easter-ambiguous victory (structure of evil)

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writer for theNational Observer." (One

can't, without back issues at hand, be

dead sure of even those names.)

The very devil can cite Scripture for

any old purpose. It is inevitable, and of

short-lived interest, that any number of

less clever contemporary colporteurs

should appropriate CS. Lewis (or flag or

motherhood or Panama's Canal) to

theirs.

One looks forward to reading

Lindskoog on almost any topic; and one

hopes that she will lift up her wary eye

from the freebie review copies of all those

evangelical publishers in California and

points East, so as to let it fall on some

deviltry deserving of her gift.

So as to be constructively hopeful

one suggests: let Lindskoog write for the

Journal a review of the first issue ofTh

Born-Again Hustler, a magazine whose

advent cannot, after all, now be very fa

off.

Bernard van't Hul

Easter:the ambiguous victory

W. Fred Graham

The title of this article does not express my theology of

Easter, but comes from a reading of Paul Van Buren'sThe Burden of Freedom (Seabury, 1976). Van Buren, no

longer associated with Death of God theology, argues

that Christ 's resurrection bore "meager conse

quences/' became a "tremendous cover-up," and has

hidden from us the obvious fact that his victory

did not bring on the expected messianic reign. In

stead, although Jesus was raised to new life, death and

oppression have continued to be the lot of everyone

else.

Against this reading of the relationship between

the resurrection and the coming of the Kingdom of

God, I shall place the careful study by Thomas F. Torrance,Space, Time and Resurrection (Eerdmans, 1976), in

which a strong case is made that Christ won a cosmic

victory by his resurrection. Van Buren cries out for a

visible victoryone where sickness and disease are

overcome, liberation breaks forth, righteousness and

peace kiss each other, and even death is undone. But

Torrance holds with Augustine that we are now living

in the mil lennium if we can only view history "from

the point of triumph of the risen Lamb of God who

subornes all world events to serve God's saving pur

pose" (p. 138).

After reviewing both books against each other, I

shall conclude by calling attention to a curiously over

looked historical argument from sociologist Ernest

Becker's Escape from Evil (Free Press, 1975), which I

believe supplements and even corrects the studies of

the theologians.

I still remember with embarrassment sitting in a

young adult Sunday School class in my home church

W.Fred Graham is a professor in the department of reli

gious studies at Michigan State University, East Lansing.

in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, and being asked by th

teacher how I would interpret Jesus' words in Mar13:30: "Truly, I say to you, this generation will no

pass away before all these th ings take place ." I was

seminary student at the time and would within th

hour be conducting the worship service, proclaimin

the Word of God to my old friends and relatives. Bu

that particular word, with angels gathering the elec

and Jesus coming in clouds of glory, I had not a clu

for understanding. This is not, of course, a new prob

lem. St. Paul seems clearly to have changed his min

about the nearness of the second Advent. In I Thes

salonians 4 he tells early believers that many of them

will still be alive when Christ's triumph is made complete. But in Romans 2 and 9-11, he speaks of ours a

the time of God's patience and envisions the conver

sion of Israel before the end. By the time II Peter wa

penned, it was necessary to explain the delayed com

ing by noting that God's clock doesn't keep time lik

ours.

Van Buren is no longer the confident secularist o

The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1968), who assure

us then that we neither were able nor needed to tal

about God. In his return in theism he brought bac

two convictions that were healthy even during tha

pestilential period. First, he maintains now as he di

then that the disciples of Jesus met the risen Chris

and that the resurrection is the center of Christia

proclamation and life. Secondly, he keeps asking th

down-to-earth questions, the almost brutal, practica

questions many of us want to sidestep, as doubtless

did in that Sunday School class over twenty years ago

We may not like the Temple Universi ty professor

answers, but we cannot ignore his questions.

His is a slender book and I shall summarize a

briefly as I can. He maintains that God has give

humans freedom and in doing so qualifies his ow

March 1978


2/6

HUMAN FREEDOM DOES NOT MEANHAVING LEISURETIME TOCHOOSEBETWEEN CUTTINGTHEGRASS AND WATCHINGTHETIGERS...

freedom. Indeed, God's freedom is now dependent on

ours, "so that the realization of his freedom awaits the

realization of the freedom of the sons and daughters ofGod" (pp. 9-10). This is not a novel view, nor is its

corollary, that human freedom does not mean having

leisure time to choose between cutting the grass and

watching the Tigers, but can only be realized when all

people are free from oppression and hunger. He barks

harsh words against the false freedoms prop agandized

by both state socialism and international capitalism.

His third chapter treats "the mystery of Israel's free

dom," which is that she must announce the freedom

God wants for all peoples by witnessing to the liberat

ing events in her history beginning with the Exodus.

(He also has what seems to be silly advice to Israel that

she also whisper and drop hints about liberating

events in the history of others, such as the emergence

of Castro's Cuba or the new China. Perhaps had Van

Buren indicated how and who would whisper and

drop hint ss ome bo ard of rab bis ? the Israeli

Parliament?this advice would not seem so airy and

off-hand.)

But it is in his final chapter that he puts the

orthodox on the defensive. The resurrection of Jesus

Christ, he argues, was real enough but odd also be

cause in Jesus' appearances to his disciples "he either

could not or would not stay with them, and the former

seems strongly suggested" (p. 91). He ate fish with

them, but they had trouble recognizing him. They

expected his near return ("will you now restore again

the Kingdom to Israel?"Acts 1:6), but he hasn't

come though we've been waiting over nineteen

centuries.

God did something for Jesus not done for any otherman, causing his history, his story, to resume afterhis death, not merely as any man's story may continue in the memory of those who live on. To thisman it was said that death was not the last word. Inanother sense, however, his was a victory so qualified as to make one wonder. He was alive, but whatsort of victory was it that could not be realized in afull and open return to the land of the living? Hecould appear, but he could not stay. His disciplescalled him Lord, but the kingship of death and oppression continued as before (p. 93).

Two other points must be noted. First, this am

biguity is like all the liberation events in Israel's

historyExodus, the reception of the Law, captivity

and return, the State of Israel rising from the ashes of

Auschwitzthey are hints (earnests, down payments)

of the way the mysterious freedom of God acts in the

world. In them God causes freedom to happen, b

because our freedom involves the freedom of a

peoples, they are not unqualified triumphs, but awitnessing events. God is our hope and gives us sig

of a liberation to come, that we may keep up th

struggle (p. 103).

The second point to be noted is that early Chri

tians, without deliberately intending to deceive, pulle

a massive cover-up to pretend that a comple

victory had been won in Jesus' resurrection. Phase

hid his delay by interpreting his heralding a new e

on earth as preaching another world, running paralle

so to speak, to this world. The realm of righteousne

and peace is above. Phase 2 was to identify the ne

age with the church: "Was liberation promised? Theenter the church, and you are thereby liberated. I

deed, no liberation outside the church!" (p. 98). Pha

3 was to replace longing for a Messiah to bring rig

teousness on earth by teaching that each individu

will at death go to be with the Messiah in that oth

invisible world. Van Buren contrasts this sharply wi

I Thessalonians 4:15-17, where both quick and de

meet the risen Christ. (Unfortunately for Van Bur

that meeting in the air doesn't sound very earthy

me!) And thus , he charges, early Christi anity turn

its back on Judaism, its mother, which continued

affirm the prophetic (and Nazarene) conviction th

God's Kingdom must come on earth. Thus Chris

church became pagano-Christ ian, not Judae

Christian.

The basic issue here is the delay in the coming

the Kingdom. II Peter witnesses to its effect on t

early church; Albert Schweitzer made it the heart

his frustrated Jesus in his The Quest for the Historic

Jesus.And Van Buren reminds us forcefully that it is

issue that will not down. Who amongReformed Journ

readers hasn't agonized about the seemingly lit

progress we in the church have made toward a

earthly reign of Christ? And who among us, wh

holding onto the conviction that each person has lbeyond death with God, hasn't wondered why t

Kingdom teachings of Jesus make so little impact up

human history? No wonder we are tempted into d

pensational rejection of Christ's clear demands for p

fection in righteousness and love, when so few ha

lived them and so small has been their effect on wo

affairs.

Thomas F. Torrance, like Van Buren, was a stud

under Karl Barth. That is about the only thing th

8 The Reformed Jour


3/6

BUT CAN ONLYBEREALIZED

WHEN ALL PEOPLE ARE FREE

FROM OPPRESSION AND HUNGER.

share (although their common tendency to expound

apodictically may have been a disease caught in

Basel).Space, Time and Resurrectionis a strong book. Ifin places there is a bit too much parsing of historical

theologyresurrection and justification, resurrection

and reconciliation, resurrection and redemption,

etc.nonetheless there is a lot of meat, and it engages

the Polanyi strain of modern philosophy very satisfac

torily. But we shall narrow our attention to those

places where Torrance responds to Van Buren's

concerns.

Clearly Torrance believes that Jesus' resurrection

did inaugurate a new age, though that age is not yet

clearly evident. He writes:

The Kingdom of Christ was fully inaugurated withhis crucifixion in its condition of humiliation, andwith his resurrection in triumph over the forces ofdarkness and evil and his ascension as Lamb of Godto the throne of the Father. That was in the mostintense sense the fulfillment of Christ's Kingdom. Inother words, this is the immediacy and the finality ofthe Kingdom of which Christ spoke as taking place inthe life-time of his hearers; but it is that same inaugurated Kingdom which will be openly manifested atthe end of time when the veil will be taken away.This is what we traditionally refer to as the "finaladvent" or simply the 'parousia'of Christ (p. 146).

But did not Jesus expect the Kingdom to come

with his person, the end-times to hasten to their con

clusion, and his ministry to have an imminent visible

fulfilment? To this Torrance has two answers. The first

is that signs of the new creation are "elusive" within

our space-time world, because we tend to understand

and evaluate according to old-order thinking. The sec

ond involves a fairly complicated argument that the

Kingdom is now fulfilled in God's time and place,

though not in ours. To both these arguments, he ap

pends his belief that Jesus did not expect a quick

consummation of the new age. Thatbelief, it seems to

me, is based not so much on the gospel texts as upon

the second argument. Let us look at each.That evidence for signs of the new creation are

elusive within our world is not fully argued and is

never illustrated, perhaps because Torrance believes it

has already been witnessed to sufficiently by others.

What he means is that if we take up our cross, if we

allow the resurrection to transform our lives and

thought patterns, then we'll find we are already in the

new age. Here no good discussion seems possible

only assertion. The "healthy-minded" like Corrie Ten

Boom and Catherine Marshall will find lice, disease,

March 1978

even infant death as events God uses to save lives. But

the "sick soul" will note that babies still starve, armies

march, and the innocent die, as they have since theDead Sea took sick. The former see the elusive evi

dence for the Kingdom's presence; the.latter do not.

The second argument, however, is more discuss

able. Following Polanyi, Torrance insists that there are

levels of inquiry which open upward, but are not

reducible downward. The lower levelsay

che mis try mus t be completed by a level above

itsay biology. Life is not explained by reducing

living things to their chemical elements; but chemical

elements are taken up into life. Just so with the resur

rection. It gives new meaning to levels of inquiry

below itsay history. But it is not reducible to historical events or to the kinds of data the historian or New

Testament scholar must use within their levels of in

quiry. Rather, the materials of history or New Testa

ment studies are given new meaning by the

resurrection.

In terms of the delayed return of Christ, two kinds

of space and time are involved, and the higher inter

prets the lower, not the other way around. The lower

is our ordinary space and timefor Jesus ascended

from Peter, James and John, etc., humans living in our

perceived space and time. But as God-Man he as

cended to God and took the human with him, so that

what he is there cannot be enclosed in our space-timecategories. God has no boundaries, so the ascended

Christ at the right hand of the Father is everywhere

although everywhere is not a space category for us.

Likewise he inhabits eternity, "God's time." So the

return of Christ in "God's space" and "God's time" is

already accomplished (pp. 127-31). This is why the

other side of our struggle for righteousness and peace

on earth is "from the point of the triumph of the risen

Lamb of God" already the millennium (p. 138).

Since, says Torrance, the New Testament Chris

tians lived in the expected imminence of the return of

Christ (because they were united to Christ, citizens ofthe new age inaugurated by the resurrection and as

cension), it is false to interpret varying New Testament

language like I Thessalonians 4 and Romans 9-11 or

Paul's awaiting death in Philippians as disillusion

ment with Christ's delay, thus forcing the church to

alter its outlook on the end- times (p. 153). St. Paul

lived in the new age, yet also in this old order. Of

course his language participates in both realities, not

as contradiction but as truth seen from different van

tage points.

9


4/6

VAN BUREN EXEGETES 1 CORINTHIANS 15

AND COMPLETELY MISSES THE FACT THAT

IF CHRIST IS NOT RISENWEARE STILL IN OUR SINS.

Even Jesus' teachings about the imminence of his

return and the inauguration of the Kingdom of God

are more fully apprehended after the resurrection. Forthe resurrection interprets Jesus' words, not the other

way around. Torrance's picture of an imaginary biog

rapher who travels about with Jesus and then must

reshape his notes and rewrite his material after the

resurrection is very good (pp. 161-66).

To sum up: Torrance gets around all of Van Bu-

ren's arguments about the failure of the Kingdom to

arrive when expected by the analogy of "stereoscopic

viewing." Seen from one sidethe mundane, histori

cal viewwe experience delay in Christ's return and

the establishment of the Kingdom. Seen from the

otherthe higher, resurrection overlookwe seehis complete victory. Taken separately, we have two

views. But whe n we focus stereoptically "the historical

Jesus and the risen Jesus are fused into one image of

spatio-temporal depth," and we are "really able to see

and understand Jesus Christ as he is in reality"

(p. 167). In this way the concerns of both the New

Testament scholar or historian and the modern Chris

tian who wants, say, an end to Communist-caused

death in Cambodia or capitalist-militarist-caused

death in Chile are both answered. The Kingdom has

come and we can in faith be part of that new creation,

jus t like the Christ ian proletariat who were fed to lions

in the Colosseum.

I confess some unhappiness with both Van Buren and

Torrance. Against the former, I find no place in his

monograph for the atonement. He can exegete I Corin

thians 15 and completely miss the fact that if Christ is

not risen we are still in our sins. To me such an omis

sion is an admission of special pleading. Further, it is

unnecessary and tendentious to interpret the over

comin g of death for Chris t's faithful as part of a

cover-up. For there is plenty in the synoptic reportingon Jesus to argue that our Lord took individual life

beyond death as seriously as the inauguration of an

earthly kingdom. In addition, Van Buren's assertions

that the resurrected Christ was not able to stay with

his disciples are merely thatassertions. Van Buren

hardly tries to document that inability.

Against Torrance, I agree with Van Buren that the

evidence for the Kingdom of God should not be quite

so elusive. Without agreeing that the early church

covered up for the delayed return, one must grant that

the church's charge by its Victor-Christ ought not to

have dribbled out so early, to have proclaimed anti-

Semitism as part of its message, and to have triumphedover Rome so fully and yet to have failed people so

completelyas the history of Christendom shows

even today. It is disturbing that Torrance's discussion

ignores so completely the absence of external evidence

that Christ is Lord. It is truly "ivory tower" in that

respect. Is all that Old Testament imagery of an earthly

reign of God really "old-order" talk? Must his reign

be only in the individual's life and thus so elusive?

For one who has lived in Torrance's Scotland for a

time, there is a disturbing parallel between Torrance's

ignoring the church's failure to exhibit the Kingdom

and the inability of the Church of Scotland to be alivein the time and space of Scotland's people. Can some

thing be so elusive it can no longer be found?

Ernest Becker, though Jewish, understood the mean

ing of the resurrection for early Christians. Further

more, he argued that its power affected both the indi

vidual Christian and the community, and extended

itself into what promised for several centuries to be

non-violent conquest by lovea kingdom both o

heaven and of earth.

In his widely acclaimedThe Denial of Death (1973Becker analyzed the fateful element in human life a

our denial that we are going to die. In a running battl

with Freud, he argued that all the neurotic behavio

that Freud uncovered and explained as rooted in th

libidinal and aggressive Id is really rooted in our frigh

at our bodies, the creaturely and mortal part of us, tha

dooms us to death. Soto give but one exampleth

anally retentive person is not one fixated upon a par

ticular infant-parent Oedipal relationship durin

toilet-training; rather, such a person is horrified at hi

production of feces, a decaying body excretion tha

foresignals the ultimate death and decay of the physical bearer of both feces and individual life. The bowe

movement is a reminder of body, which is a reminde

of death.

Having demonstrated that the all-encompassin

fear of death drives us to attempt to transcend deat

through culturally standardized hero systems an

symbols, Becker turns in Escape from Evil to look a

how these "heroic self-images" are the root causes o

human evil. He accepts Otto Rank's thesis that th

Roman Empire finally and fully eliminated the cla

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TORRANCE'S ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE DELAYED PAROUSIA THESIS

MAY LOOK GOOD FROM HEAVEN,

BUT SEEM CURIOUSLY DETACHED FROM EARTH.

and its rituals as the chief locus for immortality-

projects and substituted the patriarchal family. The

tyrant-father in each family was symbolized by the

emperor. Roman society caused terrible social in

equality, for it destroyed "clannishness" and its inbuilt

tendencies to equality. (However, primitive equality

was offset somewhat by power-gathering within the

clan by sacred persons, medicine men, who tapped

into the spirit world.)

What Christianity did, says Becker, was introduce

"The Era of the Son," in revolt against the oppressions

and inequalities of the family. The sons and daughters

were free of the father and of all earthly domination,

for they were immortal sons of God, a sonship that

was heavenly, but had social consequences, for

the individual could fashion his own salvation independent of any earthly authority. Christianity was agreat democratization that put spiritual power rightback into the hands of the single individual and inone blow wiped out the inequalities of the dispossessed and the slaves that had gradually and inexorably developed since the breakup of the primitiveworld and that had assumed such grotesque proportions in the mad drivenness of the Mediterraneanworld (p. 69).

Of course, we know what happened. After Chris

tianity exploded in a flash fire that lit up the whole of

Mediterranean society, which Becker somewhere calls

the most amazing non-violent conquest in history, the

Empire came hat in hand and asked the church if she

needed help. And the church, flattered, gave up most

of her power to Rome and quickly exerted what was

left on the Roman patriarchal model. The Christian

solution to humanity's penchant for avoiding death by

erecting horrible state systems and unhelpful hero

models ceased to apply. The Reformation, says Becker,

was a late attempt to reassert the promise of early

Christianity, but it failed when caught up in the poli

tics of the period.

It can be seen, I think, that the resurrection meetsthe human need to transcend death, and does so with

out the anti-physical asceticism of other religions. By

doing so, it also introduces an authentic note of social

egalitarianism by its declaration that all believers are

join t-heirs of the Kingdom. Eternal life wi th God is no

cover-up to hide the delay of the Kingdom of God, but

is essential to the transformation of human society. All

of this fits Becker's thesis and counts against Van Bu-

ren's discussion.

Most of Van Buren's case is lost: no cover-up took

place; the resurrection-teaching meets the basic

human need; no world-denial was necessitated be

cause of a parallel kingdom in heaven. However, a

major argument remainsthat Jesus and the early

church expected the quick, visible coming of his king

dom but that God works more slowly. Torrance's ar

guments against the delayed parousia thesis may look

good from heaven, but seem curiously detached from

earth. At this one point his is a "P.G. Wodehouse

theology," where great things happen to liberate indi

viduals from real and fancied crises, but the reader

knows the "real" world of hungry and exploited

peoples is deliberately set aside and unacknowl

edged.*

Perhaps we have astand-off. 1 find myself concluding

with Van Buren that God expects his people to work at

Kingdom-bringing-in. And also with Torrance that

because Jesus' resurrection and ascension are not

earth-escaping, a stereoscopic faith knows that defeat

in our history does not negate Christ's victory for us.

But I would rather put it Becker's way, that the church

had one chance and blew it. Will it get another? It

may. And if it does it will have to ponder a last word

from the modern Jewish prophet:

I think that today Christianity is in trouble not be

cause its myths are dead, but because it does notoffer its ideal of heroic sainthood as an immediatepersonal one to be lived by all believers. . . . Primitive Christianity is a real threat to both commercialism and communism, at least when it takes itsown message seriously. Primitive Christianity is oneof the few ideologies that has kept alive the idea ofthe invisible dimension of nature and the priority ofthis dimension for assuring immortality. Thus it is athreat to any one-dimensional immortality ideology,and could work in a democracy that modern democratic man himself finds too burdensome, a societyfree of class and race struggle, because symbols ofclass and race prestige don't carry weight in therealm of the invisible spirit (pp. 164 and 86).

Replacing the culture heroes of militarism and the

packaged heroes of modern consumerism by the

hero-saint is the work of the Holy Spirit. But how to

become primitive Christians in the twentieth century

is our personal calling.

*My disagreement with Torrance should probably be balanced by areading of a sympathetic assessment of Barthian "triumph of Easter" theology; e.g., Berkouwer's comments in A Half Century ofTheology (Eerdmans, 1977), pp. 67-74.

March 1978 11


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