My wife, Faith, asked me in a point-blank way what I thought about my resurrection. Maybe it was the wording or the way she asked, but in the moment, I felt only disbelief. I mumbled that I was unsure, and kept to myself that annihilation sometimes seemed plausible. I assume I am a peculiarly poor example of Christian belief, and I know that for many the reality of resurrection and heaven are live options. We went on to talk of her mother, who had an immediate and lively hope of heaven. But as I thought about it, I realized I have no trouble believing in the resurrection of Christ, and I recognized in the New Testament his resurrection is the fulcrum opening the possibility.[1]
Resurrection faith, as it develops in the New Testament, is not focused so much on the future as it is on reconceptualizing immediate, concrete, experience. Baptism, for example, is a voluntary embrace of death so as to be reborn with a new sensibility and experience. Paul makes this argument in telling the Romans they must abandon sin and live virtuous lives (Ro 6:3). Resurrection faith is a training in dying, or in reconceptualizing life. Certainly, this entails future possibility, but it is primarily a more immediate engagement, which points to the significance of the bodily resurrection.
This is not a belief in the Platonic forms, or in some vague afterlife, but it intersects with or is on a continuum with embodied human experience. The death and birth imagery in baptism plays out the immediate embodied point, of resurrection faith. Yes, perhaps it is those of us who are weaker or more immature Christians who get drug down by earthly attachments, but it is also true that it is precisely in this earth-bound embodiment which Christ addresses us. I can take up (or at least grasp) the incremental orientation of living out virtue, dying to the self, and living for others. The immediate thing that impinges is also that which can be immediately resisted, to grasp hold of life as if to preserve it, but this immediate struggle seems obvious. The danger in leaping over these realities, to a future disembodied bliss, is to imagine we get there without passing through embodiment, mortality, and death. That is, we may leap over this reality and misconstrue the eternal significance of the present condition. Rather than severing these bonds, which would amount to giving death final say, Christ lifts us up together with all of creation beyond death, and we are to realize this now. The point is to inhabit the body – bodying forth a virtuous, resurrection faith. Christ has bound us fully and completely to embodiment, and on this basis we live resurrection faith.
We live within or between two experiences, or two overlapping ages, so that the possibility of resurrection, or the end of all things (“The end of the ages has come upon us” 1 Co 10:11) is negotiated now. Paul describes being simultaneously dead to transgression and alive in Christ. He goes on to describe, in the present tense, that he “made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:17). He does tie this to the ages to come, but he poses this future possibility on the basis of the present reality, fusing past, present, and future together in a singular movement.
The working of time, in putting off sin and dying with Christ (Ro 6), is an immediately enacted realization. Believers “have been baptized into His death” (Ro 6:3); “our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with” (Ro 6:6); we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection” (Ro 6:5). The resurrection is not first, but a faith arrived at given the reality of dying with him. We live into this understanding, not as a mere metaphor or mere likeness, but a present participation. As Ann Jervis notes, it is not that “believers travel to Christ’s past but because Christ’s past is present and can be known in human present tenses.”[2] So too we do not travel to Christ’s empty grave but live his resurrection and ascension in the present.
The movement described by Athanasius, “He became man that we could become God,” ties the purposes of creation and redemption in a singular time continuum. Stage one, making humans in His image and likeness, is not instantaneous but a project only completed in the one who is fully human (his inhumanization), and then stage two is a development out of stage one, human divinization. Christ unites himself absolutely and forever (hypostasis), with human nature so as to enact entry of humanity into divinity. God becoming man and man becoming God are distinct but intertwined and overlapping.
Dying to transgression, being brought to life, and being seated at the right hand of the Father, occur for Christ, but are repeated or realized in those found in Christ. There is a realized and being realized eschatology. It is an apocalyptic explosion in slow motion, in which we can see one order coming to an end and the other commencing. For Paul, the end of the ages have come upon us, as God in Christ has become human, but he is becoming human as we too incarnate who he is. In the process we are seated with him in a full divinization, both accomplished and unfolding. As Maximus writes, “To state the matter briefly, of these ages, the former belong to God’s descent to man, while the latter belong to man’s ascent to God.”[3] But Maximus goes on to explain, that inasmuch as this has happened to Christ already, and Christ is the beginning, middle and end, in this sense all of this “has already come upon us.”[4] All at once in Christ, in whom the ages are enfolded, we are caught up in this cosmic creation purpose.
Maximus describes this as consisting of an active and passive principle, with past ages or the ages of the flesh involving “human toil,” having “the characteristic property of activity, but the future ages of the Spirit, which will come about after this present life, are characterized by the transformation of man through passivity.”[5] The Psalm Maximus references, indicates man’s life is full of wearisome toil: “seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away” (Ps 90:10). The imagery of Sabbath rest (described in my previous two blogs) intercedes into this wearisomeness, as we participate in God, in passive reception. As with Mary and Martha, the activity of Martha accompanies and provides for the reception of Mary at Jesus’ feet. With Mary and Martha (in varying proportions), so too we are caught up in two ages and modes, involving both action and receptivity. These two ages, of activity and passivity, are interfused as we must actively make our way to receiving. Having put on Christ is not an end of reason, of thinking, of putting on virtue, but involves a new nexus of reception and action.
Past, present, and future, run together, so that all things are occurring or unfolding in Christ, in and through whom we are active and passive. We accept Christ, we work, we think, we choose (e.g., to be baptized to partake of the Eucharist), we receive. This working of Christ within us is not finished, as the dying we do in taking up the cross and following him is still occurring, and the rising we do is not fully enacted, but the dying we begin, we believe will be made complete at the Parousia or at our death. “Existing here and now, we will reach the ends of the ages in a state of activity, at which point our power and ability to act will reach its limit.”[6] That is, our death is not our end, but is the full realization of the birth which we are undergoing, but it is also where God takes over. “In the ages that will follow, we shall passively experience by grace the transformation of divinization, no longer being active but passive, and for this reason we will not cease being divinized. For then passivity will transcend nature, having no principle limiting the infinite divinization of those who passively experience it.”[7] There is a limit to what we can do, what we can believe and understand, but this limit is where we entrust ourselves to God. The new creation has commenced, but there is still a groaning, a decay, a dying, which will be completed.
God will complete the good work, creation ex -nihilo begun in you: “And we are passive when, having completely traversed the inner principles of the beings created out of nothing, we will have come, in a manner beyond knowledge, to the Cause of beings, and, since all things will have reached their natural limits, our potentials for activity appropriate to them will come to rest.”[8] Our faith is not that we can take it all in, as we pass beyond knowledge and beyond our natural limits, but we can rest in God’s possibilities for us. Paul says, we shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye (I Cor 15:52). The transformation begun in you will no longer revolve around your ability to receive, but we must put this understanding to work now. “Blessed, then, is the one who, after making God human in himself through wisdom and fulfilling the genesis of such a mystery, passively becomes, by grace, God, for the fact of eternally becoming this shall have no end.”[9] Our active inhumanizing God within us, our training in righteousness, will become the age in which we are directly taken into the arms of God (our training in passive receptivity concluded).
The understanding that we are in the stages of a birth “converts” the meaning of death: no longer a condemnation of nature but clearly of sin.[10] Death reigns in one age, but those who are conformed to the death of Christ, are brought to life: “through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men (Ro 5:18–19). As Jervis notes, this one act of righteousness extends to people in every historical period. “In regard to Christ’s temporality . . . this suggests that Paul thought that an act in Christ’s human past affected all of humanity, even those who lived before the incarnation. In effect, Christ’s past spans all of human time.”[11] Though our time and place bound natural capacities limit our perspective, recognition of this time of Christ pertains directly to participation in him: “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Ro 6:9).
Paul, and Maximus after him, compare this state to being in the womb: “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who are the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Ro 8:22–23). We may see as in a glass darkly, or as if we are peering through a womb, prior to which has been the activity of our conception (creation) and the other side of which is our entry into the fulness and purpose of creation (divinization). As Maximus writes: “For it is true—though it may be a jarring and unusual thing to say—that both we and the Word of God, the Creator and Master of the universe, exist in a kind of womb, owing to the present conditions of our life.”[12] The Word may appear obscurely in this material, sense-perceptible, enclosure, but the delimitations of the womb, set in the context of the birth it indicates, provides a continuity with resurrection which we can live and die into.
The work begun in us, the reality in which we are engaged, the effort of our life, Paul says, will be brought to completion (Phil. 1:6). This makes of death the final descent through birth. I may not immediately leap to faith in my resurrection, but I can fully embrace the faith of Christ, who is “the author and perfecter of faith,” and so I fix my eyes on Jesus, his death on the cross, his resurrection and his ascension (Heb 12:2). This Christocentric approach is not a faith in my faith, it does not depend on my power of belief but it is a participation in his faith, in his dying, and rising.
(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th from 7 pm to 9 pm central time. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
[1] I found the lecture by John Bare on Maximus, and I turned to Maximus’ approach to the subject, parting some from Bare’s and Maximus’ analysis.
[2] Ann L. Jervis, Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ (p. 81). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[3] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, Translated by Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 22.5.
[4] Ibid, 22.6.
[5] Ibid, 22.7.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, 22.8.
[10] Ibid, 61.10,
[11] Jervis, 82-83.
[12] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 6.3.