Christians say each Easter, and many say each week, “He is risen.” Yet it is no longer clear that all who utter these words mean the same thing by them. Is this a cognitive claim? If so, what kind of claim is it, and what could make it true? Everything depends upon whether Easter names an objective act of God or merely the significance later attached to Jesus.
The Question We Must Ask
What does resurrection mean? Christians say each year, and many say each week, He is risen. Yet it is no longer clear that all who utter these words mean the same thing by them, or even that they take them to be the kind of claim the Church has historically taken them to be. For some, resurrection names a miracle in the strongest sense: God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead. For others, it is a symbol of hope, a poetic way of saying that love is stronger than hate, or that the memory of Jesus still animates the community of faith. For still others, it names the disciples’ transformed consciousness after the catastrophe of the cross, an existential recovery of courage after despair. These are not small differences. They concern what Christians are actually claiming when they say, He is risen.
The first task, then, is conceptual. What sort of assertion is He is risen? Is it a claim about reality, or a way of interpreting reality? Does it refer to something God has done, or to the significance believers have found in Jesus after his death? Does it name an event, however mysterious, or does it function as symbol, confession, or communal orientation? These questions arise because in modern theology and modern culture the meaning of resurrection has become unstable. The language remains; the content often shifts beneath it.
This instability matters because Christianity has always understood Easter as proclamation. The earliest Christians did not merely say that the cause of Jesus lived on, nor that his ideals remained inspiring, nor that his followers had recovered courage after his execution. They proclaimed that God had raised him. Whatever difficulties attend that proclamation, its grammar is plain enough. Something is being said to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to the inner life of the disciples or to the continuing vitality of Jesus’ teaching. Easter, in its classical Christian sense, is not first the announcement that the disciples came to see things differently. It is the announcement that God acted.
The Logical Type of the Easter Claim
Before asking whether He is risen is true, one must ask what kind of utterance it is. Is it cognitive or noncognitive? Does it purport to say what is the case, or does it instead express an attitude, commitment, hope, or stance?
This distinction is decisive. Expressivism is noncognitive. On such a view, He is risen does not fundamentally report a state of affairs. It expresses commitment, hope, endorsement, or ecclesial posture. The sentence retains declarative grammar, but its deepest function is not descriptive. One still says He is risen, but what is displayed is not what God has done to Jesus so much as the community’s orientation toward Jesus, death, and the future.
Subjectivism is different. It is cognitive. It does treat He is risen as truth-apt. But it locates the truthmaker within the sphere of consciousness: the experience of the disciples, the continuing consciousness of the Church, the transformation of existential self-understanding, or the occurrence of certain moral or religious states. Subjectivism does not say that the sentence merely expresses a stance. It says something. But what it says is made true by what obtains within human mindedness.
A further clarification is needed. The psychological states of others are objective for me. They may obtain apart from my awareness, perception, conception, and language, and they may therefore be investigated from a third-person standpoint. That is why psychology and historiography are possible. Yet epistemic objectivity is not the same thing as ontological realism. If the truth of He is risen were exhausted by the disciples’ psychological states, then the claim would still depend upon human awareness, conception, and experience as such, even if not upon mine.
That is why one must distinguish a weaker and a stronger sense of realism. If one says, x is real if and only if x obtains apart from my awareness, perception, conception, and language, then the psychological states of others may count as real. But if one says, x is real if and only if x obtains apart from human awareness, perception, conception, and language, then those same states no longer count as real in the stronger sense. They may be objective for inquiry without being mind-independent. The stronger sense is the one at issue in theological realism.
An objective cognitive reading of Easter in the strongest sense therefore requires more than the existence of Easter-faith, Easter-experience, or Easter-interpretation. It requires that something obtain apart from human mindedness as such. The decisive question then becomes: what must obtain if He is risen is to be true in that stronger realist sense?
What Could Make “He Is Risen” True?
Once the issue is framed in this way, the truthmaker question can no longer remain vague. It is not enough to say that resurrection is “real” or that “God acted.” One must ask more exactly: what in particular could make the sentence true?
The disciples’ renewed courage cannot be the truthmaker. Nor can the Church’s enduring hope, its liturgical confidence, or its Easter-shaped life. These may all be effects of resurrection-faith, or even effects of the risen Christ if Christ is risen, but they are not what makes the sentence true. They concern reception and appropriation, not the state of affairs to which the sentence answers.
Nor are the disciples’ experiences, taken simply as psychological events, sufficient truthmakers. One may say truly that certain disciples had visions, convictions, affective transformations, or powerful experiences of presence. Such claims may be psychologically and historically objective in the weaker sense just described. But if He is risen is made true only by such states, then its truth remains enclosed within human consciousness. The claim may still be about something more than my own mind, but it is not yet about something that obtains apart from human mindedness as such.
Neither are the empty tomb and the appearances, taken simply as evidential data, themselves the truthmakers. They are signs, testimonies, and evidentially relevant features within the Easter witness. But evidence for a claim is not identical with the state of affairs that makes the claim true.
The bare survival of Jesus’ soul is likewise insufficient. If that were all, then Easter would collapse into a doctrine of postmortem continuation. Yet the Church has always meant more than this. The scandal of Easter lies not in the persistence of consciousness after death, but in the victory of God over death itself.
Simple revivification is insufficient as well. If the truthmaker were merely that a corpse was biologically reanimated into ordinary mortal life, then Easter would amount to a remarkable reversal within the old order. But the Church has not meant Lazarus repeated. Resurrection, in the Christian sense, is not temporary return to perishability.
The strongest candidate truthmaker is therefore something like this: that the numerically same Jesus who was crucified, died, and was buried now lives by the act of God in a transformed, death-transcending mode of embodied existence. The truthmaker is thus neither bare psychology nor bare symbolism, neither sheer soul-survival nor mere biological reversal, but a divine act upon this Jesus yielding a transformed continuity between the crucified one and the risen one.
This is realism, but it is not crude resuscitationism. It does not say that a corpse simply resumed ordinary biological life. It says something far stranger and more difficult: that God acted objectively upon Jesus Christ so that the crucified one now lives beyond the ordinary conditions of mortality. Easter is therefore realist without being naively physicalist, and objective without being reducible to ordinary empirical occurrence.
The Post-Kantian Drift
Once these distinctions are in hand, much of modern theology becomes easier to read. The decisive question is always the same: what sort of claim is being made by the sentence, and what sort of thing could make it true? The theological tradition since the Enlightenment can often be read as a series of increasingly subtle relocations of the truthmaker for Christian discourse.
Kant is the great watershed. His critical philosophy does not simply reject religion; it restricts theoretical knowledge and presses religion toward practical reason. In that setting, claims such as He is risen become difficult to handle as straightforward judgments concerning divine action in reality. They are pressured toward moral significance, practical necessity, or regulative function.
Fichte radicalizes the movement. Religious language tends increasingly to function as language about vocation, ethical direction, or the self’s relation to the moral world-order. Easter is then no longer securely anchored in a singular divine act upon Jesus, but is tempted toward the sphere of moral or spiritual consciousness.
Schelling reopens the question of revelation and ontological depth, but the issue remains whether Easter is preserved as the singular act of God in history or absorbed into a larger speculative grammar of revelation.
Hegel transforms the matter still further. If spirit comes to actuality through the historical unfolding of consciousness and reconciliation, then resurrection is readily redescribed as a moment in the self-manifestation of spirit rather than as a singular divine act standing over against the Church’s appropriation of it.
Lotze then gives later theology one of its most important tools. Once one distinguishes sharply between the world of causal explanation and the world of worth and significance, resurrection can be preserved as a value-judgment even where confidence in its objective truthmaker has weakened. He is risen may then mean that Jesus is of abiding worth, that his significance was vindicated, or that the community stands under his incomparable value. The language remains cognitive, but its truthmaker has been relocated into the sphere of value rather than event.
Seen in this light, the post-Enlightenment trajectories become more intelligible. Some are frankly noncognitive and expressivist. Some are cognitive but subjectivist. Some are intersubjectively objective without being strongly realist. Some move from event-language to value-language. Once one asks of each trajectory, what kind of claim is this? and what could make it true?, a great deal of fog lifts.
Another Decisive Distinction: Does Soteriology Precede Christology?
A further distinction clarifies modern theology even more. One must ask whether, in the order of theological construction, soteriology precedes Christology or Christology precedes soteriology. Do we begin with the human need for salvation and then interpret Christ as the answer to that need? Or do we begin with the person and history of Jesus Christ and only then derive from that who he is for us and what he accomplishes?
The point here is methodological rather than ontological. No orthodox Christian theologian means to say that salvation exists prior to Christ in reality. The question is what has explanatory priority in the theologian’s account.
Tillich exemplifies one path. One begins with the human predicament and then presents the Christian message as the answer. Estrangement is first analyzed; Christ appears as the bearer of the New Being who overcomes estrangement. Christology is thus organized by the prior soteriological question. Jesus matters because he answers the problem already disclosed in the analysis of existence.
Pannenberg moves in the opposite direction. One asks first: Who is Jesus? What happened to him? What does the resurrection disclose about his identity? Only then does one ask what this means for us. Salvation follows from Christ’s identity and history; it is not the prior lens through which Christ is first construed.
This distinction matters deeply for the resurrection question. If soteriology precedes Christology, then Easter will be handled primarily as the answer to a human need already specified in advance. Resurrection then readily becomes a function of its salvific meaning. If, however, Christology precedes soteriology, then one asks first what God has done in Jesus, and only after that what this means for humanity, judgment, forgiveness, and hope.
That is why Pannenberg remains so important. He saw clearly that the resurrection of Jesus must be treated as an objective claim and not merely as existential transformation, ecclesial value, or post-Easter interpretation. He refused the easy modern bargain whereby one preserves Easter’s significance at the cost of surrendering its objectivity.
Some Major Ways “Resurrection” Has Been Understood
At this point, the conceptual field comes more fully into view. The word resurrection has not functioned univocally. It has carried several distinct possibilities, some ancient, some modern, some half-orthodox, some plainly reductive. To say merely that there are “different interpretations” is too weak. One must see the differing structures of thought at work.
1. Resurrection as Revivification
On the crudest construal, resurrection means that a dead organism once again became biologically alive. The corpse resumes ordinary bodily functioning and returns to the same order of mortal existence it inhabited before death. This is the easiest conception to imagine, because it requires the least conceptual revision. It treats resurrection as an extraordinary instance within an otherwise familiar biological frame.
Yet this is not the Christian meaning of Easter. It is closer to revivification than resurrection. It amounts to saying that Jesus came back, as one might come back from a coma or a near-fatal injury. But the risen Christ of the Church’s confession is not simply returned to ordinary life. If this were all Easter meant, then resurrection would be only a temporary reversal, not the decisive victory over death. Revivification leaves mortality structurally untouched.
2. Resurrection as Miraculous Resuscitation
A slightly more refined version speaks not of ordinary revivification, but of miraculous resuscitation. Here one does not imagine a natural process, but a supernatural interruption. God miraculously restores the dead Jesus to life. Still, the conceptual difficulty remains. For if the result is simply the restoration of ordinary mortal life, then the miracle changes only the cause of the return, not the kind of life returned to. The question is not merely how Jesus lives again, but what kind of life he now lives. A miraculous return to perishability is still not yet what the Church has meant by resurrection.
3. Resurrection as the Survival of the Soul
Another possibility is that resurrection language is really a way of speaking about postmortem spiritual continuation. On this account, what matters is that Jesus was not annihilated by death. His soul, spirit, or consciousness survived and continued in a mode no longer bound to the body. This view is often more intellectually refined than resuscitation language, and it can seem more plausible to those who find bodily resurrection difficult.
But it too falls short of the Christian claim. The Church has never proclaimed merely that Jesus’ spirit survived. If that were all, Easter would tell us little more than many religious and philosophical traditions have already maintained. The scandal of Easter lies not in disembodied persistence, but in God’s victory over death in relation to the crucified Jesus himself. A doctrine of soul-survival weakens the creaturely and bodily density of the Christian proclamation.
4. Resurrection as Symbolic Vindication
A modern symbolic construal takes resurrection as a way of saying that Jesus was, in the end, “right,” that his cause was vindicated, or that the meaning of his life survived the attempt to destroy him. Here resurrection names not a new state of affairs obtaining in relation to Jesus himself, but the enduring force of his significance. The world tried to silence him, yet his meaning lives on.
There is rhetorical power in such a construal. One can see why it appeals to modern hearers. It allows one to retain Easter language without bearing the full ontological weight of the classical claim. Yet the sentence He is risen is thereby transformed. It no longer says that God has acted upon Jesus; it says that Jesus continues to matter. It is not about a new state of affairs regarding Christ, but about the permanence of his significance.
5. Resurrection as Existential Awakening
A further construal, especially influential in modern theology, understands resurrection in terms of the disciples’ transformation. After the devastation of the cross, the disciples were reconstituted in courage, mission, and faith. Resurrection then names not primarily what happened to Jesus, but what happened in the disciples through their post-crucifixion encounter with his significance. The Easter proclamation becomes, in effect, a report on the emergence of a new existential possibility.
This is stronger than pure symbolism because it does describe a real occurrence. It is cognitive. It speaks of something that happened. But what happened is still located within human consciousness and communal life. The truthmaker lies in the disciples’ transformation. Resurrection has here become an account of Easter-faith rather than a proclamation of an objective divine act upon Jesus.
6. Resurrection as Value-Judgment
Lotze and much later theology make possible a different shift. Resurrection may be understood as a judgment of worth. To say He is risen is to say that Jesus possesses unsurpassable value, that his life has final significance, that the world cannot nullify the worth manifest in him, or that the community rightly stands under his claim. Here the statement remains cognitive, but its truthmaker lies not in event but in value. What is “risen” is not first a person in transformed life, but the incomparable worth of Jesus in relation to faith, history, and human self-understanding.
This construal is especially important because it preserves seriousness while quietly altering ontology. It is not noncognitive expressivism. It does assert something. But what it asserts is no longer a divine act in relation to Jesus so much as an evaluative truth about Jesus’ place in human and religious life.
7. Resurrection as the Self-Manifestation of Spirit
In more idealist construals, resurrection may function as a moment in the manifestation of spirit, reconciliation, or absolute life in history. The focus shifts from what happened to this Jesus to the larger movement in which death, negation, and estrangement are aufgehoben within the life of spirit. The language becomes grand, even majestic, but once again the center of gravity shifts. Easter becomes intelligible chiefly within a speculative account of totality rather than as the singular proclamation that God raised Jesus from the dead.
This construal can preserve theological richness, but it carries an obvious danger. The singularity of Jesus may become an exemplary moment within a larger metaphysical drama rather than the unique object of Easter proclamation.
8. Resurrection as Objective Divine Act
The classical Christian claim is different from all of these, though it may share elements with some of them. It is not mere revivification, not mere soul-survival, not symbolic endurance, not simply the transformation of the disciples, not a pure value-judgment, and not merely a speculative moment in the life of spirit. It is the claim that God acted upon Jesus Christ. The one crucified, dead, and buried now lives by the act of God in a transformed, death-transcending mode of embodied existence.
This is why the classical claim is so difficult. It will not allow itself to be reduced either to ordinary biological categories or to inward religious categories. It is realist, but not crudely physicalist. It is objective, but not reducible to simple empirical occurrence. It is bodily, but not merely biological. It is historical in reference, but not merely one item among others within the ordinary causal nexus. It is precisely the kind of claim modern thought has found hardest to sustain.
9. Why These Distinctions Matter
These are not idle conceptual possibilities. They govern preaching, apologetics, liturgy, and faith itself. If resurrection means revivification, then Easter is a miracle-story. If it means soul-survival, then Easter is a doctrine of personal continuity. If it means existential awakening, then Easter is a report on the disciples. If it means value-judgment, then Easter is a claim about significance. If it means objective divine act, then Easter is the proclamation that God has done something upon which all Christian hope rests.
The word resurrection thus conceals a great mass of philosophical and theological decisions. That is why the question cannot be left vague. To say He is risen is already to have decided, whether clearly or obscurely, what sort of claim Christian proclamation is.
Why the Modern Reductions Are Not Enough
The pressure of the modern world has made weaker accounts tempting. They allow one to retain Easter language while softening Easter’s metaphysical claims. One may still speak of resurrection while meaning by it memory, courage, value, or transformed self-understanding.
But this lowering of scandal also lowers the Gospel. If resurrection is reduced to symbol, then Christianity becomes a language for coping with death rather than the proclamation of God’s victory over it. If it is reduced to existential transformation, then the decisive Easter event is no longer what happened to Jesus, but what happened to the disciples. If it is reduced to spiritual survival, then the body becomes finally irrelevant and death remains substantially unconquered. If it is reduced to value-judgment, then Jesus’ significance is preserved at the cost of the objective divine act.
The problem is not that these weaker accounts contain no insight. Of course Easter does transform existence. Of course it does generate hope. Of course it does sustain a community and invest history with meaning. But none of these effects is the resurrection itself. They are, at best, consequences of it. When they are substituted for it, theology loses its object.
What the Church Has Traditionally Meant
What, then, has the Church meant when it says that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead? It has meant, first, that the crucified Jesus truly lives by the act of God. The subject of Easter is not a timeless ideal, nor the memory of a noble martyr, but this Jesus, the one who suffered, was crucified, died, and was buried.
It has meant, second, that resurrection is neither mere resuscitation nor mere spiritual continuation. The risen Christ is continuous with the crucified Jesus, yet he is not simply returned to the old order of perishability. His life is transformed and no longer subject to death. Easter is thus the beginning, in one man, of the new creation.
It has meant, third, that the resurrection is the Father’s vindication of the Son. The cross is not canceled by Easter, but confirmed in its deepest truth. The one rejected and condemned is the very one whom God vindicates.
It has meant, fourth, that resurrection concerns the creaturely life of the one raised. God does not redeem by abandoning creaturely reality, but by bringing His life to bear upon it.
A Theological Judgment
My own judgment is that He is risen must be taken as a cognitive and truth-apt claim about divine action and reality. It is not well understood as expressivist utterance, nor is it adequately grounded in the psychological states of the disciples or the Church. Its truthmaker cannot finally lie within human consciousness, however objectively such consciousness may be studied. Nor can it be reduced to the simple revivification of a corpse.
The claim is stronger and stranger than all of these. God raised Jesus from the dead. The crucified one now lives by the act of God in a transformed, death-transcending mode of embodied existence. That is not the resuscitation of ordinary mortal life. It is the Church’s proclamation that God has acted objectively upon Jesus Christ in such a way that death no longer has authority over him.
This means that Easter is not secured by liturgical repetition alone, communal intensity alone, or the persistence of Christian memory. The decisive matter is whether the words He is risen refer to what God has in fact done. If they do not, then Christian faith remains enclosed within the sphere of human projection and religious practice. If they do, then Easter names a reality that exceeds us, judges us, comforts us, and gives us hope.
Why This Matters Now
All of this matters because ours is an age tempted to make peace with death in subtle ways. Even where people deny transcendence, they continue to long for consolation. Hence the great temptation of modern theology: to preserve the consoling effects of Easter while relinquishing its claim about reality. One may still speak of hope, courage, renewal, and life emerging from darkness. But if God has not raised Jesus Christ from the dead, these become, at last, noble fictions.
The Christian proclamation is more difficult and more daring than that. It does not say merely that spring follows winter, that communities survive tragedy, or that ideals outlive their founders. It says that the God who gives life to the dead has acted in Jesus Christ, and that because of this act the deepest truth about the world is not death but life, not negation but promise, not despair but mercy.
That is why Easter matters. That is why Christians say, He is risen. And that is why the meaning of resurrection cannot finally be left vague. For if Christ is not raised, then the Church has mistaken its own need for God’s act. But if he is raised, then death is not sovereign, hope is not delusion, and the final truth of reality is disclosed not in the tomb, but in the God who raised Jesus from the dead.
Easter is therefore not the celebration of a religious symbol. It is the proclamation of an ontological victory. The Church dares to say that the crucified Jesus lives, that God has acted, and that because He has acted, death no longer has the authority to define what is finally real.
No comments:
Post a Comment