Intuitions and Dead Ends of Contemporary Exegesis
Olivier Clément
Translated from:
Olivier Clément. Le Christ, terre des vivants. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2019, pp 9-16.
Until the crisis of the European conscience which marks the transition from the 17th to the 18th century, no one among Christians had raised doubts about the scriptural accounts concerning the resurrection of Christ. Faith in the Risen One and the affirmation of the resurrection as a historical fact were united in a simple and powerful way. Not naïvely — at least not among the Fathers, especially the Greeks — for whom the resurrection also signified the metamorphosis of Christ and of the conditions of universal existence. In the West, this union was more difficult, more “fideistic,” where the absence of a properly Christian conception of being and the substantialism of late scholasticism tended to objectify the resurrection within those very conditions.
The problem thus arose in the West when a science — itself pre-critical — established as a principle that no other reality, no other modality of being, exists but that of the world of the senses and of quantity. The “miracle” — and the resurrection, “miracle of miracles” — could only be denied a priori. Lacking an understanding of faith — the epignosis of Paul — and a vision of all reality illumined by the mystery, Christians could only entrench themselves in a sentimental faith, slowly corroded by the “scientific evidences” which technique had made the everyday framework of life.
When the intelligence of faith dries up, what mostly remains — and initially redoubles — are institutional constraints. Thus, the living exegetical research of the 19th century was necessarily liberal. It developed in that world without mystery, that “Euclidean” universe which Dostoevsky mockingly called “the crystal palace,” and drew upon no other reference but a rationality that remained pre-critical (despite Kant!), that is to say, declared sovereign and defining its historical field of vision only along the horizontal line of collective becoming, then in the process of being divinized by Hegel and his lesser disciples.
But when one locks oneself into one of the dwelling-places of being — here, the sensible world — by identifying it with the totality of the real, how can one possibly understand an event — such as the resurrection — that, at a nearly hidden point in space and time, breaks through the walls of that dwelling and of all dwellings? The risen Christ appears as a myth — in the poorest sense of the term. Historical research, bent on constructing a “life of Jesus” freed of every irrational element, will admit only the man of Nazareth: rabbi, prophet, or likely political messiah (for this kind of history recognizes no horizon but the political), whose story ends in the dead-end failure of the cross. And it is precisely that failure which, in this perspective, would provoke a compensatory mythification — ultimately, a verbalism that announces, yet remains impotent.
To this Christianity was reduced for many, and from Nietzsche to liberal Protestantism one finds the same opposition: on the one hand, a Jesus who is variously appreciated — but is quite dead — and on the other, a Paul who is seen as the creator of the Christological myth. Thus was shaped the era — still ongoing — in which, within Christian circles themselves, the properly religious content of Christianity has been transferred into politics and its idols: nationalism, around the time of the First World War; revolutionary messianism, today. For those who remained faithful, yet whose faith was not shielded by institutional structures — that is to say, Protestants — the quest for a Jesus who could be called “credible” gradually revealed itself to be futile.
The Gospels are so woven through with signs and enigmas, the invisible so deeply permeates the visible, and the consciousness of his own divine identity, constantly hinted at by Jesus, seems so clear, that one was always forced to cut away something, if one wished to retain only a rationally verified human being and his ipsissima verba. At the limit, by a gesture reminiscent of the denials of mystical theology, history itself threatened to vanish.
To adapt a famous turn of phrase: “Then came Bultmann.” Driven by the Lutheran sensibility in which the movement of faith itself matters more than its content, Bultmann “de-Christified” the “Jesus of history.” In him, after so many liberal exegetes, he saw only a Jewish prophet, to whom he denied any messianic claim, and whom he made into the mere herald of the heavenly “Son of Man” spoken of in the Book of Daniel — he who is yet to come to carry out the final judgment.
The resurrection of Christ thus appears as the event of faith erupting within an atmosphere of exalted expectation in the earliest communities, expressing the meaning they gave to the cross through the myth of the Heavenly Man: a personal judgment, a decision of faith, to which each person is henceforth called. The world remaining what it is — subject to the “laws” uncovered by science and constantly harnessed by technology — the resurrection is identified with the very movement of faith itself, with the re-interpretation of Scripture, with the psychological death-and-resurrection of each person and, if one wishes, of the people of God. The prophet Jesus dies like all men, but a “heavenly,” “Christic” light illumines our subjectivity and grants us access to the realm of existences in communion. The resurrection of the flesh, the properly physical action of God, is replaced by a new existential coloration — something now presented as a stable structure within faith and designated, by way of Heideggerian vocabulary, an “existential.” In this perspective, not only are the empty tomb and the appearances reported in the Gospels rationally absurd, but the very development of such a rich mythology would itself bear witness to a weakening of faith: as the fervor of the first Christians diminished, faith would have “materialized,” “objectified” itself in stories and demonstrations which, moreover, for the ancient mind, were self-evident within a world saturated by the marvelous.
Today, in the exegesis that dominates in the West, the thought of Rudolf Bultmann is tempered but not truly surpassed. On the contrary, it is often taken up — though with a considerable lag regarding its more recent developments in Germany — by certain Catholic exegetes who, freed from institutional constraints, have not yet had time to recover the inspiration of the great ecclesial Tradition. Or rather, what seems not to have been transcended is the opposition between an objectivizing conception — which reduces the resurrection to a kind of intra-worldly reanimation — and a conception that ultimately subjects it to the disciples’ subjective experience of the Risen One.
Since the inauguration, in 1952, of the “post-Bultmannian era” by Ernst Käsemann, in his famous report on “The Problems of New Testament Research in Germany,”1 the full continuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is no longer denied. But the bodily resurrection of Jesus is still, in most cases, rejected as being “the more or less hallucinatory presence (...) of a kind of post-mortem radiance”2 — this so-called blasphemy against scientific rigor, whose stroke of genius, Bultmann had shown, was that it would also be a blasphemy against the demands of faith! For some, like Willi Marxsen3 and Xavier Léon-Dufour,4 the resurrection narratives are a literary elaboration, by the Gospel writers, of a real experience of communion with the ever-living Christ — though his body, perhaps having decomposed rapidly (sic),5 had returned to the earth. This would make it possible to account for the historicity — after all, quite probable — of the empty tomb. For others, like Charles Kannengiesser — who nonetheless studied with depth and subtlety Saint Paul’s vision of the Risen One — resurrection would signify a radical transformation in the interpretation of the Scriptures, both for Jesus himself and for his disciples: the overwhelming sense of the Resurrection of Israel under the sign of ultimate fulfillment. Here we find again one of the principal concerns of the German masters of “post-Bultmannism”: the effort to show that the proclamation of resurrection is already present in seed-form within the words and actions of Jesus himself.6 (This does not mean, for them, that the resurrection is merely a phenomenon of interpretation; in this regard, the French Jesuit is actually closer to the master of Marburg than some of that master’s own disciples...)
If Kannengiesser seems scarcely concerned with the question of whether or not Jesus survived in some real sense (that would, in his view, belong to hermeneutics), one may well ask what is meant, for so many others, by the claim that Jesus is still alive, while at the same time refusing to accept his bodily resurrection. Either this refers, apparently, to the influence that Jesus’ words and example continue to exert through the centuries, turning people toward the decision of faith and the recognition of their neighbor — and if that is all it means, we are squarely in the realm of Arianism, that fourth-century heresy which held that Jesus was merely the highest of creatures. Or else it concerns the immortality of Jesus’ “person”: if this person is divine, the affirmation is a tautology; if it is merely human, then we would do better to speak of his individuality, lest we fall into Nestorianism, and we are thus brought back to ancient Hellenism and its conception of the soul’s immortality. But where, then, is the novelty of the Gospel and the biblical conception — so powerfully unitive and incarnational — of the person? How can one take seriously the great Pauline affirmations of our real incorporation into the Risen One? How much less would Jesus matter to us if he were merely a teacher, even the greatest, and not the Living One par excellence, capable of revivifying — in his “pneumatized” body, his “body of breath” — the entire flesh of the earth!
Under these conditions, one can understand the reaction of certain English and German exegetes, such as Alan Richardson7 and Wolfhart Pannenberg,8 who affirm once again — without ignoring the gains of modern exegesis — that the resurrection is an historical fact, one that honest science — which observes without interpreting — cannot avoid confronting. And that this fact, truly registered by history, is the starting point of faith, not its projection. But then one comes up against the non-objectifiable nature of the resurrection itself: one could not have taken a photograph of it, as Metropolitan Ignatius Hazim9 said, and Eastern iconography has been careful never to represent it. One must also note that the Risen One never appeared to neutral witnesses, and that he could not have done so without compelling them — and thereby denying the free love of the human being. Would not the resurrection, if it were a pure historical fact whose intra-worldly evidence imposed itself irresistibly, imply for Jesus the unthinkable yielding to the temptation — which he rejected during his great fast in the desert — of the magical miracle, which is not sign but rather fascination and coercion?
The demands of the exegesis inaugurated by Bultmann cannot simply be dismissed, whether one is speaking of the mystery of faith or of the necessary updating (actualisation) of the proclamation for the modern person. This is why we are now seeing the emergence of a third trend, one that, rooted in the living Tradition, seeks not to ignore the problems of modern mentality or the findings of science—whether in biblical exegesis or in contemporary worldviews. Anglicans such as Arthur Michael Ramsey;10 post-Bultmannian Lutherans like Günther Bornkamm;11 Catholics such as Marie-Joseph Le Guillou,12 Gustave Martelet,13 and Louis Bouyer;14 and Orthodox thinkers like Ignace Hazim — all have undertaken to restore to the proclamation of the truly risen Christ its full power of life. In the Christian East, the paschal mystery—becoming, in the Holy Spirit, the ecclesial mystery—is such an evident reality that there has, until now, scarcely been the necessary distance to formulate a systematic discourse about it. Even the work of Metropolitan Ignace Hazim remains only a sketch—yet all the more suggestive for its brevity. By contrast, allusions abound in the writings of the great Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, from practically unknown remarks made by Nicolas Berdyaev as early as 1911,15 to the explicitly resurrectional theology of Christos Yannaras in his explorations of the relationship between person and being...16
The present essay wishes simply to focus on one precise point: the bodily resurrection of Christ and its exegesis, that is, the effort of faith seeking understanding. With the certainty — as brutal as contemporary anguish — that this is no matter for clever wordplay, but a confrontation with life and death. For indeed, dogmatic materialism, convulsive eroticism, and the search for an impersonal nirvana all have their roots in one and the same reality: the modern Christian’s hesitation to proclaim and to attempt to live the resurrection of the flesh.
Ernst Käsemann, Die Freiheit des Evangeliums und die Ordnung der Gesellschaft (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1952), 151.
Charles Kannengiesser, Foi en la résurrection, résurrection de la foi (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1974), 136.
Willi Marxsen, Die Auferstehung Jesu als historisches und als theologisches Problem (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1964). English translation Willi Marxsen, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970).
Xavier Léon-Dufour, Résurrection de Jésus et message pascal (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971).
Ibid., 304.
Heinz Zahrnt, Aux prises avec Dieu: la théologie protestante au XXème siècle, French trans. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), chap. 8, “La redécouverte du Jésus historique,” 339. English translation Heinz Zahrnt, The Question of God: Protestant Theology in the Twentieth Century, trans. R. A. Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969).
Alan Richardson, An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1958), chapter on the resurrection.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Offenbarung als Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961), 101ff. English translation Wolfhart Pannenberg, Revelation as History, ed. and trans. David Granskou (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch, La Résurrection et l’homme d’aujourd’hui (Beirut: Institut de Théologie, Université Saint-Joseph, 1970), 71. English translation Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch, The Resurrection and Modern Man, trans. Paul Nadim Tarazi (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 71.
Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1961). French translation: La Résurrection du Christ, trans. fr. (Paris: Le Centurion, 1968).
Günther Bornkamm, Qui est Jésus de Nazareth ?, trans. fr. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1973). English translation Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Irene and Fraser McLuskey with James M. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).
Marle-Joseph Le Guillou, L’Innocent, celui qui vient d’ailleurs (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1972).
Gustave Martelet, Résurrection, eucharistie et genèse de l’homme (Paris: Desclée, 1972).
Louis Bouyer, Le Fils éternel (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1974). English translation Louis Bouyer, The Eternal Son (Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1991).
Nicolas Berdyaev, Philosophie de la liberté, published in Moscow in 1911, p. 53 (originally in Russian). English translation Nicolas Berdyaev, The Philosophy of Freedom, trans. Stephen Graham (London: Bles, 1935).
Christos Yannaras, Le présupposé ontologique de la conception théologique de la personne (1970), in Greek.