III
When we come to the question of the view of the revelation of God in the New Testament, then we discover the fact, already familiar from the Old Testament, that there is no unequivocal concept of revelation. What the New Testament understands by revelation is thus again not to be learned from the original content of the words employed, but only from the event to which they are here applied. The event to which the New Testament applies the expressions for revelation imparts to them a peculiar dynamic which is messianic in kind and implies a history of promise. The general impression could be described in the first instance by saying that with the cross and resurrection of Christ the one revelation of God, the glory of his lordship which embraces righteousness, life and freedom, has begun to move towards man. In the gospel of the event of Christ this future is already present in the promises of Christ. It proclaims the present breaking in of this future, and thus vice versa this future announces itself in the promises of the gospel. The proclamation of Christ thus places men in the midst of an event of revelation which embraces the nearness of the coming Lord. It thereby makes the reality of man ‘historic’ and stakes it on history.
The eschatological tendency of the revelation in Christ is manifested by the fact that the revealing word is εὐαγγέλιον and ἐπαγγελία in one. J. Schniewind has rightly described ἐπαγγελία in Pauline theology as the ‘complement’ of εὐαγγέλιον. The gospel of the revelation of God in Christ is thus in danger of being incomplete and of collapsing altogether, if we fail to notice the dimension of promise in it. Christology likewise deteriorates if the dimension of the ‘future of Christ’ is not regarded as a constitutive element in it.
But how is ‘promise’ proclaimed in the New Testament as compared with the Old Testament history of promise? How is the future horizon of promise asserted in the New Testament as against the views of the Hellenistic mystery religions?
The approach to Christology has been sought in Christian dogmatics along different lines. We here select two basic types as illustrations of the problem.
Since the shaping of Christian dogmatics by Greek thought, it has been the general custom to approach the mystery of Jesus from the general idea of God in Greek metaphysics: the one God, for whom all men are seeking on the ground of their experience of reality, has appeared in Jesus of Nazareth—be it that the highest eternal idea of goodness and truth has found its most perfect teacher in him, or be it that in him eternal Being, the Source of all things, has become flesh and appeared in the multifarious world of transience and mortality. The mystery of Jesus is then the incarnation of the one, eternal, original, true and immutable divine Being. This line of approach was adopted in the Christology of the ancient Church in manifold forms. Its problems accordingly resulted from the fact that the Father of Jesus Christ was identified with the one God of Greek metaphysics and had the attributes of this God ascribed to him. If, however, the divinity of God is seen in his unchangeableness, immutability, impassibility and unity, then the historic working of this God in the Christ event of the cross and resurrection becomes as impossible to assert as does his eschatological promise for the future.
In modern times the approach to the mystery of Jesus has often been from a general view of the being of man in history. History has always existed, ever since man existed. But the actual experiencing and conceiving of the existence of man as historic, the radical disclosure of the historic character of human existence, came into the world with Jesus. The word and work of Jesus brought the decisive change in man’s understanding of himself and the world, for by him man’s self-understanding in history was given its true expression as an understanding of the historic character of human existence. Instead of a general question of God and a general idea of God, which finds its true expression in Jesus and is thus verified by him, what is here presupposed is a general concept of the being of man, a general questionableness of human existence, which finds its true expression in Jesus and is thus verified by him.
Both approaches to the mystery of Jesus set out from the universal, in order to find its true expression in the concrete instance of his person and his history. Neither of these approaches to Christology, to be sure, need bypass the Old Testament, but their way does not necessarily lie through it. The approach of Jesus to all men, however, has the Old Testament with its law and its promise as a necessary presupposition. It is therefore a real question whether we do not have to take seriously the importance for theology of the following two propositions:
1. It was Yahweh, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, the God of the promise, who raised Jesus from the dead. Who the God is who is revealed in and by Jesus, emerges only in his difference from, and identity with, the God of the Old Testament.
2. Jesus was a Jew. Who Jesus is, and what the human nature is which is revealed by him, emerges from his conflict with the law and the promise of the Old Testament.
If we take these starting points seriously, then the path of theological knowledge leads irreversibly from the particular to the general, from the historic to the eschatological and universal.
The first proposition would mean, that the God who reveals himself in Jesus must be thought of as the God of the Old Testament, as the God of the exodus and the promise, as the God with ‘future as his essential nature’, and therefore must not be identified with the Greek view of God, with Parmenides’ ‘eternal present’ of Being, with Plato’s highest Idea and with the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, not even in his attributes. Who he is, is not declared by the world as a whole, but is declared by Israel’s history of promise. His attributes cannot be expressed by negation of the sphere of the earthly, human, mortal and transient, but only in recalling and recounting the history of his promise. In Jesus Christ, however, the God of Israel has revealed himself as the God of all mankind. Thus the path leads from the concretum to the concretum universale, not the other way round. Christian theology has to think along this line. It is not that a general truth became concrete in Jesus, but the concrete, unique, historic event of the crucifying and raising of Jesus by Yahweh, the God of promise who creates being out of nothing, becomes general through the universal eschatological horizon it anticipates. Through the raising of Jesus from the dead the God of the promises of Israel becomes the God of all men. The Christian proclamation of this God will accordingly always move within a horizon of general truth which it projects ahead of it and towards which it tends, and will claim in advance to be general in character and generally binding, even if its own universality is of an eschatological kind and does not come of abstract argument from the particular to the general.
If on the other hand theology takes seriously the fact that Jesus was a Jew, then this means that he is not to be understood as a particular case of human being in general, but only in connection with the Old Testament history of promise and in conflict with it. It is through the event of the cross and resurrection, which is understandable only in the context of the conflict between law and promise, that he becomes the salvation of all men, both Jews and Gentiles. It is the Christ event that first gives birth to what can be theologically described as ‘man’, ‘true man’, ‘humanity’—‘neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female’ (Gal. 3:28). Only when the real, historic and religious differences between peoples, groups and classes are broken down in the Christ event in which the sinner is justified, does there come a prospect of what true humanity can be and will be. The path leads here from the historic and unique to the universal, because it leads from the concrete event to the general in the sense of eschatological direction. Christian proclamation will consequently here again move within the horizon of general truth and make the claim to be universally binding. It will have to expound this claim in contra-distinction to other kinds of general anthropological concepts of humanitas, precisely because its own general concept of humanity has an eschatological content. It will not be able, for example, to set out from the fact that man is the being which possesses reason and language, and then go on to verify this aspect of his being by means of the event of justification, but it will set out on the contrary from the event of justification and calling, and then go on in face of other assertions as to the nature of man to uphold this event which makes man, theologically speaking, true man.
When we take this approach to Christology into consideration, then it is peculiarly significant that in the New Testament God is known and described as the ‘God of promise’. He is the θεὸς ἐπαγγειλάμενος (Heb. 10:23; 11:11, and frequently elsewhere). The essential predicate of God accordingly lies in the statement: Πιστὸς ὁ ἐπαγγειλάμενος, ‘faithful is he that promised’. His essence is not his absoluteness as such, but the faithfulness with which he reveals and identifies himself in the history of his promise as ‘the same’. His divinity consists in the constancy of his faithfulness, which becomes credible in the contradiction of judgment and grace. The word which reveals God has thus fundamentally the character of promise and is therefore eschatological in kind. It is grounded upon the event of God’s faithfulness and open towards it. It sets us on a path whose goal it shows and guarantees in terms of promise. It places the one who receives it in a position of insurmountable antithesis and hostility to the existing reality of this world. It gives ground for hope and criticism, and expects us to endure in hope.
The result of this is a knowledge of God fundamentally different from the knowledge of the θεὸς ἐπιφανής in the surrounding world of the epiphany religions, of the Hellenistic mystery religions and finally of Greek metaphysics, even if in actual fact signs of syncretism are to be seen everywhere in the New Testament. The life, work, death and resurrection of Jesus are therefore not described after the pattern of the appearance of epiphany gods, but in the categories of expectation that are appropriate to the God of promise. Jesus is no θεῖος ἀνήρ, no divine man, although ideas of this kind are employed at many levels in the tradition. The gospels are not cult legends, but offer historical recollections under the auspices of eschatological hope, although traits of the cult legend are also to be found. The language of Christian mission is not the language of gnostic revelation, although this type of language, too, is used on occasion. ‘Thus although Christianity stands in the midst of the religious life of its time, epiphany faith can influence it in the first instance only as a formal element in its presentation. For it stands under the protection of the Old Testament thought of God, which expects God to act uniquely and comprehensively upon the world.’
The word ἐπαγγελία has its roots in Hellenistic usage. There it is generally used of promises, vows and pledges which men make to their gods. That God is the ‘God who promises’ is here obviously unknown. Linguistically speaking it appears to have no previous history in the Old Testament, although it is actually only in the Old Testament traditions that a previous history exists. ‘It was through Judaism that ἐπαγγελία received its peculiar character as revealing word of God in the history of salvation.’ Here a theology of the promises of God was developed—and that, too, both in the rabbinical Torah theology and in the apocalyptic traditions. While in the former case promise means the promised reward of the righteous and is bound up with righteousness in the sense of the Torah, in the latter case it is used in the context of election and law to describe the ‘future world’ as opposed to this world, which is not able to bear what is promised to the righteous. In both traditions God is recognized as the God who promises, and whose faithfulness guarantees the fulfilment.
Just as for rabbinism and apocalyptic the figure of Abraham as the example of righteousness becomes the focal point of the interest in the promise, law and righteousness of God, so also Paul sets this figure in the centre of his exposition of gospel and promise. Yet his reason for going back to Abraham as the ‘father of the promise’ in contrast to Moses and the law lies in the fact that for Paul the Christ event is not a renewal of the people of God, but brings to life a ‘new people of God’ made up of Jews and Gentiles. His quarrel with the Jewish Christians is concerned, to be sure, with law and gospel, but it is really centred on the promise. If for him Christ is the ‘end of the law’ (Rom. 10:4), yet he does not see him as the end of the promise, but on the contrary as its rebirth, its liberation and validation.
Paul links the traditional Abrahamitic promises with the promise of life and obviously understands ‘life’ no longer in the context of possessing the land, being fruitful and multiplying, but as ‘quickening of the dead’ (Rom. 4:15, 17). As in Judaism, so also he, too, is certain that God keeps his promises. Yet the ground of this assurance is new: because God has the power to quicken the dead and call into being things that are not, therefore the fulfilment of his promise is possible, and because he has raised Christ from the dead, therefore the fulfilment of his promise is certain. Lack of assurance in, or doubt of, God’s will to fulfil it is therefore robbing God of his glory. Unbelief is doubt of God’s truthfulness, of his omnipotence and his faithfulness (Rom. 4:20). Unbelief does not let God be God, for it doubts the dependability of God which guarantees his promises. Paul manifestly sees the concrete form of such unbelief in the theology of Torah, righteousness, in which the power of the promise towards its fulfilment is bound to the fulfilling of the law. If, however, the promise of God is bound to the law, then the promise is invalidated: it then depends no longer on the power of the God who has promised, but on the power of the man who obeys. But the wrath of God will be revealed upon all who leave the law unfulfilled or transgress it. Hence law and promise are mutually exclusive, just as glorying in the works of the law and glorying in the God who justifies sinners and quickens the dead are mutually exclusive. The law does not have within it the power of the promised life and of the resurrection, but exposes life to death and leads it to death. The law does not have within it the power of justification, but the power to expose sins and to make them exceeding sinful. For the promise has in the form of the law been made of no effect. Just as for Paul the justification of the godless and the life that comes of the raising of the dead belong together, so also for him the righteousness of faith and the validation of the promise in the raising of Christ belong together. ‘If they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect’ (Rom. 4:14). But if, on the contrary, the promise is set in force by God, then it confers righteousness by faith. ‘Therefore it is “of faith”, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure (βεβαίαν) to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all’ (Rom. 4:16). Promise would no longer be the promise of God, who quickens the dead and calls into being what is not, if it had anything to do with the law. ‘If the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise’ (Gal. 3:18). If we sought to attain the inheritance of the promise through fulfilling the law, then we should lose this inheritance, for by the promise God showed himself to Abraham as gracious (Gal. 3:18). The true heirs of the promise and children of Abraham are therefore those who are partakers of the promise in faith in Christ (Gal. 3:29). For by the gospel the Gentiles become partakers of the promise in Christ (Eph. 3:6).
It is plainly recognizable how the gospel in its antithesis to the law is here related to the promise. Paul does not use Abraham as an example by which to illustrate his new understanding of righteousness by faith, but the struggle for the inheritance of Abraham as between the gospel of the raising of the crucified Christ and the Torah is concerned with the ‘power of the promise’. If Christ is the ‘end of the Torah’ (Rom. 10:4), yet he is there for Israel ‘for the sake of the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers’ (Rom. 15:8). If the true heirs of Abraham, the father of the promise, are those in whom the Abrahamitic promise gives proof of itself in the Christ event in the power of the God who justifies men and creates life out of death, then that is the end of the Jew’s precedence over the Gentile in the history of salvation. What was promised to Israel is now valid for all believers, both Jews and Gentiles. The promise is no longer exclusive, but becomes inclusive. It becomes universal. This universalizing of the promise comes of its being liberated from the confining grip of the law and the election of Israel. If in the power of God, as seen in the raising of the Crucified and, as a result of that, in the justification and calling of the godless, the promise has become unconditional—of grace and not of the law—then it has also become unrestricted and is therefore valid ‘without distinction’. If the Christ event thus contains the validation (βεβαίωσις) of the promise, then this means no less than that through the faithfulness and truth of God the promise is made true in Christ—and made true wholly, unbreakably, for ever and for all. Nothing more stands in the way of its fulfilment, for sins are forgiven in him (Heb. 9:15). Between this once-for-all validation of the promise and its fulfilment in the glory of God there stands only the dependability of God himself. Hence the promise now determines the existence of the recipient and all he does and suffers. It is not that vice versa the fulfilling of the promise is determined by the existence and behaviour of the recipient.
The gospel has its inabrogable presupposition in the Old Testament history of promise. In the gospel the Old Testament history of promise finds more than a fulfilment which does away with it; it finds its future. ‘All the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen’ (2 Cor. 1:20). They have become an eschatological certainty in Christ, by being liberated and validated, made unconditional and universal. The history of promise which the gospel presupposes is not annulled. The Israel which comes into view with the presupposed promise is not paganized, but on the contrary it has disclosed to it in the gospel the future and the certainty of its own promises. The Christ event can be understood as a reversal of the history of promise: the first will be last. It is not that the Gentiles will come and worship when Zion is at the last redeemed from its shame, but Israel will come when the fulness of the Gentiles have become partakers of the promise in Christ (Rom. 9–11). Thus the gospel is not to be understood as antiquating the promises of Israel or even putting an end to them. In the ultimate, eschatological sense of these promises it is in fact identical with them.
On the other hand, the gospel itself becomes unintelligible, if the contours of the promise are not recognized in it itself. It would lose its power to give eschatological direction, and would become either gnostic talk of revelation or else preaching of morals, if it were not made clear that the gospel constitutes on earth and in time the promise of the future of Christ. The gospel is promise and as promise it is an earnest of the promised future. ‘The divine word in Christ is new solely because its fulfilment can no longer be endangered or abolished, as was once the case, but has become incontestable; and it is unique, despite all its varied earthly movement and manifold testimony and despite its prolepsis in the Old Testament, because in Christ it not only reveals anew the one eschatological salvation, but in addition also conclusively guarantees the realizing of that salvation. As such it is already present and apprehensible in history, yet solely in the form of promise, i.e. as pointing and directing us towards a still outstanding future.’
How are we to regard the connection between gospel and promise, and thus in a wider sense also the relation between the New and the Old Testaments? Two radically opposed conceptions suggest themselves: the continuity can be understood in terms of a view of history as history of salvation, or the discontinuity can be understood in terms of an existentialist interpretation of the gospel. Both methods employ concepts of history with which it is barely possible to comprehend the manifold perspectives in which Paul expounds the gospel’s relation to law and promise.
A view of the continuity in terms of the history of election or of salvation, whatever its precise form, understands the gospel as the fulfilment of the history that has preceded it. The event of Christ accordingly cannot be taken by itself as an isolated fact. It always requires the witness of the history which it fulfils, if its significance as an event of universal eschatological salvation is to be intelligible. It is only by the witness of the Old Testament ‘scripture’ that the gospel shows the Christ event to be the fulfilment of the history of God’s election. This is done not only by taking the saving events of the New Testament as the clue to the exposition of the Old Testament, but also vice versa by taking the saving events of the Old Testament as the clue to the understanding of the event of Christ. It is true of course that Paul set the Old Testament promise to Abraham in a universal eschatological context: the ‘land’ has become the world, and his ‘seed’ has become all nations. But this reinterpretation must prove itself to be a true interpretation of what was to be interpreted. The Christian interpretation of Abraham must make the claim that ‘this beginning of the history of election in the promise of God and the faith of Abraham’ points ‘in essence to its end as its fulfilment’. The result of this is on the one hand a view of the fulfilment in the Christ event in terms of ‘history of election’, and secondly, an ‘essential’ view of the meaning of this history, i.e. a view which is arrived at in the light of its end and which ‘in truth’ underlies the story of Abraham. The Christ event thus has its place in a definite history: it is the fulfilment of that history and as such reveals its essence and truth. Christian faith is grounded in history, itself stands in history, and trusts in history. Faith and history belong together. Faith is not a possibility which is severally, and to that extent generally, open to individuals, but is due to a definite history of election and is concrete trust in future divine action.
What is here asserted as a continuity in the history of election and salvation from Abraham to Christ is no doubt noetically accessible only from the standpoint of the Christ event. The exposition and appropriation of the promise to Abraham in Christian faith cannot, however, present itself as insight into an ‘essentially’ coherent chain from Abraham to Christ. Christian faith is not a view of the essence of history underlying the temporal and concrete statements of the Old Testament tradition. The ‘newness’ of the New Testament is not to be seen merely in the disclosing of the essence and truth of the Old Testament. The continuity cannot be defined merely in terms of an essence of history which becomes apparent in the light of its end.
An existentialist interpretation of the discontinuity, on the other hand, takes ‘history’ out of the light of the promise and sets it in the light of the law. History here becomes the epitome of existence under the law—of the fact that man must understand himself from his works and, in analogy thereto, from established, demonstrable complexes of history. ‘History’ is here understood as a genealogical force. It becomes the epitome of transience and degeneration. It becomes the realm of the things that are ready to man’s hand, calculable, objectively demonstrable, at his disposal. All views of history which provide surveyable complexes thus belong in principle to the realm of deficient, objectifying thought. Understanding oneself from history is therefore synonymous with man’s understanding of himself from the world. If history is understood in this way in the light of the law, then faith and history never belong together; on the contrary, faith lies ‘athwart’ history and destroys every kind of historic continuity, including that which is understood in terms of the history of election and salvation. Faith brings liberation from history and is itself the eschatological crisis of history in the individual. The element of continuity between Abraham and the believer is accordingly not to be regarded as a ‘product of historic development’, but can only be understood as ‘a retrospective projection of faith’, which is not demonstrable by historical science and must therefore itself again be an object of faith.
But now, in this antithesis of history and faith, faith is dialectically anchored to a negative concept of history from which it must repeatedly distinguish itself. On the other hand, history is dialectically anchored to a subjectivistic concept of faith, as a result of which it must repeatedly be seen in terms of the above-mentioned identification of legalistic and objectifying thought. It is easy to see how strongly the modern positivistic concept of history prevails in this identification of legalistic and objectifying thought. The result of this concept is that the searching, knowing and objectifying subject frees itself from the power of history, of genealogy and of tradition by means of this reflection, and withdraws into the objectively incomprehensible background of a transcendental subjectivity and spontaneity. What a thus subjectified faith sees in history, must then become an ‘expression’ of faith itself. What a faith understood in such terms has to say of Abraham, becomes a ‘projection’ of faith—a projection which, because it is unprovable, faith believes. This, however, makes it unintelligible why Paul does not use the figure of Abraham merely to illustrate his own view of righteousness by faith, but enters into a dispute with Jews and Jewish Christians over the inheritance of Abraham. In this antithesis to ‘history’ as such, which then includes automatically also the Old Testament history of promise, it becomes as impossible to say what is ‘new’ in the New Testament as to say what is ‘new’ in gnosticism. But when the ‘old’ is thus defined in the light of our antithesis to a history that is seen as the realm of the objective, demonstrable and disposable, then the ‘new’ becomes nothing else but faith in the form of immediate subjectivity, of pure, subjective conception from the realm of the indisposable. When we see it in this light, the ‘new’ is not very new—not at least as compared with the ecstatic gnostic passion for newness. The Old Testament is not then regarded as being historic testimony to the promise and as such having present relevance along with its fulfilment in the New Testament, but it can be presented by a transcendentally understood faith in Christ only in terms of antithesis, as a thing we have always left beneath us.
Now it is no doubt true that Paul rejects the idea of the Jews’ genealogical connection with Abraham being in itself soteriological. Yet what he puts in its place is hardly a picture of Abraham as projected by Christian faith, but he manifestly regards Abraham and his promise as forming both theologically and materially a necessary bone of contention with Torah Judaism. Projections of faith which are undemonstrable and have to be believed are not things one can contend about. A view of the essence of history, too, is really only a thing one either can or cannot see. Paul, however, deals ‘objectively’ with Abraham and his promise, in the sense that he understands them as an object of contention in necessary proceedings against the Jews. Thus it is really a question of the correct exposition of the Abrahamitic promise as between the claims of the Torah and the claims of the gospel. The continuity with the Abrahamitic promise can therefore be taken neither as a product of historic development nor as a retrospective projection of faith. The continuity of the promise to Abraham exists according to Paul where the promise is eschatologically validated. If Paul is concerned in this sense with the ‘object’ of the promise to Abraham, then his exposition and appropriation of it is neither a dictate of the historic development nor a creation of his believing phantasy. His gospel does not derive by necessity from the essence of the history of election, but neither does the promise to Abraham appear in his gospel by chance. Because his gospel proclaims the promise as validated in the event of Christ, it starts the traditional promise to Abraham off on a new history. The promise finds in the gospel its eschatological future, while the law finds its end. The ‘newness’ of the gospel is thus not ‘totally new’. It proves its newness by asserting itself against the old, against human nature in the context of law, sin and death, and thereby bringing about the ‘oldness’ of the old. It proves its eschatological newness, however, by using the previously proclaimed promise of God as the means of its explication. Paul rediscovers the promise to Abraham in the gospel of Christ and therfore recalls along with the gospel of Christ the promise to Abraham as well. The history of law and gospel takes its bearings from the theological problem of the past. The history of promise and gospel, however, takes its bearings from the eschatological problem of the future. Without the relating of the gospel to what was promised in advance, it loses its own bearing on the eschatological future and threatens to transform itself into gnostic talk of revelation. Without relation to the promise in the gospel, faith loses the driving-power of hope and becomes credulity.
Because the gospel presents itself as validation of the promise of the God of Abraham by the same God, it must enter into a judicial process with Judaism concerning the future of the promise, while on the other hand it must bring Gentiles to hope in the God of promise. It has then the Old Testament at its side neither as a historic documentation of its fulfilment nor as a history of examples of human failure in the things of God. Just as the promise is validated in the gospel, so also the Old Testament, inasmuch as it is witness to the history of the promise, is validated and renewed in the New Testament.
Formally speaking, between the promise to Abraham that is witnessed at many levels of the Old Testament and the gospel of Christ that is witnessed in the New Testament, there takes place a ‘word-history’, a history of tradition or the history of the working of the traditional hope. This history of word and tradition is materially determined by that future which is announced and promised in the transmission and constantly new reception of the promise. That is why Paul apparently sees the continuity as being given in the ‘scripture’, whose meaning and goal he finds in the present hope (Rom. 15:4). What the scripture that was ‘written before our time’ offers must therefore contain possibilities and a future to which present hope can be directed. The exposition and presentation of what was written ‘aforetime’ must accordingly pay attention to that in it which is promised, open, unsettled and points to the future. Because the gospel directs men to the future of eschatological salvation, it has its presupposition in the promises that were issued and written aforetime, and along with the future of Christ it presents also the future of what was aforetime promised (Rom. 1:2). It links on to promises that have been issued but not yet fulfilled and takes them up into itself. This is a process belonging to the sphere of the history of the promise. The promise which was promised aforetime is not interpreted in terms of the history of salvation, nor is it taken as an opportune occasion for a new projection of faith, but it is validated. Something thereby happens to it—something the New Testament understands as eschatologically ‘new’—but this new thing does happen to it. Remembering the promise issued aforetime means asking about the future in the past. It is dominated by that expectation which is made possible by the eschatological validation and liberation of the promise. The promise to Abraham is called to mind in order to proclaim the gospel of Christ to Jews and Gentiles and to call them into the new people of God. The calling to mind is thus a necessary part of the proclamation of the gospel. In this way of calling to mind past promises and in this hope in the form of remembrance we are no longer presented with the alternative between a complex of saving history which is a product of history, and unprovable retrospective projections of faith which are products of subjective faith. We take the past promises up into our own eschatological future as disclosed by the gospel and give them breadth. We do not interpret past history. We do not emancipate ourselves from history altogether, but we enter into the history that is determined by the promised and guaranteed eschaton, and we expect from it not only the future of the present but also the future of the past.
The promissory character of the gospel can be seen not only from the language used especially by Paul and in Hebrews. It shows itself still more plainly in the conflicts in which Paul was involved with various tendencies in primitive Christianity. As long as Christianity remained within the sphere of Judaism with its apocalyptic outlook and its expectation of the Messiah, it was only natural that it should take an eschatological view of the Christ event and of the gospel. Only, here the Christians also remained within the bounds of the Jewish expectations and understood themselves as the ‘renewed people of God’ and maintained the gospel as the ‘renewed covenant’ of Israel. It was only the move into the Gentile world that compelled them to a new understanding of the gospel. The gospel shows itself effective by justifying the godless and calling the Gentiles to the God of hope. The Church which thereby arises and consists of both Jews and Gentiles, can therefore no longer be understood as the ‘renewed people of God’ but now only as the ‘new people of God’. This crossing of the frontiers of Israel on to Hellenistic soil, however, brought with it problems of considerable magnitude. If it was here no longer possible to understand the Church as a Christian synagogue, then it was a short step on the other hand to the misunderstanding of the Church as a Christian mystery religion. The question arises, what it was that prevented Christianity from presenting itself to the Hellenistic world as a Christian mystery religion. What was it in its inheritance that proved resistent to an assimilation of this kind?
The view of the Christian faith as a mystery religion takes palpable form for us in that ecstatic Hellenistic fervour with which Paul finds himself embroiled in Corinth. Yet the various hymns and fragments of confessions in the Pauline and deutero-Pauline epistles also show that similar ideas presumably lay at the root of the whole Christian outlook where it came within the influence of the Hellenistic mystery religions. It is generally a question here of the influence exerted upon Christianity by the epiphany religion of the time, of which it can be said: ‘Since the man of myth lives only for the present, epiphany is for him already fulfilment. Eschatological thinking is foreign to him.’ The influence of this kind of piety shows itself not only as a formal element in the self-presentation of Christianity on Hellenistic soil, but quite certainly extends also to the understanding of the event of Christ. The Christ event can here be understood in a wholly non-eschatological way as epiphany of the eternal present in the form of the dying and rising Kyrios of the cultus. Then, however, the place of the scriptural authentication κατὰ τὰς γραφάς is taken by the cultic epiphany as proof of its own self in a timeless sense. Baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ then means that the goal of redemption is already attained, for in this baptism eternity is sacramentally present. The believing participant is transposed from the realm of death, of constraining forces and of the old aeon of transience into the eternally present realm of freedom, of heavenly life and of resurrection. All that now remains for him on earth is to exhibit his new, heavenly nature in freedom. In the sacramental and spiritual presence of Christ, resurrection from the dead is already imparted to the receivers and is eternally present to them. The earthly body and the things of the world fade away to become for them an unreal semblance, in the disregarding of which they must give proof of their heavenly freedom. ‘Among these Gentile Christians, as 1 Corinthians amply shows, there is a total view of the tradition at work within a framework of ideas which is not—as with Paul himself—that of the primitive Christian eschatology of the early Jewish tradition, but manifestly that of Hellenistic ideas of epiphany. As a result of this, all religious thought and experience is so strongly oriented towards the ever present event of the coming of the Spirit as the epiphanous presentation of the exalted Kyrios, that the content of the eschatologically oriented tradition is included within this total view.’
What is the relation between this Christian mystery religion, which we have here only roughly outlined, and the primitive Christian apocalyptic expectations that were kindled by the riddle and the open question of the Easter appearance of Jesus? Did the original apocalyptic already contain the conditions of its possible transformation into terms of the epiphany piety of Hellenistic mystery religion? Did Hellenistic mystery religion in its Christian form still remain what it originally was?
It is plain that the ecstasy of Christian mystery religion has its presupposition in an apocalyptic ecstasy which was a feature of primitive Christianity, and which thought to perceive in the experience of the Spirit the fulfilment of long awaited promises. This non-Hellenistic, apocalyptic ecstasy, which arose from the consciousness of living in the age of the fulfilment of the divine promises, was then certainly able later on to identify this fulfilment with the timeless epiphany of the eternal presence of God. It was theologically able to take the original, temporal and teleological statements about the fulfilment of promises and translate them into timeless types of the presence of the eternal. It was therefore also able vice versa, in face of the Greek search for the eternal present in the mystery cults, to offer the cult of Christ as the true presence of the eternal. Thus it is a reciprocal process, whose result could be a ‘presentative eschatology’ on the one hand, but also on the other hand a ‘presence of eternity’. The ecstatic eschatology of fulfilment could present itself in Greek terms, and the Greek idea of the presence of eternity could offer itself as a fulfilment of eschatological expectations. Thus even the Christian mystery religion still retained the appeal of finality and uniqueness, even when the explicit connection with the old eschatological hopes for the future was lost. Yet the temporally final (das Endzeitliche) now became the conclusively final (das Endgültige), and the conclusively final became the eternal. In the light of this process of transformation it is possible to understand the early Church’s passion for absoluteness; for with the departure from the eschatological categories of expectation the Church did not by any means turn itself into a relative body among the existing religions and cults, but took its confession of the one God, which could then be formulated in the terms of Greek metaphysics, and combined it quite definitely with a passionate assertion of the final and unique revelation of the one and only God in Christ. This process of transformation, which has often been described, took place not so much on the ground of an eschatology that had been abandoned because of the delayed parousia of Christ and the disappointed hopes of his nearness, as rather on the ground of an ecstasy of fulfilment which took the eschaton that was to be expected and transformed it into the presence of eternity as experienced in cultus and in spirit. It was not so much disappointed hopes but rather the supposed fulfilment of all hopes that led the acute Hellenization of Christianity but also to the acute Christianizing of Hellenism. ‘Expectation of the nearness of Christ and his parousia has now become meaningless, because all that apocalyptic still hoped for appears to be already realized.’
What are the consequences of this view of presentative eschatology as the presence of eternity? The event of promise, which is what the life and teaching, dying and raising of Jesus were held to be, now becomes an event of redemption, which can be subsequently repeated in the cultus in the form of a mystery drama. The sacramental event bestows participation in the dying and rising of the God. The solemn representation regarded the raising of Jesus as his enthronement as exalted Kyrios and took it to be already completed and therefore now awaiting only representation. ‘In place of the hidden Lord of the world, who in truth is as yet only designated as such and whose return in glory to assume earthly power is still awaited by the Church, we have the Lord who now already reigns over all forces and powers and thus over the world hitherto dominated by them.’ With this change from the apocalyptic of the promised and still outstanding lordship of Christ to the cultic presence of his eternal, heavenly lordship there goes at the same time also a waning of theological interest in the cross. The resurrection of Jesus is regarded as his exaltation and enthronement and is related to his incarnation. To be sure, his humiliation even to the cross can be understood as the perfecting of his incarnation, by means of which he draws all things into the sphere of his lordship, yet the cross is in this way made only a transitional stage on his way to heavenly lordship. The cross does not remain until the fulfilment of the eschaton the abiding key-signature of his lordship in the world. If his resurrection is understood in this sense as his heavenly enthronement, then the sacramental event which represents him in the cultus becomes a parallel to his incarnation and is taken as an earthly adumbration and accomplishment of his heavenly lordship, his heavenly life in the realm of the things that are earthly, transient and split up into a multitude of forces.
History thus loses its eschatological direction. It is not the realm in which men suffer and hope, groaning and travailing in expectation of Christ’s future for the world, but it becomes the field in which the heavenly lordship of Christ is disclosed in Church and sacrament. In place of the eschatological ‘not yet’ (noch nicht) we have a cultic ‘now only’ (nur noch), and this becomes the key-signature of history post Christum. It is understandable that this disclosure of the eternal, heavenly lordship of Christ can then be regarded as a continuation of his incarnation. Here the transient continues in the light of the intransient things of heaven, the mortal continues in the light of the immortal things of heaven, and what is split up into multiplicity is transfigured in the lordship of the divinely one. A future expectation which is expressed sacramentally and in terms of salvation history takes the place of that of earthly eschatology: the Church gradually permeates the world with heavenly truth, with powers of heavenly life and with heavenly salvation. The world is led by the one Church to the Christ who is one with the one God, and is thus brought to unity and salvation. The eschatological expectation of what has ‘not yet’ happened becomes a noetic expectation of the universal disclosure and glorification of what has already happened in heaven. The old apocalyptic dualism which distinguished the passing aeon from the coming aeon is transformed into a metaphysical dualism which understands the coming as the eternal and the passing as transience. Instead of citizens of the coming kingdom we have a people redeemed from heaven. Instead of the citizens of the passing aeon we have those that are earthly and of the world. And finally, the cross becomes a timeless sacrament of martyrdom which perfects the martyr and unites him with the heavenly Christ.
With these few examples we can let the matter rest. The trend towards early Catholicism and the life and thought of the ancient Church is plain. The ecstasy of eschatological fulfilment in the Christ event is the presupposition for this process of the transformation of Christianity into an ecstatic form of Hellenistic mystery religion and into an ecumenical world Church. This form of ‘presentative eschatology’, this religion of the presence of the eternal whose eschatological determination is now only subliminal, can be called an eschatologia gloriae, if it is still possible to comprehend it in eschatological categories at all.
In this context Paul’s passionate polemic against Hellenistic ecstasy in Corinth acquires an abiding significance, as do also his correctives to that Hellenistic type of Christian theology which afterwards became standard. His criticism clearly has two focal points. For one thing, there is an ‘eschatological proviso’ which he maintains against this fulfilment ecstasy. It consists of the so-called ‘relics of apocalyptic theology’ which assert themselves in his view of the resurrection of Christ, of the sacrament, of the presence of the Spirit, of the earthly obedience of the believer, and of course in his future expectations. And secondly, there is his theology of the cross, in which he opposes the ecstasy that abandons the earth on which that cross stands. There is a profound material connection between these two starting points of his criticism. We shall therefore call the basis of his criticism the eschatologia crucis, meaning by this both objections in one.
When Bultmann interprets Paul by seeing the heart of Pauline theology in Paul’s anthropological and existentialist interpretation of the peculiarity of presentative eschatology, then he has undoubtedly discovered an important modification of the theology of the eternal present, but not really a fundamental alternative to it. Presentative eschatology can appear equally well both in mythological dress and in existentialist interpretation. The ‘presence of eternity’ can be expressed both in the language of world-picture and myth, and can also be stated in paradoxical terms as a nunc aeternum in the history of existence. If Pauline criticism consisted merely in this transposition, then it would certainly contain an important modification of the theology of the Hellenistic church, but not a truly transforming corrective. But now, the polemic in which Paul attacks Hellenism is marked both by a new recognition of the significance of the cross of Christ and also by a new recognition of a truly futurist eschatology, and thus becomes a criticism of presentative eschatology as such. ‘The apostle’s anti-ecstatic struggle, however, is in the last and deepest analysis fought out in the name of apocalyptic.’ This does not refer to mere repetitions or tiresome relics of late Jewish apocalyptic in Paul, but means his own apocalyptic, which is kindled by an eschatology of the cross and is therefore hostile to every eschatological ecstasy of fulfilment.
Against the uniting of the believer with the dying and rising Lord of the cultus after the fashion of the mysteries Paul asserts an eschatological distinction: baptism is the means of participation in the Christ event of the crucifixion and death of Christ. Fellowship with Christ is fellowship in suffering with the crucified Christ. The baptized are dead with Christ, if they are baptized into his death. But they are not already risen with him and translated into heaven in the perfect tense of the cultus. They attain participation in the resurrection of Christ by new obedience, which unfolds itself in the realm of the hope of resurrection. In the power of the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead, they can obediently take upon them the sufferings of discipleship and in these very sufferings await the future glory. ‘Participation in the resurrection is spoken of not in the perfect, but in the future tense.’ Christ is risen and beyond the reach of death, yet his followers are not yet beyond the reach of death, but it is only through their hope that they here attain to participation in the life of the resurrection. Thus resurrection is present to them in hope and as promise. This is an eschatological presentness of the future, not a cultic presence of the eternal. The believer does not already in the cultus and in spirit find full participation in the lordship of Christ, but he is led by hope into the tensions and antitheses of obedience and suffering in the world. The life of everyday accordingly becomes the sphere of the true service of God (Rom. 12:1ff.). Inasmuch as call and promise point the believer on the way of obedience in the body and on earth, earth and the body are set within the horizon of the expectation of the coming lordship of Christ. ‘The reality of the new life stands or falls with the promise that God remains faithful and does not abandon his work.’ Hence the trials of the body and the opposition of the world are not understood as signs of a paradoxical presence of the eternal but are accepted in terms of seeking after, and calling for, the coming freedom in the kingdom of Christ. This is not ‘now only’ the sphere of transience, in which the believer has to demonstrate his heavenly freedom, but it is the reality in which the Church along with the whole creation groans for its redemption from the powers of annihilation in the future of Christ and earnestly awaits it (Rom. 8:18ff.). The imperative of the Pauline call to new obedience is accordingly not to be understood merely as a summons to demonstrate the indicative of the new being in Christ, but it has also its eschatological presupposition in the future that has been promised and is to be expected—the coming of the Lord to judge and to reign. Hence it ought not to be rendered merely by saying: ‘Become what you are!’, but emphatically also by saying: ‘Become what you will be!’
The believer is given not the eternal Spirit of heaven, but the eschatological ‘earnest of the Spirit’—of the Spirit, moreover, who has raised Christ from the dead and will quicken our mortal bodies (Rom. 8:11). For the word which leads the believer into the truth is promise of eternal life, but not yet that life itself. The observance of this eschatological distinction manifests itself also in the apostle’s Christology. If in 1 Cor. 15:3–5 he takes over a primitive Christian tradition of the resurrection kerygma, yet his expositions of it in the verses that follow are nevertheless original. He extends the picture into the future and shows what is to be expected because with the resurrection of Christ it is held in prospect and has been made a certainty (1 Cor. 15:25): ‘He must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.’ This shows that in the future possibilities there is an element of necessity in the sense that they can be relied on and are to be expected. The tendencies and latent implications in the resurrection event are drawn out into the future opened up by it. With the raising of Jesus all has not yet been done. The end of death’s domination is still outstanding. The overcoming of all opposition to God is still outstanding in that future reality of which Paul says that ‘God will be all in all’ (1 Cor. 15:28). Finally, even the coming world lordship of Christ over all his enemies can once again be eschatologically surpassed, in that not even his lordship is in itself the eternal presence of God, but has an eschatologically provisional character in which it serves the sole and all-embracing lordship of God.
When these perspectives are borne in mind, then it becomes clear that the Easter appearances of the risen Christ are not covered by the theological answer that he is the presence of the eternal, but require the development of a new eschatology. The resurrection has set in motion an eschatologically determined process of history, whose goal is the annihilation of death in the victory of the life of the resurrection, and which ends in that righteousness in which God receives in all things his due and the creature thereby finds its salvation. It is only from the standpoint of a presentative eschatology or a theology of the eternal present that the eschatological and anticipatory thinking displayed by Paul in 1 Cor. 15 can be regarded as a relapse into outmoded apocalyptic mythology. Yet it is not by an existentialist interpretation of the religion of the eternal present that the mythology of that religion is overcome, but only an eschatology of promise can overcome its mythical and illusionary view of the world and of human existence, because it alone takes the trials, the contradictions and the godlessness of this world seriously in a meaningful way, because it makes faith and obedience possible in the world not by regarding the contradictions as of no account, but by enabling us to believe and obey on the ground of our hope in the overcoming of these contradictions by God. Faith does not come to its own in becoming radically unworldly, but by hopeful outgoing into the world it becomes a benefit to the world. By accepting the cross, the suffering and the death of Christ, by taking upon it the trials and struggles of obedience in the body and surrendering itself to the pain of love, it proclaims in the everyday world the future of the resurrection, of life and the righteousness of God. The future of the resurrection comes to it as it takes upon itself the cross. Thus the eschatology of the future and the theology of the cross are interwoven. It is neither that futuristic eschatology is isolated, as in late Jewish apocalyptic, nor does the cross become the mark of the paradoxical presence of eternity in every moment, as in Kierkegaard. The eschatological expectation of the all-embracing lordship of Christ for the corporeal, earthly world brings the clear perception and acceptance of the distinction of the cross and the resurrection.
Finally, it should be noticed that Paul is not so much concerned with a compromise between presentative and futuristic eschatology, that is, with a compromise between apocalyptic and Hellenism. Rather, the content of the Hellenistic idea of the presence of the eternal is futurized by him and applied to the still outstanding eschaton. That all-embracing truth in which the creature comes into saving harmony with God, that all-embracing righteousness in which God receives his due in all things and all becomes well, that glory of God in whose reflected light all things are transfigured and the hidden face of man disclosed—all this is set by Paul within the realm of hope in that future to which faith looks forward on the ground of the raising of the crucified Lord. The fulness of all things from God, in God and to God lies for him in the still outstanding fulfilment of the promises guaranteed in Christ. ‘Eternal presence’ is therefore the eschatological, future goal of history, not its inmost essence. Creation is therefore not the things that are given and lie to hand, but the future of these things, the resurrection and the new being.
God is not somewhere in the Beyond, but he is coming and as the coming One he is present. He promises a new world of all-embracing life, of righteousness and truth, and with this promise he constantly calls this world in question—not because to the eye of hope it is as nothing, but because to the eye of hope it is not yet what it has the prospect of being. When the world and the human nature bound up with it are called in question in this way, then they become ‘historic’, for they are staked upon, and submitted to the crisis of, the promised future. Where the new begins, the old becomes manifest. Where the new is promised, the old becomes transient and surpassable. Where the new is hoped for and expected, the old can be left behind. Thus ‘history’ arises in the light of its end, in the things which happen because of, and become perceptible through, the promise that lights up the way ahead. Eschatology does not disappear in the quicksands of history, but it keeps history moving by its criticism and hope; it is itself something like a sort of quicksand of history from afar. The impression of general transience that comes of looking back sorrowfully upon the things that cannot endure, has in actual fact as such nothing to do with history. Rather, that transience is historic which comes of hope, of exodus, of setting out towards the promised, not yet visible future. The reason why the Church of Christ has here no ‘continuing city’ is, that it seeks the ‘city to come’ and therefore goes forth without the camp to bear the reproach of Christ. The reason for its here having no continuing city is not that in history there is nothing that continues at all. In the eyes of Christian hope the epithet ‘transient’ belongs not only to the things which we generally feel are destined to pass away, but it sees as transient those very things which are generally felt to be always there and to cause the transience of all life, namely, evil and death. Death becomes transient in the promised resurrection. Sin becomes transient in the justification of the sinner and the righteousness for which we have to hope.
It is neither that history swallows up eschatology (Albert Schweitzer) nor does eschatology swallow up history (Rudolf Bultmann). The logos of the eschaton is promise of that which is not yet, and for that reason it makes history. The promise which announces the eschaton, and in which the eschaton announces itself, is the motive power, the mainspring, the driving force and the torture of history.
Christianity stands or falls with the reality of the raising of Jesus from the dead by God. In the New Testament there is no faith that does not start a priori with the resurrection of Jesus. Paul is clearly taking over a basic form of the primitive Christian confession when he says in Rom. 10:9: ‘If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.’ The confession to the person of Jesus as the Lord and the confession to the work of God who raised him from the dead belong inseparably together, although the two formulae do not coincide but mutually expound each other. A Christian faith that is not resurrection faith can therefore be called neither Christian nor faith. It is the knowledge of the risen Lord and the confession to him who raised him that form the basis on which the memory of the life, work, sufferings and death of Jesus is kept alive and presented in the gospels. It is the recognition of the risen Christ that gives rise to the Church’s recognition of its own commission in the mission to the nations. It is the remembrance of his resurrection that is the ground of the inclusive hope in the universal future of Christ. The central statements of the primitive Christian missionary proclamation are therefore: 1. ‘God has raised the crucified Jesus from the dead’ (Acts 2:24; 3:15; 5:31; 1 Cor. 15:4; and frequently elsewhere). 2. ‘Of this we are witnesses.’ 3. In him is grounded the future of righteousness for sinners and the future of life for those subject to death. The fact, the witness and the eschatological hope belong together in the Easter kerygma. It is true that in the different angles of approach adopted in more detailed study of the circumstances, ideas and expectations they can be distinguished, but they cannot be separated from each other. The question, ‘What can I know of the historical facts?’ cannot here be separated from the ethical and existential question, ‘What am I to do?’ and from the eschatological question, ‘What may I hope for?’—just as the other questions in turn cannot be isolated. Only when concerted attention is given to these three questions does the reality of the resurrection disclose itself.
When the question of the reality of the resurrection is raised today, then it mostly takes the form: Is he risen? In what modus of esse is the reality of the resurrection to be understood? Is he risen in the sense of a reality accessible to ‘historical science’? Is he risen in the sense of a reality belonging to the history of ideas and traditions? Is he risen in the sense of a reality that affects our own existence? Is he risen in the sense of a wishful reality of human longings and hopes?
The question of the reality of the resurrection of Christ can thus be asked in the light of a number of very different views of reality that are possible today. Hence it is not only the nature of the reality of the resurrection that stands in question, but also the reality on the basis of which the question of the reality of the resurrection is shaped, motivated and formulated.
We shall therefore have to try first of all to discover the point of approach at which the answer to the question of the reality of the resurrection of Christ can become plain. This approach cannot be by any single question within the context of those that can be asked on the basis of reality today, but it can only be a question which embraces the whole modern experience of the world, of self and of the future—a question which we ourselves constitute with our whole reality. If the question of the reality of the resurrection is tied down, say, to the question of the relevance and significance of this piece of church teaching, or to the question of the historical probability of the fact of Jesus’ resurrection, or to the question of its real meaning for heart and conscience, or to the question of the hopes it may possibly contain, then the situation out of which the question arises and towards which it is directed is tacitly left as it was and simply taken for granted. It might well be, however, that the recognition of the reality of the resurrection calls this very situation in question.
Now of course it is difficult to find a single designation for the situation out of which the question of the reality of the resurrection of Christ can arise one way or another today. Yet it is no accident when this situation is interpreted by expounding the statement of Hegel and Nietzsche: ‘God is dead.’
For that is not merely a statement of philosophical metaphysics or of theology, but is one which also seems to lie at the foundations of modern experience of self and the world and to provide the ground for the atheism that characterizes the methods of science. All possible questions as to the reality of the resurrection which are asked in such a way as to define this reality in ‘historical’ or ‘existentialist’ or ‘utopian’ terms, have their ground in the a-theistic form of the historian’s view of history, of man’s view of himself, and of his utopian view of the future. In none of these ways of dealing with reality does the idea of God thrust itself upon us as necessary. It has become partly superfluous, partly optional—at all events in its traditional theological and metaphysical form. Hence the proclamation of the raising of Jesus from the dead by God has also become partly superfluous, partly optional, as long as ‘God’ is understood as something that is known to us from history, from the world or from human existence. Only when along with the knowledge of the resurrection of Jesus the ‘God of the resurrection’ can be shown to be ‘God’ in terms of the ‘death of God’ that has become familiar to us from history, from the world and from our own existence—only then is the proclamation of the resurrection, and only then are faith and hope in the God of promise, something that is necessary, that is new, that is possible in an objectively real sense.
The origin of the impression that ‘God is dead’ gives some indication of this. The early romantic poet Jean Paul in his nightmare vision, ‘Die Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, dass kein Gott sei’ (‘Address by the Dead Christ from the Heights of the Cosmic System to the Effect that there is no God’), placed this statement appropriately on the lips of the risen and returning Christ. He himself wished only to give an idea of how it would feel if atheism were true—yet he had a greater effect than any other upon the romanticist nihilism of modern times. His marks are found in Stifter, Keller, Dostoievsky and Nietzsche. Heine’s Mönche des Atheismus, the martyrs in F. Schlegel’s Diktatur des Nichts, and also Dostoievski’s The Possessed, were all influenced by him. The setting of Jean Paul’s piece is the hour of the Last Judgment. The Christ who is awaited by the dead comes and proclaims: ‘There is no God. I was mistaken. Everywhere is only stark, staring nothing, the death rigour of infinity. Eternity lies in chaos, gnaws at it and turns self-ruminant.’ This vision is like a commentary on 1 Cor. 15:13ff. Hence it is significant that the message, ‘There is no God’, is proclaimed in terms of despair of the hope of resurrection. It is plain that for Jean Paul the reality of God and the hope of resurrection depend on each other both for faith and for unbelief.
Hegel in 1802 described the ‘death of God’ as the basic feeling of the religion of modern times and saw in it a new interpretation of Good Friday: ‘The pure notion, however, or infinity as the abyss which engulfs all being, must take the infinite pain—which till now was historic only in culture and in the form of the feeling upon which the religion of modern times rests, the feeling that God himself is dead (that feeling which was merely empirically expressed, so to speak, in Pascal’s words: ‘la nature est telle qu’elle marque partout un Dieu perdu et dans l’homme et hors de l’homme’)—and designate it purely as an element, but also no more than an element, of the highest idea, and so give a philosophical existence to that which, as could also happen, was either a moral demand for sacrifice of empirical being or else the concept of formal abstraction, and thereby restore to philosophy the idea of absolute freedom, thus taking absolute suffering, or the speculative Good Friday which was otherwise historical, and restoring it in nothing less than the full truth and stringency of its godlessness, out of which stringency alone—because the cheerful, more unfathomable and more individual aspects of the dogmatic philosophies and of the nature religions must disappear—the highest totality can and must rise again in all its seriousness and from its deepest foundation, as also all-embracingly, and in the most cheerful freedom of form’ (Glauben und Wissen, in op. cit., pp. 123f.). Hegel meant by this that modern atheism and nihilism, which causes the disappearance of all dogmatic philosophies and all nature religions, can be understood as a universalizing of the historic Good Friday of the god-forsakenness of Jesus, so that it becomes a speculative Good Friday of the forsakenness of all that is. Only then does resurrection, as a resurrection of the totality of being out of nothing, and only then does the birth of freedom and cheerfulness out of infinite pain, become a prospect necessary to all that is. If the modern a-theistic world thus comes to stand in the shadow of Good Friday, and Good Friday is conceived by it as the abyss of nothingness that engulfs all being, then there arises on the other hand the possibility of conceiving this foundering world in theological terms as an element in the process of the now all-embracing and universal revelation of God in the cross and resurrection of reality. Then the stringency of the world’s god-forsakenness is not in itself enough to ruin it, but its ruination comes only when it abstracts the element of the expending and death of God from the dialectical process of God and fastens on that. The romanticist nihilism of the ‘death of God’, like the methodical atheism of science (etsi Deus non daretur), is an element that has been isolated from the dialectical process and is therefore no longer engaged in the movement of the process to which it belongs. From the theological standpoint one thing at least is unforgettably plain in Hegel—that the resurrection and the future of God must manifest themselves not only in the case of the god-forsakenness of the crucified Jesus, but also in that of the god-forsakenness of the world.
This speculative dialectic even in the very matter of God or the highest idea had already eluded the grasp of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard returned to the dualism of Kant and radicalized it. The age of infinite reflection no longer allows of any objective certainty in regard to the being or the self-motion of objects. Doubt and criticism do away with all mediation of the absolute in the objective. Thus all that remains is, in irreconcilable dialectic, the paradoxical antithesis of a theoretical atheism and an existential inner life, of objective godlessness and subjective piety. The inner life of the immediate and unmediated relationship of existence and transcendence goes hand in hand with contempt for outward things as absurd, meaningless and godless. Kierkegaard’s ‘individual’ falls out of the dialectic of mediation and reconciliation and falls back upon pure immediacy. His ‘inner life’ is, even to the extent of verbal parallels, the ‘unhappy consciousness’ of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, only isolated from Hegel’s dialectic and abstracted from its movement. When the unhappy consciousness of the ‘beautiful soul’ fastens upon itself and seeks in its own inward immediacy all that is glorious along with all that is transcendent, then at the same time it fastens down the world of objects to rigid immutability and sanctions its inhuman and godless conditions. Since no reconciliation between the inward and the outward can be hoped for, it is also pointless to expend oneself on the pain of the negative, to take upon oneself the cross of reality. The god-forsakenness and absurdity of a world that has become a calculable world of wares and techniques can now serve only as a negative urge towards the attaining of pure inwardness. This dialectic that has frozen into an eternal paradox is the mark of romanticism and of all romanticist theology.
A different exposition of the statement, ‘God is dead’, appears in Nietzsche and Feuerbach. ‘God is dead! God stays dead! And it is we who have killed him!… Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods, if we are to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed-and whosoever is born after us belongs because of this deed to a history higher than any history was till now!’ [F. Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, No. 125.] Here the death of God is ascribed to man, who has killed him, not to God’s expending of his own self. God’s death is the exaltation of man above himself. History, which man takes into his own hands, is built upon the corpse of God. The cross becomes the symbol of the victory of man over God and himself. ‘Dead are all gods: let us now see the superman live.’ When the feeling of the modern age that God is dead is thus based on saying that we have killed him, then this is in very close proximity to Feuerbach’s abolition of God through which man is said to come to himself. Only, Nietzsche is thinking of an event and of a new destiny given to our being, and not merely of a re-subjectifying of religious objectifications. The result is not man’s coming to himself in his sensual presence and immediacy, but man’s self-transcendence and his rising beyond himself. Yet even here in Nietzsche the place which for metaphysical thinking would belong to God, as being the place of effective cause, is now no longer experienced in the passivity of the human subject, but in his activity (M. Heidegger, Holzwege, 1957, pp. 236ff). The ‘world’ is the projection and object of our subjectivity. It is consequently ‘disenchanted’ to become the material for possible changes. It is no longer able to reconcile our subjectivity with itself. The all-powerful self becomes abstract identity. This new self-transcendence in the experience of being able to dominate the world is, to be sure, the end of all cosmological metaphysics and theology, but not by any means the end of metaphysics as such, for it contains a metaphysic of subjectivity. Its ‘atheism’ is merely theoretic atheism in regard to the world of objects. The subject, on the other hand-that fundamentum inconcussum which is so certain of itself in all human activity-arrogates to itself all the traditional divine predicates of metaphysics and theology (causa sui in Feuerbach and Marx, transcendence in Nietzsche). If Christian faith is given its theological home in this subjectivity, then it inevitably becomes a creatrix divinitatis, a god-creating and god-venturing force. This faith-mysticism becomes the necessary complement of the mathematics which man uses to prescribe to the world its laws. This means, however, that here, too, we have an exposition of the statement, ‘God is dead’, which returns in the end to those antitheses in the modern consciousness which Hegel’s dialectic was meant to reconcile. Hegel had addressed himself both to the banishing of God from the world on the part of mathematics and to the corresponding rise of man to the throne of immediate subjectivity, and had sought to understand and accept both of these as elements in the process of the self-movement of absolute Spirit. The following sentences, in which Feuerbach characterizes Hegel’s solution and seeks to reduce it ad absurdum, give much food for theological thought: ‘Hegel’s philosophy was the last great attempt to restore a lost and ruined Christianity by means of philosophy-whereby, as is general in recent times, the negation of Christianity is identified with Christianity itself. This contradiction is obscured and hidden from sight in Hegel only by turning the negation of God, or atheism, into an objective determination of God-God is defined as a process, and atheism as an element in this process. But just as the faith that is reconstructed on the basis of unbelief is no true faith, because it is constantly entrammelled with its opposite, so the God who reconstructs himself on the basis of his own negation is no true God, but on the contrary a self-contradictory, atheistic God’ (Grundsätze der Philosophic der Zukunft, 1843, § 21).
Here it becomes plain that Feuerbach knows only the God of dogmatic philosophy and nature religion, for it is only this God who in his abstract identity can be reduced to man. Christian faith, however, constantly rises on the ground of the conquest of unbelief and has the latter always at its side to vex it. The risen Christ is and remains the crucified Christ. The God who in the event of the cross and resurrection reveals himself as ‘the same’ is the God who reveals himself in his own contradiction. Out of the night of the ‘death of God’ on the cross, out of the pain of the negation of himself, he is experienced in the resurrection of the crucified one, in the negation of the negation, as the God of promise, as the coming God. If ‘atheism’ finds its radical form in the recognition of the universal significance of Good Friday, then it is a fact that the God of the resurrection is in some sort an ‘a-theistic’ God. This is presumably also what Dietrich Bonhoeffer means-in Hegel’s sense, and not in Feuerbach’s-when he writes: ‘And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world “etsi deus non daretur”. And this is just what we do recognize-before God!… God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us.… Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.’ Only, the god-forsakenness of the cross cannot, as in Hegel, be made into an element belonging to the divine process and thus immanent in God. A theology of the dialectical self-movement of absolute Spirit would then be only a modification of the dialectical epiphany of the eternal as subject. Hegel attempted to reconcile faith and knowledge—but at the price of doing away with the historicity of the event of revelation and understanding it as an eternal event. ‘For concept cancels time.’ But the cross—the hiddenness of God and the independence of man—is not at once ‘done away with’ in the logos of reflection and of consciousness, but is taken up for the time being into the promise and hope of a still outstanding, real eschaton, which is a stimulus to the consciousness but is not resolved into the believing consciousness. The cross is the mark of an eschatological openness which is not yet closed by the resurrection of Christ and the spirit of the Church, but remains open beyond both of these until the future of God and the annihilation of death. When it is precisely Nietzsche’s ‘frantic man’ who cries incessantly, ‘I seek God’, then that surely points in this direction. It is one thing whether the ‘death of God’ leads to the enthronement of deified man, and quite another thing whether the ‘death of God’ causes us, on the ground of our preview of resurrection in the raising of Christ, to ask, seek and hope for resurrection, life, kingdom and righteousness and thus, through this asking, seeking and hoping and the criticism, opposition and suffering that result from them, gives the world that has established itself upon the corpse of God its proper setting in the historic process of the future of the truth. The world is then not engulfed in the abyss of nothingness, but its negative aspects are taken up into the ‘not yet’ of hope. The world is not stabilized in eternal being, but is ‘held’ in the ‘not yet being’ of a history open towards the future.
The first question regarding the reality of the resurrection of Christ will always be concerned with the fact which is reported and proclaimed by the Easter witnesses. Since this fact is reported as an event—namely, as the ‘raising of Jesus from the dead by God’—the question as to the reality of this event will in the first instance take the form of a historical question. Even if the witnesses did not attempt after the fashion of ancient chroniclers or modern historians only to report what happened, yet they did speak of a fact and an event whose reality lay for them outside their own consciousness and their own faith, whose reality was indeed the origin of their consciousness in remembrance and hope. They did not merely wish to tell of their own new self-understanding in the Easter faith, but in that faith and as a result of it they reported something also about the way of Jesus and about the event of the raising of Jesus. Their statements contain not only existential certainty in the sense of saying, ‘I am certain,’ but also and together with this objective certainty in the sense of saying, ‘It is certain.’ They did not merely proclaim that they believe, and what they believe, but therewith and therein also the fact they have recognized. They are ‘selfless witnesses’, so to speak. Hence it is not by any means self-evident that the point of their statements is the new self-understanding of faith. Rather, the Easter narratives themselves compel us to ask about the reality of the event of which they tell. It is not their own faith, nor the demand for faith or offer of faith bound up with their proclamation, that constitutes the reality underlying their statements, but it is solely the reality of the fact declared and proclaimed that must correspond with their declarations and their proclamation. It would be foreign to the intention of the Easter texts themselves, if the ‘point’ of their statements were to be sought solely in the birth of faith. There can thus be no forbidding the attempt to go behind their kerygma and ask about the reality which underlies their statements and makes them dependable and credible.
Now these questions as to the certainty of the reality which underlies the proclamation of the resurrection and makes it legitimate and credible have all, ever since the collapse of the orthodox way of asserting the truth, taken the form of historical examination. This is in harmony with the texts, in so far as they themselves speak of an event which can be dated. But it is alien to the texts if, and in so far as, the historical form of the question implies a definite anterior understanding of what is historically possible, and one which since the birth of the modern age does not coincide with the understanding which these texts themselves have of the historically possible as being the divinely possible. The concept of the historical, of the historically possible and the historically probable, has been developed in the modern age on the basis of experiences of history other than the experience of the raising of Jesus from the dead-namely, since the Enlightenment, on the basis of the experience of man’s ability to calculate history and to make it. The controversy between the disciples and the Jews was concerned with the question: has God raised him from the dead according to his promises, or can God according to his promises not have raised him? The modern controversy on the resurrection, however, is concerned with the question whether resurrection is historically possible. If, as has frequently been pointed out, it is true that the experiences of history on the basis of which the concepts of the historical have been constructed have nowadays an anthropocentric character, that ‘history’ is here man’s history and man is the real subject of history in the sense of its metaphysical hypokeimenon, then it is plain that on this presupposition the assertion of the raising of Jesus by God is a ‘historically’ impossible and therefore a ‘historically’ meaningless statement. Yet even on this presupposition there is point in asking ‘how far and with what degree of probability the actual facts and the actual course of events can still be ascertained’, even if that brings us to the limits of the historical as these are prescribed by the presupposed view of historic fact as such. Enquiries conducted in the light of the modern concept of the historical lead neither to the fundamental provability of the resurrection nor to fundamental historical scepticism. But they prevent theology from postulating ‘historical’ facts on dogmatic grounds, and they prevent theology from abandoning the ground of history altogether in despair. Neither the historian nor the theologian can allow methods based on the principle that what must not be cannot be.
But now, the historian who enquires into the reality of the resurrection of Jesus is confronted in the biblical texts not only by realities of history, but also with a different outlook on the experience and significance of history, which sets the event here recounted in a different light. The experience of history which is expressed in the historical approach is here confronted not merely by events which are more or less well testified, more or less imaginatively embellished, but this experience of history is confronted also by a different experience of history. Hence the historical question as to the reality of the resurrection of Jesus also recoils upon the historical enquirer and calls in question the basic experience of history which is the ground of his historical enquiry. The historical question as to the historicity of the resurrection of Christ is thereby expanded to include the questionability of the historical approach to history as such. For in the historical question of the resurrection, the texts which tell of the resurrection of Jesus have always a historical view of the world also brought to bear on them. This latter must be subjected to questioning in the process of understanding, as surely as the proclaimed resurrection of Jesus is subjected to historical questioning. Let us therefore now consider the way the historical question as to the resurrection of Jesus recoils upon the questioner.
It is generally acknowledged that historical understanding nowadays is always analogical understanding and must therefore always remain within the realm of what is understandable in terms of analogy. This method of analogy in historical understanding had been ontologically grounded by E. Troeltsch in the ‘correlation which exists between all historical processes’. ‘For the means by which criticism becomes possible at all is the application of analogy. The analogy of that which happens before our eyes … is the key to criticism. The illusions, … the formation of myths, the deceptions, the party spirit, which we see before our eyes, are the means of recognizing such things also in the tradition. Agreement with normal, usual, or at least variously attested, happenings … as we know them, is the mark of probability for happenings which the critic can recognize as really having happened or can leave aside. The observation of analogies between past events of the same kind makes it possible to ascribe probability to them and to interpret the unknown aspects of the one on the basis of the known aspects of the other. The omnipotence thus attaching to analogy implies, however, the basic similarity of all historical events, which is not, of course, identity … but presupposes that there is always a common core of similarity, on the basis of which the differences can be sensed and perceived.’ If historical understanding and historical criticism thus depend on the postulate and presupposition of a fundamental similarity underlying all events, then historical understanding and historical criticism manifestly depend on a specific view of the world. In this view of the world, much as in Greek cosmology, it is presupposed that a ‘common core of similarity’ underlies all the changes and chances of history and that ‘all things are eternally related at heart’. In terms of this core of similarity, however, the historic now becomes only accidental. Historic events become understandable when they are conceived as ‘manifestations’ of this common core of similarity. This, however, is to put an end to their nature as events and to abandon the historic character of history in favour of a metaphysic which sees all historical things in terms of substance. In L. von Ranke and the great historians of romanticism this core was felt to be pantheistic: all ages and all events follow each other in meaningful succession ‘in order that what is not possible to any of them individually may happen in all, in order that the whole fulness of the spiritual life breathed into the human race by the deity should come to light in the course of the centuries’. For H. von Sybel the similarity acquired a mechanistic appearance: ‘The presupposition by which the certainty of knowledge stands or falls is the regulation of all development by absolute laws, the common unity in the constitution of all earthly things.’ So, too, in W. Dilthey’s philosophical hermeneutic of the history of the expressions of human life, historical understanding rests on the presupposed similarity of the underlying, unfathomable life. To be sure, there is no hard and fast nature of man which exists as a self-identical factor anterior to history and independent of it. ‘The human type melts in the process of history.’ But the fact that human existence in itself has a hermeneutic structure proves to be the abiding core that motivates the history of man’s expressions of his life and expositions of his self. From the depths of his creative unfathomableness man must ever again seek and find himself, ever again form and determine himself, and it is this that constitutes that common core of similarity which makes historical understanding possible and also necessary.
In face of this basing of historical understanding on a metaphysical definition of the core, the substance or the subject of history, Christian theology finds itself in grave difficulties as it seeks to reflect upon the proclamation of the resurrection. In face of the pantheistic definition of the nature of history, according to which the eternal idea does not delight to present itself wholly in an individual, it becomes impossible to regard a person and an event in history as absolute. In face of the positivistic and mechanistic definition of the nature of history as a self-contained system of cause and effect, the assertion of a raising of Jesus by God appears as a myth concerning a supernatural incursion which is contradicted by all our experience of the world. And finally, in face of the philosophy of life with its definition of the creative ground of life that manifests and objectifies itself in history, the Easter texts can be taken only as expressions of the life acts of a faith which is in itself unfathomable.
A theology of the resurrection can try several ways of solving the problem of history thus presented to it. If, as is plain from the above few references, the risen Lord does not fit in with our concept of the historical, it is possible to grant that the report of the raising of Jesus by God is ‘unhistorical’ and to look around for other ways for modern, historically determined man to approach to and appropriate the reality of the resurrection. Yet in so doing, the whole realm of our knowledge of history and our dealings with it is abandoned to historical expositions of the world. If the reality of the resurrection cannot be comprehended by the historical means of the modern age, neither is the modern intellectual way of dealing with history theologically comprehensible for faith. The fides quaerens intellectum must then give up all claim to an intellectus fidei in the realm of history. This is primarily done by theology’s leaving aside the historical question as to the reality of the resurrection and concentrating on the second question-the question of the character of witness and of claim that attaches to the proclamation of the Easter faith. It then leaves the knowledge of history to all possible kinds of pantheistic or atheistic principles and concentrates on the personal encounter, the non-objectifiable experience or the existential decision, to which the Easter kerygma leads. ‘Thus we are simply asked whether we believe that in such things (visionary Easter experiences) God acts in the way they themselves believe and in the way the proclamation asserts.’ The word ‘simply’ here plainly recommends the leap from mediating, objectifying, historical knowledge to personal decision. The resurrection of Christ is then to be grasped neither mythically nor historically but ‘only in the category of revelation’. But then the message of the resurrection is left hanging in the air, and so also is the existence affected by it, without it being possible to understand the need for the proclamation and the necessity for decision in face of it at all.
Another possibility is, that we no longer regard the historical method and its view of history as being final and inescapable in its substantio-metaphysical form, and thus veer off into the subjective decision of faith, but that we seek new ways of further developing the historical methods themselves in such a way ‘that they become adequate to grasp the whole of history in all its variety’. Such an extension of the historical approach to history and the historical mediation of it can have an eye to the other side of the analogical process in historical understanding. For indeed the cognitive power of a comparative understanding need not lie merely in recognizing only the similar and common elements amid the dissimilarities in historical events and expressions of life, but can also be directed towards observing what is dissimilar and individual, accidental and suddenly new, in the similar and the like. A one-sided interest in the similar, ever-recurring, typical and regular, would level down the really historic element, which lies in the contingent and new, and would thus end up by losing the feeling for history altogether. The method of understanding by comparison can thus be expanded in the direction of bringing. to light the incomparable, hitherto non-existent and new. To be sure, it comes to light only in the comparison. But if we are to set eyes on it in this comparison, then we must divest ourselves of all hard and fast presuppositions about the core or the substance of history and must regard these ideas themselves as provisional and alterable. But if, as compared with the historical methods that are interested in the regular and the similar, Christian theology were to manifest merely a supplementary interest in the individual, contingent and new, then that would be only an interesting variant in the historical picture of history as a whole, yet one that would be possible and conceivable also without a theology of the resurrection. The rediscovery of the category of the contingent does not in itself necessarily involve the discovery of a theological category. For the raising of Christ involves not the category of the accidentally new, but the expectational category of the eschatologically new. The eschatologically new event of the resurrection of Christ, however, proves to be a novum ultimum both as against the similarity in ever-recurring reality and also as against the comparative dissimilarity of new possibilities emerging in history. To expand the historical approach to the extent of taking account of the contingent does not as yet bring the reality of the resurrection itself into view. It is quite possible to overcome the anthropocentric form of historical analogy, but this does not necessarily give the latter a theological character. Only if the whole historical picture, contingency and continuity and all, could be shown to be in itself not necessary but contingent, should we come within sight of that which can be called the eschatologically new fact of the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection of Christ does not mean a possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence and for history. Only when the world can be understood as contingent creation out of the freedom of God and ex nihilo-only on the basis of this contingentia mundi-does the raising of Christ become intelligible as nova creatio. In view of what is meant and what is promised when we speak of the raising of Christ, it is therefore necessary to expose the profound irrationality of the rational cosmos of the modern, technico-scientific world. By the raising of Christ we do not mean a possible process in world history, but the eschatological process to which world history is subjected.
Finally, theology has the possibility of constructing its own concept of history and its own view of the tale of history on the basis of a theological and eschatological understanding of the reality of the resurrection. Then the theology of the resurrection would no longer be fitted in with an existing concept of history, but an attempt would have to be made, in comparison with and contradistinction to the existing views of history, to arrive at a new understanding of history with the ultimate possibilities and hopes that attach to it on the presupposition of the raising of Christ from the dead. In conflict with other concepts of history, an intellectus fidei resurrectionis must then be developed which makes it possible to speak ‘Christianly’ of God, history and nature. The resurrection of Christ is without parallel in the history known to us. But it can for that very reason be regarded as a ‘history-making event’ in the light of which all other history is illumined, called in question and transformed. The mode of proclaiming and hopefully remembering this event must then be presented as a mode of historical remembrance which is wholly governed by this event both in content and in procedure. It is not that from the hopeful remembrance of this event we then derive general laws of world history, but in remembering this one, unique event, we remember the hope for the future of all world history. Then the resurrection of Christ does not offer itself as an analogy to that which can be experienced any time and anywhere, but as an analogy to what is to come to all. The expectation of what is to come on the ground of the resurrection of Christ, must then turn all reality that can be experienced and all real experience into an experience that is provisional and a reality that does not yet contain within it what is held in prospect for it. It must therefore contradict all rigid substantio-metaphysical definitions of the common core of similarity in world events, and therefore also the corresponding historical understanding that works with analogy. It must develop a historical understanding which works with eschatological analogy as a foreshadowing and anticipation of the future. The raising of Christ is then to be called ‘historic’, not because it took place in the history to which other categories of some sort provide a key, but it is to be called historic because, by pointing the way for future events, it makes history in which we can and must live. It is historic, because it discloses an eschatological future. This assertion must then give proof of itself in conflict with other concepts of history, all of which are ultimately based on other ‘history-making’ events, shocks or revolutions in history.
Here of course there arises an objection in the form of the question whether such theological statements are universally binding. If the modern, historical approach to history is taken as the only one that is possible, honest and binding today, then the view of reality and history which is presupposed by it has to be accepted as inevitable also for theological thought. This view of reality is then ‘imposed upon us by our place in history’. In the society in which Christians and non-Christians live together, it is the axiom within the framework of which alone we are able and willing to ‘understand’. If according to this now universally binding and universally recognized view of reality, scientifically and historically speaking, the gods are silent—or hearing them is optional and left to the individual’s discretion—then a theology of the resurrection can be developed only at a point which is not affected by this view of reality and comes under the aegis of the individual’s subjectivity—which, however, means only in that realm of human subjectivity and inwardness which is set free by the rationalizing of the world and the historicizing of history. A theology of the resurrection can then no longer speak of facts of the resurrection, in terms of a metaphysic of history, but in terms of a metaphysic of subjectivity it can certainly still speak of an Easter faith for which ‘resurrection of Jesus’ is merely an expression of faith, and one that can be left behind in the course of history. In this form the resurrection faith that makes no assertions of the resurrection fits in exactly with the modern world’s view of reality and is in a sense the ultimate religion of our society. If theology on the other hand strives to attain a theological view of history and a revolution in the historical way of thinking, then there is justification for the objection that theology is thereby driven into the ghetto of an esoteric church ideology and can no longer make itself intelligible to anyone else.
But the Church—including theology—is neither the religion of this or that society, nor yet is it a sect. It can neither be required to adapt itself to the view of reality which is generally binding in society at the moment, nor may it be expected to present itself as the arbitrary jargon of an exclusive group and to exist only for believers. As the church is engaged with its surrounding society in a struggle for the truth, so theology, too, has a part in the mission of the church. It must engage with views of history and historical world-views in a struggle for the future of the truth and therefore also in a battle for the reality of the resurrection of Jesus. If in contesting and exploding the modern historical concepts of reality we are wrestling for the mysterious reality of the resurrection of Jesus, then that is no mere wrangle about a detail of the distant past, but this reality becomes the ground for questioning also the historical means of attaining certainty about history. It is a struggle for the future of history and for the right way of recognizing, hoping and working for that future. It is a battle for the recognition of the mission of the present, and for the place and the task of human nature in it.
The point of the historical debate on the resurrection of Christ was never merely historical. Thus the specialist’s question as to the historical reality of the resurrection—‘what can I know?’—points him on to the neighbouring questions, ‘what am I to do?’ and ‘what may I hope for? What future horizon of possibilities and dangers is opened up by past history?’ To put the question of the resurrection in exclusively historical terms is to alienate the texts of the Easter narrative, as we have seen. These, however, as we have seen, alienate the historian from that context of experience of the world in which he seeks to read the texts. All real understanding begins with such alienations.
The critical examination of the resurrection narratives in regard to their historical correctness, which has been usual since the Enlightenment, has been transformed, and largely also supplanted in scholarly interest, by form-critical examination of the narratives. The form-critical approach no longer asks about the historically accessible events which the accounts relate and which possibly made the accounts necessary, but it enquires into the kerygmatic motives which shaped the accounts, and examines their place in the life and conduct of specific societies. It argues from the forms to the life of the society, and from the life of the society to the forms. The real subject of the accounts is then not the matter to be recounted but the social life which finds its expression in them. The form-critical method is originally a sociological method. From its standpoint the Easter texts present themselves primarily as kerygma, as proclamation by the Church in faith and to faith. The texts are found to exist in a specific tradition of proclamation in which, according to the circumstances, the addressees and the opponents, they could be very freely varied in the various stages of the tradition and could to a certain extent be theologically enriched and transformed according to the new situations. The discovery of such kerygmatic transformations in particular elements of the tradition and in the history of the forms in which they are stated in worship, instruction, exhortation, polemic, etc., brought out an abundance of new insights. The question of the underlying events in which they have their ground was not thereby discarded, yet there was a decisive shift in the centre of the researcher’s interest. It was no longer a question of the historicity of the statements in the old sense of historical criticism, but it was now a historical question of the motives and forms of the statements themselves, and of the changes undergone by these motives and forms. Yet the insight into the fact that in these texts we have to do not with historical reports but with testimonies of faith on the part of the primitive Christian Church, is also a historical insight.
The important question for theology arises only when the results of the form-critical analyses of the primitive Christian message are removed from their own historic ground and theologically grounded in a different reality from that of which they speak, when the enquirer has no desire at all to know how things really were, but only how the believers saw them and how they represented them in terms of their faith, when the texts are no longer taken as statements about a reality, but are understood only as expressions of the Church’s faith. Do these pieces of witness and of proclamation have their ground in a new self-understanding of the existence of the witnesses and proclaimers? Is the kerygmatic character of these statements grounded in a revelational commission which can no longer be grasped historically? The form-critical approach clearly provided the possibility of conceiving these statements as grounded elsewhere than in the reality of the events to be proclaimed—the possibility of understanding them no longer as ‘statements about’ something, but as ‘expressions of’ personal or corporate faith. This change of subject has come about through the alliance between form-critical research and dialectical theology, especially in existentialist interpretation since the twenties.
If the reality of the resurrection is not to be conceived as a historically accessible reality, then it can of course still become real for man in another sense of the word ‘reality’. It can be reality for man in the sense in which he is real to himself. It is not from a historical detachment that he becomes aware of his own existential reality, but only in the immediate experience of himself as a reality that has constantly to come about anew. Similarly, the resurrection of Christ then no longer confronts him in the doubtful image of historical tradition and historical reconstructions, but then, in the Easter faith of the disciples and in the proclamation, the resurrection of Christ becomes for him a reality which affects him in the questionableness of his own existence and faces him with a decision. Doubtful as the resurrection may appear from the objectifying standpoint of historical science, it is yet in all closeness and immediacy that the Easter faith of the disciples encounters man in the claim of the proclamation and in the decisive question of faith. The Easter faith of the disciples presents itself as a possibility of existence which we can repeat and re-echo in the questionableness of our own existence. Only in being thus immediately involved by the preaching of faith today, only in beholding the Lord today, only in today obeying his absolute claim, in which salvation is disclosed for today, do we then discover the reality of the resurrection. The ‘reality’ of the resurrection encounters us as word of God, as kerygma, to which we can no longer put the question of its historical legitimacy, but which asks us whether or not we are willing to believe. The message which proclaims Jesus as the risen Lord must convince ‘our heart and conscience’. It must speak of his resurrection in such a way that the latter no longer appears as a historical or mythical event, but as ‘a reality that concerns our own existence’.
Here the question of the ‘reality’ of the resurrection is raised in a way different from that of the historian. The questioner is not concerned to arrive at a historically assured picture of that event, but the question which he puts to the Easter narratives is the questionableness of his own historic existence. He does not stand outside history, in order to survey its correlations, but he stands with his own existence and decisions in the midst of history. His interest in history is therefore identical with his interest in his own historic existence. Hence in this encounter with the Easter texts he will seek an existentialist exegesis in which the exposition of history and the exposition of himself correspond. If, however, the radical questionableness of his own historic existence provides the angle from which he approaches the kerygma of the resurrection, then his question is no longer as to whether the resurrection once took place in terms of possible analogies in world history, but is directed towards the understanding of human existence which comes to expression in these narratives. The place of the substantio-metaphysically conceived common core of similarity in all events, which makes analogical understanding possible, is taken by a similarity in the historic character of human existence, which is conceived in terms of fundamental ontology and makes understanding possible between one existence and another in encounter. That the resurrection actually took place is not thereby denied, but does not lie within the field of interest. That God is not perceptible apart from faith, certainly need not mean that he does not exist apart from faith, nor yet that ‘God’ is merely an ‘expression’ for believing existence, but this question of whether God and his action exist extra nos does not lie within the field of our interest. Of vital interest to our existence, on the other hand, is the Easter faith of the witnesses, and the understanding of existence which emerged in primitive Christianity as a new possibility for human existence. This view of ‘reality’ as an event which concerns existence, or an event that happens ‘to heart and conscience’, can then also lead to a new mode of historical understanding. ‘The Easter event of the resurrection of Christ is not a historical event; the only thing that can be grasped as a historical event is the Easter faith of the first disciples.’ This historical statement is wholly in accord with the theological statement that the Easter faith has no interest in the historical question. ‘For the historical event of the rise of the Easter faith means for us what it meant for the first disciples, namely, the self-manifestation of the risen Lord, the act of God in which the redemption event of the cross is completed.’ This, however, is to shift the ‘reality’ of the resurrection from something that happens to the crucified Jesus to something that happens to the existence of the disciples. The act of God is then the rise of the Easter faith, in so far as this Easter faith understands itself as brought about by the self-manifestation of the risen Lord. The ‘reality’ of the resurrection is then no longer a reality about Jesus, but is identical with the reality of kerygma and faith in a ‘today’ which cannot be historically authenticated but is ever and again without past or future.
It is an undeniably true insight that the Easter narratives are not meant to be ‘narratives’, but to be proclamation directed to faith, and that the reality of the resurrection of Jesus is inseparably bound up with the witness of universal missionary proclamation; but it is an insight that can lead in the way just indicated to no longer enquiring into the historical legitimacy of this proclamation, but putting in place of that an existential verification of it to heart and conscience or to a historic self-understanding in terms of a general historic questionableness of human existence. The transition from form-critical research to existentialist interpretation often proceeds by the following stages:
1. The place of the question, ‘What do the accounts in substance say?’, is taken by the question, ‘Who speaks in these accounts?’
2. Once it has been established that the Church in these accounts and in the forms assumed by them is expressing its relation to Jesus, there follows the further question, ‘How does the Church understand its relation to Jesus?’
3. Once the Church’s christological conceptions of Jesus have been established, the next question is, ‘How does the Church understand itself?’ Then its understanding of Christ is grounded in its understanding of faith, and its understanding of faith is grounded in its self-understanding and is understood as an expression of the self-understanding that is sought by all men. Christology is then the variable, anthropology the constant.
Just as the historical question presupposes a historical approach which sets the proclamation of the resurrection in the alien light of a mere report about the events, so too the question as to the self-understanding announced and expressed in it presupposes an approach from the angle of the general questionableness of human existence, which also sets these texts in an alien light. This whole approach in terms of ‘reality’ as a reality which concerns existence leaves out of account the fact that these texts speak of God and his action on Jesus, and purposely so speak—that they speak of the world and the future and certainly do not mean all this merely as an ‘expression’ of a new self-understanding. The existentialist interpretation examines the texts in order to find the ‘meaning’ of what they say, and takes it for granted from the start that this meaning is existential truth and not factual truth. This is today no doubt a ‘meaningful’ way of appropriating what was then proclaimed, but is not at all in harmony with its own original intention. On the other hand it is not by any means self-evident that ‘understanding’ today must take place only in the context of ‘self-understanding’ of our own particular existence. This is as far from being self-evident as is the modern custom of defining the reality of the world in terms of a hard and fast ‘world picture’ and projecting our age’s concept of a world picture back into ages which had a completely different relation to the world.
The Easter reports in the New Testament proclaim in the form of narrative, and narrate history in the form of proclamation. The modern alternative, reading them either as historical sources or as kerygmatic calls to decision, is foreign to them, as the modern distinction between factual truth and existential truth is also foreign to them. The question therefore arises whether the insights of form-criticism into the fact that, briefly speaking, it was not archivists but missionaries who shaped this tradition, would not have to be combined again in a new way with the intention of the historical question which enquires about the events which this proclamation brings to expression. If the reality of the resurrection of Jesus is transmitted and mediated to us only in the form of missionary proclamation, and this form of transmission and mediation manifestly belongs to the reality of the resurrection itself, then it must be asked whether the inner compulsion to this kind of statement and communication is not grounded in the peculiarity of the event itself. For it cannot really be accounted for as supplement or accident. The reality which stands behind the proclamatory reports must plainly be of such a kind that it compelled proclamation to all peoples and the continual formation of new christological conceptions. The commission and authorization to this universal mission must then be a constitutive part of the very event of which this mission tells. If we no longer ask merely how the Church preached and to what changes the form of its proclamation was subjected, but why it spoke as it did and what provoked its proclamation, then we are on the road to raising the historical question in a new way and seeing the existential truth of faith as grounded in the factual truth of what is to be believed. The question is then no longer whether this proclamation is correct in the ‘historical’ sense, but whether and how the proclamation is legitimated and necessarily called to life by the event of which it speaks. We cannot then merely embark on a historical examination of the past that once was, nor yet merely provide an existentialist interpretation of present claims, but we must enquire into what is open, unfinished, unsettled and outstanding, and consequently into the future announced by this event. If in this event there lies something which has not yet been realized and strains after a particular future, then it is understandable that this event cannot be spoken of in historical detachment in the form of a report on a process complete in itself, but it can be spoken of only in the form of remembrance and hope. If this event of the raising of Jesus can be rightly understood only in conjunction with his universal eschatological future, then the only mode of communication appropriate to this event must be missionary proclamation to all peoples without distinction—a mission which knows itself in the service of the promised future of this event. Only missionary proclamation does justice to the historical and eschatological character of this event. It is, in the light of this event, the only appropriate way of experiencing history, historic existence and historic expectation.
What unites our present age with past ages in history is, to the extent that we have here a ‘historic’ relationship, not a common core of similarity nor a general historic character attaching to human existence as such, but the problem of the future. The meaning of each several present becomes clear only in the light of hopes for the future. Hence a ‘historic’ relationship to history will not seek merely to illumine the factual sequences of events and their laws, nor merely to explore past possibilities of existence in order possibly to repeat them, but will search the reality of the past for the possibilities that lie within it. Unborn future lies in the past. Fulfilled past can be expected from the future. Positivistic historicism reduces history to realities that can be dated and localized, without noticing the realm of future possibilities that surrounds these realities so long as they are ‘historic’ realities. We have here a process of exclusion and abstraction which the historian can and must employ in order to reach plain conclusions, but he must also always be clear that his picture is painted in perspective. The existentialist interpretation on the other hand seeks the existential possibilities attaching to past existence in order to repeat and re-echo them, yet without noticing that they are made possible by events which institute history and provide the gateway to the historic character of existence. This, too, is a process of exclusion and abstraction which the interpreter must employ in order to reach conclusions, but he, too, must always be clear that his picture is painted in perspective. Beyond both historicism and existentialism stands the attempt to find the ground of historic phenomena neither in a positivistic system of laws nor in the historic character of human existence, but to see them in their significance for the future. This does not mean that the future, and indeed eschatological, significance of historic phenomena is confined within the framework of a teleology of universal history. Nor does it mean that the future of historic phenomena is exhausted in a present summoned to responsibility by the future. ‘Meaning’ (Bedeuten) is something which strains and stretches towards that which it seeks to indicate (be-deuten), to announce and to pre-figure, and which is not yet present in all its fulness. We know historic phenomena in their own peculiar historic character only when we perceive their meaning for ‘their’ future. Only in that light do we then also attain to a perception of their meaning for our future and to the perception of our meaning for their future.
In this sense the event of the raising of Christ from the dead is an event which is understood only in the modus of promise. It has its time still ahead of it, is grasped as a ‘historic phenomenon’ only in its relation to its future, and mediates to those who know it a future towards which they have to move in history. Hence the reports of the resurrection will always have to be read also eschatologically in the light of the question, ‘What may I hope for?’ It is only with this third question that our remembrance and the corresponding historical knowledge are set within a horizon appropriate to the thing to be remembered. It is only in the light of this question that the historic character of existence and the corresponding self-understanding are set within a horizon appropriate to the history which provides the ground of, and the gateway to, the historic character of existence.
Experience and judgment are always bound up with a horizon of openness towards reality, in which a thing comes to view and can be experienced and in which judgments become meaningful. A horizon of this kind contains a certain anterior knowledge of that which we learn. It is not a closed system, but includes also open questions and anticipations and is therefore open towards the new and the unknown. Horizons of this kind can come from our traditions, and they can also arise from the context of our own experience and our familiarity with the world. They can arise out of the incalculable significance attaching to specific experiences we have undergone, and they can also have their source in ideas of our own which we use for the purpose of attaining to knowledge of history. Without a horizon of this kind, and in abstraction from it, no event can be experienced and stated.
In the resurrection narratives experience and judgment manifestly take place within a decidedly eschatological horizon of expectations, hopes and questions about the promised future. The very designations ‘raising’, ‘resurrection’, etc., contain a whole world of memories and hopes. Thus the resurrection narratives do not stand directly within a cosmological horizon of questions as to the origin, meaning and nature of the world. Nor do they stand directly within an existentialist horizon of questions as to the origin, meaning and nature of human existence. Nor, finally, do they stand directly within a general theological horizon of questions as to the nature and appearance of the deity. They stand directly within the special horizon of prophetic and apocalyptic expectations, hopes and questions about that which according to the promises of this God is to come. What is spotlighted in the resurrection appearances is therefore expounded in terms of the earlier promises, and this exposition in turn takes place in the form of prophetic proclamation of, and eschatological outlook towards, the future of Christ which was spotlighted in these appearances. Christian eschatology arose from the Easter experience, and Christian prophecy determined the Easter faith. But Christian eschatology expounded and expressed the Easter experiences in recalling and taking up the earlier promises and—in regard to Jesus himself—in recalling and taking up what had earlier been promised and proclaimed. The Easter appearances are bound up with this eschatological horizon, both in that which they presuppose and call to mind and also in that which they themselves prefigure and provoke. The question of the divinity of God, the question of the worldliness of the world and the question of the human nature of man are not thereby rendered irrelevant, but in the light of the Easter appearances they are set within a peculiar horizon, both in regard to the way they are asked and also in regard to the point at which the answer is sought. To the extent that the earlier promises become general and universal in the resurrection event, these questions concerning the universal become relevant. But to the extent that this universality and generality appears in the Easter event in eschatological form, i.e. in hope and in looking forward, the questions are asked in a different way, and they are no longer answered on the basis of experience of the world, of man’s experience of himself, or of the concept of God, but on the basis of the event of the resurrection and within the eschatological horizon of this event.
Christian eschatology differs from Old Testament faith in the promise, as also from prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology, by being Christian eschatology and speaking of ‘Christ and his future’. It is related in content to the person of Jesus of Nazareth and the event of his raising, and speaks of the future for which the ground is laid in this person and this event. Christian eschatology does not examine the general future possibilities of history. Nor does it unfold the general possibilities of human nature in its dependence on the future. It is therefore right to emphasize that Christian eschatology is at heart Christology in an eschatological perspective.
While it is true that in the Easter experiences the modes of experiencing the ‘revelation of Jesus Christ’, and the forms of communicating it, incorporate apocalyptic ideas and hopes from the tradition of late Judaism, yet it is equally true that the content of this revelation breaks the bounds of late Jewish apocalyptic. For what God made manifest, according to the statements of the Easter narratives, was not the course of history, not the secrets of the higher world of heaven, not the outcome of the future world judgment, but the future of the crucified Christ for the world. Christian eschatology or eschatological Christology is therefore not to be understood as a special case of general apocalyptic. Christian eschatology is not Christianized apocalyptic. The adoption of apocalyptic ideas and apocalyptic hopes in the Easter narratives and in the Easter theology of the primitive Church is plainly eclectic. Specific memories are aroused by this event and are recalled along with the Easter proclamation, while others are dropped. Particular ideas of God’s revelation of the end are used, yet the Weltanschauung of late Jewish apocalyptic and its attitude to life are not restored as a whole. ‘Resurrection from the dead’ does, to be sure, also belong to the apocalyptic expectations of God’s revelation of the end, but certainly not in every case and not even centrally. When, however, Jesus is described as ‘the firstfruits of them that slept’, then that goes beyond the bounds of apocalyptic inasmuch as it means that the raising of the dead has already taken place in this one case for all, and that the raising was performed not on one faithful to the law but on one who was crucified, and consequently future resurrection is to be expected not from obedience to the law but from the justification of sinners and from faith in Christ. The central place of the Torah in late Jewish apocalyptic is thus taken by the person and the cross of Christ. The place of life in the law is taken by fellowship with Christ in the following of the crucified one. The place of the self-preservation of the righteous from the world is taken by the mission of the believer to the world. The place of the Torah shining in the light of the fulness of divine glory is taken by the ἀποκάλυψις κυρίου, the judgment seat of Jesus Christ before whom all things will be revealed. It is not that the secrets of what awaits world history and the cosmos at the end of time are disclosed in advance according to a heavenly plan—‘what shall befall thy people in the latter days’ (Dan. 10:14)—but the universal future of the lordship of the crucified Christ over all is spotlighted in the Easter appearances. Yet the Old Testament, prophetic and apocalyptic expectation of a universal revelation and glorification of God in all things is still maintained. Thus the adoption and recalling of apocalyptic ideas and apocalyptic expectations does not by any means lead to levelling down the uniqueness of the Christ event, but it becomes possible to state the eschatological ‘once for all’ by means of recalling the earlier promises.
The Christian hope for the future comes of observing a specific, unique event—that of the resurrection and appearing of Jesus Christ. The hopeful theological mind, however, can observe this event only in seeking to span the future horizon projected by this event. Hence to recognize the resurrection of Christ means to recognize in this event the future of God for the world and the future which man finds in this God and his acts. Wherever this recognition takes place, there comes also a recalling of the Old Testament history of promise now seen in a critical and transforming light. Christian eschatology, which seeks to span the inexhaustible future of Christ, does not set the event of the resurrection within a framework of apocalyptic and world history. Rather, it examines the inner tendency of the resurrection event, asking what rightly can and must be expected from the risen and exalted Lord. It enquires about the mission of Christ and the intention of God in raising him from the dead. It recognizes as the inner tendency of this event his future lordship over every enemy, including death. ‘For he must reign …’ (1 Cor. 15:25). It recognizes as the outer tendency, or as the consequence of this tendency, its own mission: ‘The gospel must be published among all nations’ (Mark 13:10). Christian eschatology speaks of the future of Christ which brings man and the world to light. It does not, on the contrary, speak of a world history and a time which brings Christ to light, nor yet of man whose good will Christ brings to light. It is therefore out of the question to classify the resurrection event among the events of world history and apocalyptic and to give a date for his future or his coming again. It is not that ‘time’ brings his day and it is not that history proves him right, but he guides time to his day. The return of Christ does not come ‘of itself’, like the year 1965, but comes from himself, when and as God will according to his promise. It is therefore also out of the question to eternalize the openness of the Christian hope towards the future. There is an end to the openness of Christian existence, for it is not openness for a future that remains empty, but it presupposes the future of Christ and finds in that future its fulfilment.
One could say that Christian eschatology is the study of the tendency of the resurrection and future of Christ and therefore leads immediately to the practical knowledge of mission. In that case it is false to lay down the alternative: either apocalyptic calculation of the times and apocalyptic belief in a final destiny, or else the ethic of hope. The speculative interpretation of history on the part of cosmic apocalyptic is not simply replaced by a moral eschatology. To be sure, alternatives of this kind do appear in many sayings: Ye know not when the end cometh, therefore watch and pray. Nevertheless, experiences of history are important for Christian eschatology. These are the experiences involved in relation to Jesus and his mission—namely, persecution, accusation, suffering and martyrdom. The Revelation of John and also the Little Apocalypse of Mark 13 show that what we have here is not merely apocalyptic speculations or moral appeals, but an eschatological grasp of that history which is to be expected, and is experienced, in martyrdom in the mission of Christ. Thus the experiential content of Christian eschatology is not that ‘world history’ which is arrived at by exploring and comparing great events of world history and stringing them together in a temporal succession to form an apocalyptic system of universal history; rather, it comprises the experiences which are undergone in the course of the mission undertaken in world history ‘to all peoples’. The Christian consciousness of history is not a consciousness of the millennia of all history, in some mysterious knowledge of a divine plan for history, but it is a missionary consciousness in the knowledge of a divine commission, and is therefore a consciousness of the contradiction inherent in this unredeemed world, and of the sign of the cross under which the Christian mission and the Christian hope stand.
The Easter appearances of Christ are manifestly phenomena of vocation. That is why the knowledge of Jesus Christ and the knowledge of his mission and future coincide in them. That, too, is why self-knowledge and the knowledge of being called and sent into his future also coincide. The horizon within which the resurrection of Christ becomes knowable as ‘resurrection’, is the horizon of promise and mission, beckoning us on to his future and the future of his lordship. It is only in this context, on this basis and for this reason, that these other questions arise concerning the future of world history. Hence they arise in the form of the question as to the destiny of ‘Israel and the nations’, and are answered at that cardinal point in history constituted by the crucifixion of Christ by Jews and Gentiles and his resurrection for Jews and Gentiles. They are answered within the horizon of the mission of Christ and the mission of the Jewish and Gentile church.
It is only in this context, too, that the question of ‘true human nature’ arises—the question of what makes man to be true man—and is answered by the disclosure of a way, a promise and a future in which ‘the truth’ comes to man and he himself is brought into the truth. Communion with Christ, the new being in Christ, proves to be the way for man to become man. In it true human nature emerges, and the still hidden and unfulfilled future of human nature can be sought in it. This is an openness of human existence towards the world and towards the future—an openness grounded, manifested and kept alive by that openness of the revelation of God which is announced in the event of the resurrection of Christ and in which this event points beyond itself to an eschaton of the fulness of all things. The openness of Christian existence is not a special case of general human openness. It is not a special form of the cor inquietum, the restless heart that is part of man’s created makeup. Rather, the historic and history-making cor inquietum of man arises from the promissio inquieta, and clings to it and is dependent on it. The resurrection of Christ goes on being a promissio inquieta until it finds rest in the resurrection of the dead and a totality of new being. Through the knowledge of the resurrection of the crucified the contradiction that is always and everywhere perceptible in an unredeemed world, and the sorrow and suffering caused by that world, are taken up into the confidence of hope, while on the other hand hope’s confidence becomes earthly and universal. Any kind of docetic hope which leaves earthly conditions or corporeal existence to the mercy of their own contradictoriness and restricts itself to the Church, to the cultus or to believing inwardness, is therefore a denial of the cross. The hope that is born of the cross and the resurrection transforms the negative, contradictory and torturing aspects of the world into terms of ‘not yet’, and does not suffer them to end in ‘nothing’.
How are the cross and resurrection of Jesus, that is to say, the historical and eschatological notes, combined with each other in the Easter proclamation?
None of the Easter narratives goes back any further than to the appearance of the risen Lord. Nowhere is the actual process of the raising of Jesus described in a historicizing or mythological way. What actually happened between the experience of his crucifixion and burial and his Easter appearances, is left in the darkness of the still unknown and still hidden God. Yet this event that took place between the two experiences of the cross of Jesus and his living appearance was already very early described as ‘raising from the dead’. It is covered by a term for which there is no basis in experience hitherto and elsewhere. That is to say, it is described as something for which there are no analogies in the history we know, but only apocalyptic promises and hopes that where death is concerned God will give proof of his divinity at the last. ‘Raising of the dead’ is an expression which looks expectantly towards the future proof of God’s creative power over the non-existent. What ‘resurrection of the dead’ really is, and what ‘actually happened’ in the raising of Jesus, is thus a thing which not even the New Testament Easter narratives profess to know. From the two mutually radically contradictory experiences of the cross and the appearances of Jesus, they argue to the event in between as an eschatological event for which the verifying analogy is as yet only in prospect and is still to come. That is, they use the term ‘raising’ to express not only a judgment about something that happened to Jesus, but at the same time also an eschatological expectation. This expectation is fulfilled in Jesus’ own case in the experiences of the cross and of the appearances, and yet it still remains an expectation and a hope that precedes our own experience of being raised.
Now there is more to be said about the process of the raising of the crucified than merely that it is an eschatological mystery and that the assertions of the disciples have to be believed. The disciples’ proclamation that he was raised from the dead does not arise from peculiar powers of imagination or from a unique kind of inspiration, but it arises from, and is made necessary by, the comparing of the two contradictory experiences which they have of Christ. The experience of the cross of Jesus means for them the experience of the god-forsakenness of God’s ambassador—that is, an absolute nihil embracing also God. The experience of the appearance of the crucified one as the living Lord therefore means for them the experience of the nearness of God in the god-forsaken one, of the divineness of God in the crucified and dead Christ—that is, a new totality which annihilates the total nihil. The two experiences stand in a radical contradiction to each other, like death and life, nothing and everything, godlessness and the divinity of God. But how can it be possible to identify both experiences in one and the same person without resolving either the one experience or the other and making it of no account?
If this process of identification is to be made intelligible, then we must surely start from the fact that in the Easter appearances we have not merely dumb visions, but at the same time, and at bottom no doubt first and foremost, so-called auditions as well. This is indicated by the fact that these visions were entirely a matter of vocatory visions. Without the speaking and hearing of words it would have been unlikely—indeed impossible—to identify the one who appeared with the crucified Jesus. Without words spoken and heard the Easter appearances would have remained ghostly things. The appearances—for such things also exist elsewhere in the history of religion—would have been taken as hierophanies of a strange, new heavenly Being, if they had not been coupled with the speaking of the one who appeared here. The phenomenon of primitive Christian ecstasy shows that this possibility of understanding the Easter appearances as hierophanies of a new, divine spiritual Being was one that lay very close to hand. Moreover, it is surely a fact that the appearances themselves hardly provided the possibility of identifying the one who appeared with the one who was crucified. This possibility will therefore have to be looked for in what is said by the one who appeared. What he said must have contained something in the nature of a self-identification (‘It is I’). In that case the self-identification of the one who appears in the glory of the promised divine life with the one who was crucified can be regarded as an act of the self-revelation of Jesus. The fundamental event in the Easter appearances then manifestly lies in the revelation of the identity and continuity of Jesus in the total contradiction of cross and resurrection, of god-forsakenness and the nearness of God. That is why the whole New Testament can assert that the disciples at Easter did not see a new heavenly Being of some kind, but Jesus himself. The Lord who is believed and proclaimed at Easter therefore stands in continuity with the earthly Jesus who had come and been crucified—a continuity which must repeatedly be sought and formulated anew and can never be surrendered. The sole bridge of continuity between the primitive Christian proclamation and the history and proclamation of Jesus himself is via the raising of the one who was crucified. This is a continuity in radical discontinuity, or an identity in total contradiction. The enigma of this mysterious identity between the crucified and the risen Christ is manifestly the driving force in the christological controversies of primitive Christianity. In all its repeatedly obvious questionableness it is really the constant factor in the christological controversies. The following possibilities arising here are erroneous:
1. The earthly, crucified Jesus is completely swallowed up in the heavenly being of the risen and exalted Lord. The memory of his words and his death is so overrun and choked out by visions of his present heavenly being, that the harshness of the godlessness of Good Friday is no longer noticed. This tendency led to Docetism.
2. The Easter appearances are taken merely as divine confirmation of the claims of the dead prophet, so that while his words certainly go on working, yet he himself does not. Then the ‘resurrection’ is merely the legitimation and interpretation of the historical. The line of continuity runs from the words of the dead Master to the proclamation of the Church which carries on what he said. His death is so to speak cancelled out by the divine confirmation in the Easter appearances. The abiding continuity is then of a direct and repetitive kind and bypasses the cross and resurrection in favour of Jesus’ understanding of himself or of existence. Then the Easter appearances are not signs of something new that happens to Jesus, but mean the birth of faith in Jesus’ message. This tendency led to Ebionitism.
3. Jesus Christ, crucified yesterday, risen today, is in both modes of his appearing the ‘same’. Then cross and resurrection are merely two modes of being, which belong to his one, eternal, and in itself unchangeable person. His earthly death and his risen life then become relative to the one substance of his person, which in itself would stand beyond death and life. This view, as suggested above all by the Christology of the ancient Church, perceives neither the deadliness of his death nor the startling newness of his resurrection. This tendency led to Modalism.
With an eye on these ideas we shall have to say that the identity of Jesus can be understood only as an identity in, but not above and beyond, cross and resurrection—that is, that it must remain bound up with the dialectic of cross and resurrection. In that case the contradictions between the cross and the resurrection are an inherent part of his identity. Then the resurrection can neither be reduced to the cross, as showing its meaning, nor can the cross be reduced to the resurrection, as its preliminary. It is formally a question of a dialectical identity which exists only through the contradiction, and of a dialectic which exists in the identity.
The apocalyptic expression ‘raising from the dead by God’ introduces a verb form into the adjectival qualifications of the person as ‘crucified’ and ‘risen’. In the act of raising by God, Jesus is identified as the crucified one who is raised. In that case the point of identification lies not in the person of Jesus, but extra se in the God who creates life and new being out of nothing. He is then wholly dead and wholly raised. For this kind of thinking, the self-revelation of Jesus in his appearances includes the revelation of the divinity and faithfulness of God. In that case we must say that in this event which is experienced in the crucifixion and the Easter appearances, God confesses to God and reveals his faithfulness. Then, however, this event which is revealed in the cross and the Easter experiences points back to the promises of God and forwards to an eschaton in which his divinity is revealed in all. It must then be understood as the eschatological coming to pass of the faithfulness of God, and at the same time as the eschatological authentication of his promise and as the dawning of its fulfilment. It is a logical consequence of this, that then the future of Christ is not only awaited in his universal glorification, but that his lordship is subordinated to the eschatological revelation of the divinity of God in all that is and in all that is not, as Paul suggests in 1 Cor. 15:28. What happened between the cross and the Easter appearances is then an eschatological event which has its goal in future revelation and universal fulfilment. It points beyond itself, and even beyond Jesus, to the coming revelation of the glory of God. Then Jesus identifies himself in the Easter appearances as the coming one, and his identity in cross and resurrection points the direction for coming events and makes a path for them. The Lord who appears as risen is not then recognized as one who is eternalized or clothed in heavenly glory, but he appears in the foreglow of the coming, promised glory of God. What happened to him is understood as the dawn and assured promise of the coming glory of God over all, as the victory of life from God over death. Cross and resurrection are then not merely modi in the person of Christ. Rather, their dialectic is an open dialectic, which will find its resolving synthesis only in the eschaton of all things. If, on the other hand, cross and resurrection are seen as distinctions in the eternal person of Jesus, then what happened between the cross and Easter is not understood as a revelation of the divinity of God in face of death, and is no longer taken as a creative act of God, but is understood as the αὐτοβασιλεία of Jesus: the crucified has arisen. Moreover, he has arisen without any special interference on God’s part, because he is himself God. This view, however, turns Easter into the birth of a new cultic Kyrios, and can assert itself only with the greatest difficulty over against the real experience of the existing lordship of death and the powers of annihilation over men.
The fact that the one who appears is heard to speak contains, if we would sum up the Easter narratives, not only the element of self-identification, but also a constant note of mission and promise. The appearances of the risen Lord were experienced by those involved as a commission to service and mission in the world, but not as blissful experiences of union with the divine Being appearing here. The commission to apostolic service in the world was held to be the word of the risen Lord. His appearances were vocatory appearances by which the men involved were set to follow the footsteps of the mission of Jesus. By the revelation of the risen Lord the men involved were identified with the mission of Jesus and thus placed in the midst of a history which is instituted and determined by the mission of Jesus and by his future as revealed and made an object of hope in the fore-glow of Easter. The perceiving of the event of resurrection which took place in him thus led by logical necessity to a perception of their own mission and their own future. This is really intelligible only when the mystery of the person of Jesus and of his history in the cross and resurrection is grasped from the standpoint of his mission and in the light of God’s future for the world, which his mission serves. Only when his history is thus seen as determined by the eschaton, and only when our own consciousness of history takes the form of a consciousness of mission, can the raising of Jesus from the dead be called ‘historic’. His enigmatic identity in the contradiction of cross and resurrection has therefore to be understood as an eschatological identity. The titles of Christ which are used to express it anticipate his future. They are therefore not hard and fast titles which define who he was and is, but open and flexible titles, so to speak, which announce in terms of promise what he will be. They are therefore at the same time also dynamic titles. They are stirred and stirring ideas of mission, which seek to point men to their work in the world and their hope in the future of Christ.
If we now ask what the future of the risen Christ contains by way of promise and expectation, then we discover promises whose content is already lit up in certain outline by the prophetic expectations of the Old Testament, but whose form is determined by the words, the suffering and the death of Christ. The future of Christ which is to be expected can be stated only in promises which bring out and make clear in the form of foreshadowing and prefigurement what is hidden and prepared in him and his history. In this case, too, promise stands between knowing and not knowing, between necessity and possibility, between that which is not yet and that which already is. The knowledge of the future which is kindled by promise is therefore a knowledge in hope, is therefore prospective and anticipatory, but is therefore also provisional, fragmentary, open, straining beyond itself. It knows the future in striving to bring out the tendencies and latencies of the Christ event of the crucifixion and resurrection, and in seeking to estimate the possibilities opened up by this event. Here the Easter appearances of the crucified Christ are a constant incitement to the consciousness that hopes and anticipates, but on the other hand also suffers and is critical of existence. For these ‘appearances’ make visible something of the eschatological future of the Christ event, and therefore cause us to seek and search for the future revelation of this event. Thus knowledge of Christ becomes anticipatory, provisional and fragmentary knowledge of his future, namely, of what he will be. All the titles of Christ point messianically forward in this sense. On the other hand, knowledge of the future has its stimulus nowhere else than in the riddle of Jesus of Nazareth. It will thus be knowledge of Christ in the urge to know who he is and what is hidden and prepared in him.
If, however, we take the absconditum sub cruce as latency and the revelatum in resurrectione as tendency, if we enquire about the intention of God in the mission of Jesus, then we light upon what was promised beforehand. The missio of Jesus becomes intelligible only by the promissio. His future, in the light of which he can be recognized as what he is, is illuminated in advance by the promise of the righteousness of God, the promise of life as a reult of resurrection from the dead, and the promise of the kingdom of God in a new totality of being.
Righteousness means ‘being in order’, standing in the right relationship; it means correspondence and harmony and is to that extent akin to ‘truth’. But righteousness also means ‘being able to stand’, having subsistence, finding a basis on which to exist, and is to that extent akin to existence as such. Righteousness in the Old Testament does not mean agreement with an ideal norm or with the logos of eternal being, but describes a historic communal relationship which is founded on promise and faithfulness. When Israel praises the righteousness of God, then it thankfully remembers his faithfulness to his covenant promises as it has taken practical shape in the history of Israel. Yahweh’s righteousness is his faithfulness to the covenant. That is why his righteousness ‘happens’, and why one can ‘tell’ it and trust in it for the future and expect ‘salvation’ from this righteousness. In trusting in God’s faithfulness to this covenant, and in living in accordance with his covenant in promise and statute, men do right by God and are set right. They are set right not only in relation to God, but also in their mutual relationships and in relation to things. This history of the divine righteousness is manifestly recognized not only in Israel’s own history and not only in human history, but in the history and the destiny of the whole of God’s creation. By the righteousness of God is meant the way in which in freedom he remains true to his statutes, his word and his works and gives them subsistence. The righteousness of God requires everything that owes its existence to the action of God, that is, the whole creation. The righteousness of God is the essence of its stability and the ground of its subsistence. Without his justice and faithfulness nothing can exist, but everything is swallowed up in nothingness. Hence God’s righteousness is universal. It is concerned with the justification of life and with the ground of the existence of all things. If we expect the righteousness of God to set man right with himself, with his fellows and with the whole of creation, then it can become the summary expression for a universal, all-inclusive eschatology which expects from the future of righteousness a new being for all things. The righteousness of God then refers not merely to a new order for the existing world, but provides creation as a whole with a new ground of existence and a new right to life. Hence with the coming of the righteousness of God we can expect also a new creation.
In the New Testament the divine righteousness is accordingly understood by Paul as God’s faithfulness in communal relationships, as an event brought about by God, and as an event from which there arises a new creation and new life. Paul sees this divine righteousness as revealed in the gospel (Rom. 1:17) and grasped in faith. It is the christological gospel of the cross and of the raising of Christ by God. In this event divine righteousness is revealed for the unrighteous and justification of life (Rom. 5:18) for those who, both in a juridical and in an ontological sense, cannot stand before the wrath of God. It is the eschatological gospel, which imputes this divine righteousness ‘that must be hoped for’ (Gal. 5:5) as now already present and as savingly at work in the wrath of God that is now being revealed. It is, finally, the universal gospel, which is oriented towards the new creation that fulfils all things, sets them right with God and so gives them status and being.
Divine righteousness ‘happens’ here, and the gospel reveals it by proclaiming the event of the obedience of Jesus even to the death of the cross, by proclaiming the event of his surrender to this death, and by proclaiming his resurrection and his life as the coming of the divine righteousness to the unjust. The realization and revelation of a new divine righteousness for sinners thus becomes the mystery of Jesus Christ which is disclosed in the promise of the gospel: ‘delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification’ (Rom. 4:25). ‘He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him’ (2 Cor. 5:21). Thus there takes place in him reconciliation of the unreconciled by God. It is important here to see that this divine righteousness has its ground both in the event of the cross and in that of the resurrection, that is, both in his death and in his life. A one-sided theology of the cross would attain only to the gospel of the remissio peccatorum, but not to the promissio of the new righteousness whose life is grounded in his life and whose future consists in the future of his lordship. ‘In that he died, he died unto sin once (ἐφάπαξ): but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom. 6:10–11). The divine righteousness which is here revealed finds its measure not in the sin it forgives, but in that new life in the glory of the risen and exalted Christ which it promises and to which it points.
Along with this goes the fact that since the gospel of divine righteousness has its ground in the dying and living of Jesus, sin and death are seen together. ‘The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom. 6:23, cf. 1 Cor. 15:55ff.). Sin is therefore to be understood as unrighteousness, as having no ground and no rights, as being unable to stand. This includes both being lost in revolt against God and in falsehood, and also dying and being swallowed up in nothingness. The divine righteousness which is revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus accordingly embraces both reconciliation with God and justification of life. It embraces forgiveness of guilt and annihilation of the destiny of death. It embraces reconciliation and redemption of the mortal body. It takes place in the pledge of reconciliation and the promise of quickening. Since Jesus’ resurrection and his exaltation to be Lord is not yet the consummation of his lordship, but the ground and guarantee of his liberating and remedial lordship over all, so the divine righteousness is present in faith and in baptism, yet in such a way that it is engaged in a process which will be completed only at the parousia of Christ. In this process we have the divine righteousness here always as a gift that is pledged, disputed and subject to testing, that is, we have it in terms of promise and expectancy. Then, however, the promised divine righteousness sets us on a path whose tension and whose goal it announces. It is this eschatological differentiation in the revelation of Christ in gospel and promise that forms the ground of the historic and ethical statements in which Paul speaks of ‘grace reigning through righteousness’ (Rom. 5:21), of the ‘ministration of righteousness’ (2 Cor. 3:9, cf. Rom. 6:13), and of ‘submission unto righteousness’ (Rom. 10:3). Divine righteousness is not merely a gift that has been made manifest, but means also the power of the Giver which is at work in the life of the believer. That is why the man who is justified begins to suffer under the contradiction of this world with which he has a bodily solidarity, for he must in obedience seek the divine righteousness in his body, on earth, and in all creatures.
If the divine righteousness of God means that in communal relationships he is faithful to his promise and to the work of his hands, then justification has finally not only the sense that the unjust is given a right to stand before God and to endure in his judgment, but it has contrariwise also a theological sense—namely, that in this event God attains his rights over against his creation. Luther, in his Lectures on Romans in 1516, had sought to interpret this as a reciprocal event of justificatio Dei activa et passiva: justification means that God justifies man by grace and that man acknowledges God’s justice in confessing his sins, so that in this reciprocal event not only the sinner but God, too, is given his rights. 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.
Expectation of life and recognition of death are immediately bound up together in love. It is only in the things a man loves that he can be hurt, and it is only in love that man suffers and recognizes the deadliness of death. What sort of expectation of life and what sort of experience of death were quickened by the promises of Israel?
It is a widely established and surprising fact that ‘Yahwism turned with a special intolerance against all forms of the cult of death’. ‘It is surprising that for long the Jews had no thoughts or dreams about the last agony. They were as much a this-worldly people as the Greeks, and yet their life was incomparably more vigorously determined by future goals.’ In this enigmatic fact that Israel’s religion of promise clings with obstinate exclusiveness to the historic and this-worldly fulfilment of the promises, we have the 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. 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. 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.
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.’ 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 fulfilment 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 nonexistent, 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 therefore 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 expectation 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.’ 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’ (2 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 fulfilment, 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 towards 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. In the struggle for obedience and for what is due to God in the body he discovers the contradiction of the flesh and his subjection to the hostile powers of annihilation and death. In beginning to hope for the triumph of life and to wait for resurrection, he perceives the deadliness of death and can no longer put up with it. The corporeality which thus comes to the fore in hope is plainly the starting point for the solidarity of the believer with the whole of creation which, like him, is subjected to vanity—in hope. This corporeality, for the redemption of which the man of hope waits because it has not yet taken place, is the existential starting point for the universality that marks the Christian hope and for the as yet undetermined character of what is hoped for. The hope of the redemption of the body and the hope of the redemption of all creation from vanity are one. Hence it is on this hope of the redemption of the body that the universality which belongs to the Christian hope depends. On the other hand, in the contradictions of the body, in the painful difference between what he hopes and what he experiences, the man of hope perceives that his hoped-for future is still outstanding. Hence it is on the difference between hope and bodily reality that the wide open, future character of the Christian hope depends. The cosmic ideas of Christian eschatology are therefore not by any means mythological, but reach forward into the open realm of possibilities ahead of all reality, give expression to the ‘expectation of the creature’ for a nova creatio, and provide a prelude for eternal life, peace and the haven of the reconciliation of all things. They bring to light not only what future means in man’s ‘openness towards the world’, but also what future means in the world’s ‘openness towards man’ (cf. the relation of correspondence between the ‘expectation of the creature’ and the ‘liberty of the children of God’ in Rom. 8:20ff.).
In the light of the differences which the hope of resurrection and of reconciled, perfect life finds in the existing reality of man and the world as at present experienced, and which it reveals in all their negativity, the positive side of the future for which it hopes for man and the world, for spirit and body, for Israel and the nations, can be expressed in the first instance as negation of the negative. The ‘new heaven and new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness’ (2 Peter 3:13), the promise that ‘God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain’ (Rev. 21:4), the face unveiled in the glory of God (2 Cor. 2:16) and the body glorified by the Spirit of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:35ff)—these are representations and pictures of this kind, in which the future is re-‘pre’-sented and ‘pro’-mised in contrast to the experiences of a negative present. These ideas and pictures are fragments from a life that has been unmasked in all its flaws by hope and is therefore one of suffering. The book of Revelation is the book of the martyrs. These ideas and pictures may well be conditioned by their time—they are, and must be, if they would be critical of their time—yet they are used with the intention of expressing something which goes completely beyond the status quo and sets things on the move.
As long as ‘every thing’ is not ‘very good’, the difference between hope and reality remains, and faith remains irreconciled and must press towards the future in hope and suffering. Thus the promise of life through the resurrection of Christ also brings us within the tendency of the Spirit who quickens men in suffering and whose goal is the praise of the new creation. This is something like ‘progressive revelation’ or ‘self-realizing eschatology’, only it is a case of the progressus gratiae itself. It is not objective time that brings the progress. It is not human activity that makes the future. It is the inner necessity of the Christ event itself, the tendency of which is finally to bring out in all things the eternal life latent in him and the justice of God latent in him.
The real heart of eschatology, and the basic concept which it constantly employs with varying content, is doubtless to be found in the promise and expectation of what is known as the ‘kingdom of God’ and the ‘lordship of God’. It is plain that even in the early days of Israel, the hope which has its ground in the promise is directed towards the lordship of Yahweh. It is in his real, historic lordship that his glory manifests itself. It is in the faithful and powerful fulfilment of his promises that he manifests himself as himself, as God and Lord. Bound up with the expectation of the lordship of God is the expectation that his people, mankind, and all that he has made will attain to salvation, peace, happiness, life—in a word, to what it was truly meant to be. Faith in his lordship finds its expression in the confession that Yahweh is king (Judg. 8:23). If we go back to the nomadic period of the Israelite tribes, then we find the idea that Yahweh is the Leader who goes before his people, that he rules them by leading them as a shepherd, issuing commands, giving counsel and announcing his will for the future. Thus his lordship does not mean in the first instance a worldly kingship over the natural world around man, but leadership towards the lands of promise, and thus a historic lordship which shows itself in unique, unrepeatable, startlingly new, purposeful events.
God’s lordship originally means lordship in promise, faithfulness and fulfilment. Life under his lordship then accordingly means the historic life of the nomad in breaking new ground and in obedient readiness to face the future—a life that is received in promise and is open to promise. It is only in controversy with the nature religions and theophanous ideas of the world in Palestine, and in the context of the development of belief in creation and of the prophetic eschatology, that the idea of God’s lordship becomes universal, and that this universality of the lordship of the one God is at the same time understood eschatologically. The praises of God’s royal lordship over all things, the ideas of his coming, his justice and judgment upon earth, are all related to the God who is on the march with Israel, the God of the promise and the exodus. Thus the ideas of universal theophany can be supplemented by ideas from the nature religions, and yet these latter can at once be set in an eschatological framework on the ground of the historic religion of promise.
In the idea of the lordship of God two elements are combined: remembrance of his historic lordship and confidence in it, and expectation of his universal lordship in which the world and all nations and things become his universe, his kingdom and his praise.
It is not possible to distinguish the two by making the first a matter of narrow nationalism and the second one of universal cosmic faith. Rather, the universal expectation has its ground in remembering the particular historic reality of his sovereign action in Israel. After the breakdown of Israel’s historic independence, the expectation of the divine lordship was represented in rabbinic theology in the obedience of the legally righteous, while in apocalyptic theology it was futurized by means of speculations about world history, and his coming was delegated to events in the course of world history. This shows the impossibility of conceiving the promise of divine lordship in both historic and eschatological terms without its being given new content from experience.
In the New Testament the βασιλεία is obviously a central concept—especially in the synoptic tradition, and here indeed at all levels of the tradition. In particular, the message and acts, miracles and parables of Jesus before Easter are described as ‘the kingdom of God’. Jesus proclaims the messianic kingdom of God. The peculiar feature of his proclamation of the kingdom lies in the fact that nearness to, entry into, and inheritance of, the kingdom are bound by him to the decision of the hearers and their attitude to his own person. The future of the divine lordship is immediately bound up with the mystery of his own presence.
This can be understood in the sense that as the last prophet of the coming kingdom he gives men’s decision in face of his message the character of the final, and in this sense eschatological, decision.
It can also be understood as a transformation of the kingdom of God tradition. Then Jesus has surmounted the apocalyptic question as to the appointed times and historic circumstances of the arrival of the kingdom ‘by concentrating on what the announcement of the kingdom means for existence’. By proclaiming his hour as the last hour of decision, Jesus himself demythologizes the apocalyptic pictures of the kingdom for the sake of existential actualization. ‘The eschatological proclamation and the ethical demand both point man to the fact that he is brought before God and that God is at hand; both point him to his Now as the hour of decision for God.’ In that case, however, the peculiar feature of Jesus’ message of the kingdom would lie in an existential ethicizing of it, in favour of which all ideas of cosmological apocalyptic fade out of the picture. But this alone gives the primitive Christian Church no reason, and hardly even a right, to continue his proclamation. The reason and the right of the Christian Church to carry on his proclamation, and for its part even to transform it, surely lies in the event which gave it cause to remember Jesus’ words and actions at all and to proclaim him as Lord of all the world—namely, in the Easter appearances of the risen Lord. The Easter appearances, however, were recognized and proclaimed within a horizon of apocalyptic expectation: resurrection as an eschatological event—Jesus as the firstfruits of the resurrection. The understanding of Jesus which results from the event of the raising of the crucified one by God was necessarily connected in the Church’s mind with its remembrance of the understanding of God and his kingdom which results from the words and acts of Jesus. The note of eschatological decision in his proclamation of the imminent lordship of God was therefore necessarily transferred to the note of eschatological decision in the message of the crucified and risen Lord. With this, however, the proclamation of the divine lordship acquired a new apocalyptic character and could be bound up with the messianic titles of Christ, such as Son of Man, which are found in apocalyptic. This constitutes a discontinuity between Jesus’ message of the kingdom and the Church’s christological message of the kingdom, as it is aptly expressed in the remark of Albert Schweitzer: Jesus proclaimed the kingdom, and the Church proclaimed—him. Yet this discontinuity exists rightly. The Church has not to carry on Jesus’ self-consciousness or self-understanding, but to proclaim who he is. This, however, can be seen only in the light of the end, i.e. of the cross and of the Easter appearances as the foreshadowing of his eschatologically still outstanding goal and end. The Church’s statements are based not on Jesus’ self-understanding, but on that which happened to him in the cross and the resurrection. His death and resurrection mark the discontinuity between the historical Jesus and primitive Christian Christology. His identity, however, which lies in the fact that he who here appears as risen is the one who was crucified and no other, forms at the same time the bridge to the historical Jesus and provides the ground and occasion for the historical remembrance of Jesus’ message and acts. This remembrance may be clouded in the gospel tradition of primitive Christianity by many an enthusiastic concern for resurrection and the Spirit, yet the Easter Christophanies are the only adequate ground for remembering and calling to mind his proclamation, just as his cross is the only adequate ground for not forgetting his promise of the kingdom in face of the so-called delay of the parousia of the kingdom. There is no need here to subject the gospel narratives to the verdict of being imaginative backward projections of the resurrection faith. They remember Jesus on the ground of the expectations for his future which are aroused by the resurrection appearances, and present the earthly Jesus of the past in the light of the hopes for his future which become possible with Easter. These hopes are no doubt a strong motive for historical remembrance and also for historical discoveries. The key to what he ‘in fact’ was and is, is provided not by his self-understanding, whatever that may have been, but by the understanding of his future which Easter makes credible and enables us to hope for. It is not the remembrance of the dead Master in the light of his death, but the experience of Easter, that makes it necessary to identify Jesus. It is only the enigmatic, dialectical identity of the risen Lord with the crucified Christ that compels the acceptance of a continuity between the primitive Christian Christology and the message of Jesus himself. The ‘self-consciousness’ of Jesus does not compel men to remain conscious of him, but their consciousness of Jesus—as fashioned by the resurrection appearances—is certainly compelled to raise the question of its own continuity with Jesus’ consciousness.
But if the raising of Jesus from the dead is thus a constitutive part of the Christian message of the kingdom, then it is hardly possible any longer for the latter to be concentrated on its ‘meaning for existence’ and existentially ethicized, but then it is essential to take the universal horizon of hope and promise embracing all things and develop it just as widely as apocalyptic had done—not in the same way, but in the same cosmic breadth. Hence we ought not to speak only of divine lordship, meaning by this the eschatological subjection of man’s existence to the absolute demand, but we should also speak again of the kingdom of God, and so bring out the all-embracing eschatological breadth of his future, into which the mission and the love of Christ lead the man of hope.
If the Easter appearances of Jesus as perceived within the eschatological horizon of expectation are the occasion for remembering and taking over Jesus’ message of the kingdom, yet they are at the same time also the occasion for the transforming of this message of the kingdom. The future which remained open in Jesus’ message of the kingdom is confirmed by his resurrection appearances, assured in anticipation as the dawn of his parousia, and can now be called his future. At the later levels of the synoptic tradition a christological understanding of the kingdom of God asserts itself, inasmuch as the idea of the kingdom of Christ, or of the Son of Man, is developed on the lines of the Jewish idea of the messianic kingdom. This, however, brings with it a change in the idea of the kingdom of God itself. To be sure, it still retains its bearing on the present decision for new obedience, but this call which summons men to new life in obedience finds support and prospect in the resurrecting act of God. The sole Lord of the kingdom is the God ‘who has raised Jesus from the dead’ and therein shows himself to be the creator ex nihilo. His kingdom can then no longer be seen in a historic transformation of the godless state of man and the world. His future does not result from the trends of world history. His rule is his raising of the dead and consists in calling into being the things that are not, and choosing things which are not, to bring to nothing things which are (1 Cor. 1:28). This makes it impossible to conceive the kingdom of God in deistic terms of salvation history, as a result of world history or of a divine plan for the world. It also makes it impossible to conceive the kingdom of God ‘without God’ and to resolve ‘God’ himself as the ‘highest Good’ into the ideal of the kingdom.
Finally, the enigma of the Easter appearances—understood in the Hellenistic church as ‘exaltation’—also led to regarding Jesus as the exalted cultic Kyrios and extolling his kingdom as his hidden heavenly lordship. Thus whatever the horizon within which the ideas were formed, it was always the interpretation of the resurrection of the crucified one which became determinative for the understanding of the promise of the kingdom of God.
In the very different views which thus arose, we note the following characteristics:
1. The experiences of the cross and of the resurrection appearances of Jesus give a new stamp to the message of the kingdom of God. His cross and resurrection in a certain sense ‘distort’ his own open picture of the future and the coming of the kingdom of God. But at the same time, and for this reason, the lordship of God assumes the concrete form of this event of the raising of the crucified one. In this event the kingdom of God is not only christologically ‘distorted’ (verstellt), but concretely represented (vorgestellt). If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then the kingdom of God can be nothing less than a nova creatio. If the risen Lord is the crucified Christ, then the kingdom is tectum sub cruce. The coming lordship of God takes shape here in the suffering of the Christians, who because of their hope cannot be conformed to the world, but are drawn by the mission and love of Christ into discipleship and conformity to his sufferings. This way of taking into consideration the cross and resurrection of Christ does not mean that the ‘kingdom of God’ is spiritualized and made into a thing of the beyond, but it becomes this-worldly and becomes the antithesis and contradiction of a godless and god-forsaken world.
2. The experience of the cross and resurrection of Jesus brings not only a christological understanding of the ‘kingdom of God’, but also in a new sense an eschatological understanding of it. Because of their experiences of the cross and of Easter, the oldest churches did not live in a ‘time of fulfilment’, but in earnest looking forward to the future. To be sure, it was possible for the experiences of Easter and of the Spirit to give occasion for an eschatology of fulfilment in the Spirit, as a result of which the experiences of the cross and of the contradiction of reality appeared to be overcome in the Spirit. Only, the realism of the earthly cross of Jesus and of the contradiction everywhere perceptible in an unredeemed world in the course of the Christian mission showed this religious or cultic docetism to be an error. Thus particularly in Paul an eschatological view of the still outstanding kingdom of God asserted itself over against all eschatological and cultic enthusiasm. If the raising of Jesus from the dead provides the ground for a new kind of hope in the kingdom, then the promised future cannot lie simply in the very fact of the giving of the Spirit, but the ‘Spirit’ himself becomes the ‘earnest’ of the still outstanding future and therefore ‘strives’ against the ‘works of the flesh’. If the kingdom of God implies the raising of the dead, then it is a new creation, and then the ‘exalted Lord’ cannot be understood as one of several cultic lords or as the ‘true cultic Lord’, but only as the Cosmocrator. The lordship of the risen and exalted Christ, as it was understood in the Hellenistic church’s Christology of exaltation, is from the eschatological standpoint itself provisional and serves the final goal of the sole lordship of God, in which all things become new. Then, however, the christological understanding of the message of the kingdom does not distort Jesus’ message of the kingdom, but makes it universal, opens it to embrace a totality of new being. The Easter appearances are then made the occasion for expecting the lordship of God over death and the righteousness of God in all transient things. If the kingdom of God begins as it were with a new act of creation, then the Reconciler is ultimately the Creator, and thus the eschatological prospect of reconciliation must mean the reconciliation of the whole creation, and must develop an eschatology of all things. In the cross we can recognize the god-forsakenness of all things, and with the cross we can recognize the real absence of the kingdom of God in which all things attain to righteousness, life and peace. Hence the kingdom of God can mean no less than resurrection and new creation, and hope in the kingdom can be satisfied with no less than this. Because of this universality, the new hope of the kingdom leads us to suffer under the forsakenness and unredeemedness of all things and their subjection to vanity. It leads us to a solidarity with the anxious expectation of the whole creation that waits for the liberty of the children of God (Rom. 8:22), and thus it perceives in all things the longing, the travail, and the unfulfilled openness for God’s future. Thus the kingdom of God is present here as promise and hope for the future horizon of all things, which are then seen in their historic character because they do not yet contain their truth in themselves. If it is present as promise and hope, then this its presence is determined by the contradiction in which the future, the possible and the promised stands to a corrupt reality. In the Reformers it was said that the kingdom of God is tectum sub cruece et sub contrario. This was intended to mean that the kingdom of God is here hidden beneath its opposite: its freedom is hidden under trial, its happiness under suffering, its right under rightlessness, its omnipotence under weakness, its glory under unrecognizability. Here the kingdom of God was seen in the form of the lordship of the crucified one. This is a true insight, and one that cannot be relinquished. Only, the kingdom of God does not end in the paradoxical form of a presence of this kind. Its paradoxical hiddenness ‘under the contrary’ is not its eternal form. For indeed it is only the resurrection hope and the mission of Christ, the hunger for righteousness in all things and the thirst for true life, that first lead to the suffering, the weakness, the rightlessness and the unrecognizability. The contradiction does not result automatically from man’s experiences with history, with sin and death, but it results from the promise and the hope which contradict these experiences and make it no longer possible to put up with them. If the promise of the kingdom of God shows us a universal eschatological future horizon spanning all things—‘that God may be all in all’—then it is impossible for the man of hope to adopt an attitude of religious and cultic resignation from the world. On the contrary, he is compelled to accept the world in all meekness, subject as it is to death and the powers of annihilation, and to guide all things towards their new being. He becomes homeless with the homeless, for the sake of the home of reconciliation. He becomes restless with the restless, for the sake of the peace of God. He becomes rightless with the rightless, for the sake of the divine right that is coming.
The promise of the kingdom of God in which all things attain to right, to life, to peace, to freedom, and to truth, is not exclusive but inclusive. And so, too, its love, its neighbourliness and its sympathy are inclusive, excluding nothing, but embracing in hope everything wherein God will be all in all. The pro-missio of the kingdom is the ground of the missio of love to the world.
It is the ground of the outgoing of the spirit in bodily obedience, because and in order that the ‘inward’ may become the ‘outward’, reality become rational and reason real—as Hegel put it, and as it can be theologically understood if by reason we understand the Spirit of God as the ‘earnest’ which causes the longing for a reality filled with the Spirit and brought about by the Spirit (Rom. 8:23 and 1 Cor. 15:42ff.).
We now proceed to sum up by attempting a review of the method we have here followed.
1. Christian eschatology speaks of ‘Christ and his future’. Its language is the language of promises. It understands history as the reality instituted by promise. In the light of the present promise and hope, the as yet unrealized future of the promise stands in contradiction to given reality. The historic character of reality is experienced in this contradiction, in the front line between the present and the promised future. History in all its ultimate possibilities and dangers is revealed in the event of promise constituted by the resurrection and cross of Christ. We took the promise contained in this event, in the sense of that which is latent, hidden, prepared and intended in this event, and expounded it against the background of the Old Testament history of promise, perceiving at the same time the tendencies of the Spirit which arise from these insights. The promissio of the universal future leads of necessity to the universal missio of the Church to all nations. The promise of divine righteousness in the event of the justification of the godless leads immediately to the hunger for divine right in the godless world, and thus to the struggle for public, bodily obedience. The promise of the resurrection of the dead leads at once to love for the true life of the whole imperilled and impaired creation. In expounding the promises in the Christ event in terms of latency and tendency, we discovered a historic process of mediation between subject and object, which allows us neither to assign the future of Christ to a place within some system of world history and of the history of salvation, and thereby make this event relative to something that is foreign to it, acquired from other experiences and imposed upon it from without, nor yet to reflect the future of Christ into the existentialistic futurity of man. The history of the future of Christ and the historic character of the witnesses and missionaries condition each other and stand in a correlation of promissio and missio. The Christian consciousness of history is a consciousness of mission, and only to that extent is it also a consciousness of world history and of the historic character of existence.
2. We have employed in various ways the concept of ‘progressive revelation’. It derives from Richard Rothe and Ernst Troeltsch, and means in both writers that the impulse of the Christian spirit in the history of the West links up again and again with the spirit of the modern age and produces progressively better views of the world and of life. The progressive development of the kingdom of the Redeemer is the constantly progressing revelation of that kingdom’s absolute truth and perfection. ‘Progressive revelation’ here means that the revelation becomes progressive in the progress of the human spirit, or that the progress of the human spirit can be interpreted as the self-movement of absolute Spirit. Similar conclusions can be reached when it is thought possible to deduce the direction and future of the Christ event from a comprehensive chain of historic events before and after this event. The Christ event is then given its place in a historic chain that results from fate, or providence, and from the course of the facts of world history. If, however, the promise of the future of Christ arises from the resurrection of the one who was crucified, then the promise enters into such a contradiction to reality that this contradiction cannot be classified within a general dialectic of history such as can be deduced from other processes. It can be classified within the sphere of world history and history of salvation only by diminishing the contradiction in question. Only then can it be resolved in a dialectic of world history. If, however, the event of the raising of the one who was crucified is recognized to be creatio ex nihilo, then it is not a case here of possible changes in existing things, but of all or nothing. Then it becomes clear that this world ‘cannot bear’ the resurrection and the new world created by resurrection. The dialectic which would seek to bear this contradiction must be of an apocalyptic kind. The reconciling synthesis of cross and resurrection can be expected and hoped for solely in a totality of new being. The theology of saving history does indeed perceive the process of promises and events, but not the contradiction in which the promise stands to reality, and hence not the unmasking of the godless world in the cross of Christ. Only when we see the progressive, eschatological driving forces in the contradictory event of the cross and resurrection itself, do the true problems arise. The revelation—i.e. the appearances of the risen Lord—does not acquire its character of progressiveness from a reality foreign to it, from the mysteriously continuing history after Easter, but itself creates the progress in its process of contradiction to the godless reality of sin and death. It does not become progressive by ‘entering into’ human history; but by dint of promise, hope and criticism it makes the reality of man historic and progressive. It is the revelation of the potentiality and power of God in the raising of the one who was crucified, and the tendency and intention of God recognizable therein, that constitute the horizon of what is to be called history and to be expected as history. The revelation of God in the cross and resurrection thus sets the stage for history, on which there emerges the possibility of the engulfing of all things in nothingness and of the new creation. The mission on which the man of hope is sent into this advance area of universal possibilities pursues the direction of the tendency of God’s own action in omnipotently pursuing his faithfulness and his promise. The man of hope who leaves behind the corrupt reality and launches out on to the sea of divine possibilities, thereby radically sets this reality of his at stake—staking it on the hope that the promise of God will win the day.
3. When we speak of the ‘future of Jesus Christ’, then we mean that which is described elsewhere as the ‘parousia of Christ’ or the ‘return of Christ’. Parousia actually does not mean the return of someone who has departed, but ‘imminent arrival’. Parousia can also mean presence, yet not a presence which is past tomorrow, but a presence which must be awaited today and tomorrow. It is the ‘presence of what is coming towards us, so to speak an arriving future’. The parousia of Christ is a different thing from a reality that is experienced now and given now. As compared with what can now be experienced, it brings something new. Yet it is not for that reason totally separate from the reality which we can now experience and have now to live in, but, as the future that is really outstanding, it works upon the present by awaking hopes and establishing resistance. The eschaton of the parousia of Christ, as a result of its eschatological promise, causes the present that can be experienced at any given moment to become historic by breaking away from the past and breaking out towards the things that are to come.
Now this parousia of Christ is also described as revelation of Christ, as ἀποκάλυψις τοῦ κυρίου. But how have we then to understand the future of Christ? Can his expected future then still be conceived in the expectational category ‘novum’? Does his future then bring something new, or merely a universal repetition of what has already happened in the history of Jesus Christ? Is the future of Christ then merely an unveiling of what has already happened in Jesus once and for all? Or does it contain something which has not yet happened?
According to Karl Barth the future of Christ is mainly only a matter of unveiling: ‘Christ’s coming again … is described in the New Testament as the revelation. He will be revealed, not only to the Church but to everyone, as the Person He is.… In full clarity and publicity the “it is finished” will come to light.… What is the future bringing? Not once more a turning-point in history, but the revelation of that which is. It is the future, but the future of that which the Church remembers, of that which has already taken place once and for all. The Alpha and the Omega are the same thing.’
Similarly, Walter Kreck declares: ‘[What is expected is] precisely the coming of the Lord who is proclaimed and believed to have come. The fulfilment, to be sure, can at bottom be nothing else but the unveiling of that which is already reality in Jesus Christ, but this very unveiling is nevertheless now looked forward to and awaited as future.’ Here it is somewhat clearer than in Barth that revelation is understood as promise, and that the revelation of Christ is also conceived as the fulfilment of the promise of Christ. But if this is followed up consistently, then the expression ‘unveiling’ for revelation must be dropped, and in its stead revelation must be conceived as an event that takes place in promise and fulfilment. The revelation of Christ cannot then merely consist in what has already happened in hidden ways being unveiled for us to see, but it must be expected in events which fulfil the promise that is given with the Christ event. This Christ event cannot then itself be understood as fulfilling all promises, so that after this event there remains only the sequel of its being unveiled for all to see. ‘In Christ all the promises of God are yea and Amen’ (2 Cor. 1:20), i.e., in him they are confirmed and validated, but not yet fulfilled. Therefore the Christian hope expects from the future of Christ not only unveiling, but also final fulfilment. The latter is to bring the redeeming of the promise which the cross and resurrection of Christ contains for his own and for the world. What, then, does the future of Christ bring? Not a mere repetition of his history, and not only an unveiling of it, but something which has so far not yet happened through Christ. The Christian expectation is directed to no other than the Christ who has come, but it expects something new from him, something that has not yet happened so far: it awaits the fulfilment of the promised righteousness of God in all things, the fulfilment of the resurrection of the dead that is promised in his resurrection, the fulfilment of the lordship of the crucified one over all things that is promised in his exaltation. The visible and painful experience of the unredeemed state of the world is not for Christians, as for Jews, an argument against belief in the Messiah’s having come, but constitutes the burning question in their prayers for the future of the Redeemer who has come. It is not because it is doubtful whether Jesus is the Christ, but because in him our redemption is confirmed, that Christians groan along with all creation under the unredeemed state of the world and long to see the universal fulfilment of his redeeming and saving acts. But if they know the Redeemer and expect the future of redemption in his name, then neither can the unredeemed state of this world of death become for them, after the fashion of Plato, a part of the insignificant world of appearance in which it is now only a matter of the demonstrating and unveiling of redemption. To be sure, the Alpha and the Omega are the same as far as the Person is concerned: ‘I am Alpha and Omega’ (Rev. 1:8). But they are not the same where the reality of the event is concerned, for ‘it doth not yet appear what we shall be’ (1 John 3:2) and ‘the former things’ are not yet passed away, nor are ‘all things’ yet become new. Thus we must expect something new from the future. But if this future is expected as the ‘future of Jesus Christ’, then it is not expected from someone new or from someone else. What the future is bringing is something which, through the Christ event of the raising of the one who was crucified, has become ‘once and for all’ a possible object of confident hope. Faith in Jesus as the Christ is not the end of hope, but it is the confidence in which we hope (Heb. 11:1). Faith in Christ is the prior of the two, but in this faith hope has the primacy.