The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright
The Open Volume
Thoughtful Reviews in Theology and Ministry
The Resurrection of the Son of God
N.T. Wright
Bibliographic Information
Author: Wright, N.T. Full Title: The Resurrection of the Son of God Publisher: Fortress Press (USA) / SPCK (UK) Year of Publication: 2003 Pages: 817 pp. (+ bibliography and indices) ISBN: 978-0-8006-2679-3 Series: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3
Author Background
N.T. Wright (D.Phil., Oxford University) is Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Andrews University. His full scholarly profile and institutional context are described in the companion reviews of The New Testament and the People of God and Jesus and the Victory of God in this series. At the time of this volume's publication Wright was Bishop of Durham — the fourth most senior position in the Church of England — a role that placed the most technically demanding volume in the series at the intersection of the highest levels of academic scholarship and active episcopal leadership. The book reflects this dual location: it is simultaneously the most rigorous piece of historical argumentation in the series and the most directly apologetic, written with an evident awareness that the resurrection is not merely an academic question but the confession on which the church's existence depends.
The Resurrection of the Son of God occupies a structurally unique position in the series. Where Volumes 1 and 2 established a methodological framework and applied it to the question of the historical Jesus, this volume addresses the single most contested factual claim in the entire Christian tradition — the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth — and argues for it on historical grounds with a directness and a technical comprehensiveness that no previous scholarly treatment had achieved. The book is the longest in the series, the most exhaustively documented, and the most directly engaged with the broadest range of scholarly and philosophical interlocutors. It is also, in the judgment of a wide range of reviewers across the theological spectrum, the most important single volume in the series and one of the most significant works of Christian apologetics produced in the twentieth century.
The contextual factor most relevant to this volume's significance is the state of scholarly opinion on the resurrection at the time of its publication. The dominant positions in critical New Testament scholarship — represented by Rudolf Bultmann's demythologization program, the form critics' account of the resurrection narratives as legendary accretions, and the more recent proposals of Crossan and Ludemann that the resurrection appearances were visionary or psychological rather than bodily — had created an environment in which serious historical argument for a bodily resurrection was widely regarded as methodologically naive or theologically motivated. Wright's intervention challenged this consensus not by invoking theological authority but by engaging the historical evidence with greater technical precision and greater breadth of contextual knowledge than any previous treatment, and the result was a book that forced even skeptical scholars to engage the historical argument on its own terms.
Thesis and Central Argument
The governing thesis of The Resurrection of the Son of God is that the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth — his physical rising from the dead in a transformed but material body — is the most historically adequate explanation of two facts that are themselves historically established with high probability: the empty tomb and the post-resurrection appearances. The book argues this thesis through a three-stage argument. First, Wright establishes what "resurrection" meant in the ancient world — both in the pagan Greco-Roman tradition and in the Jewish tradition — demonstrating that resurrection consistently denoted a specific kind of event: the re-embodiment of a person who had died, in a transformed but material body, in a context that implied the defeat of death and the inauguration of the new creation. Second, he examines the New Testament resurrection accounts against this background, arguing that the specific features of the accounts — the empty tomb, the physical but transformed nature of the resurrection body, the way the appearances are narrated, the immediate transformation of the disciples from defeated and frightened followers to bold proclaimers — are precisely what the first-century Jewish understanding of resurrection would have predicted as the result of an actual bodily resurrection and precisely what it would not have predicted as the result of visionary experiences, legendary development, or theological construction. Third, he argues that the combination of the empty tomb and the appearances, considered together against the first-century Jewish context, constitutes the most historically compelling explanation of the origin of early Christianity — more compelling than any of the alternative hypotheses on offer — and that the historian who follows the evidence is driven toward the conclusion that something happened to Jesus's body that the earliest witnesses correctly described as resurrection.
The book responds to the dominant critical consensus by challenging it on its own methodological terms: not by invoking the authority of Scripture or the tradition but by deploying the full apparatus of critical historical scholarship — the primary sources, the secondary literature, the criteria of historical judgment, and the logic of historical explanation — in support of a conclusion that the critical tradition had largely dismissed without adequately engaging the evidence. The proposed contribution is simultaneously historical, apologetic, and theological: historical in its engagement with the ancient evidence; apologetic in its demonstration that the historical argument for the resurrection is considerably stronger than the critical consensus had acknowledged; and theological in its account of the resurrection's significance for Christian faith, practice, and eschatological hope.
Overview of Contents
The Resurrection of the Son of God is organized across five major parts: the ancient context of resurrection belief (Part One), the resurrection in the New Testament outside the Gospels (Part Two), the resurrection narratives in the Gospels (Part Three), the historical argument for the resurrection (Part Four), and the theological implications (Part Five).
Part One: Resurrection in the Ancient World
The book's opening section — running to nearly two hundred pages — is its most technically demanding and its most important for the argument that follows. Wright surveys the concept of resurrection across the full range of ancient sources: the Homeric and classical Greek traditions, in which the dead descend to Hades and do not return; the Platonic tradition, in which the immortality of the soul is affirmed but the resurrection of the body is consistently denied; the Roman traditions; and the diverse traditions of Second Temple Judaism, in which a genuine expectation of bodily resurrection emerges with increasing clarity in texts ranging from Daniel 12 and Isaiah 26 to the Maccabean literature, the Psalms of Solomon, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The most important findings of this survey are twofold. First, in the pagan traditions, "resurrection" — understood as the re-embodiment of a dead person in a transformed but material body — was not a live option. The dead did not return in bodily form; the most the pagan traditions offered was the immortality of the soul, or in some cases the translation of exceptional figures to a divine realm. When pagans encountered the Christian proclamation of the resurrection they found it not merely incredible but conceptually alien — it described something their traditions had consistently denied was possible. Second, in the Jewish traditions, "resurrection" had a consistent and specific meaning: the re-embodiment of the dead in a transformed but physical body, in the context of the divine vindication of the righteous at the end of the age. This meaning is remarkably stable across the diverse Second Temple sources, and it provides the essential context for understanding what the earliest Christians were claiming when they proclaimed that Jesus had been raised.
Part Two: Resurrection in the Pauline Letters and Acts
The second section examines the resurrection in the Pauline letters — the earliest written evidence for the Christian resurrection proclamation — and in Acts. The treatment of 1 Corinthians 15 is the most technically detailed and the most theologically significant section of the book. Wright argues that Paul's account of the resurrection body — "it is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (15:44) — does not describe the replacement of the physical by the non-physical but the transformation of the physical by the Spirit's power. The Greek terms soma psychikon and soma pneumatikon describe not the material composition of the body but its animating principle — the present body animated by the psyche (soul/life principle) versus the resurrection body animated by the pneuma (Spirit). This philological argument — developed with greater technical precision than any previous treatment — is crucial for Wright's overall case, because the alternative reading of Paul (in which the "spiritual body" is a non-material spiritual entity rather than a transformed physical body) has been the primary Pauline support for the view that the early Christian resurrection proclamation did not involve an empty tomb or a physical transformation.
The treatment of Paul's Damascus Road experience — the foundational apostolic appearance narrative — is similarly careful: Wright argues that Paul consistently distinguishes his own Damascus Road experience from the resurrection appearances to the other apostles, treating it as a special anomalous encounter rather than as the paradigm for all resurrection appearances, and that the attempt to reduce all the resurrection appearances to visionary experiences of the Damascus Road type misreads both Paul's own testimony and the logic of his resurrection argument.
Part Three: The Resurrection Narratives in the Gospels
The book's most exegetically detailed section surveys the four Gospel resurrection narratives — Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20–21 — with sustained attention to both their individual features and their points of convergence and divergence. Wright's most important finding is that the Gospel resurrection narratives are, in terms of their literary and theological character, among the most historically reliable portions of the Gospel tradition — not despite their unusual features but because of them. The narratives are notably restrained in their description of the resurrection itself (none of the canonical Gospels describes the moment of resurrection), they include features that would have been theologically embarrassing to the early church (the women as primary witnesses, the disciples' doubt and confusion, the gradual recognition of the risen Jesus), and they resist the legendary elaboration characteristic of later resurrection accounts (the Gospel of Peter, for example, describes the resurrection in elaborate cosmic detail). These features, Wright argues, are precisely what historical authenticity looks like: the narratives bear the marks of early, unembellished testimony rather than of theological construction.
The treatment of the empty tomb is the most directly controversial section: Wright argues that the empty tomb is historically well-established — attested across multiple independent sources, consistent with the first-century Jewish understanding of what resurrection would mean, and unexplained by any of the alternative hypotheses — and that the attempts to explain it away (theft, wrong tomb, symbolic narrative) founder on the historical evidence. The treatment of the appearances is equally careful: the diversity of the appearance accounts — different locations, different people, different circumstances — is precisely what the historical evidence for a real event looks like, and the attempt to reduce the diversity to a single legendary pattern fails to account for the specificity and the particularity of the individual accounts.
Part Four: The Historical Argument
The book's most directly apologetic section assembles the historical argument from the evidence surveyed in the preceding parts. Wright's argument proceeds in two stages. First, he establishes that two facts can be held with high historical probability: the tomb was empty on the third day after the crucifixion, and various people — individually and in groups — had experiences that they described as encounters with the risen Jesus. These two facts, he argues, are established by the convergence of multiple independent lines of evidence and cannot be explained away by the alternative hypotheses that critical scholarship has proposed. Second, he argues that the combination of these two facts, considered against the first-century Jewish understanding of resurrection, drives the historian toward the conclusion that something happened to Jesus's body — that the tomb was empty because the body had been transformed rather than removed — and that the appearances were encounters with the bodily risen Jesus rather than visionary experiences or legendary constructions.
The engagement with the alternative hypotheses — hallucination, grief vision, cognitive dissonance reduction, legendary development, deliberate invention — is the most comprehensive in the literature, and Wright's demonstration that each hypothesis fails to account for the full range of the evidence is the most technically detailed defense of the historical argument for the resurrection available in any single volume. The engagement with Gerd Lüdemann's The Resurrection of Jesus (1994) — the most technically detailed defense of the visionary hypothesis — is particularly sustained and particularly illuminating, and readers wanting to engage the strongest case against the bodily resurrection will find Wright's response both fair and compelling.
Part Five: Theological Implications
The book's final section addresses the theological significance of the resurrection — for Christology, for eschatology, for ethics, and for the nature of Christian hope. Wright develops the resurrection's implications for the doctrine of God — the resurrection as the vindication of Jesus's claim to embody Israel's returning God — and for Christian eschatology — the resurrection as the beginning of the new creation rather than the rescue of souls from the material world. The account of the resurrection's ethical implications — the transformed creation as the beginning of the new world that Christian practice is to embody and anticipate — is the most directly pastoral section of the volume and connects most explicitly to the popular-level account of resurrection hope developed in Surprised by Hope (2008). The theological synthesis is the least technically demanding section of the book and the most directly accessible to non-specialist readers, and it provides a coherent account of why the resurrection matters for Christian faith, practice, and hope that stands as a significant theological contribution independent of the historical argument.
Theological Evaluation and Critique
Exegetical and Hermeneutical Method
The exegetical method of The Resurrection of the Son of God is the most technically precise in the series. The philological treatment of resurrection vocabulary across the ancient sources — Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic — is comprehensive and consistently careful, and the engagement with the primary sources is more thorough than any previous treatment of the resurrection question. The 1 Corinthians 15 exegesis is the most important single exegetical contribution of the volume, and the argument that soma pneumatikon describes a transformed physical body rather than a non-physical spiritual entity has been engaged seriously — and largely accepted — by scholars across the theological spectrum, including several who resist other aspects of Wright's program.
The most significant exegetical tension concerns the specific nature of the resurrection body and its relationship to the pre-resurrection body. Wright's account — that the resurrection body is the transformation of the physical body rather than its replacement — is the historically most adequate reading of both Paul and the Gospel narratives, but it raises questions about the mode and mechanism of transformation that the New Testament texts themselves do not fully specify and that the book does not always address with the precision the theological tradition requires. The question of the relationship between the physical continuity of the resurrection body (implied by the empty tomb) and its transformed character (implied by the appearance narratives' accounts of doors passing through and unrecognized appearances) is acknowledged but not fully resolved, and readers from traditions with developed theologies of the resurrection body — including the Catholic tradition's engagement with the beatific vision and the Orthodox tradition's account of theosis — will want to press this question further than the book's historical focus allows.
Doctrinal Analysis
The doctrinal stakes of The Resurrection of the Son of God are the most directly creedal in the series, because the resurrection is the article of faith whose historical grounding is most directly at issue in the contemporary intellectual and cultural context.
From a Reformed perspective, the most significant benchmark is the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), Chapter VIII.4, which affirms that Christ "rose again from the dead, with the same body in which he suffered, with which also he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth at the right hand of his Father." The Confession's affirmation of the bodily resurrection — the same body, transformed and glorified — is precisely what Wright's historical argument establishes, and the Reformed tradition's reception of this volume has been among the most enthusiastically positive of any work of critical scholarship in the past generation. Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology (1994) and Richard Gaffin's Resurrection and Redemption (1978) — the most technically detailed Reformed engagements with the resurrection's theological significance — share Wright's commitment to the bodily resurrection and extend its dogmatic implications in directions that complement the historical argument. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Questions 45–46, which develop the resurrection's significance for justification, sanctification, and eschatological hope, are directly engaged by Wright's theological synthesis in Part Five, and readers from the Reformed tradition will find the book a powerful historical grounding for confessional commitments they already hold.
From a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective, the resurrection's significance in the Wesleyan tradition is developed primarily in terms of the resurrection as the inauguration of the new creation that the Spirit's sanctifying work in the believer is beginning to embody. Wesley's own account of the resurrection — implicit throughout his account of entire sanctification as the restoration of the divine image in humanity — is developed most explicitly in his sermon The New Creation (sermon 64), whose account of the transformed creation that the resurrection inaugurates resonates directly with Wright's eschatological synthesis. Thomas Oden's The Word of Life (1989) and Life in the Spirit (1992) represent the most careful Wesleyan systematic engagement with the resurrection, and readers from that tradition will find Wright's historical grounding of the resurrection hope broadly compatible with their tradition's theological instincts.
From a Roman Catholic perspective, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), §638–658, affirms the bodily resurrection with considerable theological precision — the resurrection as the Father's vindication of the Son, the inauguration of the new creation, and the foundation of Christian hope — and Wright's historical argument is broadly compatible with and supportive of these affirmations. The Catholic tradition's engagement with the resurrection's relationship to the beatific vision — the question of whether the resurrection body's transformation implies a mode of existence that transcends the ordinary categories of material embodiment — is developed most precisely in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae III, QQ. 53–59, and readers from the Catholic tradition will want to engage Aquinas's account alongside Wright's historical argument to assess the full theological significance of the resurrection body's transformed character. Karl Rahner's account of the resurrection in Foundations of Christian Faith (1978) and Hans Urs von Balthasar's engagement with the resurrection in the Theo-Drama (vol. 4, 1994) represent the most significant Catholic systematic engagements with the question and should be read as productive conversation partners.
From an Eastern Orthodox perspective, the resurrection is the theological center of the Orthodox liturgical and theological tradition in a way that is more explicit and more structurally central than in any Western tradition. The Paschal proclamation — "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life" — is the organizing confession of Orthodox worship, and the theological framework within which the resurrection is understood — as the defeat of death, the restoration of the divine image, and the beginning of theosis — resonates deeply with Wright's account of the resurrection as the inauguration of the new creation. John Meyendorff's Byzantine Theology (1974) and Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World (1963) represent the most accessible Orthodox theological engagements with the resurrection's cosmic and liturgical significance, and readers from the Orthodox tradition will find Wright's historical argument providing strong scholarly support for convictions that are central to their tradition's worship and theology.
From a Lutheran perspective, the resurrection's significance in the Lutheran tradition is developed primarily in terms of the resurrection as the vindication of the crucified Christ — the demonstration that the theologia crucis is not the final word, that the God who hides in the cross is also the God who raises the dead. Luther's own account of the resurrection in his Easter sermons and in the Large Catechism emphasizes the resurrection as the ground of justification and the guarantee of the believer's own future resurrection, and Gerhard Forde's account of the resurrection in Theology Is for Proclamation (1990) develops these themes with characteristic Lutheran precision. Wright's historical argument provides strong grounding for the Lutheran tradition's confessional commitments, and readers from that tradition will find the book a powerful scholarly defense of the bodily resurrection that the Formula of Concord's Article III — "On the Righteousness of Faith" — presupposes.
From a Baptist and broader evangelical perspective, the book's reception within conservative evangelical scholarship has been overwhelmingly positive — it is, in the judgment of many evangelical scholars, the most important work of Christian apologetics produced in the past half-century, and its influence on evangelical engagement with the resurrection question has been transformative. The Baptist Faith and Message (2000) affirms that Christ "rose from the dead with a glorified body" — a confession whose historical grounding Wright's argument provides with unprecedented scholarly precision — and conservative Baptist scholars including Gary Habermas (The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, 2004) and Michael Licona (The Resurrection of Jesus, 2010) have developed adjacent historical arguments that share Wright's methodological commitments while engaging some of his specific proposals critically.
Engagement with Secondary Literature
The secondary literature engagement in The Resurrection of the Son of God is the most comprehensive in the series and among the most exhaustive in contemporary New Testament scholarship. The ancient primary sources — pagan, Jewish, and early Christian — are engaged with a thoroughness that no previous resurrection study had achieved, and the modern scholarly literature is surveyed with comparable breadth. The engagement with Gerd Lüdemann, Crossan, Borg, and the diverse critical positions on the resurrection is thorough and technically precise. Gary Habermas's extensive apologetic literature on the resurrection is engaged with appropriate acknowledgment of its contributions and its methodological differences. Wolfhart Pannenberg's Jesus — God and Man (1968) — the most important systematic-theological engagement with the resurrection's historical and dogmatic significance in the twentieth century — is engaged with appropriate depth and appropriate critical distance.
The most significant gap is in the philosophical literature on miracles and historical explanation. David Hume's argument against miracles — the foundational philosophical challenge to historical arguments for the resurrection — is addressed, but the engagement with the subsequent philosophical literature — C.S. Lewis's Miracles (1947), John Earman's Hume's Abject Failure (2000), and the essays in In Defence of Miracles (Geivett and Habermas, eds., 1997) — is less comprehensive than the historical stakes require. Readers who press the philosophical objection to miracles before the historical argument will need to supplement Wright's engagement with the more specifically philosophical treatments.
Strengths
The establishment of resurrection's ancient meaning. The book's most durable scholarly contribution is its exhaustive establishment of what "resurrection" consistently meant in the ancient world — both in the pagan traditions (where it was consistently denied as possible) and in the Jewish traditions (where it consistently denoted bodily re-embodiment in a transformed but physical body). This contribution is independent of the book's apologetic argument and stands as a permanent reference point for the field: any subsequent discussion of the resurrection in its ancient context must engage Wright's survey of the primary sources. The demonstration that the New Testament's resurrection proclamation was making a specific, historically intelligible, and consistently understood claim — not a vague spiritual affirmation capable of multiple interpretations — is the foundational achievement of the volume and provides the indispensable contextual framework for the historical argument that follows.
The 1 Corinthians 15 exegesis. The philological and exegetical treatment of 1 Corinthians 15 — particularly the argument that soma pneumatikon describes a transformed physical body rather than a non-physical spiritual entity — is the most important single exegetical contribution in the book and one of the most significant in contemporary Pauline scholarship. Its reception across the scholarly spectrum — including by scholars who resist other aspects of Wright's program — is a measure of its exegetical precision and its persuasive force. Pastors and teachers who have struggled with the question of the resurrection body's nature will find this the most technically grounded and the most accessible treatment of the relevant evidence available in the literature.
The comprehensive engagement with alternative hypotheses. The book's treatment of the alternative hypotheses — hallucination, grief vision, cognitive dissonance reduction, legendary development, deliberate invention — is the most comprehensive and the most technically rigorous in the literature. Wright's demonstration that each hypothesis fails to account for the full range of the evidence — and specifically for the combination of the empty tomb and the diverse appearance accounts — is the most persuasive historical defense of the bodily resurrection available in any single volume. Even readers who do not share Wright's theological commitments have acknowledged that the alternative hypotheses, as he examines them, are less adequate to the evidence than the hypothesis of a bodily resurrection.
The account of resurrection and new creation. The theological synthesis of Part Five — the account of the resurrection as the beginning of the new creation, the inauguration of the transformed material world that Christian eschatological hope anticipates — is the most theologically generative section of the book and the most directly pastoral. The demonstration that the resurrection is not the rescue of souls from the material world but the transformation of the material world itself — that the resurrection body is the first installment of the renewed creation — provides the theological framework for Christian engagement with embodied life, social justice, and ecological care that Wright develops at greater length in Surprised by Hope (2008) and that has proved among the most broadly influential theological contributions of his career.
Weaknesses and Limitations
The philosophical engagement with miracles is insufficient. The book's most significant gap is the insufficient engagement with the philosophical argument against miracles as a category — the Humean challenge that no historical evidence can establish the probability of an event that violates the laws of nature. Wright's response to Hume is present but brief, and the book's historical argument assumes rather than establishes the philosophical framework within which historical evidence for a resurrection can even in principle be assessed. Readers who hold the Humean objection as a prior constraint on historical reasoning — as many critical scholars do — will not find the historical evidence compelling unless the philosophical objection is first addressed, and the book does not address it with the thoroughness the argument's apologetic ambitions require. John Earman's Hume's Abject Failure (2000) and Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew's essay on the resurrection in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (2009) address the philosophical question with greater precision and should be read alongside this volume by readers for whom the philosophical objection is the primary challenge.
The mode of the resurrection body remains underspecified. The book establishes with considerable force that the resurrection body is a transformed physical body — continuous with the pre-resurrection body, attested by the empty tomb, capable of being touched and of eating. It is less successful in specifying the mode of transformation that accounts for the appearance narratives' accounts of the risen Jesus passing through locked doors, appearing and disappearing, and being initially unrecognized. Wright acknowledges that the resurrection body inhabits a different mode of existence than ordinary physical bodies — a "transphysical" body, in his terminology — but the account of what this means is less philosophically precise than the apologetic argument's demands require. The question of how the physical continuity of the resurrection body is compatible with its transformed mode of existence is a genuine philosophical and theological problem that the book identifies more clearly than it resolves.
The reception of the resurrection as historical conclusion requires more epistemological grounding. Wright argues that the historian who follows the evidence is driven toward the conclusion that Jesus's body was raised from the dead. This is a significant claim, and its epistemological status — what kind of conclusion historical argument can establish, and what relationship the historian's conclusion has to the believer's confession — is addressed in the methodological sections but not with the precision the claim's ambition requires. The relationship between "the best historical explanation of the evidence" and "the truth of the resurrection" involves epistemological steps that the critical realist framework of Volume 1 poses more clearly than it resolves, and readers who press the epistemological question will need to engage the philosophy of testimony and the epistemology of religious belief — C.A.J. Coady's Testimony (1992), Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief (2000) — to find the philosophical grounding the historical argument assumes.
Engagement with the Broader Scholarly Conversation
The Resurrection of the Son of God enters a field shaped by the demythologization debate (Bultmann), the form-critical tradition's account of the resurrection narratives as legendary development, and the more recent historical proposals of Lüdemann, Crossan, and Borg. The most important scholarly responses have come from three directions. From the left: Gerd Lüdemann's The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry (2004) — written partly in response to Wright — represents the most technically detailed defense of the visionary hypothesis, and the exchange between Wright and Lüdemann in The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue (2006) provides the most direct engagement between the competing historical accounts. From within evangelical scholarship: Gary Habermas and Michael Licona's The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (2004) and Licona's The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (2010) develop adjacent historical arguments that share Wright's methodological commitments while engaging some of his specific proposals — particularly the treatment of Matthew 27:52–53 — critically. From the systematic tradition: Wolfhart Pannenberg's Systematic Theology (vol. 2, 1994) and Oliver O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order (1986) represent the most important systematic-theological engagements with the resurrection's dogmatic and ethical significance, and both should be read alongside Wright's historical argument for a complete account of the resurrection's theological implications.
Conclusion and Recommendation
The Resurrection of the Son of God is, in the judgment of this review, the most important volume in the Christian Origins and the Question of God series and one of the most significant works of Christian scholarship produced in the past half-century. Its genuine contributions — the exhaustive establishment of resurrection's ancient meaning, the 1 Corinthians 15 exegesis, the comprehensive engagement with alternative hypotheses, and the account of resurrection and new creation — constitute a permanent contribution to the historical, exegetical, and theological engagement with the resurrection question that no serious student of the New Testament, Christian apologetics, or systematic theology can responsibly ignore. Its limitations — the insufficient philosophical engagement with miracles, the underspecified account of the resurrection body's mode of transformation, and the undergrounded epistemological status of the historical conclusion — are real but do not diminish the book's fundamental achievement. Read alongside Habermas and Licona's The Case for the Resurrection, Pannenberg's Systematic Theology vol. 2, and O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order, this volume provides the most comprehensive and the most historically rigorous account of the resurrection's evidence, meaning, and significance available anywhere in the literature.
Recommended for: Ph.D. students and faculty in New Testament, historical Jesus studies, systematic theology, and apologetics; M.Div. and Th.M. students in advanced Christology, eschatology, and apologetics courses; pastors whose congregants are navigating challenges to the bodily resurrection from critical scholarship, popular skepticism, or the New Atheism; apologists who want the most technically comprehensive historical defense of the resurrection available in a single volume; any serious reader for whom the resurrection is the central question of Christian faith and who wants to engage the evidence at the highest level of historical and theological rigor.
Not recommended for: Readers without background in New Testament studies or the history of resurrection scholarship — the book presupposes familiarity with the critical tradition that a first-time reader of New Testament scholarship will lack; those who hold the Humean philosophical objection to miracles as a prior constraint on historical reasoning — the book's historical argument does not adequately address the philosophical objection, and readers in this category should engage Earman and the McGrews before or alongside Wright; those seeking a devotional or popular-level engagement with the resurrection — Wright's Surprised by Hope (2008) serves that purpose far more accessibly; readers looking for a complete systematic theology of the resurrection — Oliver O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order and Pannenberg's Systematic Theology provide the dogmatic development that Wright's historical focus does not supply.
Overall Assessment: ☑ Highly Recommended | ☐ Recommended | ☐ Recommended with Reservations | ☐ Not Recommended
Comments
Post a Comment