The Reality of the Resurrection: The New Testament Witness

10. Protestant Discourse about Death and Resurrection in Funeral Services

241 Chapter 10 Protestant Discourse about Death and Resurrection in Funeral Services This third and final section of the present investigation offers no detailed pedagogical program for religious education or practical theology. Rather, the relevance of Protestant discourse about the reality of the resurrection in and according to the scriptures of the New Testament in their connection with the Old Testament scriptures worked out in the first two parts will be shown in a fragmentary but exemplary way with the help of three fields of praxis. This third section of the present investigation will have achieved its purpose if it provides impetus by which practical theology and the pedagogy of religious education as well as every concrete theological praxis in church, school, university, and society may have a more intensive encounter with the theology of the resurrection, and bring it into Protestant praxis. What can a Protestant funeral sermon say to provide well-justified comfort, and by what makes it recognizable as a particularly Protestant funeral sermon? How can one thus speak of the resurrection in accord with the biblical scriptures in religious instruction in schools, so that students do not encounter dogma irrelevant for their everyday lives, but rather a fundamental question of human life necessitating real consideration for the entire formation of their identity? And finally, what must be borne in mind in celebrating the Lord’s Supper so that it is not dragged around as the dead ritual of a dying form of worship but rather so that it is celebrated worthily and joyfully, because it contributes to believers’ assurance of community with their Lord and therefore also strengthensone’s own life? 242—The Reality of the Resurrection Death makes one silent and stiff. It is a break that wholly ends empirically perceptible life. Death robs the body of every possibility of action. It turns the living, perceiving body into a stiff, unfeeling corpse unable to do anything else by itself. It draws a line that neither the living nor the dead can overcome. But even a corpse, which can do nothing more, which has served its purpose, which has become useless, and which is rotting or reduced to ashes, remains God’s creature and therefore rests in God’s hand. From this fact the burial service receives its value and meaning. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” With this phrase Christians give thanks for the gift of the enlivened body and remind themselves that the body is not their possession that they can rule over autocratically. The body is a gift of God for a time, enlivened material that is given back again to the continuum of the material after the expiration of the breath of life. The corpse rests in the hand of God. Even the dead belong to the unlimited realm of his reign. It rests in God’s hand even if its organs are removed in order to enable others to live longer on earth. It also rests in the hand of God if it is cremated or torn to pieces by bombs even when pieces are altogether missing. There is no condition of matter, and there is no place, that lies outside the realm of God’s reign. Nothing can escape the almighty creator and the continuum of his creation. There is nothing outside God’s creation. Death is an unconquerable boundary for creaturely existence, but not for God. Therefore, from a Protestant perspective, there is no anthropology of resurrection, and indeed not even the supposition of a soul that lives on. Nothing, and especially nothing in the creature, is able to halt death. Human beings have nothing that they can contribute to their resurrection . They are radically dependent on the power of the creator. The soul that lives on is a supposition of Greek mythology and philosophy . It is not to be found in the Bible.1 The idea of the immortality of the soul trivializes the reality of death and sets aside the radical reliance of the creature on the creator. Seen from Protestant perspective, continuity between living existence and life after death is a self-serving construction with regard to creatures. Rather, death creates a distinction, a difference that cannot be overcome by creaturely existence. In the Protestant perspective there is therefore no anthropology but rather exclusively a theology of resurrection. Protestant Christians trust exclusively in the promise of God and with Paul in the fact that God can also do what he has promised (Rom...