8 - Resurrection and renewal: Christ the first fruits

Summary

Resurrection, another conditional necessity?

Thwarted evasions

What you think the non-optimality problems are determines what you think it will take for God to solve them. Reflecting on the history of soteriology, Paul Tillich distinguished: for the ancients, death was the problem; for the medievals as for both Protestant and counter-reformers, sin was the problem; for “modern man,” meaning is the problem. In both this and my earlier book, I take a page from Tillich and other neo-orthodox twentieth-century theologians to contend that meaning is the issue and horrors are the problem. I have defined horrors as evils participation in which makes positive meaning prima facie impossible for the participant. Like Tillich, I have seen the meaning-problem as a fundamentally ontological problem, one which underlies and explains our propensity to inauthentic choices and living, to our being and doing the kinds of things that medieval and reformed theology identified as sin (see chapter 2).

Twentieth-century neo-orthodox theologians set about to solve the meaning-problem without solving the death-problem. Either they did not believe that biological death – after bringing each of us to an end – would be overcome and itself be brought to an end; or they did not bring that belief systematically into play. Tillich urged stoic courage to be, held out the hope of new being, of living without anxiety in the face of finitude. Bultmann promised “a new self-understanding” which accepts and moves into the uncertain future that God will provide.