Abstract
One of the striking (though in a sense not very surprising) features of a certain strand of present-day Anglican thought is the strange hope in salvation from the abyss of modernity and modern theology by some version of Christian Platonism. Its proponents wish to break with the pseudo-alternative of so-called ‘Lockean’ and ‘Barthian’ approaches in much recent theology which are said merely to embrace or to oppose secular tendencies without setting their own agenda. The beginnings of both aberrations are traced back through the ambiguities of the enlightenment to the failures of Scotist and Reformation thought to embrace an authentic Orthodox Catholicism and Patristic Platonism. And one hopes to find an antidote against the ills of modernistic theology by focussing not on biblical faith and its critical appropriation in the Protestant traditions but on the recovery of a genuine Patristic Orthodoxy with its Platonist theology, anthropology, and - as in the present case - epistemology.
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Notes
L. Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen. Eine Auswahl aus dem Nachlaß. Herausgegeben von Georg Henrik von Wright. Unter Mitarbeit von Heikki Nyman, Frankfurt am Main 1977, p. 65.
And such writers as Stephen Davies, ‘Seeing’ the Risen Jesus, in: Stephen Davies, D. Kendall, G. O’Collins (eds), The Resurrection. An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Resurrection of Jesus, Oxford 1997, pp. 126–47. To ask ‘what sort of seeing was involved in seeing the risen Jesus’ (p. 127) is putting the cart before the horse because it assumes what has to be shown in the first place: that the problem before us is a case of ‘seeing’ at all. Before we can even begin to inquire into different sorts of seeing (normal vision, subjective vision, objective vision) we must have reason to assume that those who are presented as saying ‘We have seen the Lord’ speak of some sort of vision at all. It is not enough to cite the New Testament evidence, assume it to be a literal description of a vision, discuss the arguments for or against it, and conclude that the most likely truth is: ‘the risen Jesus was a physical body that was objectively present to the witnesses in space and time, and he was accordingly seen in a normal sense of that word’ (p. 146). Before anything like this can be convincing we need a careful exegetical and hermeneutical analysis and discussion of the language used in the New Testament. We shall simply miss the point of what is being communicated if we ignore the different ways of speaking and genres of writing in the New Testament, the imagery used by different writers in different traditions and settings, the varieties of credal, narrative, argumentative, doxological, epistolary, liturgical, apologetic and many other contexts that determine the sense of what is being said and the point of what is communicated. Scripture is not a handbook of dogmatic propositions or a collection of historical evidence for doctrinal debates. In order to understand a phrase or fragment of a biblical text it is not enough to show that it can be construed in a literal way that is not self-defeating, impossible or absurd. What needs to be shown is not whether a phrase can be understood in a literal sense but whether this is how it is to be understood if we want to understand the text in question. When language is ‘on holiday’, excluding the impossible is not enough to arrive at the truth (cf. p. 147). Philosophy of religion must become hermeneutically much more sensitive before it can be argumentatively convincing.
I have argued this more fully with respect to the New Testament language of resurrection in I.U. Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte. Zur Grammatik der Christologie, Tübingen 1994, pp. 54–84.
G. Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710, ed. G.J. Warnock, Glasgow 1962, p. 46.
Origen, De Principiis 1.1 c. 1 n. 9. Cf. K. Rahner, Die geistlichen Sinne nach Origenes, in: Schriften zur Theologie, vol. XII, Köln 1975, pp. 111–36; Die Lehre von den ‘geistlichen Sinnen’ im Mittelalter, ibid., pp. 137–72.
R. Williams, Barth on the Triune God, in: S.W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth. Studies of his Theological Method, Oxford 1979, pp. 147–93, 189.
Cf. T. Merricks, The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting, in: MJ. Murray (ed.), Reason for the Hope Within, Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK 1999, pp. 261–86.
T.W. Jennings, Beyond Theism. A Grammar of God-Language, New York/Oxford 1985, p. 55.
Cf. I.U. Dalferth, Theology and Philosophy, Oxford 1988, Ch. 18.
Cf. I.U. Dalferth, Voiles Grab, leerer Glaube? Zum Streit um die Auferweckung des Gekreuzigten, ZThK 95, 1998, pp. 379–402.
R. Helms, Gospel Fictions, New York 1989, p. 130.
K. Ward, Religion and Revelation. A Theology of Revelations in the World’s Religions, Oxford 1994, p. 301.
J. Sanders, The God Who Risks. A Theology of Providence, Downers Grove 1998, p. 108.
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© 2004 Ingolf U. Dalferth
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Dalferth, I.U. (2004). The Resurrection: The Grammar of ‘Raised’. In: Phillips, D.Z., von der Ruhr, M. (eds) Biblical Concepts and Our World. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504790_10
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