Resurrection and Exaltation

1 Corinthians was written from Ephesus in the middle fifties, which already makes it early. But the four clauses at 15:3-5 are older than the letter, and Paul says so in the sentence itself. He passed on to them what he also received. Those two verbs, paradidomi and paralambano, are the standard Greek terms for the formal transmission of tradition, and they correspond to the pair of Hebrew verbs used in rabbinic Judaism for handing on teaching intact. Paul is not describing what he thought up. He is quoting.

The internal evidence supports him, and it is worth being able to list it. The phrase for our sins with the plural noun is not his usual idiom. According to the Scriptures appears twice in a fixed form. The Twelve, as a title, occurs nowhere else in Paul's letters. Cephas is the Aramaic form of Peter's name. And the clauses are arranged in a balanced four-part shape that looks composed for memory. A sceptical reader and a believing reader can agree on all of that, and they broadly do; the judgement that Paul is quoting earlier material is about as near to consensus as New Testament scholarship gets.

Then the dating, which is where the formula becomes remarkable. Paul received it at his conversion or at the visit to Jerusalem he describes in Galatians 1:18, which he dates three years after. The crucifixion was around the year 30. So a fixed summary of the resurrection, already circulating as shared property, existed within a handful of years of the event, and behind that summary is a community that had agreed on its wording. Gerd Ludemann, who does not believe the resurrection happened, dated the formula to within about two years of the crucifixion. This is not a legend that had a century to grow.

Read what the formula contains and what it does not. It contains the death, its purpose, its agreement with the scriptures, the burial, the raising, the third day, and named witnesses beginning with Peter. It does not mention the empty tomb in so many words, though the sequence buried, then raised, is taken by most readers to imply it, and a serious minority argue otherwise. It does not mention the women, though all four Gospels put women at the tomb first. The usual explanation is that a list intended as formal testimony named the witnesses whose testimony would carry weight, and that the Gospels' preservation of the women's priority is evidence precisely because it was not useful; some scholars have pushed back on how much that argument can bear. Report both.

One more thing the formula does. It puts the resurrection inside a story already written. According to the Scriptures is not a proof-text move; the earliest Christians read the whole shape of Israel's scriptures, the suffering and vindication of the servant in Isaiah 53, the deliverance of the righteous sufferer in the Psalms, the raising up on the third day in Hosea 6:2, and found the pattern completed. Acts 2:24-32 shows Peter making the same move with Psalm 16. Whatever the resurrection was, the first Christians did not regard it as an anomaly dropped into history. They regarded it as the thing the history had been going towards.

The first thing the New Testament says the resurrection does is reverse a verdict. A crucified man had been judged, by the court that condemned him and by the law that cursed anyone hanged on a tree. The resurrection is God's answer. Romans 1:4 says he was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. 1 Timothy 3:16 puts it in a line of a hymn: he appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit. Two things in the BSB's English are choices, and its footnotes show them: the Greek begins who appeared, and the Byzantine text and the Textus Receptus read God appeared; and the footnote offers vindicated in spirit as the alternative to the capitalised Spirit, which is the translators' reading, since Greek has no capitals. The line of thought here does not depend on either choice. Peter's sermons in Acts turn on this contrast again and again: you put him to death by nailing him to the cross, but God raised him from the dead (Acts 2:23-24), and God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36). Acts 17:31 makes the resurrection the public assurance that the man God has appointed will judge the world. The resurrection is not, in the New Testament, primarily a proof of the possibility of miracles. It is a verdict.

The second thing it does is begin something. Paul calls Christ the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20), and the word comes from the harvest ritual of Leviticus 23, where the first sheaf is brought to the priest before the main reaping. The point of the image is the identity of the sheaf with the harvest and the guarantee it carries. It is not that Christ is an exception to human mortality; it is that he is the first instance of the general resurrection, which has therefore begun. That is why Paul can argue in both directions in 1 Corinthians 15, from Christ's rising to ours in verse 20 and from the denial of ours to the denial of his in verses 13 and 16. If the general resurrection is impossible, then this one did not happen either. The two stand or fall together, which is a far stronger claim than an isolated miracle would require.

The third thing is the one most easily missed by readers trained to put everything on the cross. Romans 4:25 says he was delivered over to death for our trespasses and raised to life for our justification. The Greek preposition is the same both times, and it can look backward to a ground or forward to a purpose, so the second clause may mean that he was raised because our justification had been accomplished, or that he was raised so that we might be justified. Commentators divide, and the parallelism of the line, which is probably itself an earlier formula, tells against making the two halves work differently. Richard Gaffin argued in Resurrection and Redemption that Protestant theology had made the resurrection evidential when Paul makes it constitutive, and 1 Corinthians 15:17 supports him: if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Not your faith is unsupported. You are still in your sins.

The Eastern tradition has never needed persuading of this. In Orthodox worship the resurrection is not the epilogue to the crucifixion but the centre of the whole year, and the Paschal proclamation that Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, states a soteriology in a line: what was wrong with us was death, and the cure was administered inside death. Catholic theology likewise treats the paschal mystery as one act with two moments rather than a work followed by its receipt. Western Protestant preaching has often been weaker here than its own confessions, and a student can check this against his own experience by asking how many sermons he has heard on how the cross saves and how many on how the resurrection saves.

Put the three together and the shape is this. The resurrection declares who Jesus was all along, it completes and not merely confirms what the cross did, and it starts the general resurrection of which every Christian's own future is the rest. None of these is a separate doctrine bolted on. They are what the New Testament says about the same morning.

1 Corinthians 15:35-49 is the only sustained argument in the New Testament about the nature of the risen body, and its key sentence is verse 44: it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. That translation has misled generations of English readers. The two adjectives are psychikos and pneumatikos. The first cannot mean made of soul, since it describes the ordinary body that goes into the grave. So the second is most unlikely to mean made of spirit. Both words in Paul describe what animates and governs a thing: the present body is run by psyche, the natural life, and the risen body is run by the Spirit of God. Paul's own analogies in verses 36 to 44 all involve continuity with transformation, a seed and the plant it becomes, and that is what the argument is for.

The Gospels claim the same thing in narrative. On the plain side: he says look at my hands and my feet, it is I myself; touch me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have (Luke 24:39). He eats a piece of broiled fish in front of them. Thomas is told to put his finger into the wounds. The women take hold of his feet. He cooks breakfast on a beach. On the strange side, in the same chapters: two disciples walk with him for hours without recognising him, Mary takes him for the gardener, the men in the boat do not recognise him, he appears in a room whose doors were locked, and he vanishes from the table at Emmaus. The evangelists set the two sides down next to each other and make no attempt to harmonise them, which is itself worth noticing, because a made-up account would have picked one.

So the claim is neither of the two things it is usually flattened into. It is not resuscitation: Lazarus came back to the life he had left and died again, and nothing in the resurrection accounts is described that way. It is not a spiritual survival or a vision: the whole point of Luke 24:39 is the exclusion of that reading. What is claimed is a body that is continuous with the one that was buried, bearing its wounds, and transformed into a mode of life that the writers can describe only by reporting what it did.

Modern academic theology contains alternatives, and a student should know them rather than be startled later. Rudolf Bultmann held that the resurrection is not an event behind the preaching but the rise of the church's faith, and said that Christ is risen into the kerygma; on this account asking what happened to the body is asking the wrong question. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan argued for a non-bodily reading in which the disciples' experience was real and the tomb is not the issue. Against these, Wolfhart Pannenberg argued for the historicity of the resurrection from within the apocalyptic framework of first-century Judaism, and N. T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God made the fullest historical case that neither Jewish nor pagan categories of the time could have produced the Christian claim by evolution, since resurrection in that world meant bodies and meant everyone at the end, not one man in the middle.

Here the honesty rule of this course cuts in a particular direction. On many questions this track holds a disagreement open because the church genuinely holds it open. This one it does not. Every historic communion, Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Wesleyan, Baptist, Pentecostal and Anabaptist, confesses the bodily resurrection in its creeds and its liturgies, and Paul himself makes the claim falsifiable in principle at 1 Corinthians 15:14-19 in terms no later apologist has improved on. Say that plainly, state the alternatives fairly, and do not manufacture a division in the church where there is not one.

Luke tells the ascension twice, at the end of his Gospel and at the start of Acts, and the second telling supplies the sentence the church has held on to: this same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven (Acts 1:11). The ascension is not the resurrection's fading out. It is a distinct event with its own content: the end of the appearances, the enthronement of the Son in his humanity, and the precondition of Pentecost, since John 16:7 has Jesus saying that the Advocate will not come unless he goes away.

Session is the word for what follows the ascension: he sat down. Psalm 110:1, the LORD said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet, is quoted or alluded to in the New Testament more often than any other verse of the Old Testament, which tells you how the first Christians were reading their situation. Hebrews presses the posture itself: day after day every priest stands to minister and to offer again and again the same sacrifices, but when this Priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God (Hebrews 10:11-12). A seated priest is a priest whose offering is finished. The right hand is not a location but an office, the place of executive authority, which is why Ephesians 1:20-22 can say he is seated there and that everything is under his feet in the same breath.

Now the thing this lesson exists to say, and it is the most neglected sentence in popular Christology. The humanity was not laid aside. The one who reigns is a man. Paul writes, years after the ascension, that there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5), in the present tense. Stephen sees the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56). The wounds are still there when Thomas is invited to touch them, and John's vision in Revelation 5:6 is of a Lamb who appeared to have been slain, standing in the center of the throne. Hebrews 2:8-9 makes the pastoral point directly: we do not see everything subject to him, but we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death. What you cannot see in the world you can see in him.

Two consequences follow, and the traditions draw them in the same way even where they disagree about the metaphysics. First, our nature is in the presence of God, which is why Hebrews can tell a frightened congregation to approach the throne of grace with confidence, because their high priest was tempted in every way that we are (Hebrews 4:15-16). Second, the reign is exercised now and not only later, which is why Matthew 28:18 grounds the commission in authority already given. The Lutheran and Reformed dispute you met in lesson two is a dispute about where that risen body now is: the Lutherans hold that the ascended humanity shares the divine omnipresence, the Reformed that it remains a located human body while the person of the Son is everywhere. Both are trying to protect the same sentence, that the man Jesus reigns.

The exaltation is not finished. 1 Corinthians 15:25 says he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet, and 15:24-28 has him finally delivering the kingdom to the Father. The intervening state, in which the enthroned Lord is acknowledged by some and not by all, is the time the church lives in, and the last lesson of this module will name it as the already and the not yet of his kingly office.

The Apostles' Creed says that he was crucified, dead and buried, and then that he descended into hell. That line has a textual history worth knowing, because it explains why Christians who recite the same words mean different things. It is not in the oldest forms of the Roman creed. The first clear creedal appearances are in a Greek formula from the Council of Sirmium in 359 and in the creed of Aquileia, which Rufinus expounds in his commentary about 404. Rufinus is the first witness to it in Latin, and he explicitly tells his readers that the Roman and Eastern creeds do not have the words, and that at Aquileia they are understood to mean the same as he was buried. The clause spreads through the Western creeds over the following centuries and reaches the form now recited in the received Latin text of the early medieval West.

The Latin also leaves room. Descendit ad inferos means he went down to the dead, to the place of the departed, which is what the Greek Hades and the Hebrew Sheol name; descendit ad infernum leans towards hell as the place of punishment. Modern English liturgies frequently render it he descended to the dead, which is a translation decision that takes the first sense, and readers should know it is a decision and not a softening invented recently.

Now the readings, each held by serious people. The Eastern Orthodox reading is the fullest and should be given first, because it is the one for which the doctrine carries the most weight. In Orthodoxy the descent is the Harrowing of Hades, and it is not an appendix to the resurrection but the picture of it: the Paschal icon of the Anastasis shows Christ standing on the shattered gates of Hades, pulling Adam and Eve by the wrists out of their tombs. The Paschal homily read in every Orthodox church on Easter night says that Hades was embittered when it met him below, because it took a body and found God. The theology is that death is destroyed from the inside, by the one place death could not hold entering it, and this is what the tradition means when it says that Christ trampled down death by death. Roman Catholic teaching is close in substance and more precisely delimited: the Catechism at 631 to 637 teaches that the dead Christ, in his human soul united to his divine person, went to the abode of the dead, not to deliver the damned but to open heaven to the righteous who had died before him, an idea Western theology developed under the name limbus patrum.

The Lutheran reading places the descent on the other side of the line. The Formula of Concord, in the ninth article of the Solid Declaration, follows a sermon Luther preached at Torgau in 1533 and treats the descent as the first act of the exaltation rather than the last of the humiliation: the living Christ goes to hell as conqueror to proclaim his victory, and the Formula pointedly declines to define how, saying the manner is not for this life to work out. The Reformed reading, which Calvin set out at Institutes 2.16.8 to 12, is different again and is not a spatial claim at all. Calvin argued that if the clause meant only that he was buried the creed would be repeating itself, and that what it names is the dereliction: Christ bore in his soul the judgement that the damned bear, the invisible and incomprehensible judgement he underwent before God, of which the cry of forsakenness at Mark 15:34 is the audible part. On Calvin's reading the descent belongs to Good Friday and to the cross, not to Holy Saturday and a journey.

Two further positions are current. Within Catholic theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar reinterpreted Holy Saturday in the twentieth century as Christ's solidarity with the dead in utter godforsakenness rather than a triumphal descent, and the proposal has been contested by other Catholic theologians as a departure from the tradition it claims to expound; the exchange is worth reading for anyone who thinks Catholic theology is monolithic. And some Protestant writers, Wayne Grudem the best known among them, have argued that the clause should simply be dropped from the creed, on the ground that no biblical text clearly teaches it and that the clause entered the creed late. Others answer that a phrase the church has recited for fifteen hundred years should be interpreted rather than deleted, and that there are texts in view even if they are difficult.

Those texts are worth naming, since the whole argument circles them. Acts 2:27 and 2:31 quote Psalm 16 to say that his soul was not abandoned to Hades. Ephesians 4:8-10 speaks of his descending to the lower parts of the earth, which may mean the earth itself rather than an underworld. And 1 Peter 3:18-20 says that he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, with 1 Peter 4:6 adding that the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead. Notice what the BSB's English does with this passage. It prints made alive in the Spirit with a capital, and its footnote at verse 19 offers in the spirit, in which as the alternative, so even who or what he was made alive by is a translators' choice. And preached at 3:19 translates a verb that means to proclaim as a herald, not the verb for preaching good news used at 4:6, so a reader should not assume the two verses describe the same act. This is among the most disputed passages in the New Testament and it has three main readings: that the spirits are the fallen angels of Genesis 6, to whom the risen Christ proclaimed his victory, which William Dalton argued at length and which many now follow; that this is the preincarnate Christ preaching through Noah to Noah's generation, which is Augustine's reading and was taken up by much Reformed exegesis; or that it is a proclamation to the human dead. A teacher who tells his class which of the three is right without telling them there are three has not taught them the passage.

This module has now taken Christ from the eternal Word to the throne. One thing remains and it is not this lesson's to do. Acts 1:11 says he will come in the same way as he went, 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 says the reign runs until every enemy is subdued, and Hebrews 9:28 says he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him. What that return is, when it is, and what the church has agreed and not agreed about it, is the subject of module 8. Note only what belongs to Christology: the work is not finished, the church lives in the gap, and the one who will complete it is the same man the disciples watched go.