On Hope and Resurrection
Quaeritur
Utrum spes Christiana fundamentum habeat in ipsa structura participationis, ita ut resurrectio non sit extrinseca recompensatio sed consummatio participationis in vita Dei; et quomodo Spiritus identitatem personalem per mortem servet et restituat, ita ut resurrectio sit opus remembrance divinae potius quam naturae humanae.
Whether Christian hope finds its foundation in the very structure of participation, such that resurrection is not an extrinsic reward but the consummation of participation in the life of God; and how the Spirit preserves and reconstitutes personal identity through death, so that resurrection is an act of divine remembrance rather than a natural extension of creaturely being.
Thesis
Resurrection is the eschatological manifestation of participation. What is now hidden—participation in the crucified and risen Christ—will then be revealed as the definitive form of life. Hope is therefore not the anticipation of a future possibility but the confident trust that the Spirit who has begun participation will bring it to completion. The believer’s identity is preserved through death not by the persistence of a metaphysical substrate but by the fidelity of divine remembrance. Resurrection is God’s act of reconstituting the person in the fullness of life by the same power that raised Christ from the dead.
Thus the Christian does not hope for escape from finitude but for the transfiguration of finitude into glory.
Locus Classicus
1 Corinthians 15:20–22
νυνὶ δὲ Χριστὸς ἐγήγερται ἐκ νεκρῶν… ὥσπερ γὰρ ἐν Ἀδὰμ πάντες ἀποθνήσκουσιν, οὕτως καὶ ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ πάντες ζωοποιηθήσονται.
“Christ has been raised from the dead… for as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
Romans 8:11
ὁ ἐγείρας Ἰησοῦν ἐκ νεκρῶν ζωοποιήσει καὶ τὰ θνητὰ σώματα ὑμῶν διὰ τοῦ ἐνοικοῦντος πνεύματος.
“He who raised Jesus will give life also to your mortal bodies through His indwelling Spirit.”
Luther, WA 10 I, 1, 45
Resurrectio est opus purum Dei, qui nos de nihilo iterum creat.
“Resurrection is the pure work of God, who creates us again out of nothing.”
Explicatio
1. Participation is the seed of resurrection
Participation is not merely moral renewal or spiritual elevation. It is the ontological union of the believer with the crucified and risen Christ through the Spirit. This participation is incomplete and hidden under the conditions of mortal life, but it bears within itself the form of its fulfillment. Resurrection is the revelation of what participation already is: life sustained by the Spirit, grounded in Christ, embraced by the Father.
Thus hope is not conjecture. It is the anticipation of what participation necessarily entails.
2. Death as the boundary at which creaturely agency ceases
Death is not merely the cessation of biological functions. It is the interruption of creaturely self-articulation. The creature can no longer enact its identity. All natural continuity fails. If the person is to persist, it must be through a form of identity not grounded in creaturely endurance but grounded in divine fidelity.
This is why hope is theological, for the creature cannot secure its own future. Only God can remember and reconstitute the creature.
3. Divine remembrance as the ground of personal identity
Identity is not an inert substance but a pattern of intelligibility sustained by the Spirit. In life, the Spirit shapes the believer into conformity with Christ. In death, the Spirit retains this pattern in divine remembrance. In resurrection, the Spirit reconstitutes the believer according to this remembered form.
Thus the believer’s identity does not persist by nature. It persists because the Spirit is faithful.
This is Luther’s insight: God remembers the person into being.
4. Resurrection as the consummation of cruciform participation
Because participation is cruciform—shaped by the humility and majesty of the crucified Christ—resurrection must be the revelation of this form in glory. Glory is not a reversal of the cross but its fulfillment. The wounds of Christ are not erased; they become radiant. In resurrection, creaturely life is purified of distortion but not stripped of finitude. The creature remains creature, yet its life is transfigured by union with the Logos.
5. Eschatological hope is grounded in the Spirit’s constitutive causality
Hope is not grounded in the autonomy of the soul but in the Spirit’s power to give life. Romans 8:11 is decisive: resurrection occurs διὰ τοῦ ἐνοικοῦντος πνεύματος—through the indwelling Spirit.
Thus:
• Christ is the form of resurrection,
• the Spirit is the cause of resurrection,
• the Father is the source of resurrection.
Participation is therefore Trinitarian in its origin, structure, and consummation.
6. Resurrection is not the natural immortality of the soul
Natural immortality cannot sustain the theological hope of resurrection. It reduces eschatology to anthropology and empties the cross of its metaphysical significance. The Christian does not hope for the survival of a separable essence. The Christian hopes for the recreation of the person by the God who raises the dead. Thus Luther reminding us that God makes something out of nothing. Clearly, resurrection is precisely this nothing-from-something again.
Objectiones
Ob I. If identity depends on divine remembrance, does this not destroy continuity of person?
Ob II. If resurrection is pure divine act, how can the believer’s moral history matter?
Ob III. Does this not reduce eschatology to determinism?
Ob IV. How can the risen body be both continuous with the mortal body and glorified?
Ob V. Does the hope of resurrection undermine the seriousness of death?
Responsiones
Ad I. Divine remembrance is not recollection but constitutive fidelity. The person remains the same because God preserves the pattern of intelligibility that defines the person. Continuity is secured at the highest possible level.
Ad II. Moral history matters because God remembers the person as the person has been shaped in Christ. Resurrection does not erase moral history; it redeems and completes it.
Ad III. Resurrection is certain, but it is not deterministic. It is the consequence of divine promise, not metaphysical compulsion. Hope rests on fidelity, not necessity.
Ad IV. Continuity lies in identity; transformation lies in glory. The mortal body is raised immortal because the Spirit reconstitutes it according to its true form in Christ.
Ad V. The seriousness of death is intensified, not diminished. Death destroys every creaturely ground of hope so that hope may rest entirely in God.
Nota
Resurrection is the final act of the participatory ontology developed throughout these disputations. It is the Spirit’s definitive articulation of the believer in conformity to Christ. It is not the resumption of interrupted life but the gift of new life. Hope is therefore the posture of those who know that their future lies not in their own endurance but in the God who raises the dead.
Determinatio
We determine that resurrection is the eschatological fulfillment of participation in the life of God. Death cannot sever the believer from Christ because the Spirit preserves personal identity through divine remembrance. Resurrection is God’s reconstitution of the creature in glory, revealing the cruciform form of divine life in perfected clarity. Hope rests not in natural immortality but in divine fidelity. The final word of theology is therefore not abstraction but promise: the love that made us will remake us.
Finis
The sixty-four disputationes have traced a path across the full horizon of theological reason. We began with logic, not because theology is reducible to logical form, but because theology must speak intelligibly of what it confesses. We proceeded to ontology, not because metaphysics precedes revelation, but because divine revelation presses thought to articulate what it has seen. We turned to Christology, where intelligibility and being converge in the Logos who is both the form of God and the form of the servant. We explored the Spirit’s illumination, creaturely participation, providence, history, cruciformity, and finally the hope of resurrection.
Through all of these movements a single conviction has guided the work: theology speaks truly only because God acts. Theological speech is not the construction of a conceptual system, nor the refinement of human religious insight, nor the self-expression of a community. It is the response of reason awakened by divine presence. Theology is an act of participation: the mind caught up into what it cannot generate but can only receive.
Thus each disputatio—however analytic in method or metaphysical in structure—has aimed to keep before the reader the living center of theological truth: the God who gives Himself to be known. The Logos renders divine life intelligible. The Spirit renders this intelligibility accessible. The Father is the eternal source of both. Without this triune economy of self-giving, the work of theology collapses either into rationalization or despair.
The communicatio idiomatum stands at the heart of this vision, for in Christ God shows not only who He is but how He acts. The hypostatic union is not an isolated miracle but the grammar of all divine–human communion. It grounds the real presence in sacrament, the efficacy of the Word, the transformation of the believer, and the final hope of resurrection. What Christ is personally, believers become participatively. This is the shape of grace.
The cross reveals the form of this grace. Divine majesty appears in humility, not by contradiction but by nature of divine love. In the crucified Christ the character of God is made manifest: power exercised as mercy, glory revealed in self-offering. All genuine theological understanding must therefore pass through the cruciform horizon. Outside the cross, divine majesty becomes a metaphysical abstraction or an instrument of human pride. In the cross, majesty becomes the world’s redemption.
This is why the final disputatio turns to hope. Resurrection is not the compensation for suffering nor the restoration of natural capacities but the consummation of participation. What the Spirit has begun in the believer—conformity to the form of the Son—He completes in the act of divine remembrance. The Christian does not place hope in the durability of the soul but in the fidelity of God. To be remembered by the God who raises the dead is to live forever.
If these disputationes have any unity, it lies here: theology is the mind’s participation in God’s self-giving act. It proceeds from revelation, through illumination, into understanding, and finally to praise. Its method is disciplined, its language careful, its categories precise, but its end is doxological. Theology thinks because God speaks; theology understands because God gives; theology hopes because God remembers.
The disputationes end where theology always ends; they end in the confession that the love that made us will remake us and that the last word spoken over all creaturely life is not death but the Word Himself.
Soli Deo Gloria
No comments:
Post a Comment