Theology of Hope by Jurgen Moltmann
Chapter 3: The Resurrection and the Future of Jesus Christ
12. The Future of Life
of the event of justification in the revelation of the divinity of God, and only where that happens does the justificatio impii come to stand within the eschatological horizon of the resurretio mortuorum and the creatio ex nihil.) If this insight of Luther’s is detached from the framework of the humilitas Christology in which he formulated it, then it can be said that because the divine righteousness is gift and power and the
communion of faith with Christ is both a dying with Christ to sin and also a living under his lordship with an outlook towards his future, therefore the event of justification is the earnest and promise of an all- inclusive setting to rights on God’s part. If in the justification of the sinner God attains to his rights, then this justification is the beginning and foreshadowing of his sole lordship. The divine righteousness which is latent in the event of Christ has an inner trend towards a totality of new being. The man who is justified follows this trend in bodily obedience. His struggle for obedience and his suffering under the godlessness of the world have their goal in the future of the
righteousness of the whole. Thus this struggle is a fragment of; and a prelude to, the coming divine righteousness, for it already gives God his due, and in it already God attains to his rights over his world.
Thus in the New Testament, too, we shall have to understand divine righteousness as promise. In this promise the promised object is offered in the present, and yet it is grasped in the believing hope which makes man ready to serve the future of the divine righteousness in all things.
presupposition for understanding the resurrection of Christ as the resurrection of the crucified one and not as a symbol for the hope of immortality and for the resigned attitude to life that goes along with it.
All dead things represent for Israel the acme of uncleanness. All pollutions of this kind involve exclusion from the service of God. It is true that the temptation to necromancy did exist in Canaan. Yet the very rejection of it by Israel shows plainly that the religion of promise must abjure all sacral communication with the dead. The dead are cut off from God and from living communion with him. Because God and his
promise are life, the real bitterness of death lies not merely in the loss of life, but also in the loss of God, in god-forsakenness.(G. von Rad, op.
cit., I, p. 386 [ET pp. 388 f.]) For life means giving thanks and praise in the presence of God. But in death there can be no giving of praise, and therefore no thanksgiving either and no harmony with God. Being able to praise God and being no longer able to praise him are here synonyms for the antithesis of life and death.(Ibid. I, p. 367 [ET p. 370] : ‘Praising and not praising stand over against one another like life and death: praise becomes the most elementary "mark of being alive".’) Death cuts man off from God by separating him from his promises and his praise. Not only our physical end, but also sickness, exile and oppression can cut us off from the life of praise and from the promised life and thus be
understood as death. We have our life in praising God, hoping in him and giving thanks to him. Death therefore means that we are far from God and he from us.
On this ground it becomes understandable that the Greek doctrine of universal transience in the outward world and of the essential
immortality of the true being of the soul hardly gained any admittance in Israel, but that the hopes of resurrection on the other hand certainly did find a place on the periphery of the Old Testament and in the apocalyptic of late Judaism. This expectation of the resurrection of the dead is found in its Israelite form neither in an anthropological context -- as a hope for man beyond death -- nor in a cosmological context -- in recognition of immortal substances in which man participates -- but in a theological context -- in expounding the power of the God of promise, whom even death cannot rob of his due but who must attain his due beyond death.
Thus according to Ezek. 37.11 the people of the promise can now recognize itself only in the picture of dead bones, i.e. of hope that has come to nothing, and is then given to hear the prophetic message of a new promise of life by Yahweh: ‘Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live’ (Ezek. 37.5). This is a new promise of life,
for it is no longer attached to the condition of a possible repentance, but promises a creative act of Yahweh upon his people beyond the bounds of the temporal and the possible. It therefore acquires the form of a promise that has no conditions and no presuppositions, a promise of life from the dead on the ground of a creative act of Yahweh ex nihilo. Thus in Israel the idea of ‘raising of the dead’ is formulated in the first
instance within the framework of the religion of promise: it is not a case of natural reanimation, but of the fulfilling of Yahweh’s promises of life in the dead bearer of the promise. It is not until the apocalyptic writers that ‘raising of the dead’ is understood in universal terms, in the sense that even beyond death this God will achieve his judgment and his due in both righteous and unrighteous. This is entirely in harmony with the development of the Israelite confession to God the Creator and to his faithfulness as Creator. The late Israelite ideas of creatio ex nihilo and resurrectio mortuorum mark the eschatological extremities of the religion of promise.(W. Zimmerli, "‘Leben" und "Tod" im Buch des Propheten Ezechiel’, in Gottes Offenbarung, 1963, p. 195. Zimmerli points out how closely Ezek. 37 approaches the priestly narrative of the creation and how the prophet’s conditional promises of life -- ‘return, and ye shall live’ -- are anchored in God’s promise of life which
unconditionally embraces the beginning (creation) and end (resurrection of the dead) of the history of the people of God. Cf. also Christoph Barth, Die Errettung vom Tode in den individuellen Klage- und
Dankliedern des Alten Testamentes 1947; Robert Martin-Achard, De la mort à la resurrection d’après l’Ancien Testament, 1956, and K. Koch’s review in Verkündigung und Forschung, 1960/2, 1/2, pp. 57-60.)
It has rightly been said: ‘Should we not see this theological vacuum, which Israel zealously kept free from any sacral concepts, as one of the greatest theological enigmas in the Old Testament? The prediction that God will prepare a resurrection from the dead for his own people is found only peripherally.(G. von Rad, op. cit., II, p.362 (ET p. 350). This
‘vacuum’ caused by the absence of religious ideas and hopes against death makes it possible on the one hand to experience in all its
undisguised harshness the deadliness of death as compared with the promised life received from the promise of God. It can be filled on the other hand only by a hope which makes possible a whole-hearted, unrestricted and unreserved assent to life, to the body and to the world, and which yet extends beyond death. The hope of resurrection does not overcome the deadliness of death by regarding living and dying as mere summary expressions for the transience of all things and as such
unimportant, but by proclaiming the victory of praise and therewith of
life over death and over the curse of god-forsakenness, by announcing the victory of God over the absence of God.
What is the significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the context of these expectations?
In the context of these expectations of life, his death on the cross implies not only the end of the life which he had, but also the end of the life which he loves and in which he hopes. The death of Jesus was
experienced as the death of him who had been sent as the Messiah of God, and therefore implies also the ‘death of God’. Thus his death is experienced and proclaimed as god-forsakenness, as judgment, as curse, as exclusion from the promised life, as reprobation and damnation.
In the context of these expectations of life, his resurrection must then be understood not as a mere return to life as such, but as a conquest of the deadliness of death -- as a conquest of god-forsakenness, as a conquest of judgment and of the curse, as a beginning of the fulfillment of the promised life, and thus as a conquest of all that is dead in death, as a negation of the negative (Hegel), as a negation of the negation of God.
It is then understandable, further, that Jesus’ resurrection was not seen as a private Easter for his private Good Friday, but as the beginning and source of the abolition of the universal Good Friday, of that god-
forsakenness of the world which comes to light in the deadliness of the death of the cross. Hence the resurrection of Christ was not understood merely as the first instance of a general resurrection of the dead and as a beginning of the revelation of the divinity of God in the non-existent, but also as the source of the risen life of all believers and as a confirmation of the promise which will be fulfilled in all and will show itself in the very deadliness of death to be irresistible.
To recognize the event of the resurrection of Christ is there- fore to have a hopeful and expectant knowledge of this event. It means recognizing in this event the latency of that eternal life which in the praise of God arises from the negation of the negative, from the raising of the one who was crucified and the exaltation of the one who was forsaken. It means assenting to the tendency towards resurrection of the dead in this event of the raising of the one. It means following the intention of God by entering into the dialectic of suffering and dying in expection of eternal life and of resurrection. This is described as the working of the Holy Spirit. The ‘Spirit’ is according to Paul the ‘life-giving Spirit’, the Spirit
who ‘raised up Christ from the dead’ and ‘dwells in’ those who
recognize Christ and his future, and ‘shall quicken their mortal bodies’
(Rom. 8.11).
The ‘Spirit’ in question here does not fall from heaven and does not soar ecstatically into heaven, but arises from the event of the resurrection of Christ and is an earnest and pledge of his future, of the future of
universal resurrection and of life. ‘And as the power of the "flesh" is manifested in the fact that it binds man to the transitory, to that which in reality is always already past, to death, so the power of the Spirit is manifested in the fact that it gives the believer freedom, opens the way to the future, to the eternal, to life. For freedom is nothing else than being open for the genuine future, letting oneself be determined by the future. So Spirit may be called the power of futurity.’(R. Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, 1953, p. 331 (ET pp. 334f.). Yet the difference between past and future emerges for the Spirit of faith not in the punctum mathematicum of the present, and not in an airy nunc aeternum, but in that historic event of the raising of the crucified Christ in which the power of transience and the deadliness of death are
conquered and the future of life is opened once and for all. Christ did not rise into the Spirit or into the kerygma, but into that as yet undetermined future realm ahead of us which is pointed to by the tendencies of the Spirit and the proclamations of the kerygma. This realm of the future which lies before us cannot be turned into mere ‘futurity’ by reflecting solely on its relation to existence, but it is the future of Jesus Christ and can therefore be inferred only from the knowledge and recognition of that historic event of the resurrection of Christ which is the making of history and the key to it. The ‘Spirit’ who ‘mortifies the things of the flesh’ and gives freedom for the future is not an eternal event, but arises from a historic event and discloses eschatological possibilities and
dangers. As a reminder of Christ he is also the promise of his future, and vice versa. Hence he leads us into the ‘fellowship of the sufferings of Christ’, into conformity to his death, into the love which exposes itself to death because it is upheld by hope. Hence, too, he leads into the future of that glorification of Jesus Christ on which depends the future and glorification of humanity and of all things. ‘As he was crucified through weakness, yet liveth by the power of God, so we also are weak in him, but we shall live with him by the power of God’ (II Cor.13.4). Thus the Spirit is the power to suffer in participation in the mission and the love of Jesus Christ, and is in this suffering the passion for what is possible, for what is coming and promised in the future of life, of freedom and of resurrection. The Spirit subjects man to the tendency of the things which
are latent in the resurrection of Jesus and which are the intended goal of the future of the risen Lord. Resurrection and eternal life are the future that is promised, and thereby make obedience possible in the body. In all our acts we are sowing in hope. So, too, in love and obedience we are sowing for the future of the resurrection of the body. In obedience, those who have been quickened by the Spirit are on the way towards the
quickening of the mortal body. Just as the urge of promise is towards fulfillment, as the urge of faith is towards obedience and sight, and as the urge of hope is towards the life that is promised and finally attained, so the urge of the raising of Christ is towards life in the Spirit and to- wards the eternal life that is the consummation of all things. This eternal life here lies hidden beneath its opposite, under trial, suffering, death and sorrow. Yet this its hiddenness is not an eternal paradox, but a latency within the tendency that presses forwards and outwards into that open realm of possibilities that lies ahead and is so full of promise. In the darkness of the pain of love, the man of hope discovers the dissension between the self and the body.( ‘The interpretation of and corporeality in R. Bultmann (Theolgie des Neuen Testamentes, pp. 191 ff., ET pp. 195 ff.) seems to be too one-sidedly personalistic. For him, means man, ‘the person as a whole’. ‘He is called in so far as he can make himself the object of his own actions, or experiences himself as the subject of
something that happens or that he suffers. Thus he can be called in so far as he has a relation to himself’ (p. 192, cf. ET pp. 195f.). ‘Man does not have a but he is (p. 191 ET p. 194). The former thesis no doubt aptly represents what modern philosophic anthropology calls the ‘ex-centric position’ of man. The second thesis, however, cancels out the dialectic of the ex-centric position of human nature. ‘He neither is only body, nor has he only a body. Every claim upon his physical existence demands a balance between being and having, without and within’ (H. Plessner, Lachen und Weinen, 3rd ed. 1965, p. 48). Bultmann sees the fact of man’s ‘having a relation to himself’ as providing the possibility of
‘being one with himself or being estranged from himself, at odds with himself’ (p. 192, ET p. 196). The can therefore be understood as a reconciliation of the dualism in man between self and self (p.195, ET p.
199). In harmony with this view of corporeality as the relation of man to himself, G. Ebeling finds that in faith man comes ‘to himself’ and attains to agreement with himself (Theologie und Veründigung,pp. 84ff.; ET, pp. 83f.). But now, man’s relation to himself is not identical with his relation to his body. His corporeal, physical and social existence is not identical with ‘existence’ in the sense of the relation to himself. The two belong together in such a way that according as man acquires in
reflection a consciousness of his self and his subjectivity, so he attains to an objective consciousness of the world and assumes a detached attitude
to the corporeal, social and cosmic ‘world around him’ as belonging to the world of objects. ‘To become man is to be raised to openness towards the world through the spirit’ (M. Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 2nd ed. 1949, p. 41). The thing man becomes conscious of as his corporeality is not his ‘self’, but is rather the very thing from which he succeeds in differentiating himself. The fact that through the spirit, through consciousness and through reflection man can differentiate himself from himself, that he is able to objectify himself, constitutes the ambiguity of his existence: he can neither be himself without having himself, nor have himself without being himself, he achieves neither complete distinction and objectivity in regard to
himself, nor complete identity. If the promise of justification gives him a prospect of reconciliation and identity, then it cannot mean only the reconciliation of man with himself, but must also mean the redemption of his corporeality and of the world that has become to him a world of objects. Hence through the promise and the Holy Spirit he perceives not only his own reconciliation, but along with it at the same time also the unreconciled and unredeemed character of the body that is subject to death and of the world that is subject to the powers of godlessness. His reconciliation in the Spirit does not yet reconcile him with his body and his world in such a way that he would see these as the ‘world around him’, in such a way that like the animals (or the angels) he could attain to harmony with his environment amid existing things. E. Käsemann is therefore right when he asserts against Bultmann that ‘body’ for Paul is not in fact the relation of man to himself, but is that piece of world which we ourselves are and for which, as a gift of the Creator, we are responsible. ‘For the apostle it means man in his worldliness, that is, in his ability to communicate’ (ZTK59, 1962, p. 282). If the perceiving of his corporeality is grounded for man in his being raised to openness towards the world through the spirit, if his corporeality is not his ‘self’
but that from which he can differentiate himself, then the perceiving of corporeality, of socialness and of worldliness becomes one. Then the perceiving of his unredeemed corporeality is the starting point for the perceiving of man’s solidarity with the whole unredeemed creation. And in this context there also finally comes to light the existential character of all man’s objective statements. Objective statements are not by any means statements that are oblivious of self and of existence, but are grounded in the existential raising of man to openness towards the world through the spirit. This calls for a re-check on demythologizing and existentialist interpretation.)
In the struggle for obedience and for what is due to God in the body he