Cross and Resurrection: God's Wonder and Mystery

1. Cross, Resurrection, and Truth

1 The cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the heart and soul of the Christian faith. From the beginning, Christianity has confessed them not only as the ground of its faith but also as upheld in this same faith and answerable to it: the cross and resurrection of Christ are absolutely God’s work of salvation. A new era, the time of salvation , has begun with them. Whatever is, was, or will be; whatever happens and whoever lives; all people and all things have their measure and goal in them. Christ’s crucifixion was surely a result of a combined effort on the part of cool and calculating leaders of the Jewish people, the mob that was stirred up by them, and the Roman powers of occupation , who for their part no less coolly pursued their own run-of-the-mill political expediencies. From the beginning, Christ’s resurrection has stood and continues to stand amid the dim light of skepticism and doubt. In other words, Christ’s cross and 1 Cross, Resurrection, and Truth Cross and Resurrection 2 resurrection are, to say the least, interwoven with ambiguous historical processes that do not allow for definitive assertions. That is, the Christian faith builds on a foundation that becomes blurred in the twilight of prior history. The Christian’s response to this ambiguity can be taken up in a couple of ways. To this day, the first approach has regarded it as self-deception, illusion, wishful thinking, pious fables, or even, to put a point on it, as a con job, deception, or opiate of the people. From the time of the developing community’s opponents in the first century up through Gerd Lüdemann in the twentieth, it has not been possible to refute this stance convincingly , especially since these opponents have the facts on their side (or rather, Christians have a lack of unambiguous evidence on theirs). The second approach has taken a completely different path from the start: though they recognize the form of God’s mystery, the mantle of the miracle of salvation in it, they do not completely deny the ambiguity . They do not depend on historical conditions, verifications, or other dubious matters. Instead they generate historical consequences, whether they can be demonstrated or not. The two approaches cannot be reconciled. As a consequence, the cross is always “a sign that will be opposed” (Luke 2:34) and, together with the resurrection , provokes reason and snubs experience. This conflict trails Christian faith like a shadow. The abiding counterpoint to the Creed is to pose questions. Thus faith is not untouched—not least Cross, Resurrection, and Truth 3 because it is precisely the Christian faith, a faith grounded in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, that sets reason free and is expressed in a reality that can be experienced. This is why faith can and indeed does encounter these objections. Nevertheless, Christian faith has spread and remains vital even today. What is more, it has been demonstrated historically that when we use reason and experience as our approach, then it follows that opposition, hostility, and persecution altogether strengthen and confirm faith. Whatever we conclude from this, two things are evident. On the one hand, because Christian faith is grounded in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, it obviously draws on sources that flow beyond reason and experience. On the other hand, matters that are irrational, improbable, or merely made up evoke radical questioning and rabid challenges, which have indeed befallen the Christian faith throughout history, and cannot hold up successfully in the long run. If historical work wants to remain honest and objective, it must reckon with this. At any rate, despite the challenges posed by reason and experience, the affirmation and confession of Christian faith that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the absolutely universal event of salvation remains undeniably intact. However, the objection or accusation of a lack of historical validity cannot simply be dismissed. Instead, it confirms that history can only be done in “earthen vessels” (2 Cor. 4:7) in which eternal treasure is stored, the hidden cloak of God’s mystery and Cross and Resurrection 4 wonder. But who would decide to ground certainty according to either stance? It was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the Enlightenment thinker and combative opponent of the orthodox theologians of his day (and a learned theologian himself), who insisted that we can recognize...