Book Reviews
Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews
Professors Jon D. Levenson and Kevin J. Madigan
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008
Reviewed by Dr. Christopher M. Leighton
The concept of resurrection has not weathered the storms of modernity well. I recall heated debates during my seminary days about the unintelligibility of the doctrine of Jesus' bodily resurrection. The question that generated late-night quarrels was this: If Jesus' bones were found within a tomb and his bodily resurrection was empirically disproved, what would become of Christianity? My more liberal friends spoke of "resurrection" as a metaphor that points to a spiritual transformation. From their vantage point, it is the individual soul that endures. This ethereal entity exists in an otherworldly dimension and is in no way entangled within the corporeal realities of the here and now. They blithely re-situated the concept of resurrection within a Greco-Roman framework and posited a notion of an immortal soul capable of enjoying eternal communion with the divine. With or without Jesus' bones, the Church could march confidently into the future.
Analogous efforts to remove the embarrassment about bodily resurrection occupied liberal Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early proponents of Reform Judaism, such as David Einhorn (1809-79) and Abraham Geiger (1810-74), jettisoned traditional claims about bodily transformation in favor of the immortality of the human soul and vague promises of eternal life. The Union Prayerbook (1895) of the Reform movement notes that "only the body dies and is laid in the dust. The spirit lives in the shelter of God's love and mercy" (quoted in Madigan and Levenson, p. 216). More recent adaptations within Reform liturgies are agnostic on the question of resurrection. "One can affirm it or deny it, without loss. The choice is one of personal preference" (Madigan and Levenson, p. 218). Conservative Judaism tried to neutralize the scandal by reinterpreting ancient prayers, including the Amidah, the Tefilla, and the Semoneh Esreh. Traditional affirmations of resurrection were recast in the ambiguous language of "reviving the dead," and expectations of life-after-death were stretched to include notions of a disembodied spirit. Only Orthodox Judaism has held fast to traditional claims and continues to maintain the hope of bodily resurrection.
Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson, Christian and Jewish colleagues at Harvard Divinity School, have written a volume that demonstrates the debilitating theological consequences that come with the abandonment of the doctrine of resurrection, a concept that was traditionally inseparable from a bodily transformation. They excavate the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature, tracing the development of this concept and its ongoing centrality for both traditions. In a work that a diverse reading public will find both accessible and challenging, they map familiar terrain and then unearth material that offers fresh insights. As biblical scholars have long acknowledged, the idea of bodily resurrection does not figure prominently within the Hebrew Scriptures. Life beyond the grave did not constitute a major concern, although Madigan and Levenson do not spare readers an overview of the grim contours of Sheol that are found within these sacred writings.
Death however did not call into doubt either God's goodness or God's power. Questions about the fate of the individual after death were eclipsed by concerns about the destiny of the family and the nation. The meaning of a person's life and death was determined by the vitality that the individual poured into the community. In this historical context, there was little room for the modern preoccupation with an autonomous self. The distances between ancient and modern hopes were at least as vast as the divide between ancient and modern anxieties. To appreciate these radically divergent worldviews, Madigan and Levenson evoke a conceptual landscape in which body and soul are not bifurcated, where the lines between life, disease and death are differently drawn, and where the individual is subsumed within a larger corporate reality.
They proceed by sifting through a series of foundational biblical texts, demonstrating how various writers of the Hebrew Scriptures deciphered God's promise as the fusion of land and people within a covenantal framework that extended across generations. Texts such as Ezekiel's vision in the valley of dry bones (Chapter 37) may suggest notions of bodily resurrection that later became doctrinal bedrock for both Christians and Jews. But Madigan and Levenson argue that Ezekiel's language of resurrection was first and foremost deployed to advance national expectations. God will overcome the trauma of exile and death by restoring his chosen people to the land, and by rehabilitating, indeed recreating, the people Israel. To construct this portrait of the future Ezekiel digs into the primordial depths of the past and embellishes imagery from the Creation and the Exodus.
Daniel 12:1-3 is the biblical text on which traditional ideas of resurrection hinge, and Madigan and Levenson go to considerable lengths to dispel simplistic interpretations of this passage within recent scholarship. The prevailing view is that the idea of resurrection in Daniel emerged as a response to a theo-political crisis, namely the death of martyrs who remained faithful in the midst of murderous persecutions during the second century B.C.E. According to many biblical exegetes, resurrection provided a religious answer to what would have otherwise proved a refutation of God's providential care. Daniel contested the political appearances of the day by envisioning a great reversal. God will rescue the righteous from the pit and raise them to eternal life, while the godless and arrogant will awake "to reproaches, to everlasting abhorrence." Resurrection served an indispensable function by re-establishing the reliability of God's justice and by reaffirming God's fidelity to His covenantal partners. Without minimizing the historical context that would have led Jews to welcome this cosmic reassurance, Madigan and Levenson argue that the problems of theodicy were anything but new and did not necessitate radical innovation. There were alternative strategies for coping with cataclysmic loss that had ancient pedigrees and had proven adequate in the face of previous catastrophes. Madigan and Levenson maintain that Daniel's formulation of resurrection sank deep roots within the Jewish and subsequent Christian traditions because the affirmation at the core of this doctrine pulled together disparate biblical motifs and synthesized long-standing assertions about God's power.
What emerges is a portrait of God whose might penetrates all of nature and history and whose purpose will be definitively established with the defeat of the forces of injustice. Given the glaring disparities between the righteous, who all too often suffer great indignities and the wicked, who frequently thrive in the lap of luxury, God's power must ultimately reach into the domain of death to establish a just order. Therefore the concept of resurrection (whether applied to the individual, the community, or to the entire creation) goes hand in hand with God's judgment at the end of days, and both point to the eschatological restoration of Israel. Madigan and Levenson conclude that God's victory over evil and injustice is inseparable from the elimination of the greatest of foes, death (p.188).
Bodily resurrection therefore occupies a central place within the Jewish and Christian imaginations because it binds hope for the future, stretching through all of history to the creation itself. In this vision, life in all its multiplicity, through all the twists and turns of time past, present, and future, belongs to God, and death has no ultimate sovereignty over anything in the created order. Redemption is consequently misconstrued if confined to the human realm. The rejuvenation of the world extends from the social to the natural order, and we are therefore prompted to envision God's transformation as all encompassing. In praying that God's kingdom come, we not only anticipate a radical overhaul of governments that exploit the weak, but a reversal in policies and practices that yield ecological devastation. Although a biblical scholar such as Jon Levenson might bristle at the suggestion that his biblical research is consonant with contemporary trends among environmentalists, this book delivers a conception of resurrection that contests the individualism of American culture and challenges the anthropomorphism of western religiosity. The concept of resurrection emerges from this inquiry as a far more counter-cultural affirmation than most Jews and Christians dared to imagine. Here is a radical idea deeply woven into the texture of our traditions that most Jews and Christians have not yet fully acknowledged. Rather than opt for hopes that are framed in purely spiritual terms, Christians and Jews may discover that the ancient dream of bodily resurrection offers a more compelling vision of the ways in which we are interconnected with one another, the creation, and God.
To be sure ideas of resurrection operate differently within the communal dramas of Jews and Christians, and it would be a grave oversimplification to suggest otherwise. "Contrary to what one often hears, the difference between Judaism and Christianity, as they took shape in late antiquity, is not a difference between a this-worldly and an otherworldly religion, for both traditions affirm both worlds and take them with utmost seriousness. It is rather a difference about what constitutes God's highest revelation of the Wisdom that defines the way faithful members of each community should live even now and that, according to the classical form of each tradition, will surely result in the resurrection of the dead and the gift of eternal life" (p.257).
The theological implications of this volume are many, and they will be left to dangle until Jews and Christians are willing to wrestle with its multiple challenges. For example, Christians have interpreted Jesus' resurrection as God's decisive triumph over death, and they traditionally grounded some of their most daring Christological claims on this event. Yet it is not self-evident how Jesus' resurrection undergirds the traditional affirmations about his divinity. Madigan and Levenson set the stage for Christians and Jews to re-examine the inner logic of the early church and in the process re-discover how Jesus' resurrection came to represent a startling reversal in a cosmic struggle with death. The vindication of the man raised from the dead shaped a community's expectations about God's coming kingdom. Readers will find themselves challenged to reconsider the manner in which Christians continue to connect the theological dots, and this inquiry promises to disclose a great deal about the content and character of the Christian imagination.
Yet this book promises to unsettle Jews as well as Christians. Many of my Jewish colleagues insist that Jews are not particularly interested in eschatology and rarely do they frame the work of their communities in terms of cosmic struggles against the forces of death. Many have become agnostic, indeed indifferent about the question of life beyond the grave. Perhaps the reflexive resistance to resurrection is one of the lamentable inheritances of the anguished history that divides Jews and Christians. If so, this book could prove an important catalyst for an encounter where Jews and Christians can inspire fresh thinking about some of our most basic assumptions and our deepest points of opposition. This kind of probing is bound to lead to clearer understandings of what makes each religious community indissolubly distinct.
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