Resurrection Issue Surfaces as Reason for Delaying Election of Bishop

In their stories of an empty burial tomb, the Christian Gospels conjure up an image of Jesus’ corpse rising from the grave and making physical appearances before his disciples.

That literal picture of the Resurrection was surely evoked at Protestant and Catholic Easter services last Sunday and will be again this Sunday in Eastern Orthodox churches proclaiming “Christ Is Risen!”

Yet many clergy outside of conservative church circles might give a long, involved reply if pressed on whether they believe that Jesus was literally raised from the dead as implied by the empty tomb stories in the Gospels, all of which were written decades after the events described.

The Gospel stories are seen by many scholars--again, outside of conservative Christianity--as attempts after AD 70 to solidify the claim of Resurrection with material descriptions of Jesus rising from the dead 40 years earlier. These so-called “apologetic” purposes seen by some interpreters detract from confidence that they are based in historical memory.

The oldest New Testament statement on the Resurrection was in a letter by the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians around AD 55. He wrote simply that Jesus was “raised on the third day according to Scriptures” and “appeared” to certain followers, including Paul himself. He says nothing of an empty tomb.

Questions on interpretation of the Resurrection arose last week in the decision by the San Diego Episcopal Diocese to withhold assent to the January election of New Testament scholar Frederick H. Borsch as bishop of the Los Angeles Diocese.

There is little doubt, however, that Borsch will receive approval from the overwhelming majority of U.S. dioceses and that his June 18 consecration will go on as scheduled. “I have no knowledge of any individual or organized opposition to him,” said the Rev. Jerome F. Politzer of Monterey, president of a traditionalist group that seeks to combat liberal trends in the denomination.

Questions Raised

But Borsch’s writings on the subject raised questions of whether he believes in the physical resurrection of Jesus. The questions were posed by the Rev. Steven McClaskey, rector of San Diego’s All Saints Episcopal Church and a member of the diocese’s standing committee. McClaskey said that he got “bafflegab” rather than a direct yes or no to his question.

As a result, McClaskey and Larry Bausch of Holy Trinity Church in Ocean Beach, plus two laymen, said they could not consent to Borsch’s election, leaving the standing committee deadlocked 4 to 4 and blocking assent from the diocese.

In an interview, McClaskey said he disagreed with some articles Borsch had written about the Resurrection. “What God did becomes reinterpreted and becomes less and less significant. Hence, you don’t need an empty tomb.”

McClaskey said the characterization of the Resurrection by Borsch and like-minded scholars is part of an “erosion of faith” in the Episcopal Church. “There is an attempt, both blatant and insidious, to undermine the basic Christian teaching.”

Faith ‘Cornerstone’

Borsch, anticipating questions on the subject because of the San Diego inquiry, telephoned a statement to the Los Angeles diocesan headquarters from Princeton University, where he is dean of the chapel. Borsch recounted his conversation with McClaskey, saying that the Resurrection “is the cornerstone of my faith” and that he believed that “on the third day he rose again from the dead,” as stated in the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds.

“I was then asked whether this meant that I believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead,” Borsch said. “When I asked in return what the questioner meant by ‘physical’ and why the question was being asked, I was told that he felt that a bishop of the church had to believe in the real, physical Resurrection and that a 1975 or 1976 article I had written made him wonder about this.

“I responded that I certainly believed in the real resurrection of Jesus, but I did not believe that it is in the spirit of our church to require a particular interpretation of the creeds.

“In fact, from a faith perspective, I have no trouble professing the physical resurrection of Jesus, as many people probably understand that word, but as a biblical scholar and theologian I recognize that there are different views in the New Testament itself. . . .”

In a telephone interview this week, Borsch said that he is perfectly willing to believe that Jesus’ body was raised literally from the dead. “Something objective happened. My concern is that that data is not available to 20th-Century people,” he said. The contemporary believer is in the position described by Jesus in the Gospel of John: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe,” Borsch said.

But, in addition, Borsch said, “Nobody says Paul’s way of presenting the Resurrection is wrong.” Whether Paul was unaware of any empty tomb stories or simply did not refer to them cannot be known, Borsch said.

In “God’s Parable,” a book published in 1976, Borsch asked if Paul’s non-use of the empty tomb story indicated “a more subjective and less physical understanding of the Resurrection. And, in this light, could not the Gospels’ descriptions now be understood as ways of insisting by means of picture language upon the intensity of the spiritual experience of Jesus as still living?”

Point Is Important

James M. Robinson of Claremont Graduate School said that the earliest Christians used mythological language designed to score a point. “The language is not central to Christianity, but the point being scored is,” he said.

Robinson has argued that Paul “would have imagined the risen Jesus as a luminous body,” something akin to the account of Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ in the New Testament Book of Acts.

Although church presentations seem to present the image of a resuscitated corpse, Robinson said he did not know “of any leading New Testament scholar who would affirm a resuscitated corpse. The fact that a corpse was resuscitated is not the Christian message.”

Evangelical scholars are virtually unanimous in affirming a physical, bodily resurrection, and they tend to feel that Paul knew of the empty tomb traditions but simply chose not to mention them. Evangelicals by conviction teach that the Gospels are historically reliable. Yet the focus is not simply on the empty tomb.

“Christian faith rests on the positive encounter with Christ, not on a negative fact like an empty tomb,” said Fuller Theological Seminary’s Colin Brown, an evangelical theologian whose books include “Miracles and the Critical Mind.”

Brown said that many informed Christians believe that Jesus was transformed in some way in his resurrection. “That fits in with the story in Luke about the disciples who fail to recognize the risen Jesus on the road,” Brown said.

The empty tomb stories by themselves, Brown and others have pointed out, are susceptible to the interpretation that Jesus’ body might have been stolen, a question dealt with in Matthew 28:13.

The oldest versions of the Gospel of Mark, generally accepted as the first Gospel to be written, ends at Mark 16:8 and says the women were so afraid that they told no one that Jesus had risen from the tomb. In other words, in Mark, the disciples, who had fled and abandoned Jesus, do not see the risen Jesus. Only an appearance of the risen Jesus later in Galilee is predicted. Bibles today include additional verses added to Mark later, that include physical appearances by the risen Jesus before his disciples.

The other three Gospels, which otherwise relied heavily on Mark’s narrative, remedied the situation by adding appearance stories--of Jesus walking, talking and eating with disciples.

“The narratives themselves contain as many points of divergence as they do of similarity. They cannot be treated as fragments of a single account,” wrote Pheme Perkins of Boston College in her 1984 book, “Resurrection.”

“Nevertheless, it remains a constant temptation of interpreters to create a synthetic account that will ‘unify’ this diversity,” Perkins warned.

In the Gospels, each version is dependent on how the author wants to treat his subject and shows “the development of early Christian reflection on the Resurrection.”

Reginald H. Fuller wrote in Harper’s Bible Dictionary that the Gospels had theological motives in making the risen Jesus appear to be as physically real as he was before his Crucifixion. The Book of Acts says that the risen Jesus made appearances over a period of 40 days before he ascended to heaven, an account that serves the literary and theological purpose of the author, Fuller said.

By contrast, Fuller wrote, earlier Christians understood the appearances as “manifestations of the resurrected and already ascended Christ from heaven.” The Greek word for “appeared” used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is the same word used elsewhere for visionary experiences, Fuller said.

Times staff writer Ralph Frammalino in San Diego contributed to this story.