Antony Flew, N. T. Wright, and the Resurrection of Jesus

In my previous two posts, I referred to internationally renowned atheist philosopher Antony Flew and his recent conversion to theism.  In his recent autobiography, There is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (Doubleday, 2007), Flew describes not only his reasons for believing in God but why, if any of the established religions is true, Christianity is the one, in his words, to beat.  He does not claim to have become a Christian, but he prints in Appendix B responses he has received from Anglican Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, to some recent questions of his.

After publishing (and commending) Wright’s understanding of how first-century Jews came to believe in Jesus as the embodiment of God himself, he proceeds to print the bishop’s reflections on the resurrection (pp. 195-213).  Here Wright helpfully sums up hundreds of pages of detailed scholarship from the book that is, in my opinion, the most impressive of all the many he has written—The Resurrection of the Son of God (SPCK, Fortress, 2003).  Jewish convictions about a general, bodily resurrection of all people at the end of human history, in conjunction with Judgment Day, were clear and pervasive, and had been since at least the time Daniel 12:2 had been written centuries earlier.  Unlike Greek or Roman thought, Jews overwhelmingly agreed that God’s plans for the eternal state of humanity was for them to be in embodied form, some raised to everlasting life and some to everlasting punishment.

Along come the first followers of Jesus, initially all Jewish, equally uniformly claiming, against their expectation, that one man, Jesus himself, had been bodily raised from the dead in advance of the general resurrection of everyone else.  They believed that this man was the Messiah, and they believed that he had been resurrected, despite the fact that there was no pre-Christian Jewish expectation for the resurrection of the Messiah.  The Gospel writers narrate the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection with greater diversity of detail than for any other comparably sized stretch of narrative in the New Testament yet agree on the essentials.  One can hardly accuse them of collusion at this juncture.  They all agree that Jesus’ appearances had elements of embodiment but that he was not limited by time and space in the way that finite, fallen human beings are—further developments beyond anything their tradition had anticipated.  Despite regularly citing the Hebrew Scriptures elsewhere as being fulfilled in numerous aspects of Jesus’ life and death, they do nothing of the kind in the resurrection narratives, so one can hardly accusing them of inventing stories based on earlier prophecies.  All four Gospels agree that the first and primary witnesses were women, despite the very chauvinistic dismissal of the value of women’s testimony in the ancient Mediterranean world.  None of these features fits the hypothesis that the disciples were inventing legendary or mythical material to commend their fledgling faith.

What is the best historical explanation for the accounts of the empty tomb and of Jesus’ post-mortem appearances to hundreds of people?  For these and other reasons, Wright insists only an actual bodily resurrection of Jesus provides an adequate answer.  This resurrection then vindicates Jesus’ earlier Messianic claims.  It climaxes a ministry in which he is presented, and is presented as presenting himself as the very embodiment of God in every classically Jewish fashion of depicting Yahweh, the one true God of the universe.  It is both a sufficient and necessary explanation of the Gospel narratives and the rise of Christian faith.

This, too, forms part of what Flew calls Wright’s “absolutely fresh” approach, which Flew likewise finds “absolutely wonderful, absolutely radical, and very powerful” (p. 213).  Flew’s final paragraph proceeds:  “Is it possible that there has been or can be divine revelation?  As I said, you cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible.  Everything else is open to omnipotence.”  May Flew live long enough to come to the conviction that the Christian accounts of Jesus are not merely possible, but true, meriting our faith and trust in Jesus as not only Revealer but Savior and Lord.