Q & A 8
Mostly theological questions this time...though a few on cinema, animism, and dogs...
Evan writes: Not long ago, I saw a comment in a comment box saying that the Catholic journalist [Ross] Douthat somewhere described your view of Christ’s resurrection as liberal Protestant. Do you know what he was talking about and did you respond to him?
I saw some mention of that as well, also in a comment box; but it would not have occurred to me to respond to it, as I believe it was just some remark on a Facebook page. As for what he was talking about, I am fairly sure he was reacting to an interview with me published in The Christian Century, one that apparently he did not follow terrifically well. I think it can be said with some justice that Douthat has a very vague notion of liberal Protestantism, but also a very hazy understanding (as is not at all uncommon among Catholics who want to be defenders of what they take to be Catholic orthodoxy) of his own church’s theological traditions regarding the scriptural material on the resurrection appearances of Christ. If nothing else, he is clearly unaware that I said nothing in that interview that stands at odds with, say, Josef Ratzinger’s views on the issue.
Before going further, however, here are the passages from the interview that I assume set him off:
... Resurrection “of the flesh” becomes part of Catholic tradition, but the problem is that Paul would have abominated the idea—flesh can’t be resurrected, he’s quite explicit. So he totally disagrees with what is presented at the end of Luke about the resurrection, for example. I’m sorry, but whether we like it or not, Paul is a first-century Hellenistic—so, quasi-Platonic and quasi-Stoic—Jew...
... if you go back to the beginning of Christianity, the one thing that was shared was this extraordinary conviction of the resurrection, of which there was never one single interpretation. The experience of the resurrection—of the real presence of the risen Christ—was attested by everybody, whatever their different convictions about its metaphysical or physical status might have been. What’s crucial is that there had been real, vivid, life-changing encounters by a large number of Christ’s followers after his death. There was an eruption of faith, and people were even willing to die for their conviction that they had encountered the risen Christ...
...1 Corinthians 15 is a very early text, and it’s just a straightforward report of what I take to be very credible experiences, first of what others had experienced and then of Paul’s own experience—and I find nothing there that makes sense if you demystify it. I think the only way to understand it is that the one who had been crucified really was alive and vindicated by God and present manifestly, at times physically, though not in a flesh-and-blood way, but physically nonetheless.
Now, it might be that it’s not an “objective” phenomenon. But is there even such a thing as an objective phenomenon? It’s perhaps like when Owen Barfield, in Saving the Appearances, talks about the rainbow. It’s real, but it’s not there in the physical sense of an actual colored strip that’s somehow drawn across the sky. You can’t separate the event of its manifestation from the event of its perception.
Not necessarily me at my most articulate, but so it goes. Now, obviously, no one truly familiar with Liberal Protestantism could possibly imagine that any of that would fit into its theological traditions. To suggest that the risen Christ became physically manifest on various occasions is to say something that would go quite outside the lines. I suppose that what caused Douthat such perplexity—or scandal, I imagine—were my remarks about the “fleshless” nature of those physical manifestations, and my questioning whether they constituted some kind of simple objective phenomenon that everyone would have experienced in the same way. Evidently, Douthat does not realize that this is all a very old theological issue, in Catholic scholarship no less than Protestant, on which there are no clear dogmatic pronouncements by his church’s Magisterium. The reason for this is not hard to find: the New Testament stories about encounters with the risen Christ often characterize them as meetings with someone who was not at first immediately recognizable even by those who had known him during his earthly ministry. Consider, for instance, the tale of the two disciples meeting the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus but not knowing to whom they were speaking, or that of Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Christ outside the empty tomb but not recognizing him. Moreover, in the case of Paul’s supposed encounter with the risen Christ, which he regarded as no different from the experiences of more than a hundred followers of the Way in and about Jerusalem, the risen Christ—at least, as the tale is told in the book of Acts—was not merely unrecognizable to many who were present, but entirely imperceptible. None of Paul’s companions on the journey to Damascus, so the story goes, were able to see or hear what Paul saw and heard. Then too, in addition to such stories, there is Paul’s discourse on the nature of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15, which flatly denies that the body of resurrection is a body of flesh and blood, and insists instead that it must be a body composed of pnevma—spirit—whose properties (we can assume) are somewhat more mercurial than those appropriate to a carnal frame.
That is all as may be. To be honest, Douthat’s remarks are strangely typical of a great many champions of orthodoxy. It is hardly surprising that a conservative Catholic should evince so vague a grasp of liberal Protestant thought; but, sad to say, neither is it particularly surprising that his understanding of Catholic theological tradition and of the Bible should prove scarcely more sophisticated.
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