Lampe explains why he does not consider the story of the empty tomb as factual history. The resurrection of Jesus can be seen as the revelation of the nature of his death. There came darkness over the whole land: for the light of the world was extinguished.
Ultimately it ends up being the way of the God who called Jesus “Father.” BELL: But Mary Magdalene and the other Mary held the feet of the risen Jesus. MONKHOUSE: I'm wondering, Professor Lampe, if you could tell us something about the relevance of the Resurrection to today.
My sermon was intended to show us something of the meaning of the Resurrection. There are also accounts of appearances of the resurrected Jesus in the Easter stories in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John. Their effect was crushing, and especially in the case of Paul, the enemy of the Christian movement, they had the.
These stories are somewhat different in character from the main body of the Gospels, especially in the case of the first three (the Synoptic Gospels). It may be as well to give a brief summary of the stories in the first three Gospels. This legend, which is very similar to the later apocryphal gospels, is interwoven with them.
It clearly reflects the controversies of Matthew's day, and has no historical value. Furthermore, the truth of the incarnation is that the Son of God became fully human. Wasn't there a night when, in the words of the Easter hymn, Christ "rose again from hell"?
It is indeed creation's relationship with God that is illuminated by this terrible mystery. In the presence of Christ's resurrection we are in the presence of the last things of God, of. We are certainly dealing with what, by its very nature, can only be a matter of disclosure.
Please do not judge a part of a picture without seeing the whole.
Lampe
Further Reflections by D
- MacKinnon
I very much welcome the reference he makes, at the end of what he has written, to the importance of the book of Hosea. This part of his argument, and indeed the whole thrust of his commentary, seems to make it clear that what ultimately arises from the issues we have discussed is the relation of the temporal to the eternal. This is of course a metaphysical problem; but it is a metaphysical problem that is transformed into Christian theology by the doctrine of the Incarnation.
Although this is a remark that has many different applications, one of its senses concerns the issues that separate Professor Lampe and myself; an issue I touched on when I suggested in my earlier comments on our material that we need to clarify the meaning of the concept of dependency in its theological application. In any case, if I turn again to that parable which perhaps above all others speaks of acceptance, namely the parable of the two brothers, there is one point that I must repeat. Whatever the context in which this parable was first told, whatever general thesis we may have about the function of the parable in Christ's teaching, we are given a story here that actually describes a raw piece of human life.
The relationship of the father to the two brothers in the climax of the story is an analogy of God's ways with people. But to regard this father in oneself as a portrait of the Divine is surely guilty of pure anthropomorphism. But part of the playwright's mastery of his subject is to make her compromising, obliging sister Chrysothemis a more appealing and likable figure.
And something of the same kind applies in the case of Deianira in the Trachiniae; It is her gentleness towards her fearful husband and her compassion for Tole that tempt her in the end. Something of the same kind can surely be said of Eruti as Shakespeare portrays him in Julius Caesar, especially if his scrupulous self-examination is contrasted with the swift, murderous resolution of the proscriptive triumvirs. Perhaps we need (this is very tentative) to alert ourselves more than we do to the tragic elements that lie beneath the surface of the parable, even to take what is offered to us as tragedy as parable, at least in a broad use of that already comprehensive .
It is with such considerations in mind that I would like to speak of God's action in Christ as objective, as something built into the fabric of the world, perhaps even (as I think Barth would argue) its very foundation. It is, of course, a mark of the greatest philosophers, Kant for example, that they have sought the middle way between these two positions, or rather have sought to do justice to the knowledge that both contain. In the end, however, one cannot escape a kind of choice as to where one accepts the final say in matters of truth and falsehood: is it what turns out to be the case, or is it what satisfies the demand of self-regulation of the intellect.
