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TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF “. . . IS RISEN”
By Robert W. Jenson*
. The message with which “apostles” and other
‘missioners raced across the Mediterranean world,
and which at least some of them called “the gos-
pel,” was most various in its religious impact and
ethical and theosophical reasoning—so_ various
that New Testament scholars deficient in analyti-
cal rigor are sometimes led to say that “message”
above should be plural. Yet all apostles—or all
whose work fed into the community that has con-
tinued to include us—made the same factual
claim: “One, Jesus the Israelite, has risen from the
dead.” Their gospeling occurred as interpretation
‘of and by this claim by and of their and their
hearers’ antecedant hopes and fears; and so was
necessarily as religiously and conceptually various
as were they and their hearers. But the claim was
‘one, in the most straightforward sense. “The gos-
pel,”” as we now tend to use the phrase, can only
denote that final interpreting pronouncement of
“Jesus is risen” by which the hopes and fears of all
created history will be given sense.
Therefore it is Christian reflection’s key task to
understand this claim, to inquire what is said when
Jesus is said to be “risen.” Just so, the inquiry is the
last—and not the first—assignment of a theologi-
‘cal career. Hoping to write afew pages after these,
There offer only assorted preliminary bits of an un:
derstanding. The above distinction of the gospel’s
claim from the gospel itself as interpretation by
this claim, is the first
“Gettysburg Theological Seminary
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The second piece is an attempt to isolate what
may be called the “gospel-minimum” components
of the resurrection-claim. These are what must be
said by “Jesus is risen” for the claim to be able to
function as it actually does in the apostolic mis-
sion, as we see this in the New Testament and as |
have just described it.
First. If Jesus is risen, he must now be alive; i.e.,
whatever is the minimum differentium of a live
human.rom a déad one must ndw be predi¢able of
him. | suggest: the minimum difference between a
live person and a dead one is that the live one can
surprise us. Your life is one life, it makes a personal
unity, in that after the fact the rest of us are able to
grasp each new act of yours as dramatically coher-
ent with what we already know of you, are able to
say, “That's Jones, alright.” But your act is that of a
living person in that before the fact it is in some
way unpredictable. If you are alive, then just when
we have you all figured out you may undo all our
reckonings. When you become too predictable,
we say, “What ails Jones? All the life is gone out of
him.” And when you die, we begin writing biogra-
phies, i.e., descriptions of an object that will hold
still for analysis, It is this liveliness of life that the
Bible and the biblically influenced parts of western
intellect tradition name “spirit.” Guided by the32
word's uses, I may venture a last formulation of
the present point: you are alive if and only if you
come to us from the future
Jesus lives. l.e., we may and must expect events
in our world, identifying themselves as his acts and
dramatically coherent with our record of his past
acts, that will surprise us, that will undo our
attempts to figure him out. There is a spirit present
in our lives—amid the swarm of such spirits—that
is his spirit: he comes to us not merely from the
remembered past in Palestine but from the
threatening and promising future.
Second. The preceding discussion was cast in
terms of “you” and “we.” This was not merely
pedagogical; there is no other way to say what was
to be said. For “surprise,” “future” and “spirit” are
categories of communication,.indeed of commu-
nity. It is the word—in all its modes, verbal and
more-than-verbal—that has all along been the
object of our analysis. You live in that you sur-
prisingly address us; your act that can escape our
calculations from past acts is your word-act, your
act that somehow speaks. As for spirit, personal
spirit is the spiritedness of communication; a spirit
that is not the spirit of some address, that moves
‘our hearts “directly,” wordlessly, is not personal
spirit, it is demonic:
Jesus lives. I.e., there are addresses made in our
world, identifying themselves as his addresses to
-us, that are spirited, that gladden and amaze, that
“open the future.” These addresses are the telling
of that very message we called “the gospel;” Jesus
is risen in that the claim that he is risen does in fact
interpret our antecedent hopes and fears in ways
that liberate and transform us. Jesus lives in that
he is present in.spirit, in that he comes as from the
future; but this spirit is the spirit of the word of the
gospel. That “holy spirit” that short-circuits the
word, that moves our hearts from the back or side
of our straightforward hearing, can be no one’s
spirit and so also not Jesus’
Third. If Jesus is risen, he must have been dead
fnevertheless he now lives, he lives with death in
the past tense. The resurrection was not a
resuscitation; it is not as if Jesus merely resumed
life as before, to die again afterward. The very
point of the resurrection-claim about Jesus is that
death is not in his future. Here we have a compo-
nent of the resurrection-claim that is not a similar-
ity to some phenomenal description of our present
lives, as were the first two, but a dissimilarity
That for Jesus death is past and not future,
means that the future from which he comes is the
last future, that the spirit in which he is present is
the Breath of the Kingdom, that the gospel-word
that is his address is an eschatological judgment.
For whereas all the promises we make one another
are rendered conditional by the future of death,
Jesus’ resurrection makes his intention’ for us
unconditional. All my commitments are iffy, for |
commit a future I do not surely have. Jesus’ com-
mitment to us is rescued from conditionality and
cannot but triumph utterly; such a triumph, vice
versa, must be the conclusion of the entire human
enterprise,
That the gospel’s eschatological judgment is
good news, the eschaton it promises (the “King.
dom,” Jesus’ spirit a Breath of life) depends of
course on who this Jesus is: that, e.g., he is an
Israelite, a prophet, a friend of sinners. Here we
come upon Christian theology's other main task:
identification of the Eschaton and so of God by the
recollected particular personhood of Jesus. But
that is not the task of this paper.
Fourth. Since Jesus was and is who he is, ”..
risen” must be good news to be predicable of him.
But for a life to be good for other lives, it must—
am about to argue—be embodied. Therefore,
anyone is risen in the sense here wanted, he must
be bodily risen. A good life must be an émbodied
life because were | only so alive for you, as to
appear in your life as a “pure” spirit, my presence
would be enslaving. In order for you to be free in
being addressed by me, you must in turn be able to
address me, | must be the possible object of your
subjectivity and not only you of mine; you must be
able to locate me. Thus | must be body in, your
world and not only spirit; for that is what we mean
by "body": a person's locatable reality. “Jenson
lives (disembédied)” can be no happy tidings
(there of course may be those who think that
also...)
Jesus lives; and this fact is a blessing. Therefore
Jesus must now be a possible object of our inten-
n, locatable by the coordinates of time and
space. I.e., he has and is a human body. His pres-
ence is not that of a spook or a mental pressure.
“Jesus lives in the life of the community he
founded,” or “Jesus lives in his continuing influ-
ence in our hearts,” are not equivalent to “Jesus is
risen.” We can point and be pointing to the man
Jesus. Or if we cannot, he is not risen.
So far four things must be claimed when it is
claimed that Jesus is risen. Perhaps there are
others. If there are, I do not know them and have
anyway more than enough in these four to be
going on with, Whether, e.g, “Jesus is risen” must
claim that the tomb was‘ emptied, that he now is a
collection of cells in organic continuity with a
material mass once buried, depends on how we
understand “body,” and this in turn on how we
understand time and space. It is therefore a matter,
of the problem next on our agenda, and not an
immediate component of the gospel-claim.
Doubtless there are also things in fact claimed by
“Jesus is risen” that we nevertheless would nothave to claim to predicate “is risen” of him, even
supposing a negative decision on the.question just
posed, the emptiness of the tomb is one such.
‘These are not my present concern.
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Of the four determinants above, it is the fourth
that is the modern world’s special problem. Stating
the problem baldly is the third bit of understand
ing offered here. We—nuclear physicists and all—
‘are no whit less superstitious than our forebears,
and have no trouble believing in spooks and
demons of all kinds. But we do have a problem
with a bodily resurrected person. The difficulty is
simple and unavoidable. To be a body is to be lo-
catable. So where is Jesus?
‘Once the answer was easy: Jesus is in heaven. In
pre-modern theology, heaven was a space—or at
Teast a realm analogous to a space—and so was,
spatially—or at least analogously to spatially—
related to our space, to the world. When Jesus
went to the Father's right hand, he got there by
ascending, i.e., moving through’space in the defi-
‘nite direction that leads to our space’s boundary
with the heavenly space. And therefore we could
point to Jesus, by pointing up. Heaven’ was the
part of creation God made for his own dwelling in
his creation, and was just so necessarily located by
the coordinates of time and space that define crea-
tion.
‘The unrefuted heart of Bultmann’s demand for
““demythologizing” is that no one exposed to tech-
nology or modern schooling does or can think so.
Copernicus has left no space for heaven. “Up” may
be a permanently necessary metaphor, of transcen-
dence; but that is nothing to our difficulty—a
metaphorical space will hold only a metaphorical
body. | know fundamentalists who claim to think
that Jesus is up there; but | know none who really
do. Otherwise, there would be more funda
mentalist-subsidized rocket research. And if that
last crack seems crude, that is the very point.
Itis not merely that astronauts bring back nega~
tive reports; the proviem is conceptual. In all pre-
Copernican western cosmologies, space had an
absolute center, and therefore space could be
divided into definite regions and these distinctions
then given metaphysical significance. Thus in the
Christianized version of Aristotle, space is a nest of
hemispherical regions, each more enveloping
hemisphere being less infected by temporality
than the next within, until the outermost hemis-
phere is so little temporal as to be a tolerable
dwelling for God, the created heaven. If we could
travel upward through all the inner hemispheres—
which in our frailty we cannot—we would by our
journey arrive in God's presence—as Dante and
others did in visions and poesy. In Copernicus’
cosmos, such structures are inconceivable.
Nor do we conceive them; which is why serious,
assertion of the resurrection is now so uncommon,
Our mental map of time and space includes no
region that could contain Jesus’ present body. And
0, whatever orthodox formulas we may repeat,
‘our actual preaching and teaching proceeds as if,
there were no present body of Jesus: the concep-
tion that operates in the thinking of “liberals” and
“conservatives” alike is of Jesus’ continuing
“spiritual” or historical influence. l.e,, by any
responsible rendering of “. . . is risen,” the whole
modern church proceeds as if Jesus were not—and
will so proceed until a post-Copernican way of
locating Jesus’ body is proposed and becomes ecu-
menically influential
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To only one of our theological fathers could
Copernicus have been a help rather than a hin-
drance (and he, ironically, thought Copernicus a
nut), Martin Luther regarded the very notion of
heaven as a place and of pointing to the risen Jesus
by pointing up as theologically ridiculous. Yet, as
we will see, hevhad no trouble specifying spatial
coordinates for Jesus’ location. If we can erasp
how he did that, maybe we can begin to do it too,
‘An interpretation of Luther is thus the fourth frag-
mentary offering of this essay.
It was, of course, over against the Swiss Refor-
mation’s understanding of the Supper, that Luther
took up the question of Jesus’ current location.
Le., it was over against the christological-sacra-
mental situation left by removing the hierarchical
church from the medieval theological structure
while retaining the rest of the structure
unchanged. If heaven is a place related by spatial
distance and direction—or by anything analogous
thereto—to St. Anastasius’ Church, and if the risen
Jesus is located in heaven, then Christ indeed
cannot be in St. Anastasius’ Church. But the Bible
says he is there nonetheless, when thanksgiving is,
offered there in his nante with loaf and cup and
these are eaten and drunk. The medieval church
accepted the impossibility, and posited a produci-
ble miracle to overcome it: when and where
authorized persons say, “Here is Jesus’ body,”
there it is, possible or no. Just so, the medieval
church put itself in the role of authorized miracle-
worker. When this role was rejected, those who
left medieval theology otherwise intact were left
33,with the initial impossibility. Jesus’ body, said
Zwingli—and Calvin too! —is in heaven and there-
fore not on earth, though his spirit of course
reaches us everywhere.
Luther thought anyone's spirit without his body,
Jesus’ included, would be a demon, for the same
reasons we have already noted. So Luther could
not just abstract the church from the structure of
medieval theology. He said, in fact, to defy tradi-
tional theology’s whole way of conceiving Jesus’
risen location.
In his Vom Abendmah! Christi, Bekenntnis of
1528," Luther experimentally adopted a_late-
scholastic distinction between three ways of
being located. An entity may be someplace “cir-
cumscribably,” i.e., so that the boundaries we
draw to locate it aré the entity's own boundaries;
material masses are thus located. Or an entity may
be someplace “definitively,” i.e., so that although
the entity has itself no spatial boundaries it can be
located by boundaries; in this fashion we may say
that an idea is in someone's head. Or an entity—
actually, only God—may be someplace “repletive-
\y;" ice., God is at any given place because he is
separated from no place, he is anywhere you like
because he is bounded in no way.
Working with this set of distinctions, Luther next
asserted that the risen Christ is not located in the
first way at all. That must mean: Luther denied
that Christ's risen body is a particular material
mass. He is not subject to Newtonian geometry
and requires for his location no region of space,
heavenly or earthly. “Circumscribably,” it is
indeed impossible for Jesus to be at once in
heaven and in St. Anastasius’. But, said Luther,
this is an objection quite beside the point; since
Jesus is located at neither place in this mode
Yet Luther did not by this denial intend at all to
mitigate the risen Jesus’ embodiment—it was,
after all, to vindicate Jesus’ bodily presence in the
Supper that Luther launched the whole argument.
Luther's denial of “circumscribable” location to
the risen Jesus incidentally escapes the Copernican
difficulty; but it has nothing whatever iri common,
with the spiritualizing to which Copernicus has
driven the rest of us. Rather, Luther intended
straightforwardly to assert the risen Jesus’ located-
ness. In the Bekenntnis, he achieved this by at-
tributing to the risen Jesus a specific combination
of the other two modes of location.
. According to Luther, Jesus the man, Jesus as a
body, participates by virtue of the Incarnation and
Resurrection in God's “repletive” location. 1.e.,
the embodied Jesus is omnipresent. Luther did
not, of course, mean that Jesus’ body is infinitely
extended—it is God's omnipresence that is at-
tributed to Jesus, which, as we have noted, con-
sists in the absence of extension. But what then
did he mean’? Two considerations may help.
First, we may note that Luther says this mode of
Jesus’ presence to us is by itself soteriologically in-
sufficient;- because in it, although Jesus is there
with us, he is not there for us. Let me switch to m
jargon and push the interpretation a little. In thi
mode, we are Jesus’ object but he is not ours. He is
where we are in the way | am present to those | see
and address. Just so the tradition had in fact inter-
preted ‘God's omnipresence: the creation is one
object for him, with which he, as the subject that
knows and wills it, is thus instantaneously present.
But though Jesus is in this mode with us as a sub:
ject, by participation in God's intention of his
creatures, he is not available to us as our recipro-
cal object: as | now sit at my desk and cast about
me, ! do not find either him or God. Merely as
omnipresent, Jesus would be a “pure” subject over
against us
‘Second, Luther has specific reason to insist that
it is the embodied human, Jesus, who as subject
thus has all creatures as his simultaneous object;
the reason is his unwillingness to posit a separation
of deity and humanity at any point. Whatever
might have been, itis in fact as the man Jesus that
God is an object for us; and therefore a presence
of God that was not also a presence of the man
Jesus would be a sheer subject-presence, enslaving
‘and demonic. Nor would this be changed by posit-
ing that God's presence includes the presence of
Jesus merely as, human subject, merely in his
human spirit; this would but add a created demon
to the uncreated one. Of God's presence that is
not a presence of the whole human Jesus, Luther
had only so much to say: “Mir aber des Gottes
nicht!”?
We may well ask how the embodied Jesus can
be omnipresent, even in this way. If indeed Jesus is
omnipresent, does not this merely as such divide
is spitit— conceivably present to all things—from
is body—not conceivably so present? Luther was
inclined to leave this difficulty to faith. But the
once most speculative and most faithful of his
disciples, Johannes Brenz, had a go at it, and most
suggestively: A body, he argued, need not be “in”
any place to be a body; for the whole creation, the
great body, precisely contains all places and so is
itself in no place.*. This “omnipresence” belongs to
the creation in that itis located by the simultane-
ous intention of God. Thus if Jesus shares God's
presence as subject to all things, then also for him
all the places where he could locate himself as
body are but one place: “For neither.are all those
places which are distinct in our human eyes and
separated by distance, so many and such in the
eyes of divine Majesty, but just as all times are as a
moment for him, so all places are as one place for
him... When we join Christ's humanity to his
ods
a
?eae
deity, we thus do not extend the latter. .., but
rather attribute this very Majesty 10 him... .”*
Again pushing the interpretation somewhat, we
‘may put it so: for God's intention, all creation is at
‘one place, the place where he intends it; and God
—and with him Jesus—locates all creation at that
place where they see Jesus’ body.
The considerations of the last paragraph
granted, it still remains true that if Jesus’ presence
as subject over against all creation is indeed to be
that of an embodied human, i.e., if he is to be
there also as our object, then we must in fact have
him somewhere as our object, then we must be
able to locate him. If the omnipresent Jesus is to
be embodied, mere omnipresence, as we have
already noted, will not do. Or rather, Jesus’
embodied omnipresence must include a presence
locatable by others. We come to Luther’ assertion
of Jesus’ “definitive” presence in the Supper—and
in the preached word and all the “sacraments.”
Although the embodied Jesus is not bounded by
spatial coordinates, he can be pointed to spatially,
where—and only where—he intends us to find
him, Guided, therefore, by his actually spoken in-
tention, we look to the bread and cup, and just so
look at and to Jesus; ie, these are his locatability,
his body. Jesus’ share in divine “repletive” omni-
presence is the possibility of this “definitive” pres-
ence, and the fact that the omnipresent Jesus is a
body is the necessity of it
We should note one last—startling—point. Ac-
cording to Luther, there is no one material mass
that is the risen body of Christ. Nor are the “reple-
tive” omnipresence of Jesus’ body and the
“definitive” presence of that body in the Supper
two different phenomena; for without the latter
the former would not in fact be the presence of an
embodied person. Thus we must say: for Luther,
there is no worry about how the body of Jesus is
related to the bread and cup—or the bath or the
mutual physical presence of-believers or the sound
of the gospeler’s voice—for these simply are alll the
body of the risen Jesus has or needs, to live as a
fully embodied human over against God and us.
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HTAHTTATANANETTTAAUNEMAEEEENANUEAKURE
Luther's propositions about Jesus’ location set
our heads in a metaphysical whirl. They are either
arrant nonsense, or the start of a theological and
philosophical revolution. Moreover, vital connec-
tions and explications are missing. To make sense
of Luther, a major effort of metaphysical creativity
is wanted—an effort so great that it is worth at-
tempting only because of the hope that in its
course we may again be saying”. . . is risen” with
some content. This article's last offering is thus a
preliminary statement of that metaphysical task,
Let us summarize Luther. AS subject, the risen
Jesus intends us, regards and addresses us, from
“the right hand of the Father,” from the “place” of
God's transcendence over space, from the source
of the Creator's creating intention, that just be-
cause it is no-place is not distant from any place.
As object, the risen Jesus is intended by us at the
bread, cup, water-bath, etc. Jesus as subject and
Jesus as object are not two realities; they are one
and the same person. And finally, we are able to
intend Jesus at the bread, cup, etc., because he—
again, as subject—addresses us calling us thither.
These propositions can all be true only if God's
‘omnipresence, and indeed his transcendence as
such, are very different than we have ordinarily
conceived them. For the propositions can be
simultaneously true only if the “place” of God's
transcendence, from which he creatingly intends
us, is the actual occurrence of the word of the
gospel, of the gospel that is God-as-subject’s ad-
dress to us, and that calls us to its own embodi-
ment as to God-as-located-object.
From where does God, and so the man Jesus,
stand omnipresently over against all creation?
From between any two or three who speak the
gospel among them.
Saying such things, we expunge the last remnant
of ‘spatial analogy—not necessarily of spatial
metaphor—from bur notion of transcendence, All
the transcendence God, and so the man Jesus, has
or needs is the transcendence of the word, the
miracle of interpretation.
Every right word—verbal or more-than-verbal—
somehow grasps the world that already is, some-
how involves a description. The tentacles by
which our conversation grasps actuality are subtle
and a puzzle to philosophers, but in life triumph
over every pseudo-Kantian qualm. But every right
word also interprets the world, and just so admits
possibility into the world. For in that the world
appears in an interpretation, it appears as a world
that could have differently ‘interpreted. Thus the
word is the “place”—the quotation marks are
getting darker and darker—of the mysterious dif-
ference and the mysterious union between past
and future, That we are what the past has made us
and yet may and must be what the future opens,
‘occurs in the converse between us and is the great
miracle of being
Itis this transcendence that belongs to the bibli-
cal God. That we were and will be, and are free in
between, is our participation in the miracle that he
is. And, God's, and so Jesus’, transcendence over
against distinctions of space is not, therefore, that
of any infinitely distant—and so infinitely near—
other place, but simply that of an infinitely certain
35coming moment. The ambiguity of the word
“present is not accidental; it isa clue to the struc-
ture of reality. Space is the field of “presence;”
i.e, it is precisely the “present,” that which is
bracketed by past and future. God, and so Jesus,
thus transcends space in that their moment is the
coming final moment, the moment of Judgment.
From the last moment, all points of the present,
i.e,, all spatial locations, are equidistant and so
equinear.
“Where” is Jesus? | have only adumbrated some
requirements for an answer. But perhaps we will
have come some way, by drapping the last re-
liance on space-analogies of transcendence, and
answering: Jesus is where the Father is. The
moment from which they intend all the present
places where we might seek them, and from which
they address us, calling us to those places where
by their creating intention we may in fact locate
them, is the moment of the Last Word; i.e.—for 1
have’ not left: my earlier assertion—it is the
moment of the gospel, which is God's uneondi-
tional and therefore unsurpassable word.
Footnotes
1. WA, 26, pp. 3271
2 Ibid, p. 332.
3. Johannes Brenz, de personali unione duarum naturarum in
Christo, 1561, p. 7a
4. Ibid., pp, 76-88. See also the further analyses and biting
Copernican polemic in Brenz’ Von der Majestaet unsers
lieben Herr und einigen Heilands Jesus Christi, 1562,