Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE CLIMAX OF JESUS' MISSION §18.6
In interpreting what they saw as 'the resurrection of Jesus', the first disciples
were affirming that what had happened to Jesus afforded an insight into reality
which was determinative for how reality itself should be seen. As interpretation,
the resurrection of Jesus constituted a perspective on reality which determined
how reality itself was conceived. As weak parallels I might cite e = me 2 or the
American Declaration of Independence, each of them a window through which
physical reality itself and society itself are perceived. The most obvious strong
parallel is creation. As belief that the cosmos is created determines how one perceives
the cosmos and the place of the human species within it, so belief in the
resurrection of Jesus determines how one perceives the significance of Jesus and
the function of life and death.
In short, resurrection of Jesus is not so much a historical fact as a foundational
fact or meta-fact, 229 the interpretative insight into reality which enables
discernment of the relative importance and unimportance of all other facts.
b. 'Resurrection' as Metaphor
As Pannenberg also recognized, we can hardly avoid drawing on the category of
'metaphor' to characterize the concept 'resurrection'. 230 As noted above
(§ 12.3c), the power of metaphor is the power 'to redescribe a reality inaccessible
to direct description' (Ricoeur), 'reality depicting without pretending to be directly
descriptive' (Martin Soskice). This point has been missed by those who
want to see 'the resurrection of Jesus' as a way of saying something else, which
could actually be said more easily and with less intellectual embarrassment than
that 'God raised Jesus from the dead'. For to say that 'the resurrection of Jesus' is
a metaphor is to recognize that the phrase is saying something which could not
otherwise be said. In consequence, to translate 'resurrection' into something
more 'literal' is not to translate it but to abandon it. To interpret the first Easter
faith into the affirmation that Jesus' significance or message has long outlasted
his life (Marxsen) is not to interpret the metaphor but to empty it. To reduce it to
an accident of language 231 or to the mythical expression of deep human
experience 232 is to lose the extra nos preserved by metaphorical reference. To re-
229. Cf. Fuller, Formation 22-24.
230. Jesus 74; cf. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus 508. Chester observes that 'the
usage of resurrection terminology from an early stage in the Old Testament is strongly metaphorical
in orientation, and serves especially as a symbol of national resurrection' ('Resurrection
and Transformation' 77).
231. Geering prefers the inadequate alternative 'idiom' (alluding here to Resurrection
217).
232. N. Perrin, The Resurrection Narratives: A New Approach (London: SCM, 1977)
878