Recent Catholic Writing on the Resurrection (1) The Empty Tomb Story

Extract

The foundation of Christianity, as fact and doctrine, is the resurrection from the dead of Jesus who was crucified,

“a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”

(I Cor 1: 23-24).

Great efforts have been made over the centuries to spell out the presuppositions and implications, historical, metaphysical and theological, of this event, and it is unlikely that anything wholly new will be discovered now. In the last ten or fifteen years, on the other hand, study of the resurrection narratives in the New Testament has quickened dramatically, among Catholics, and it is important for us all to recognize that some divergence of interpretation is now established. Without attempting even to summarise the ever increasing Catholic literature on the subject, or to examine the various problems which the divergence creates, and which the new interpretation involves, it seems worthwhile to delineate briefly some features of the approach to the gospel accounts of the Resurrection to be found in some recent Catholic theology from Germany. The same approach may be traced elsewhere, most notably in major works by the Dominican theologians Christian Duquoc and Edward Schillebeeckx, but since neither of these has yet been translated into English, it seems more useful to limit this survey to three more accessible works: Hans Küng’s On being a Christian, Walter Kasper’s Jesus the Christ, and The Common Catechism. It is not a matter of accumulating authorities for the new approach; it is rather a question of registering how widely accepted the new approach already is.