Notes on a Theme: “The Death of God”
(the following is a manuscript accompanied by student notes on the theme: “The Death of God” from Christology (1953/54) by Hans Joachim Iwand, translated by Marney Fritts and Donavon Riley)
[1] The Death of Jesus as Necessity
The necessity of Jesus’ death – if we begin with the first assumption that this is the death of God – is a paradox. The necessity is an incompatible contradiction according to our way of thinking ad modem legis. God’s don’t die, people do.
Thinking according to the law, in Subject-Object relationships there always exists the self- subsisting subject (the old Adam) and his/her object (God working in and through the neighbor). To the extent that a necessary death must occur, and functionally speaking – from a sinner’s reality there is nothing but death – the death-event occurs in the revaluing and relocation of the place of the holy by sinners as we seek God where he wills not to be found, no longer finding God where he wills to be found – the first move in the annihilatio Dei.
Setting God aside will of necessity be manifest in the breach of relationship with the neighbor, in the intimate proximity of death brought on by contact with the other person in the manifest demands of life. The neighbor as created creature, as a gift for me to enjoy, giving and offering what is needed for creaturely life, will become as incompatible to my “life-way” as the Creator himself (You rebel openly against God’s will being done through me for your neighbor’s sake and vice versa and thus I cease to be heard by you relationally. Now I am only the ominous jingle of the jailor’s keys).
Instead, you will deal substantively with me and my goods, that life might advance according to your will (what I choose is my choice) toward my final purpose of holding the two of us in readiness for the preaching and hearing of your good news.
The technical term for this upward rebellion, this breach, is Theodicy – a pre-occupation of the Enlightenment w/ the old world’s language. This begins the conversation and what follows with a string of descriptions, definitions, and explanations of “life,” “the world,” “people,” “justice,” “sexuality,” “a market economy,” etc. etc.: Abstract words, which of themselves are meaningless terms, simply awaiting a forthcoming definition from the opinio legis.
Beginning with the self, anthropologically, we project our experience outward upon objects where we encounter a God not preached, seeking to defend the self by looking for visible signs in our encounter with things, in words about God and/or created things. We provoke and enflame the imagination (symbol systems – metaphysics – specifically defined by Luther as a theology of glory) attempting to look through created things for greater meaning that we might see into the mystical being of God – the holy Thou.
But, Iwand begins where Luther begins, with God incarnate in Christ Jesus – hidden deep in the flesh sub-contrario – in God’s self-disclosure (i.e. the manger, Mary’s breast, the wedding at Cana, weeping over Lazarus, crucified, dead, buried – the most human acts!). He progresses in upon us to work death (old) and resurrection (new) through the Son – this word, this proclamation (a hidden word – Deus absconditus). Thus, Christ’s proper work (making something from nothing) makes man (making nothing into something). Man does not make Christ, at least not properly!
Our most important possession – our self-subsisting self – is put to an end, literally put to death, in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 10:4)
The self with all its protruding members (flesh, world, law, letter, etc.) and Christ Jesus are sharply distinguished (Heidelberg Disputation #1) in the moment when death and life confront one another (in the end of the old Aeon – our opposition to God – we are done unto in perfect passivity (we never saw it coming!). (1 Cor. 15:26)
The crucified one, dead and buried becomes the end of us, the end of death, and thus the end of history: the end of death because he becomes death! He is the end of our illness and want, because he becomes illness and want for us! He is the end of cursing and condemnation because he becomes a curse and the condemned for us.
The trouble we have with this is the becoming – that he, not conceptually or metaphorically, becomes that which we covet and cling to as the signs of life, the assurance of our relevance, and the greater meaning our life has “in the grand scheme of things” – he becomes in himself these things and therein the old cornerstones are overturned and shattered: the very foundation that held up and buttressed our mighty fortress.
But, lest we only take in the apocalyptic judgment without considering the eschatological mercy of this totalistic event, it is the resurrection of Christ Jesus that seals the necessity of death’s death (the old Aeon) and marks the necessary birth of the new creation (regnum Christi). Without the resurrection after three days, the disciples would most likely have hit up Caiaphas or Annas for a job, and we would be footnoting this insignificant event in Jewish history as another failed attempt to force the wheel of time down an un-navigable path (Schweitzer).
Thus, the rule of Christ (for Christ must rule and death will give way) is the end of the old-self born of a woman born under the law and the beginning of the new self, born of the spirit born under Christ Jesus (the simul). But, this is just a beginning, an opening shot across the enemy’s bow.
Now we must talk about…
a) The strange Must!
Christ Jesus exegetes God – the Deus revelatus. Is. 40-52. Not raising a human being up into the Triune identity but rather plunging the creature down into the creation, as a piece of the creation (LC – Apostles Creed Article I)(from the earth you come and to the earth…)
Matt. 16:21, Lk. 24:26; Acts 9:16
Heb. 2:10; 1 Cor. 1:23
Christ comes into history and its normal expectations.
Gal. 4:4.
Note especially the expectation of the Jews (i.e. according to the law). Instead of purifying or returning to the law (the Jewish expectation), Jesus terminates the sure footing of Torah – the author exegetes himself into the text and out again in a violent revaluation and relocation of the holy! This man and not this text is the word of God… “this word has been fulfilled in your hearing…” The text is not allowed ad hoc to interpret its master.
Rom. 10:4.
The law’s discontinuity is radicalized (politically, theologically, etc.) in Christ Jesus. The violence this rebellion against the word necessitates is simultaneously a rebellion against the Son of Man (apostasis – 2 Thess. 2:3) and a set destination toward (telos) the exegete of the text.
Now, who does unto whom will become somewhat clearer at the end of the story – who the true exegete is and who the text is. Who seizes whom in order to shut up the rebellious tongue; a tongue that cuts to the quick sharper than any two-edged sword could or would. The kingdom comes violently! Something that has never happened, not in religion or in human recorded history, comes in this body.
Mk. 2:21.
Preaching the forgiveness of sins – the killing joke!
Mk. 2:7. Authority, like power politics, is a zero sum game.
Putting himself in God’s place and forgiving sins gratis apart from the law, Jesus is handed over (by the Father) into the hands of men – for Christ must rule and this is a strange must! – in this relationship to his creatures the creature death herself will be conquered along with her man servants and maid servants; namely, along with us.
Ps. 49:14.
This event of the word’s coming in the body, born of a woman, born of man’s flesh and blood, born under the law marks the final collision between the old aeon and the new, wherein one must give way to the other. For in the old Aeon (the old way of speaking) gods do not, cannot, will not die. But now, the Creator speaks a final word on the subject and translates a new form of speech; Jesus dies, the Word made flesh dies, God dies! Speaking in a new way, creatures can now confess, “A man made the world out of nothing!” “God was born of a woman, born under the law, suffered, died, and was buried, etc.”
Iwand asserts, “When the Creator and the creature meet someone has to change.” The conclusion is therefore inevitable, the regnum Christi overcomes the rule of this world and its ruler.
Ps. 2:8-9.
A dire necessity lies in this event. It is nothing less than setting God himself aside.
But, living or not, we insist on retaining the verb for our self. The self is both the means and the end before God (corum Deo) and to God, which we assume first and last to be one part of an eternal order (an eternal hierarchy) held in place by God’s lex aeterna, keeping everything and everyone in his/her proper place within the structures of being; a substantive argument. Beginning with the law, the centrality of Christ Jesus’ death and resurrection gets displaced. The law is now ultimate and Christ Jesus penultimate. Thus, in this illusory relationship to him, the self becomes a project (like a barrel of oil, crude yet refined) until he is qualified for heaven – his neighbor then, out of necessity, becomes an opportunity for the promotion of his own righteousness. In watching the self (his naked self-interest) he watches the law of/in his member(s) and therein the law does its proper work driving, hindering, exposing, and condemning the fraudulent relationship he has with himself and the other.
But a funny thing happens here, the notion of free will ascends from the initial legal assumption that the self has a freedom of choice to act – otherwise, we could and will argue that the law is useless. The hindrance, exposure, and condemnation of the law may often times even provide for and become a goad to further self-improvement.
Is. 45:22.
Beginning in this manner with a little or a lot of the will, Christ preached apart from the law (unconditionally) for you in the forgiveness of sins (because he has become sin) has no place except as an opponent of choice. Christ Jesus is the only option for the forgiveness of your sins, or so some say, but there are so very many options for you in the old legal argument why settle for just one. Therefore, either the will or Christ Jesus must become a theoretical argument with no function in relation to God.
b) Therefore, there is a completely new destination of God’s will: Matt. 26:42.
c) The will of God means: the death of the man Jesus. That is the “mystery of his will” Eph. 1:9; Vulgate 1 Tim 1:4 oikonomia. This death can only be defined (the first definition is the true death), if we see God herein being completely alone in want, then his will is finally revealed.
Herein we can set to on that preaching that enjoys a Platonic flourish. The vital lie is in the belief that we can apprehend the “mystery of his will,” “the final revelation of God,” as but one (albeit a big one!) revelation leading to still other revelations: that Jesus’ death is but one moment on an eternal time line of process and meaning (Moltmann & Pannenberg).
An experience that sets the bar for events yet to come! The technical term for this is “proleptic eschatology.” But, digging at the argument one uncovers Platonism writ large in “the eternal recurrence of the same.” God has set the course (up, up, and away), moving history and us along with it toward his goal for creation. Within this movement, the Spirit will continually instigate events and activities, which will contribute to the maintenance of God’s master plan. Thus, every generation there will be a social justice movement because there is always a need to re-assert the rights of the oppressed. Every era will witness and cooperate in political movements because there is always a need to re-assert the rights of the citizenry, etc. etc. “Life” becomes a cyclical recurrence of the same old motifs until that time when God ushers in the new kingdom – a new heaven and a new earth. The proleptic eschatology comes into play as we who are Christians learn to see in these events, signs of the end time.
Presented in with this patina, death is made to appear reasonable and natural, a part of life’s journey. But, before any first step is taken, the legal metaphor has paved the straight way through the wilderness of choices and each cobbled stone is engraved with words (a Platonic word scramble no less) urging us on, to live well in this, our material world.
In this game, mortality is reduced (cut down into bite size pieces) to morality (Marcus Aurelius). Death is made to act the domesticated tutor who motivates (Kant) and cajoles us toward out higher calling (Aristotle) – our “immortality project.” (Becker) The joke is, neither death or resurrection in our “Christian context” (not that anyone else fairs better) are initiated morally as a doing of our own, though our doings fully participate in one or the other.
LW 28:115.
Early on, Tertullian and Origen, etc. attempted to bridge this ditch with “spirit” language in order to maintain the continuity w/the old legal argument brought over (if not in its entirety at least in large part) from their Neo-Platonic mentors. But no amount of maneuvering will deliver us from this body of sin. The attempt to separate body and soul from sin and corruption, no matter its phrasing or tempo, will separate the eternal from the finite.
The end of you is your fate. Your end marks the emphatic and imperative power, kingdom, and glory of death. Looking to the cross of Jesus, Paul mocks such posturing by us, and our old master, Death.
Gal. 2:19-20.
The foolish belief we cling to that death is a part of the natural order of things (ontology), subject to our need for options regarding the meaning of life, is snubbed outright. For Paul, as for Luther and Iwand, death is exposed in the cross of Jesus as another master and rule and power whom we, lifeless old bag of worms that we are, have been subjected to all along.
No mixture of death and life by theologian or philosopher can be maintained ontologically – past the limits of finitude – in the end there is simply death and life, undefinable, indescribable, unexplainable, unless…the gobbling up of the proleptic argument as well! Death and sin in the Christian witness are turned out, exposed as being forces, kingdoms, and powers. Sin came into the world through one man, and through sin, death. These are ruling powers in opposition to God. Even before the law came (from Adam to Moses…) death reigned.
Rom 5:12.
Death is a lord not a decision, a ruler not a choice, a power not a natural end. We belong to death personally, completely, irrevocably. As the subjects of death – slaves and death’s instruments – we stand by and watch others die. Better, we can “watch” Jesus die listening to his cry every good Friday and say, “Better him than me. Thank God it was him and not me!” But that is just it. The pinch where all options (the synthesizers who offer us options) are left scratching their head, dumbfounded. It was him and not you.
Thus, preachers must forgo the more cliqued practice of explaining away Jesus’ death in their endless clanging about meaning, ratcheting up our life as the hub of the cosmos, as though this were somehow a more soothing alternative. The preacher must become an instrument of death for another lord, the one who was abandoned and forsaken by God. At the point where God’s secret will is finally revealed once and for all, the preacher has something to say that does not descend into trite metaphors. For death and resurrection depend on to whom we belong – death or the lord of death. Jesus is the death of death that we might be the force, kingdom, and power of life through him. From him (life), to the world (death), for him (life) as witnesses (martureo) to this way, this truth, this life.
LW 31:54-55.
And what do you suppose the hearers will do to us then who preach such nonsense?
d) But that this willing occurs rests solely in the obedience of his son. Necessity and freedom. That the death of Jesus was a necessity is as follows – the son of the Father could not be disobedient. This is not fate! But because of the “Must”, because the Father and the Son are one.
Therefore, we have here the will of God.
Adam and Christ initiate ‘worlds’ or ‘aeons’ to which we belong. Through Adam, death has established a kingdom whose rule has us without any means of escape. Christ lag in Todesbanden. 1 Cor. 15:20. There is no third alternative that lies between them!
Rev. 20:14. The two deaths.
Luther’s Lecture on Romans, 179.
Rom. 5:6, 1 Cor. 15.
God takes away death in Christ by making Christ the death of death – Christ becomes death! What is reasonable and natural to the philosophers about death and resurrection assumes a legal metaphor. But the hand resting on the kill switch is not ultimately you or I, or Satan (he is only the prince of this world after all…) but God, the Creator of this creation. Try amending that and see what you end up with!This eliminates dualism; death and its rule are to be feared, not because we in our limited imagination or Satan with his plans for world domination stand behind death, but because God stands behind death.
“We have to fear death because it is God whom we have to fear in death.” Karl Barth CD 3/2, 626. Without this caveat, Manichaean dualism dominates and rules the day.
Hence the appointed time (kairos).
The cross is the day of YHWH (kairos) and the resurrection becomes mercy time/proclamation time (simul time!) seeing with our ears what we now hold in faith alone (Notice the Enthusiasts reversal of this assertion as they seek to locate evidence of the Holy Spirit in history as a sign amidst myriad kairos events whether they be hierarchical-structural or ecstatic-personal). At the appointed time, the devil moves in as well, bypassing the ordinary sins of the old Adam and plunges headlong into faith – hunting faith – “If you are the Son of God…” (Paradoxically, when the attacker roars we may now hear this as a lullaby or the harmony of a holy cantata, assured that we are in Christ Jesus – Mk. 3:26-27)
The devil attacks in order to trip the old Adam’s default button, unbelief, in an attempt to turn God into remoteness, the ultimate Spirit. For the self, the body is the problem in all the niggling legal assumptions – all the orders of being – and the spirit lifts the self up and away from fleshly (lusts) reality. In Luther’s eschatology everything moves down and in, entering into relationship to God’s people (the necessity of the death is one of relation not assumption – not an at-one-ment (he became as you are that…) but rather an incompatible contradiction (spirit becomes flesh, life becomes death, innocence becomes sin, righteousness becomes damnation – for you no less).
John 12:27-31. It does not of itself proceed according to the plan of some stranded soteriology, as machinery – but according to the moment of his death, his taking over of death as atonement.
There are two poles of human history: 1) Death as punishment. 2) Death as atonement.
Instead, his death is a sacrifice (once and for all. Heb. 10.), which grounds our flight up and away from the Creator’s creation, out of the attachments of life, in the very present presence of the crucified one. This movement down and in, from the Trinity, into ordinary relationships (vocations) is true freedom (not the illusory freedom of atonement theories!) and is the gospel himself. Christ’s righteousness does not belong to us (alien) but is rather worked in us in the relationships of life (proper), calling us into life-defining relationships (the inherent dignity of the low down and common!):
1.) Family – Source of life in the community and its sustenance for the future.
2.) Work – The particular form of neighbor love which is also life sustaining through the essentials of life gathered and provided.
3.) Citizenship – The essential services that are life sustaining and necessary for life (i.e. schools, hospitals, etc.)
4.) Church – God calls the church and involves the church in providing for life.
This loss of the self, being impinged upon by the other, means being marked by the cross (the judgment) and simultaneously bearing a sign of Easter (the mercy of God). Of course, it is also mercifully involuntary. His public sacrifice becomes our defining center.
Jn. 12:27.
Justification worked through vocation is an assertion modernity does not understand and cannot assume from the publicness (political) of the reformation, because moderns likewise cannot bear the critique of false religiosity and vocation that revalues and relocates the place of the holy in and amongst diapers, menstrual rags, and burial shrouds!
Bultmann: the hour regarding the fate of the world has been decided. Does the absolute become historical? No: The will of the Father takes place in the obedience of the Son.
d) Question: why must Christ die?
The problem of God’s mercy = his will?
Identified from righteousness and mercy.
Sin is taken up in the righteousness of God.
The death of Jesus= iustitia Dei= our all-encompassing righteousness.
“When the Creator meets the creature someone must change.”
Death does not yield to ideals – the old language has nothing to say regarding the event of God’s self-justification – it simply belches us back up after he sticks his finger down death’s throat. In the justification of the godless, the Creator is re-calling the whole creation; the re-calling is literally causing death to vomit us up. Exercising his right to the whole creation, the Creator restores us (“trues us”) to the creation and destroys the powers that oppress him in his relationship to us, beginning with the promise to the one who is in suffering – not to be distant – but to move in and enter into a relationship with the one who is suffering (not explaining the oppression but handing over the promise of Christ Jesus “for you” – it is Christ who is sickness in you and he cries out to the neighbor (God in the neighbor) from your flesh and blood!).
God has taken on the power of suffering by raising Jesus from the dead – thus, the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is like mana – you get just enough of it for the moment, you can’t store it up, it’s not to be possessed by any man, like mana, enough for the hunger in order to satisfy the hungry.
2] Jesus’ death
a) Obedience, chief place Romans 5:19; fateful obedience.
b) Hebrews 5:7-9: The question of the learning of obedience. Destination of the telos. Important: “although he was the Son” – complete similarity Phil. 2:5: which is exactly the humiliation he learned. Obedience and sorrow.
Here, there is also obedience unto death: God could (by himself) rescue Jesus. However, obedience says: “Not mine, but your will be done.” Gethsemane- Matt 26:39. The cup = death. It is the taste of death.
c) But death means: peirasmos (Anfechtung). Death= God’s remoteness. God is dead (Nietzsche). Therefore, it is who does unto whom: Death – God is then the last great one. Or God is death. The conclusion is that the death of Jesus is the deed. That in Jesus Christ, God wills the death.
The remoteness is not because we do not enjoy a lively relationship with him. The remoteness is because he wills the death of all who belong and fight for death, all sinners; he wills your death to be put down. It is hard to feel close to someone when he is trying to kill the only thing you love!
Now, the predicate “sin” at this point needs an owner (subject), someone to claim the sin in the relationship between these two incompatible contradictions, so that we can all figure out which one of us God is gunning for, and so we can clear out of the way: No need to risk getting hit by stray bullets! But, as Paul writes, it is Jesus who was made to be sin for us. And, as Iwand writes, it is Jesus who is dead.
So then, does God will the death of God? But God is without sin – He is the divine free and easy – and yet, God is the one doing and Jesus is the one done unto. So then, is Jesus not to be equated with God?
Phil. 2:2-5.
Here, your sin necessarily bumps up against its end, and thus God’s remoteness is at an end, because God, or more specifically, this man Jesus, became sin for you. To terminate the remoteness, and the Anfechtung, Jesus becomes sin, becomes a curse, becomes death for you. And this is the pinch for us: this is not fitting behavior for a proper God! Jesus cannot be God and become a curse. But those of you who refuse Christ as a curse, dead and buried, want your sin removed, not in Christ, but in yourselves. Because you know full well that you can’t trust someone else to take care of your problems, especially something as important as your sin. Of course, to be your very own righteousness before Almighty God, to be your own, personal, Jesus – someone you can understand, someone to hold your hand, someone who cares, someone who shares…Your very own Jesus…You have to manufacture your own righteousness in yourself as well. You try to generate your own god in your self – there is the remoteness of god! No matter where you go, you take yourself with you!
But that is exactly what you want after all the dust settles on the event of his death; his death is his, not yours properly speaking, and thus you want to cite his death as an example of righteousness and then make the move to biography yourself into righteousness. You want to narrate yourself, in your own self, right into righteousness. Because, you can’t get right if you can’t relate…Like attracts like and all that… In this way of thinking, the desire is to escape blame for Jesus’ death. To avoid the blame for his death and especially avoid having Christ Jesus’ cross, dead body and all, applied to your self. People do not want to die under God’s wrath!
Of course, this is exactly the type of person which Luther referred to as a “counterfeit sinner,” “an imitation sinner.” And, finally, it is a basic confusion of law and gospel. When you segregate Christ Jesus from sins that is, from sinners, the penalty, the guilt, and the punishment that was laid on him is not yours. Because if Christ is not ultimately free of having to bear your sins – free and easy to be sinless – how can he ever be like God, or more pointedly…God!
How can God not be an example of the godly life? How could you ever hope to have a relationship with him and eliminate the remoteness? Like does attract like after all and without something to go on what hope do you have?
Hebrews 12:2; Phil: 2:8; John 12:27-31
The old language, the old world, the pagan rule that, “like attracts like,” from Socrates through Aristotle (of course this thinking and acting runs roughshod over all of human history – the cornerstone!). That Christ became a curse, not just one amongst other equally flavorful curses, a curse – or, as Luther observed, that Christ became a curse, is for Paul, a substantive term, not adjectival (now we can talk substantively… about Christ, that the relationship to creatures without the restrictions of substance arguments might be enjoyed gratis).
Christ does not become like one who is cursed, or one of the multitude of the accursed under Levitical law, there is nothing descriptive, interpretive, explainable about Christ’s cursedness – he is a curse! He was made sin who knew no sin. He was made sin. Christ became sin itself. He became sin substantively yet without meaning. And this new way of speaking is to speak the creation into being ex nihilo, from a new relationship between Creator and creature through the word of God alone! The old subject – object, over – under, master – slave definitions are blown up, shot up, thrown out, slain, and annihilated (the annihilatio Dei).
From now on, the subject – subject relationship defined by indicatives and not adjectives, is without meaning and therefore, not open to speculation. It is a relationship that must be heard to be believed. One in which we cannot say enough about this one – our beloved.
Jn. 13:34.
To speak of sin is to speak of Christ Jesus. To speak of curses, condemnations, blasphemies, etc. is to speak of this man, this one man, Jesus Christ alone. He bought it, it’s his, and he is not giving it away. So, enjoy your new vocation as a bride, the old Gomer has been married off, her husband has a firm grip, and her address book has been burned up. This is a relationship, not of like-minded folk, but of incompatible contradictions. Get used to it. Because he is for you, he must be against you. You are a whore after all, spreading your legs for any god that whistles. But, because he is against you, he can be totally, unconditionally for you. You will have no other gods before me!
3] The death of God – Nietzsche’s word and the word of Scripture
a) That God is dead – is that the judgment of Scripture? Extremely strange: according to Scripture, it must be the pious (frommen) who kill him.
The cross is the revelation of the antithesis (this marks the end of all natural theology!) In the encounter between God and man, it is apparent that both could not live together in one world. Herein, amongst the pious, this will mean that we are the enemy of the God who draws near to us. But the cross also means that God, himself the incarnate man Jesus, is in the antithesis, hanging between the cross and us. He takes it over as his burden, his lot. That is its deeper meaning, that he will carry sin on himself. We do not carry it. We throw our sins on him. This is the pious lie, that we can bear our own sins, not into death but into righteousness. (The sting of death in the prophets, the death that puts their death to death, is thus the pre-history of the cross. The chief priests kill the prophets because they cannot allow the subject to get loose outside the temple cultus.)
The cross is thus, in the highest sense, a court – The apocalyptic “No!” Here God stands out as a judge. That was, admittedly, not readily apparent, but the Scripture states that this great writing is simply not to be eliminated even though there is no experiential proof for the facts of this case. You cannot look at the cross with tearful eyes and say, “Ah, judgment!” That God looked on Jesus himself as sin, is the deepest depth of this meaning.
THIS IS GOD’S ONLY MEANING.
In the cross, as a court, it has become apparent that only God has the power to abolish sins. Here the meaning has become how far sin reaches and that it reaches into the deepest depths of the relationship of God to God, and that there it is killed for us – against the will of the pious! The cross must overcome us. There is no other way. Just as God himself takes no other way. Sin in this old world is unending (infinitum). It means God and only God can cover, abolish, and bear sin. The crucifixion is the covering of sin. It is the final “non-being” (Nicht-Sein): the negation of my being by his.
But the crucifixion is at the same time an accusation against us as the juxtaposition (the distinguishing) of piety and ungodliness. It is the disclosure that a person can murder God and thereby of himself invoke the law as a power (Stephen’s sermon Acts 7). The assumption is that we alone can create and wield the power of the law over against our adversary – the mythic God-Man Jesus.
But, the crucifixion is our “invocation” of salvation – soteria! A person must be opened (Jer.23:29) to the proclamation that a person cannot gain sole power, that to us the crucifixion is salvation, that here we find the consolation of God with us and our consolation with God. It is more than merely standing naked outside ourselves (extra nos). Here a person sees whom it is standing outside of us (extra nos i.e. in Christo).
Mt. 16:21 par; Acts 3:15; Mt. 17:22.
In the encounter with God, there is life. Can God live as the lowest among us?
In the encounter, the death and resurrection of Jesus belong together because this is where he confronts us rather ingloriously as the lowest among us. A person cannot tear them apart. You cannot keep one for your self and let the other drop. Here again, when the attempt is made to sever the lowliness of his death from the glory of his resurrection, you encounter both hazards that threaten Christology: Docetism and Historicism. The Docetists must weaken the death.
For the Docetist, the death of Jesus is a passage into his true manifestation at the right hand of God. Every Christology that relies too much on pneumatology will be inclined toward Docetism: a death that levels the event of dying claiming, “We are already resurrected!” (Vgl. 2 Tim. 2:18) That is the Athens/Jerusalem theological cocktail in a nutshell.
This belief in an immortal substance, or the soul, can be heard in the popular Hellenistic expression, “in the spirit”, which was largely ignored during the middle ages, much to the injury of Christology and the church. Later, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was further scrutinized as a continuous work of some great immortal being – but the resurrection means more than simply an addition to god’s house that never gets finished. It means something else altogether – it is a phenomenon of a particular kind. The real difficulty in grasping the resurrection of Jesus Christ lies therein. There is no example for us to go by! It is a date, which stands over-against our whole way of thinking about history. He does not just spring from death; he springs from death, having become death, out of the ground.
That we understand this under girds our entire history – because it is the punctilious end of history. Nevertheless, the other stirrup, historicism, threatens Christology by bringing a particular meaning and character to the resurrection. From the historicist’s point of view, the resurrection, especially the hope of the resurrection that was alive in late Judaism, existed only in the particular imagination and vision of the disciples – that is, if you wanted to look at it from the blatantly deceitful theory which Reimarus developed (1694-1768) in his fragment “The History of the Resurrection”.
At any rate, Reimarus had a faulty theory, which still has consequences today. He spoke of a double Messianic anticipation; the prophetic-political position of the disciples in their hope of a life with Jesus, which, after the catastrophe of his death, was invalidated. Because of Reimarus and subsequent thinking that took its cue from him, Christ was snatched back out of the Daniel-Apocalyptic expectation of the parousia and its hopes for his second coming from the clouds of heaven.
The corpses cling to this possibility and trust in that which slowly but surely supported the people with the message of his resurrection. Here again, in the resurrection of Jesus there is a correct Jewish-Apocalyptic theory connected to the parousia. People worked to improve the Daniel-Apocalyptic theory later, trying to make a psychological and religious understanding out of it, but the immanence of modern historical thinking is like the legacy of Spinoza-ism. It could not acknowledge the resurrection of Jesus. Instead, the event must be reduced to a subsumable historical category. That means you would have to understand the resurrection following the old language game as the law of the continuing work of the spirit (“in the spirit” or even zeitgeist) in history.
b) Another question: Who kills God? Kierkegaard: the masses – much too optimistic.
“…it remains so that Christ is in the Church, however he is poured out like water, it remains his bones, however scattered, it remains his heart but languishing, it remains his power, but beggarly-…”
In any case: That is humanity. They cannot let God live, God as God for them, to his honor.
The positive understanding of the resurrection has, even until today, been maintained under the philosophical mantel of Hegel. It is a mixture of historicism and the old world-view of the Docetists. Hegel saw in the historical resurrection a conversion of the superficial (the common external world) toward a unique historical inwardness in the spirit.
The resurrection of the historical Jesus, in Hegel’s reading of it, had raised and abolished death in mundane humanity. That was his significant discovery for the German Idealists and his contribution to church history. This abolition of death occurred in the church because it believed.
First, there is faith. In faith, Jesus lives as spirit because that, in truth, is what he is: the bearer of the divine essence. The problem of the resurrection of Jesus lies in an entirely different direction.
The idealists, wherever they flashed their toothy smile, chewed it up and the humanists swallowed it so that what was passed on was a Jesus who had no resurrection. But, the substance of all New Testament testimonies about the man Jesus is that he was raised. It is this man, this body, who appeared to his disciples. So there is then also in the confession of the first church the witness to the first one raised from the dead, the first amongst the brethren. (Vgl. Col. 1:18) Also, in the first witness to the appearance from the grave, there is the meaning that he has said to the woman: Go therefore and tell my brethren (Vgl. Mt. 28:10).
Therefore, he points to the raising up of his “brothers” and if the later Christian brethren are named by him as well, then even these will be translated from death into life. They are heirs along with the first born from the dead, heirs of the new life together with all the brethren. So we stand before a specific dilemma. The theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth century had leveled the deity of Jesus in order to understand his death. Therefore, they abolished it just at the point where everything else comes from. They had trapped Jesus in his humanity in order to capture his resurrection and to continue seeing it as a spiritual reality in the existence of the community, in respect to his continual work in the world. They committed themselves to this course of thought and teaching in order that they might ethicize the death of Jesus and spiritualize his resurrection. Thus, the death of Jesus appeared as a fulfillment of faithfulness to his calling and his resurrection as the overcoming of the flesh (incarnation) by his spiritual existence.
To summarize, they ‘discovered’ that the resurrection of Jesus means something altogether (primordially) different. Therein they brought about a great turning point, a movement, which we have yet to apprehend fully.
Second, we understand that the Enlightenment, specifically German idealism, sought to continue isolating the saving death of Jesus Christ from their time and place in order to make for the self a moral-religious signpost in which something visible could pacify the guilty conscience of the individual as well as provide an ‘in’ for the church amidst the broader (credulous) society. However, we are of the opinion that the death of Jesus is a word of reconciliation from the no man’s land, liberating us from their moral grip.
But we must continue going forward. We must accept that the death of Jesus only has significance through his resurrection.
c) Nietzsche: God is dead. Means precisely that Jesus is dead: God is dead. We have killed him.
There can be no return to an original righteousness, to the original creation – that God is dead, that way closed to us. There can be no going back from here on out. The death, his and yours, marks the impossibility of returning from whence we came. Instead, we have encountered something, or rather someone, entirely new: a resurrected body heralding the final word for the old creation and a finalized word for the new creation. And, this will not be the same old thing. For, in the Bible, to put it in functionally definitive terms, God is whoever gets the last word. This dead God, raised from the tomb by the Father, has the final say. He gets the last word first. This is what we mean when we speak of an apocalyptic eschatology in the Biblical witness. Whoever gets the last word – pareisia – not according to a timeline, wherein we give God the first word (creation) and the last word (resurrection) and we get all the words in between (words in search of the word). Rather, the Creator gets the first word last every time. Thus, God’s death does not mark an event in history, resolved in history, according to a time table. Instead, the synthesis of God’s history and human history is swallowed up in death. And, in the resurrection of Jesus, human history is itself put to death and God’s history has the last word.
Mt. 21:33, Acts 7:52. And besides the astonishment: the law has also not been hindered.
Distinguish here between eschatological hearing of the law and the law talked about within the system of legal options ad modem Aristotelis.
In any case, (the) death (of God) has a human side, a future side for us: The removal of God, Luther: annihilatio Dei. Not letting God be God.
Nietzsche already had it right. This grounding has its life in the rebellion of man against God. Just invert the absolute Value (Heidegger); nothing more?
The idea of God, the name of God is empty. There is no God! You can kill him – without that, do you have a future? The whole thing is much too primitive!
d) (It follows the text “The foolish man” from Nietzsche, the blessed science 125, ch. 2, 126-128).
Jesus lives. The pious hear an opportunity to interject meaning. He sits at the right hand of God. The pious reflect, “Ours is the kingdom and the power and the glory.” He was crucified for us and took our place in death. The pious preach, “We are resurrected!”
He comes to us as the newly ordained high priest, like Melchizedek the king of Jerusalem (Vgl. Heb. 7). The pious teach, “We are victorious!” Contrary to the pious, the words gain their meaning in the activity of the Word upon the hearer: He is the resurrected and living one, who himself administers the work of earthly life. He has not let it escape his hand. It is not laid in your hands so that you can make something out of it, something you want to take from it or get out of it: yet another “religion.”
Jesus does not give his life’s work away. He himself administers it, he brings it before God, and he comes to us in only that way, only insofar as he is Lord. But that is not all there is. That is still in no way the main point, which should be emphasized about this question of meaning.
The main point still lies in the assertion of the first witness he encounters: He is resurrected!
Or the message of the angel, which means: What are you doing looking for the living amongst the dead? Lk. 24:5. Therein our whole world is signified as a world of death.
Gunther Bornkamm had it right when he said: “We are the dead, he is the living one.”
Or as it written in John: “He is the life.” (Vgl. Jn. 11:25)
We stand today before a whole new work, which runs counter to the false assumptions of the Enlightenment. We should understand the resurrection of Jesus as occurring definitively within our worldview, his resurrection throws the historical text forward upon us in the present as he contexts our understanding that this is a witness for us. This is more than just a spiritual substance and/or the internalization of the historical Jesus. This is the word become flesh without distance or meaning. This is the doing and the being done unto. In this risen one, we now know what a miserable thing it is for sinners to fall into the hands of a living God.
