Walter Künneth - Theologie Der Auferstehung (Theology of The Resurrection - 1933)

1933)

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Künneth begins by noting that "the bankruptcy of a secularized theology in the face of the resurrection is (of course) largely due to Schleiermacher", who maintained that the spiritual presence of Jesus and his influence on the disciples he left behind was not contingent on any news of the facts of Christ's resurrection (p. 16). Ritschl added to the confusion by approaching from the other direction: the qualities of the exalted Christ are already contained in his existence in time. Künneth sees this as enormously over-simplistic, and notes wryly, of those who conclude that Christ's resurrection was largely a "vision" of the fervent would-be apostles, that Jesus himself taught that visions from beyond the grave would not alter the religious experience of men (the parable of Lazarus and Dives, Luke 16:29ff). Künneth argues that "the resurrection of Jesus cannot be cut out of" the Christian kerygma/message (p. 36) : for that would leave us merely with matters for psychic or sociological investigation, however inadequate, scientifically, these explanations would be to account for the duration, intensity, and persistence of the Christian faith (and here, one cannot help but think of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience). To imagine Dogma to be what Matthew Arnold took it to be, the Aberglaube, or added Belief above and beyond the Facts, would be to imprison Christianity forever within the continuum of space and time, which for Künneth, is subject to uncertainty and mortality and subjectivity. This, in fact, is just what Adolf Harnack had done in Germany, as Arnold was writing in England : Dogma was interpreted, via Higher Criticism, to be a Greek addition to the pure New Testament.

Künneth's reply to Harnack's cultured successors is to explain Aberglaube neither in pietistic terms of a natural Jesus, nor in Bultmann's existential manner of essential myth. His apologetic for the Resurrection, then, is dogmatic and historical at once : he appeals to the Jewish materialistic understanding of the totality of death in judgement, as well as the philosophical inadequacy of ethic-moral explanations that presume upon the immortality of the soul. Künneth absolutely accepted an empty tomb, but he thought that most modern problems with the Resurrection began as dogmatic misconceptions. Künneth would have accepted few of the modern Church's efforts to defend the Resurrection, whether in Van Til's presuppositions, retreatist Pietism that avoids debating the central fact of the religion, or liberal accommodations to the spirit of free inquiry. He might even have disagreed with Alvin Plantinga's formulation of the Resurrection as something that is "plausible might have happened". Künneth seemed to have believed that Time itself was without any meaning unless it had, as its absolute reference point, the unleashing of the exalted Christ out of the tomb.

The liberal retreat into the immanent plenum of sensory experience (with its related Christology of Christ as purely an outstanding "servant of God"), was as unacceptable as Bultmann's accidental denigration of transcendent Truth into something purely mythical (totally ahistorical). Theologie der Auferstehung was his manifesto on the subject, and he updated it many years later, with a chapter on eschatology and the aeon of aeons, as well as more arguments aimed at Bultmann. He also included a new, need discussion on the nature of Time (something Augustine had noted as problematic long ago), in which (predictably) he rejected the dichotomy between eternity and earthly time: "This positing of an exclusive antithesis between time and eternity makes impossible any union of the eternal God with temporal man" (p. 182). Theologie der Auferstehung is tightly argued, copiously footnoted, and conceived with vision : it is no accident that he shares an affinity with Eastern theology on this point (regardless of their emphasis on the Incarnation), noting that the Evangelical Churches in Russia have "a profound grasp of the Easter Act of Jesus Christ" (p. 19). Moltmann may have emphasized the cross, and the Catholic Church the Incarnation, but it is true to assert that for Künneth, the Resurrection is the Archimedean point of eschatology, the meaning of time, history, miracles, dogma, and all else beside. Anything else, he believes, undercuts the early Christian emphasis on Jesus as the risen Kyrios (Lord), who is "risen indeed!". This reprinted "monograph" on the Resurrection was also a reaction to Paul Althaus' doctrines, which he partly agreed with, but who had criticized the original edition, and to whom Künneth respectfully responded.

Arguing from (for him) the reliable witness of Scripture, dogmatically defended, the decisive question for Künneth becomes whether or not the Resurrection appearances of the Risen One were basically of the same nature as the prophetic visions of the Spirit in the Old Testament, which he defined as "an emerging reality which lays hold of man, and is accompanied at the same time by adutions which communicate new knowledge." (p. 82) This was Rudolph Otto's view, he notes, in Aufsatze, das Numinose betreffend. In the place of Yahweh, walking and eating, appears the risen Lord, bearing in his veiled garb, "the marks of the Pilgrim God" (citing E. Fascher, Deus Invisibilis, 1931). Künneth argues for a formal similarity between Old Testament theophany and New Testament opthe. However, noting that the early Church did not place the visions of martyrs on a par with the appearances to the disciples, and insisting that the Resurrection is sui generis among the miracles of God, he cites his old teacher Schlatter:

If the disciples had considered their faith in Jesus to be the product of movements within their own souls, then instead of the Church there would have been a body of mystics busy creating in themselves the ecstatic state by means of which the Christ becomes visible also to them. Geschichte des Christus, 520/523

Building his case he continues: "The Risen One is neither a fantasy, nor a theophany, but the appearance of a new, living mode of existence. The appearance expresses the connection between life beyond death and life within history...the Risen One is in fact precisely not God himself in some sort of disguise, but Jesus of Nazareth, raised and exalted by God." (p. 85). Neither are the appearances repeatable, as prophetic visions were. Nor could the receiver of the vision carry out the task, but fail to communicate the content of the vision, as in the Old Testament. Nor was the form of the vision, and its content, a matter of indifference, so long as the prophetic task was communicated. Künneth argues that this was the reason the Church attached importance enough to the receivers of the appearances to make them eligible to be Apostles, especially proven in the case of Saint Paul. An Apostle had to have eaten and broken bread with the Risen One, or in Paul's case, been confronted on the road to Damascus, an ophthe seondarily attested by supporting visions to other Christians (as requiring a second witness, being an exception that proved the rule).

These revelations were not full, however. Though unique, they were proportioned on the scale the revealing made necessary (p. 87). The reality of the Resurrection is one thing, and its appearance to something else, just as the disciples still await the full, unmediated revelation. This was the paradox and the tension of the primitive Christian experience, which created the nature of the Ekklesia, such as it was and is. "The Risen One reveals in the appearances his glorified existence" (p. 87). Central to this is corporeality, of a kind which prohibits both spiritualizing and materializing. Künneth rejects the classic Lutheran commentator Quenstadt's definition of Christ's new body: "reproductio sive reparatio of precisely the same body as was destroyed by death, ex atomis sue particulis illius corporis hinc inde disiectis atque dissipatis"(p. 88), just as he rejects Bultmann's mythical Christ. The appearances point to a soma tes doxes (Phil. 3:21) and soma pneumatikon (I Cor. 15:42), developed by Paul.

The apostleship does not hinge upon Jesus' calling of the disciples while alive, but upon Christ's appearances to the disciples, among whom James and Peter were chosen first of all, a significance the early Church did not miss. "Paul sees the diakonis (Acts 20:24) and the apostole to world mission (Rom.1:5/Gal1:1) as received directly from the Christ who has risen and appeared to him. Accordingly he knows himself to be an ambassador, a leitourgos, a doulos of the Lord (Rom15:16/Gal1:10, p.90). The Ascension itself is the last, specially significant appearance of "the Risen One", and not a parallel miracle to the Resurrection. Even the empty tomb is subordinated to the Resurrection: that the tomb was empty was part of the Gospel, entailed by the appearance corporeal of the glorified body of the Risen One. The inverse of this would not have been necessarily true, and so the empty tomb is implied, but not emphasized: an empty tomb alone could have indicated many various things. Emil Brunner's note that Paul does not mention the empty tomb does not entail a conflict between Paul's Gospel and the original apostles (p. 92). Again, Künneth defends the extreme middle : the Church becomes increasingly focused on an empty tomb (as the original witnesses die off), yes, but "the decisive question remains open, how far an essential concern of the primitive Christian Church is expressed precisely in this tendency". Therefore, "according to the church tradition about the resurrection event handed down by Paul in I Cor 15:1ff, a difference between the experience of Paul and of the original apostles seems impossible".

Künneth understood that the dogmatic theologian, "of all people", had to be willing to make his views on the Resurrection event precisely and definitively known (p95). For him, the empty tomb was a sign, interpreted by the ophthe to the apostles. The empty tomb expresses Resurrection's "face towards history" (p97), proof that its power touches the vale of tears of matter undergoing history. Yet, God's power is not bound to or by the substratum of Creation. The Resurrection touches history, and lives within it, but is not conditioned by it. In this, he concurs with Bultmann, although he disagrees with Emil Brunner that one cannot make dogmatic, plausible, and adequate statements about what happened in the Resurrection Ur-Wunder. "It will no longer do to speak vaguely and obscurely about it, as Albert Scweitzer rightly accuses theology of doing" (p95).

Christology, then, is not the disinterested description of given, immanent facts, nor the intellectual clarification of religious experience. "Christological knowledge is characterized by the standpoint of faith, appears as a function of faith, and is meaningful only in the situation of faith" (p112). Künneth declines to embrace (fully) both Logos Christology (Christ the human as pre-existent) and Spirit Christology (Christ as a man divinized by his flawless good deeds and pure religious nature). Nor does he believe that the new, paradox Christology of his day does anything more than restate the problem more eloquently: "it does not take us beyond the balanced static relationship between the historic man and the reigning Christ, beyond the basic starting point of the two-nature doctrine" (p116). Nor does he appeal to the "faith-community" alone, which leaves Faith without a decisive content. He is acutely aware that, from a Christian standpoint, "heresy" is "that which exalts a partial truth into the thing that matters most" (p117).

Christology is Resurrection Christology. Künneth believes that the Son has no part in either time-bound humanity, nor divine majesty : the transcendent Son belongs with God, but is at the same time in subordination to God. Jseus does not share power, rank and dignity with the Father. He is essentially homogenous with the divine image, which distinguishes him from man and connects him with God. But he does not share divine majesty until after the Resurrection, when the Father exalts the Son (later on in his treatise, Künneth discusses the aeon of aeons, in which the Son returns the dominion to the Father). Künneth goes so far as to say "we have to consider whether the post-Easter sitation may not have lead Paul to a profounder and more universal Christological knowledge than was possible to Jesus before his resurrection" (p120 - John 1:1, 8:58, 17:5,24; Phil 2:5ff). Pre-existence refers to the Sonship, not the archonic majesty of the Father . Christ's pre-existence in the precondition of his one day receiving the Kyrios. The Pauline concept of kenosis does not mean that the Son emptied himself of majesty, which he did not yet possess, in fact. The true humiliation is in the change of the status of the Son in relation to both his Father, and to the world. The Son becomes sin, placing himself as a servant under both man and God, and in a position of condign and transferent punishment from the Father. "His exposure to the creaturely and sin-riddled character of human existence raises for the Son the question what is the real will of God and gives birth to the inner struggle for insight into God's plan" (p123). He cites I Cor. 15:45-47: "The second man is from heaven", noting that he disagrees with his contemporary, Paul Althaus on precisely this point : Jesus receives majesty in Matthew 28:18, not before. Nevertheless, it is true and certain that the Son possesses divine Being and Essence, as Althaus insists (Phil2:6). The Messiah is "he who is on his way to Resurrection" (p127).

To sum up, the Resurrection is grounded in the obedience of the life and death of Jesus, the servant of God who is also the pre-existent Son. The historical memory and reality of Christ protects against cultic excess and also helps form living pictures of God for those who following, must live by faith (p124).