[This is
an ongoing project that is analyzing N.T. Wright’s 5 volume series, Christian
Origins and the Question of God. This series is widely read and bridges the gap
between the academic and devotional world. It is therefore worthy to be
carefully analyzed so that all readers can understand his key points while at
the same time gaining a critical eye to some of his rather bold claims. This
series of posts are concerning volume 3 –
The Resurrection of the Son of God.]
The Hebrew Bible is notorious for its relative disinterest
in life after death. This, of course, is only notorious because of the later
Christian obsession with life after death, thereby making the silence in the
Old Testament shocking. N.T. Wright explores this problem well showing how
there was a general disinterest in what later Christians would be interested in
with any type of life after death and anticipates that what will come later
can, in some ways, be understood given the worldview of the Hebrew Bible
itself.
Wright sets up the problem well. He notes that the interest
in any type of resurrection was – to be generous – dormant in the Old
Testament. This, of course, is a shock
to Christian groups who use resurrection as one of the most fundamental tenets.
Wright explains this problem well to begin the chapter:
It is all the more surprising,
then, to discover that, within the Bible itself, the hope of resurrection makes
rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal. Though later
exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, became skilled at discovering covert
allusions which earlier readers had not seen – a skill shared, according to the
gospels, by Jesus himself – there is general agreement that for much of the Old
Testament the idea of resurrection is, to put it at its strongest, deeply
asleep, only to be woken by echoes from later time and texts.[1]
Aside from the pun about coming from sleep to waking up as a
corrolary for death itself, I’m not sure if Wright can be quite as generous as
this. Some early texts have far less a dormant idea than they basically have no
idea at all. Wright explains this himself. There simply was very little to no
interest in life after death for the majority of Israel:
In fact, however, an interest in
‘life after death’ for its own sake was characteristic of various pagan
worldview (that of Egypt, for instance), not of ancient Israel.[2]
The interest was simply not there.
Wright correctly points out that this was not a problem for
Israelites (as many seem to think it would be). A worldview that would be
depressed of not having anything after death would have to be in contrast to
another that thought there was life after death:
It would be wrong to give the
impression that the early Israelites were particularly gloomy about all this.
Only a world which had already begun to hope for something more interesting and
enjoyable after death would find this vision unusual or depressing.[3]
This point that Wright makes is important for his Christian
readers. Many Christians fall into the trap of thinking that without a belief
in a future life in the kingdom of God, then, there could be no hope. However,
that is only true if one is hoping for something else and then learns one is
not going to get it.
Wright, then moves into a proof (in which this will be the
first chapter to be followed by the next) that argues that resurrection did
eventually become part of the worldview, it was a natural extension of the very
worldview that was already present:
When belief in resurrection
eventually appeared, it is best understood, as I shall argue below, not as a
strange foreign import but as a re-expression of the ancient Israelite
worldview under new and different circumstances.[4]
In form, this is good logic. Any development of an idea
needs to be something that actually develops; not something that crops up out
of the blue. While I agree with Wright in this element, I would slightly shift
what precisely shifted to lead to a discussion of resurrection.
Before exploring this aspect, though, it should be noted
what Wright does very well. Wright recognizes what resurrection would have
meant to an Old Testament sensibility. It had to mean something that occurred
after death rather than in place of death. Wright explains this clearly:
The texts we shall consider,
however we understand their detailed nuances, are not speaking about a new construal of life after death, but about
something that will happen after whatever
‘life after death’ may involve. Resurrection is not just another way of talking
about Sheol, or about what happens, as in Psalm 73, ‘afterwards’, that is,
after the event of bodily death. It
speaks of something that will happen, if it does, after that again.
Resurrection means bodily life after ‘life
after death’, or, if you prefer, bodily life after the state of ‘death.’ That is why it is misleading – and foreign to all
the relevant texts – to speak, as does one recent writer, of ‘resurrection to
heaven.’[5]
What Wright is arguing is that resurrection needs to be seen
as a new state of something. It is not what Elijah or Enoch experienced. It is
something else once the domain of death, the place of sheol, or the time of
this world has to be completed. It is the step after that. This is where
analogies of the dead coming out of the grave break down. While they do, they
don’t come out of the grave in the sense that Lazarus did in John 11. That
would simply be going through the process again – any resurrection had to be
something that was a step beyond that.
Wright argues that the whole idea of life after death arose
out of a rereading of God’s covenant with Israel. In this, Wright must be
correct. However, his argument is that the development came from the logical
extension of a theology of exile. Wright explains his perspective:
It is not difficult to see what
expulsion from the garden would have meant (not only to readers, but to editors
of the Pentateuch) during and after the exile in Babylon, especially in light
of the promises and warnings of the great Deuteronomic covenant. Moses held out
to the people life and death, blessings and curses, and urged them to choose
life – which meant, quite specifically, living in the promised land as opposed
to being sent into the disgrace of exile. But already in Deuteronomy there was
the promise that even exile would not be final: repentance would bring
restoration and the renewal both of the covenant and of human hearts. The
explicit link of life with land and death with exile, coupled with the promise
of restoration to the other side of exile, is one of the forgotten roots of the
fully developed hope of ancient Israel. The dead might be asleep; they might be
almost nothing at all; but hope lived on within the covenant and promise of
YHWH.[6]
Here, Wright argues that it was exile which caused them to
rethink the covenant promises in a new way that led to a conversation about
life after death and in this relies heavily upon Daniel to show the interest in
the rest of the chapter.
Wright here is certainly correct that it had to do with the
covenant, but I am not sure exile is the best solution in this case. He leans
upon Daniel, but Daniel, by many scholars, is dated to closer to the Maccabean
period than the Babylonian exile meaning that it is written to a community that
is comfortable (in some sense) in diaspora for over 400 years. Further, his
argument that exile is death and the land is life would have been true at one
period – particularly noted in the book of Exodus – it is not clear that it
always would be the same.
The shift, however, was covenantal. In the Old Testament,
there was one clear way to preserve immortality – through descendants.
Descendants is one of the most important features in the whole of the Hebrew Bible
and one of the major reasons for it was that this was the “eternal” side of the
covenant with Abraham – the covenant would be for Abraham’s descendants as well
as him himself. What shifted, it could be argued then, was less of a clear
understanding of descent. Communities in diaspora with no hope (outside of the
eschatological) of truly all uniting together in the land in the present time,
then hypothesized a coming kingdom of God when all of the descendants of
Abraham could finally unite in the land. While this sounds like Wright’s
position on exile – and in some ways it is – there was an equally powerful
drive that was motivated more by unity with ancestors so that descendants were
less important.
Recall that while this was the central tenet of Old
Testament religion, by the time of the New Testament, the emphasis seemed to be
seriously shifted. Further, the early Jesus movement seems to have completely
abandoned it. That shift in thinking cannot have been accidental. While some
would argue that this was due to the cultural world of Greece and Rome, the
solution was the same.[7]
If the eternal promise would not be eternal through descent, then it needed to
be eternal in another way. The most logical solution, then, would be life after
death of some kind.
Further complication could be the influence we see so
commonly in the New Testament that death was coupled with sin. If that is the
case, then how could a perfect order stand for it? If it was a very natural
thing that always existed, then any future kingdom would be fine with it.
However, if one lived without sin (which they did think was practically – even if
not logically – possible), then logically sin would not be just. If God is
just, then there must be some way of dealing with this issue.
These points are not to challenge the value of Wright.
Wright’s main points are very good. As said many times throughout this blog
series analyzing Wright’s very popular book series, I analyze his work this way
because he presents very common views far better than many of those who parrot
his position. Therefore, I hope it is taken as a compliment to his work that I
analyze it in this way.
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