pp. 441–7). But he does not comment on its potentially contra-Pauline force. In hisinterpretation of Paul, he emphasizes that, as God raised Jesus, the human one, so he will raise us. A principle of anthropological vitality such as John speaks ofhere – we can call it the ‘ego’, if we do not confuse the grammatical with the‘metaphysical’ subject, he who is ‘the resurrection and the life’ – appears to introducedistinctions between John and Paul, as Tom Wright understands Paul, that are notreally mentioned. While uncommitted on the point, Bishop Wright thinks that Jesusmay well have said something along these lines (p. 411). My point at the momentis that a Johannine theology of the resurrection which gave full force to the sayingsabout raising up the temple, about Jesus having authority to lay down and take uphis life and his being ‘the resurrection and the life’, would yield an account of Jesus’



5 Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1980) III.32; cf. II.10 and II.16 on Jesus’ power to lay down and take up his soul.

humanity in relation to ours that is different from the Pauline theology, as understoodby Tom Wright, with its soma psuchikon common to Jesus and ourselves.

But is an account of Pauline theology required, which invites these difficulties?It seems to me that Tom Wright plays down the extent of the contrast in 1 Corinthians15 between the body that is now and the body that is to be. He renders verses 39and 40 as follows: ‘Not all flesh is the same kind of flesh, but there is one sort forhumans, another sort for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There arephysical objects in the heavens, and there are physical objects on the earth . . .’ (p.344). In a prefatory comment, this rendering is glossed with the words: ‘There aredifferent types of “body” or “flesh” . . .’ But the Greek surely conveys a different,though not a contradictory, sense of things. Having talked resolutely of soma all theway from verse 35 onwards, Paul introduces a conspicuous change to the languageof sarx in verse 39, applicable to humans, animals, birds and fish. What Tom Wrighttranslates as ‘physical objects’ in verse 40 are somata. The Pauline implication,however, seems to be that earthly somata are fleshly; heavenly somata not.Ascription of ‘physicality’ may not be denied to the heavenly somata – and TomWright will say that only by oxymoron could we deny it – but what is emphasizedseems to be the contrasting composition of that which is compounded of sarx andthat which is not. A more radical discontinuity between the present and future bodythan Tom Wright suggests, appears to be indicated by the sarx/soma contrast at thisjuncture.

I question whether the evidence warrants such a tight connection between Jesus’risen body and ours. Surely we can maintain the physical continuity between Jesus’crucified and resurrected pre-ascension body, without insisting that it be the patternfor ours. This is not to deny that we have some form of future embodiment; it is toavoid seeing in Jesus’ risen physicality, prior to his ascension, its model. AlthoughJesus’ resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:1–11 grounds the fact of our resurrection,Paul nowhere specifically says that the body seen between resurrection andascension grounds its exact form. The parousia body of Jesus may ground its form(Phil. 3:21) though, even in this area, I doubt if the houtos of 1 Thessalonians 4:14can bear the weight of meaning an exact model, even if it is not an adverb ofinference (p. 215). Loosening the connections that Bishop Wright makes herethreatens neither the reliability of the evangelists’ accounts of Jesus’ resurrection andappearances or belief in the renewal of creation and of humankind in some sort ofbodily future. And the continuities between what we are now and what we shall becan still ground ethics.6



6 On p. 737, n. 42, the author alludes to his debt to Oliver O’Donovan’s book, Resurrectionand Moral Order, as he has indicated before. For my own reservations aboutO’Donovan’s connection between resurrection and ethics, see ‘Outline for Ethics: a Response to Oliver O’Donovan’, Themelios 13.3 (1988) and ‘Evangelicals andEschatology: a Contentious Case’, in A.N.S. Lane, ed., Interpreting the Bible: Historical and Theological Studies in Honour of David F. Wright (Leicester: Apollos,1997).

Three questions remain on my account. Firstly, is there a tacit attempt to separatephysicality from bodiliness in the case of Jesus’ eschatological appearance or oursomata pneumatika? (Tom Wright coins the word ‘transphysicality’ to capture thediscontinuities between present and future.) We do not have the conceptual armouryto account for what is possible in the way of soma. Just as we might insist on thetheological possibility of God as non-embodied and personal (an oxymoron in somepeople’s books) so it is theologically possible to be agnostic on whether our futurebeings should be characterized as bodily, yet not physical. The rumour of angelsmight warn us of this. But, Tom Wright insists, Paul distinguishes humans fromangels, and what grounds have we to suppose that he could conceive of somethingbodily, but not physical, whatever the relation of his thought to the traditions ofJesus’ resurrection? No very secure grounds, I think; I find Tom Wright quitepersuasive here. At the same time, I think that Paul at least allows for a distinctionbetween the ‘physicality’ of our future existence and the physicality of Jesus’pre-ascension body that is more radical than I find in this account.

Secondly, how can we account for Paul’s account of matters in 1 Corinthians15:35ff., if it is not a theological commentary on the Easter narratives presented, intheir different ways, by the evangelists? I do not know the answer to this, but do notfind it a particularly troubling question. For all I know, Paul reflected on the nowhoary question of what happens to dismembered bodies, as well as what happenedto the risen body of Christ. Others have a competence that I do not have in figuringout the parameters of his world of thought.

Thirdly, is it my suggestion that Paul and John are pulling in irreconcilablyopposite directions? No: my point is that the contrasts are very striking if we insistthat the Corinthian description of our soma psuchikon is a description of Jesus’embodiment as well. If it is not, then the tension with John that I have mentioned,is diminished. To say that it need not be a description of Jesus’ embodiment is notto deny that much said of our embodiment must be said of Jesus’ embodiment as well, still less to court Apollinarianism. It is simply not to commit Paulineanthropology in 1 Corinthians 15:35ff. as tightly to the humanity of Christ, as doesTom Wright. But the matter is hard to pursue beyond this point, because it wouldtake us back to the issues that surface in Jesus and the Victory of God on accountof its omission of Johannine evidence, and take us forward all the way to the finalunfolding of this project, d.v., in a resolution of the matter of Christian Origins andthe Question of God. All that can be ventured here is the remark that I think that wecan give the unusual Johannine ‘I will raise’ a higher theological profile than TomWright does without pitting it in opposition to ‘God raised’ (something that TomWright, of course, does not do). And surely we must, if we are to do justice to theJohannine witness to the resurrection of the son of God.

Bishop Wright may disagree on this point but, as far as I am concerned, thequestions I raise are about modifying the thesis, not changing it. In general, Iwondered whether the author’s anxiety to secure the meaning of ‘resurrection’against detractors of that standpoint, has led to an overshooting of the mark (to pickup an early metaphor of the author’s own). My comments hitherto might be fitted



under that rubric, but there seems to me evidence of this in far smaller ways, ofwhich I give two examples.

The first is where, in his discussion of Luke’s account of the ascension, TomWright says: ‘Nor is Luke’s story to be assimilated to the strange story of Elijah inthe Old Testament. Elijah did not die; he was “taken up to heaven” directly’ (p. 655).If by ‘assimilation’ is meant the threat of confusing Jesus’ bodily resurrection afterdeath, and his ascension, with Elijah’s mysterious non-resurrectional by-pass ofdeath, I agree. But it is surely hard to avoid the conclusion that Luke is stressingrather strongly the connections. The turning-point in his narrative comes at muchthe same juncture as in the other synoptists, though earlier in his corpus, shortly afterthe transfiguration. ‘As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesusresolutely set out for Jerusalem’ (Lk. 9:51). The vocabulary echoes the Septuagintin its account of Elijah’s being taken up into heaven (2Kgs 2:1–11); the incidentfollowing this verse harks back to an incident involving Elijah in the previouschapter in 2 Kings (1.10ff.) and, of course, we have just had the transfiguration.(Interestingly, the word idou in Luke’s tranfiguration account, which Tom Wrightpoints out is a Matthean favourite (p. 640) somehow connects Moses and Elijah (Mt.9:30) with the two shining men at the tomb (Mt. 24:4) and the two figures attendingthe ascension (Acts 1:10).7) Tom Wright’s main point is unaffected, but are potentialtheological possibilities being closed down here, in order that we do not weaken thecase for Jesus’ resurrection by its false assimilation to the ascension of Elijah?

The second is his dismissal of Maurice Wiles’ position. Tom Wright takes itthat, for Wiles, ‘resurrection’ is virtually synonymous with life after death, a way ofspeaking about the dead person being alive (p. 31, n. 75). But this is not whatProfessor Wiles was saying; rather, belief in resurrection is a form of belief in lifeafter death, not a straightforwardly substitutable statement of it. When he spoke of‘hope in resurrection, in the sense of life after death’, he did not mean that the termsare virtually synonymous; he was distinguishing between this sense and the senseof resurrection as present, as being raised with Christ now. On Tom Wright’s account,it would be equally true to say that, for Maurice Wiles, ‘immortality of the soul’ isvirtually synonymous with life after death. But, for Professor Wiles, ‘immortality’and ‘resurrection’ are alternative, not identical, ways of conceiving of life after death.If both ‘immortality of the soul’ and ‘resurrection’ were virtually synonymous with‘life after death’, they would have to be virtually synonymous with each other.8 Theyare not, and if A is not identical with B, then it can not be that both A and B areidentical with C.

Conversely, Tom Wright’s own distinctions between word and concept, pictureand idea, in relation to the resurrection, are not as clean as they might be. Anillustration of this is found on p. 164, where we move from the concept ofimmortality to the word ‘immortality’ and the rather opaque claim is made that ‘[b]y



7 A detail worth noting is that what is reported as ‘two men’ in Lk. 24:4 is ‘a vision ofangels’ in 24:23, which broadly aids in the harmony of synoptic accounts.

8 The theoretical flexibilities of ‘virtually’ do not affect us here.

itself, the word simply means “a state in which death is not possible” ’. The notionof a ‘word by itself’ is difficult to grasp in this context. As far as I can judge, themain lines of the argument survive all this perfectly well. But a lengthy volume likethis makes demands on us: when surveying the New Testament data, all the waythrough to the evangelists’ accounts, we have to keep in our heads the detailedarguments offered earlier from Homer, Plato and company through to The Epistleto Rheginos and The Gospel of Philip. So it may be that something that I have missedhangs on my queries about formulation.

Finally, what of faith and history, the big question, for dwellers in the realmsof Systematics? The author’s position flies in the face of what has long beenfashionable, but it is carefully constructed – particularly if we take the previousvolumes into account – and free of naive evidentalism.9 It might be objected thatTom Wright does not sufficiently allow for the fact that his putative conclusions, asa historian, run up against what we might need to affirm or deny about God on other grounds, that is, the historian’s limits qua historian are exceeded. But the authorhas been alert to this question from the beginning and I think that the objection is hard to sustain as a matter of principle. One might query the very occasionalformulation where the distinction is elided between what we can say as historiansand what we should say as persons or as theologians, on the basis of historical work,but the author’s handling of the matter in question, especially in the last chapter,makes this either a distinction without a relevant difference or a distinction whichis implicit anyway, so it amounts to a mere quibble.10

Almost. The strongest statement in modern times of the believer’s infinitepassion and interest in relation to historical truth, is surely that of Kierkegaard in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript.11 Kierkegaard powerfully resists thehistorical approach, which he thinks can only yield approximation and which he links with illicit speculative objectivity. My head is, for the most part, with Tom Wright, rather than Kierkegaard, on this one. But one feels the force of aKierkegaardian riposte when Tom Wright is throwing the gauntlet of historicalexplanation before us at the close of the book’s penultimate chapter. On the questionof whether the evidence leads us to embrace the belief that ‘Jesus was indeed raisedfrom the dead’, he says: ‘It is, of course, perfectly possible to say that one cannotdecide. But for those who prefer not to live on such a knife-edge for ever . . . thechallenge is: what alternative account can be offered?’ (pp. 717f.). For Kierkegaard,the whole issue must be set up as a matter of existential urgency from the beginning,for who can abide on the knife-edge? Tom Wright, I believe, agrees, as his remarkson self-involvement show. But (gratuitously? cravenly? pettily?) seizing on thisremark of his, in light of Kierkegaard, is a way in to asking whether there issomething about the historical approach to Christology and resurrection that at least



9 See here the first volume in the series, The New Testament and the People of God(London: SPCK, 1992).

10 One place where this question arises is on p. 211.11 I use ‘Kierkegaard’ as shorthand for the pseudonymous author of this work.

potentially endangers a theological approach. This is where Hans Frei comes intothings.

Tom Wright cites Frei as an influential example of a position that he wishes to reject: that the historical study of the resurrection to which he aspires should, for theological reasons, not be undertaken.12 I greatly regret that space forbidscommenting here not only on his tentative interpretation of Hans Frei, but also onthat of the editors of Frei’s Theology and Narrative.13 Let me just note Hans Frei’sshort ‘Response to “Narrative Theology: An Evangelical Appraisal” ’. His strugglehere, intellectually unresolved so late in his academic life, is with categories. Ifcategories of ‘historical reality’ and ‘fact’ are deployed in relation to the resurrectionof Jesus Christ, Hans Frei affirms the empty tomb and literal resurrection. But canthey be straightforwardly deployed? ‘Is Jesus Christ . . . a “fact” like other historicalfacts? Should I really say that the eternal Word made flesh, that is, made fact indeed,is a fact like any other? I can talk about “Jesus” that way, but can I talk about theeternal Word made flesh in him that way? I don’t think so . . .’.14 In light of whatfollows, it would be easy to think that Frei is thinking in terms that Tom Wrightdiscusses elsewhere, that is, of the Troeltschian difficulties with a historical approachto events that have no analogy. But something more is going on here, and here Imust resort to the kind of gnostic allusiveness in which folk sometimes feel entitledto indulge in relation to a Doktorvater, assuming merry immunity from thepossibility of falsification. Actually, what matters is the point made, not whether I am right or wrong about Hans Frei.

One thing underlying the theological intuition and literary striving of whichGeorge Hunsinger speaks, with characteristic penetration, is the fact that Frei wasin a manner haunted by the person of Christ, if that word is not taken to implyknowledge of another’s soul. His writing on Christology bears witness to this, thoughwithout necessarily reflecting directly what was being wrestled about. Deeplysensitive to the tragedies of human existence, to the rough edges of human andChristian life, and equally sensitive to the impression made by the canonical JesusChrist on the believer, he found it impossible to believe that a dispassionate historicalinvestigation would conduct the soul to the vicinity of faith.15 What we are dealingwith in this person, Jesus Christ, that makes him Saviour, eludes the empirical claw.

We must, I think, honour this realization. To learn that Jesus, God’s Messiah,was raised from the dead, and to what purpose, is crucial. But to learn in the depthof our persons who he is in the depth of his person, the profound truth of an identitythat can not merely be formally described, is another matter. However important thefides historica, fides salvifica is born of illumination, of the operation of Spirit, andtrades in a dimension that the historian can not remotely attain, qua historian. I do



12 See especially pp. 21ff.13 Hans Frei, Theology and Narrative, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1993).14 Frei, Theology and Narrative, p. 211.15 The point is methodological; it might do so in a given case.

not for a moment claim that Tom Wright believes or implies anything contrary tothis. And if The Resurrection of the Son of God nevertheless generates my train of thought, that may be partly the function of pondering this volume without aperpetually lively sense in mind of the detail of the previous one, with its sustainedexposure to Jesus. Tom Wright mentions that his earlier omission of discussion ofresurrection had the ‘unexpected result that some reviewers of JVG accused me ofnot being interested in, or not believing in, Jesus’ resurrection’ (pp. xvf.). He mustnow have the frustrating or depressing sense that you can’t win if, now, a revieweris perhaps not just asking about what may come in subsequent volumes, but alsoworrying about forgetting what came in the last.

Having said that, taking my cue from Hans Frei, though regardless of whetherI have got him quite right, the deep human and soteriological questions must be so firmly lodged in the believer’s consciousness, that we can give no quarter tothe view that historical resolution and explanation takes us to the forecourt of faith. Adamantly, with Tom Wright, and against the stream, investigation of theresurrection of Jesus is possible and necessary; its results positive and vital. Butprecisely its success will confirm what others will maintain who deem the issue lesscertain than does the author: that, having learned as historians of the resurrection ofthe Son of God, and even of the rich connections between his messiahship and hisfilial sharing of Yahweh’s throne, we still, in one respect, have not begun to penetratehis identity.16



16 My thanks to Eddie Adams, of King’s College, London, for his comments on this article.

182. review article on n. t. wright's res. of son of god

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