Empty Tomb, Empty Throne

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

1. God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)

2. He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)

3. God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)

4. What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)

5. He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)

6. Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)

7. The Israelite Heals—That’s All You Need to Know (McCarthy, The Passenger)

8. Jesus is Not Christ Without Us (Symeon the New Theologian, First Ethical Discourse)

I’ve taken the following selection from Rowan Williams’ essay “Between the Cherubim: The Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne,” in On Christian Theology, 183-196. In it, as you’ll see, Williams is describing and reflecting on the ways the Gospel’s accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension leave us in a kind of bind, a holy knocked-off-balance-ness, which he calls “intdeterminacy”:

This indeterminacy in the resurrection stories is one way of saying what the content of the stories is meant to convey: that Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified is not confined in the past, and that this non-confinement is more than just some sort of survival in the minds or memories of Christian believers… What exactly this means is immensely complex, once we start trying to spell it out. It means at least that in the community stemming from that first community of the friends of Jesus, those who had received his announcement of the Kingdom that was available to outcasts and sinners, God continues to do what was done in Jesus' ministry, that is, to re-form a people whose corporate calling was to show the world at large what was the scope and resource of divine love. Yet to say only that would leave us with the risk of identifying the actions of God with the acts of the community, which becomes a dangerous and potentially nonsensical and blasphemous claim when the community's history and administration is so manifestly vulnerable to distortion and betrayal…

What belief in the resurrection affirms is something other than the authority of witnesses. The risen Jesus is not, for Mark, available for work in the negotiating of the Church’s business, and the empty tomb (combined, of course, with Mark’s radical skepticism about the wisdom or insight of the Twelve) serves to keep empty the seat of ultimate authority in the Church. In the terms of my governing metaphor, the empty tomb is precisely an empty throne or cathedra…

[T]he empty tomb tradition is, theologically speaking, part of the Church’s resource in resisting the temptation to ‘absorb’ Jesus into itself, and thus part of what its confession of the divinity of Jesus amounts to in spiritual and political practice. Jesus is not the possession of the community, not even as “raised into the kerygma.” because he is alive, beyond qualification or risk, he “lives to God.” The freedom of Jesus to act, however we unpack that deceptively simple statement, is not exhausted by what the community is doing or thinking…

The central image of the gospel narratives is not any one apparition but the image of an absence, an image of the failure of images, which is also an absence that confirms the reality of a creative liberty, an agency not sealed and closed, but still obstinately engaged with a material environment and an historical process. Perhaps we really cannot say much more; not least because, to turn once more to Anita Mason’s novel, “There is a kind of truth, which, when it is said, becomes untrue.” The theologian’s job may be less the speaking of truth, in a context such as this, than the patient diagnosis of untruths, and the reminding of the community where its attention belongs.

A few reflections:

1. Robert Jenson, in his review of Williams’ On Christian Theology, critiqued what he called an “obsessive fear of closure.” At the time, I offered an apology of sorts in response. More recently, however, after I read Williams’ Christ the Heart of Creation, I found myself wondering if perhaps Jenson had been right all along. In that book at least, Williams’ Christology is deeply conflicted, disrupted and perhaps even undone by the efforts he makes to distinguish the Word from Jesus. (For more on the problem with this line of thought, see Jordan Wood’s critique).

2. All that said, I do agree with Williams that our Christology needs to be chastened by and before the living Christ, the one who’s no more confined to our thinking than he is to the past. There is real risk in daring to speak of him and his identification with us. But, as Jenson would say, we have to take the risk nonetheless—because love and truth require it of us. Theology must be done in fear and in trembling—but not fear of making a mistake or the fear of riling God to wrath! We must do theology in the fear of the mercy of God, a mercy always wider and deeper than we can imagine or believe. In the end, it is the goodness of God that makes us tremble, not his majesty (cf. Jer. 33:8-9).

3. We can say, as Williams does, that the empty tomb is an empty throne, a sign of contradiction that brings down our mighty thoughts from their thrones and sends our reasonings away empty. Yet the emptiness Williams calls the central image of the gospels is not a lack or vacuity—it is an infinite fulness. Thus, it is not so much that the tomb is empty as that it is filled to overflowing with the immeasurable life of God. Jesus is not absent, realy, as so present as to make all other presences real and realizable. That’s the unthinkable wonder I’m trying to get at in this poem.

4. At its worst, theology narrows our thinking down to simplistic, formulaic, and divisive explanations. At its best, theology, like the Christ who inspires it, endlessly deepens our understanding by holding together opposing truths and laying bear half-truths and untruths so we might turn away from them. Knowing that, we can and should say, following Williams, that what Jesus is doing is not exhausted by what the church is doing and, following Jenson and St Symeon, that what the church does as the church is indeed the work of Christ.