Expectamus Resurrectionem Mortuorum
Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεὸν Πατέρα παντοκράτορα ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν Μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων, Φῶς ἐκ Φωτός, Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ, γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί, δι' οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο τὸν δι' ἡμᾶς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν σωτηρίαν κατελθόντα ἐκ τῶν οὐρανῶν, καὶ σαρκωθέντα ἐκ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς παρθένου, καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, σταυρωθέντα τε ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἐπὶ Ποντίου Πιλάτου, καὶ παθόντα, καὶ ταφέντα, καὶ ἀναστάντα τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ κατὰ τὰς γραφὰς, καὶ ἀνελθόντα εἰς τοὺς οὐρανοὺς, καὶ καθεζόμενον ἐν δεξιᾷ τοῦ Πατρὸς, καὶ πάλιν ἐρχόμενον μετὰ δόξης κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς, οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος καὶ εἰς τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ Ἅγιον, τὸ Κύριον καὶ Ζωοποιόν, τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον, τὸ σὺν Πατρὶ καὶ Υἱῷ συμπροσκυνούμενον καὶ συνδοξαζόμενον, τὸ λαλῆσαν διὰ τῶν προφητῶν εἰς μίαν ἁγίαν καθολικὴν καὶ ἀποστολικὴν ἐκκλησίαν ὁμολογοῦμεν ἓν βάπτισμα εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν προσδοκῶμεν ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν, καὶ ζωὴν τοῦ μέλλοντος αἰῶνος. ἀμήν.
I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.
If one wanted to define Christianity in terms of beliefs, the best reference would be the Nicene Creed. About a paragraph of distinctive statements about the nature of God, Humanity, Reality, and the Future, spoken aloud by Christians belonging to the Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental, and mainline Protestant churches for nearly two thousand years.
The creed was formed in 325, Constantine called his council at Nicea to consolidate the various strains of the early church in his empire into one holy catholic and apostolic church. Constantine, who had won many wars in the name of the peaceful Christ and was soon to murder his son and then his wife, wanted unity. The bishops he summoned wanted an imposition of orthodoxy on the metaphysics of christology - disagreement about which would produce centuries of disunity due to the Arian heresy.
As the product of bishops eager for intellectual conformity, the creed begins with a strong affirmative: I believe, Credo, Πιστεύω (pisteuo), and then goes through various statements on the Trinity. If Christianity is to be defined in terms of beliefs, the statements that follow are its objects. God the father, his nature and relationship to the son, the historical statements on Jesus’s identity, incarnation, death, and resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and his relationship to the other persons.
But the creed is not just these statements. There are two sentences at the end. “I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins” is about action, the exclusive action of salvation that the church can grant to believers. Here is a hint of practice in this religion. But the most curious statement is the last one, just before the “Amen.” “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead.”
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The liturgical form of the Nicene Creed, with most versions coming from the original Greek or its Latin translation, uses the first-person singular present for its three main verbs. I believe, I confess, I await. In the original, these verbs are plural. We await.
προσδοκῶμεν ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν (prosdokomen anastasin nekron), expectamus resurrection mortuorum, we hope for the resurrection of the dead.
The resurrection is not simply believed in. It is not a prediction or proposition about the future. It is hoped for, it is awaited, it is expected. These are all connotations in the Greek which carry over to its more modern formulations. This is a statement about reality, but it is also a statement about the believers, it is an action, it is a stance, it is a life. Christians are those who await the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
It is not reasonable to argue based on existing evidence that the verb chosen by the council of Nicea to indicate their attitude towards the resurrection is some sort of semi-conscious survival of the more authentic apostolic church of the 1st and 2nd centuries that they were about to overwrite. But I do argue that this clause does better correspond to the church that Jesus’s disciples founded. Perhaps the verb was based on a long worship tradition in the church, perhaps it was merely an error, a sort of felix culpa.
Religions are not best defined in terms of beliefs. Scholars and priests are deeply concerned with belief and with truth; they are the appointed managers of knowledge. But for most believers, belief is not what defines them. They pray, they go to church, they participate in ritual, they celebrate festivals, they mourn for the dead. Do all Christians who do these actions have the same beliefs about the metaphysics of the trinity? Many then did not, and many now do not, understand what it means for Christ to be a unique person but different substance from the father. But they do believe in him, they do hope in him, they do love him.
The early Church was a community of patience, and of hope. It spread through the Roman Empire and beyond as a religion of women and slaves, a religion of the oppressed, which met in secret and lived outside the expectations of society. While the philosophy of the Trinity was debated between the bishops, the people attempted to transform their lives away from sin and prayed for deliverance from their suffering and for the imminent return of their lord. They believed that all the power of this world would soon be swept away and that the justice of the one God would arrive in the form of the kingdom of heaven on earth.
This attitude of patience and hope, waiting for a collective and transformative salvation of all believers, survives at the end of the creed but does not strongly characterize the post-Nicene church. The change to the first person accompanies a more individual Christianity, focused on the affirmation of beliefs and propositions in good conduct with the centralized institution that Constantine and the bishops constructed. Christians in medieval times and more recently become concerned not with waiting and expecting collective deliverance, but with their personal salvation. The general resurrection of the dead becomes a doctrinal detail at the end of the Bible, the believer’s goal is to have their immaterial soul whisked up to heaven immediately after death, minimizing time in purgatory and avoiding hell. Christianity becomes about the life of this other world, not the life of the world to come.
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In 1st century Roman Judea, life after death was not a novel concept. The standard model of the universe shared across the many species of hellenistic and near eastern beliefs, was that there existed both soul and body, and that the soul would live after death in accords with moral and religious principles and forces. A religion promising the good news that the just would be rewarded in a magical realm for souls after death was not news at all to most.
The distinctive presence in this environment was the old and insular Judaism. More materialist in its mores and cosmology, a life separate from the body was at best a dim existence in Sheol for both the righteous and their enemies. In the centuries preceding Jesus, some began to speak of the justice of the Lord God being realized sometime in the future, not through heaven, but through resurrection of the human body. This idea was justified through the scriptures, but has very little basis in the oldest Jewish sources. God’s justice was also supposed to arrive through a millenarian political transformation, the Messiah would come to free the Jewish people from their oppression and commence the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The Messiah was to be a great conquering general like David, the resurrection to be a general victory of the righteous.
Jesus was a Jew of 1st century Roman Judea. He preached repentance, love, and faith like the prophets before him in preparation for the coming transformation of the world. He debated with the Sadducees, who believed in the law but not in the resurrection, and with the Pharisees, who believed in the resurrection but preached a different adherence to the law than Jesus. Jesus gathered disciples and spread his word among those who would not be counted among the righteous in accords with the law: the sick, the disabled, tax-collectors, women, Samaritans. He spoke little about the nature of God, but much about his promises. He healed the sick, gave food to the needy, and even raised the dead - proof of his power, but such things were thought to be common at the time.
Jesus was executed as a criminal by the Roman authorities with the consent of parts of the local Jewish population. His disciples, who believed that he was a prophet, possibly the Messiah, and possibly the Son of God, fled and hid, their hopes destroyed.
But on the third day he rose. The Gospels are consistent that the disciples did not expect this. They did not visit in expectation of the event and only heard from the women who went to the tomb as mourners. This changed everything.
Jesus’s resurrection did not make sense in the context of 1st century Roman Judea, nor even with anything his own disciples had known or expected. Jesus was a single individual who received bodily resurrection in the middle of history, not at its end as had been prophesied. The expected transformation of the world had not come, and yet here was Christ in his resurrected flesh.
What follows, namely Christianity, is entirely in reaction to this event. The disciples continue to encounter the risen Christ, who can enter locked rooms unseen but allows his wounds to be physically touched. The resurrected body is strange, mysterious, and wonderful. After Jesus leaves them, they become filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and understand the task ahead of them. Christ’s resurrection was a promise fulfilled, and a clear instruction to prepare for the more general resurrection that was to come. They reinterpret the scriptures and find that what they have seen, though unexpected, accords with what had already been written. They make decisions of what to teach and how. They come to understand that God’s promise is for all humanity, not just the Jews. They come to understand that the Messiah’s victory is not over Rome, but over death, and that he had to conquer through peace. All follows from the resurrection.
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The disciple’s claim, the Christian’s claim, is that the resurrection is the single most important event in the history of the universe. Creation has a beginning and an end, but the nature of existence and of life was revealed a few days after a trial and execution in 1st Century Roman Judea.
The event has been controversial. By the time the gospels were written, the writers feel the need to rebut rumors that Jesus’s body was simply carried off by the disciples in secret. The standard reaction of Romans and Jews seems to have been to deny that the resurrection occurred, that the tomb was not empty, or that it was robbed. Others likely gave alternate explanation, that Jesus was merely a ghost or that his resurrection was temporary like that of Lazarus.
After the age of the disciples, the controversy continued. Muslims denied that God would allow a great prophet to be killed, and devised explanations for how Jesus was saved from death at the cross, and thus resurrection was never required. Ahmadi Muslims believe that he escaped crucifixion and that his tomb is actually in Kashmir, a small group of Japanese believe his brother swapped places in the trial and Jesus himself absconded to Aomori prefecture.
The secular response has largely been to affirm the crucifixion and deny what followed. It is an iron law of the universe that people cannot come back from the dead, and third-hand accounts from a period that falsely believed in the supernatural cannot be trusted. Jesus may have been a great man and a great teacher, but science dictates that this singular event must be ruled out as noise.
Detailed critical-historical examination of the resurrection among skeptical and faithful scholars comes to few definite conclusions, but has found certain facts. We know that Jesus existed, and we know he was executed. All evidence we have of the resurrection comes through the mediation of the church that the disciples founded in response to the resurrection. We know with some confidence that regardless of what happened, the disciples took the event seriously enough to devote the rest of their lives to reacting to it. Nearly all of them chose to suffer martyrdom when they could have avoid the pain of death by simply renouncing it.
In the sources that are derived from their own accounts, the disciples are unable to follow Jesus. They do not recognize him for who he is, they fail to anticipate his resurrection, they all renounce him as soon as he is taken to Pilate. They report that they first heard of Christ’s resurrection from women, a bad choice for an invented story as women were considered unreliable enough that they could not even give testimony in court. They continue to doubt him even when they meet him in the flesh. And yet they all came to recognize that he was the lord, and that they had failed him, and that now they must spread his gospel.
We do not have hard physical evidence for the resurrection, but we can be reasonably historically confident that the disciples all came to believe in Christ’s resurrection, believed that he had simply survived the cross or appeared to them as a ghost or hallucination, and believed that this event was evidence that was worth entirely changing their view of reality over and that they no longer needed to fear death, which they happily courted. And we know that, to some extent, they succeeded and the religion they began became the largest in the world.
We also can be reasonably confident that the immediate followers of Jesus were wrong about quite a lot. The first centuries before the Nicene Creed (and after) are filled with factions that hold contradictory interpretations of what Christ’s message meant. Peter, Paul, and James seem to have had serious disagreements about basic practices required of the new church. The first generations of Christians expected his return within their lifetimes and believed that Nero’s persecutions were a harbinger of the end of the world. Lurking throughout the New Testament are references to dueling beliefs and interpretations, Paul had to struggle for recognition against some magically empowered super-apostles, John of Patmos against many deviant and impure tendencies. The resurrection alone was not enough to settle all disputes about morality and philosophy. And this may have been Christ’s intention. He left us with a promise, not a catechism.
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What was the nature of Christ’s resurrection? What exactly was his body? How could he be incarnate yet visit the disciples in the locked second floor room? How could his wounds stand open before Thomas and yet not be in pain? How could he go unrecognized and speak with the disciples who had followed him for years with them only understanding afterwards that they had seen the Lord?
Christian tradition contains plenty of speculation, but has been surprisingly quiet on these questions. We have only the bare facts of what the disciples told us, evidently still confused themselves, and thus it is hard to make anything systematic out of it. Yet Christ’s resurrection is the first fruit of our resurrection. That, not heaven, is our goal. Being a Christian is about knowing this, desiring it, awaiting it.
The Christianities that followed are strangely fixated about attaining certainty about nearly everything else. What is the nature of trinity, of sin, of the church? There have been vicious disputes about the classification of each human fault and who precisely can be saved and by what means. Endless fights over the details of prophecy and the sexual mores suggested by pastoral letters. But Jesus chose this. He could have at any moment called on twelve legions of angels, surely he could have written down his doctrines. What he left creation with instead was his teachings on love and forgiveness, the fact of his resurrection, and the instruction to repent and await his return.
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We do not know the hour of the resurrection nor do we know its nature. What should distinguish Christians is hoping for it.
But the desire to know is part of desire. After centuries of silence, we may begin to engage in some first imaginations about the resurrection. The historical-critical method of reading the New Testament and its newly discovered companion sources has revealed much of the above - bodily resurrection and the kingdom of heaven is returning to theology after so much time spent on the immaterial soul. We can understand better than the 1st century that the Jewish resurrection tradition was an innovation but that it was realized and demonstrated in Christ. We can appreciate too why the focus on the body over an immaterial soul might have been part of God’s plan.
Comparative religion, sometimes the helper of the skeptic, also gives some indications of the possibilities. Recent theology has begun to examine the rainbow body phenomenon of Tibetan Buddhism, an occurrence with living physical witnesses. If Christ’s resurrection is part of reality we might see it elsewhere. Tantric Hinduism, the bodily meditation techniques of Sufism and Judaism, all have potential light to share.
Biology bounds ahead with greater understanding than every before of what the body is and what it might offer. Secularism rules out the supernatural by axiom, science cannot overcome death. Yet when the scientifically minded begin to contemplate immortality and escape from death, might they too be able to join those awaiting the general resurrection?
It is folly to expect anything soon, and blasphemy to try to force what only God can grant. But Christians ought to take the opportunities offered by modernity to return to the patience of antiquity. We are those who look forward to the resurrection of the death, and those who hope for God’s justice to manifest in the coming Kingdom of Heaven.
Christ is Risen. Happy Easter.