The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright

Author:N. T. Wright
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Biblical Studies, Religion, New Testament, Christianity
ISBN: 9780281055517
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2003-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

THE RISEN JESUS AS THE SON OF GOD

1. Worldview, Meaning and Theology

Supposing Jesus was raised from the dead, what would it mean?

The question of meaning is an integral part of the question, whether the resurrection of Jesus is in fact ‘the best explanation’ for the historical data, both the large-scale data of early Christianity and the specific data, deduced from that, of the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’. This is the final question we face in this book.

I pointed out in The New Testament and the People of God the ways in which words, sentences and stories ‘mean’ what they mean because of the place they occupy within a larger whole: words within sentences, sentences within stories, and stories within worldviews.1 We are now faced with the sentence, ‘Jesus was bodily raised from the dead.’ What does this mean?

We must distinguish two regular meanings of the word ‘meaning’. There are several other shades to the word as well, but I shall confine myself to one of the regular ones, and use a different word for the other.2 The one I shall avoid is ‘meaning’ as referent, as in ‘democracy means government by the people’. When I intend that sense, I shall stick to referent. The sense I shall intend when I say ‘meaning’ is ‘implication in the wider world within which this notion makes the sense it makes’, as in the phrase ‘democracy means happiness’ (as spoken by a good democrat) or ‘democracy means chaos’ (as spoken by a disgruntled dictator). This is quite enough for our present purposes.

The question we are now to explore, then, is not the referent of ‘Jesus was raised from the dead’; we have already established that. Within first-century discourse, the sentence referred (whether the speaker believed it or not) to an event which the early Christians claimed took place on the third day after Jesus’ execution. (Of course, in the last two centuries plenty of people who have said or written ‘Jesus was raised from the dead’ have intended to refer, not to something that happened to the body of Jesus, but to events within the minds and hearts of his followers. But we have seen that this referent cannot have been the original one.) I have argued that, though mathematical-style ‘proof’ is impossible, such an event provides far and away the best explanation for all the other data we have surveyed. The question before us is the meaning of this sentence, and (since the sentence intends to refer to an event) the meaning of the event it intends to refer to, within wider worlds of understanding. What larger narrative(s) does the sentence belong in? What worldviews do such narratives embody and reinforce? What are the universes of discourse within which this sentence, and the event it refers to, settle down and make themselves at home—and which, at the same time, they challenge and reshape from within?3

It is important not to foreclose on possibilities here. It has too often been assumed that if

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