If God is the ultimate reality, then death is not destruction but metamorphosis - not a diminishing, but a finishing.

Corporeal resurrection?  Yes and no, if I may recall a personal conversation with Rudolf Bultmann.  No if "body" simply means the physiologically identical body.  Yes, if  "body" means in the sense of the New Testament soma the identical personal reality, the same self with its whole history.   In other words, no continuity of the body; questions of natural science, like that of the persistence of the molecules, do not arise.   But an identity of the person;  the question does arise of the lasting significance of the person's whole life ad fate.  In any case therefore not a diminished but a finished being.  The view of Eastern thinkers, that the self does not survive death and that only the works live on, is certainly worth consideration in the sense that death means a transition into dimensions other than those of space and time.  But it is inadequate.  If God is the ultimate reality, then death is not destruction but metamorphosis - not a diminishing, but a finishing. 

If then the resurrection of Jesus was not an event in human space and human time, neither can it be regarded merely as a way of expressing the significance of his death. It was admittedly not an historical event (verifiable by means of historical research), but it was certainly (for faith) a real event.  Consequently the resurrection cannot mean merely that his "cause" goes on and remains historically linked to his name, while he himself no longer exists, no longer lives, but is and remains dead.   it is not like the "cause" of monsieur Eiffel, which lives on in the Eiffel Tower, though the man himself is dead;  nor is there any similarity to Goethe, who "speaks" even today,"  being remembered in his work.  With Jesus it is a question of the living person and therefore of the cause.  The reality of the risen Jesus therefore cannot be left out of consideration.  Jesus' cause - which his disciples had given up as lost - was decided at Easter by God, himself.  Jesus' cause makes sense and continues, because he himself did not remain - a failure - in death, but lives on completely justified by God.  

Easter therefore is not a happening merely for the disciples and their faith.  Jesus does not live through their faith.  The Easter faith is not a function of the disciples' faith.  He was not - as some think - simply too great to die;  he did die.  But Easter is an event primarily for Jesus himself;  Jesus lives again through God, - for their faith.  The precondition of the new life is God's action which is not chronologically but objectively prior to it, in advance of it.  Thus this faith is first made possible, established, in which the living Jesus himself proves to be alive.  Even according to Bultmann, the formula, "Jesus is risen into the kerygma (proclamation), is liable to be misunderstood.  Even according to Bultmann, it does not mean that Jesus lives because he is proclaimed;  he is proclaimed because he lives.  It is therefore a very different situation in Rodion Shchedrin's oratorio, Lenin in the Heart of the People, * where the Red Guardsman sings at Lenin's deathbed;  No, no, no!  That cannot be!  Lenin lives lives lives!  here it is only "Lenin's cause" that continues.  

This passage made me think of Thomas Jefferson's cut and paste job made of the Gospels, cutting out anything of any religious character from it which offended Jefferson's materialist-rationalist (atheist) scientism, and its entire and complete moral non-effect, not only on the many "freethinkers" who have made reference to it (as to their having read it, call me a skeptic), the many members of Congress in the past to whom a copy was given (when I was very young I believe hearing that a copy of the "Jefferson Bible" was given to every incoming member of Congress) but on Jefferson, himself who performed the exercise of making a new and improved Jesus much in the way of more recent efforts.  As he was doing so he was at the height of his activity as a slaver, having rationally turned the human beings he held in bondage into property for his use, including the children he had fathered with at least one of them, encouraging his fellow aristocratic land barons that they should do anything they could to hold people in slavery because every child they produced was property and an increase in their wealth, not a person having the very same rights that the young Jefferson had proclaimed were the gift of the Creator equally bestowed on humanity.   And that was aside from the very, many acts as a politician and president that were entirely at odds with the very words of Jesus that Jefferson chose to retain in his exercise in natural religion (I don't think I could honestly accuse Jefferson of doing theology or anything like what Kung and Niebuhr have done) .  I honestly think that Jefferson's naturalism is what led him to view people as their physical bodies,  rejecting any transcendent character that their whole persons (to use the phrase Kung does above) and which he so clearly did not hold that Jesus had.   

One thing he doesn't seem to have had any inclination of doing was selling all he had and giving the money to the poor.  Though an habitual profligate perhaps Jefferson might have been more inclined to want people to take the commandment to give your money away to those who won't pay it back, forgiving debts, more to heart. 

Jefferson scholars note that as he got older his materialistic-scientistic inclinations came to dominate his thinking and, I would assert, his actions.   As I had cause to point out last year, the radical doctor, public health expert, Catholic nun, Teresa Forscades pointed out that that modernism which made rationality the supreme value of people inevitably carried with that the idea of radical inequality because, even if someone had the intellectual capacity to do so, the economic and social reality was that not everyone would have equal access to education but that everyone had the capacity to be holy, to sanctity, and that if you made that the basis of valuation then it led to viewing people as being equal.  

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I think the view of Jesus IN THE RESURRECTION of the risen Jesus as not merely physical but radically more than merely physical is not the non-essential add-on that I had taken it to have been twenty-five or so years ago, a distraction from the moral content, the radical equality of his Gospel, I THINK IT IS ESSENTIAL TO HOW THAT RADICAL EQUALITY, THAT RADICAL MORAL CONTENT CAN BE UNDERSTANDABLE TO HUMAN BEINGS.  I think that without it the bland unitarian-deistic-mish-mosh that the Jeffersonian-Priestlyan view of Christianity that exhibited itself among the New England transcendentalists is probably what you can expect to happen.   There are certainly other problems with other traditions that take Jesus at all seriously, or pretend to, there are certainly enormous problems in the various churches - among those that one or another aspect of the teachings of Jesus are ignored or rationalized into nothing.  But Christianity dissolving into meaninglessness through natural theology, perhaps in line with the passage about Karl Barth given yesterday, or through 18th century enlightenment rejection of the Resurrection as a real thing with real consequences for how we are to consider people as more than their bodies, their brains, their genes (or, rather, the radically naive view of those which currently dominates the college-credentialed culture) is inadequate to bring about behavior which treats people and other living beings as more than objects for use or disposal.  

I am going to continue with this series of postings through the Easter season,  I think, because Kung addresses questions about the Resurrection very well and with far more of a regard for the actual texts of the New Testament than for later dogmas and doctrines of the various churches.  I have mentioned that one of the right-wing slams against him has been that he's more of a Protestant than a Catholic, though I think what he actually is is a good scholar and an honest thinker.  

*  It's impressive to me that Kung would know to make this comparison with such a minor work of music.  I wish I had access to a translation of the libretto.  But even more interesting than that was this interview with the composer (who is apparently still living) in 1990, as Soviet Communism was falling away, if you can overlook the stupid question about the serial music which is stupid.

RS:  Yeah, of course this new move is fantastic!  It's really something happened!  Something happened!  In the East Europe it's miracle!  It's miracle, but our tradition, we are 72 years of this meat grinder!  They had only 40.  It's not ended there, but for us, everything is ended.  I'm afraid that Russian Volk is absolutely crushed!  Morale crushed. 

BD:  Devastated?

RS:  Yes!  Absolutely!  Before, people believes in God.  Now they believe in communism idea.  This next generation everybody will be equal; everybody will have this.  Now, in the last 20 years, nobody believe in anything because everything is lie!  Everybody knows it!  Now they try religion again, but this is very difficult because this tradition has been interrupted.

BD:  Is there any connection, is there a parallel between communism in economics and atonality in music?

RS:  Atonality?  [Thinks for a moment, and takes a deep breath]  Mmmm.  I think that art is very connected with economics.

BD:  But I mean is the communist system, and its oppression, like the atonal, or the 12-tone system, oppressive in music?

RS:  Mmmm.  I think that the communism system, this is not only twelve-tone system, in music; this is also a twelve tone system in rhythm, timbre, color, every aspect of music.  Then is quite the same.  But it's not like in prison.  Communism system is a big, big prison for everybody.  Somebody a little top, somebody a little lower, but everybody's prisoners!  This includes winners who is the same with slaves!  It's everybody is all together!  Not one free people.  Nobody is free.  Now you are really free, spiritual free.  If you go on the street and say, [shouts]  "Gorbachev is shit!!!", nobody take you in prison.  Nobody take you to prison.  And this is absolutely miracle!  Absolutely miracle.

BD:  Is this not happening also in music?

RS:  In all place now there is absolutely freedom in music, too!  In one very curious work, they crushed a piano.  It's 25 years after Cage, and so on, but they think this is new!  Something like this!

What I thought was most interesting in this was what Shchedrin said in those heady days, before Yeltsen and then Putin reimposed gangster government in Russia and various Stalinists did in the about to be "freed" Republics.  when he talked about how the Russian people, after 72 years in the "meat grinder" were totally demoralized, totally crushed.  I can say that I came to see the same thing in the failure of Russian democracy and directly related it to the difficulties of even longer oppressed people,  Black People in the United States, the Native People here and elsewhere under genocide and colonization.  If the Russians people have found it impossible to rise above the conditions that lead them to be led by gangsters like Putin then it is no surprise that populations with a history of similar serfdom and slavery elsewhere have the same difficulty of getting free of it.  That takes a truly radical change in individuals and in societies, radical changes that the static view of life in materialism will never, ever make possible.