Pain, Suffering, and Resurrection

But if any one were to think that the earthy image is the flesh itself, but the heavenly image some other spiritual body besides the flesh, let him first consider that Christ, the heavenly man, when He appeared, bore the same form of limbs and the same image of flesh as ours, through which also He, who was not man, became man, that “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). For if He bore flesh for any other reason than that of setting the flesh free, and raising it up, why did He bear flesh superfluously, as He purposed neither to save it, nor to raise it up? But the Son of God does nothing superfluously. He did not then take the form of a servant uselessly, but to raise it up and save it. For He truly was made man, and died, and not in mere appearance, but that He might truly be shown to be the first begotten from the dead, changing the earthy into the heavenly, and the mortal into the immortal.

This book is a collection of six essays, including “Secularizing Jesus,” a deconstruction of the commonly accepted schematic of “three quests” for the historical Jesus; “The Problem of Audience,” grappling with the interpretation of some of the “difficult sayings” of Jesus; “The Problem of Gehenna,” a biblical and historical catalog and critique of interpretations of the doctrine of everlasting punishment of the damned in hell; and the book-length centerpiece of the collection, “Resurrecting Jesus.” It is here that the historical convictions of the author and those of his readers might collide. Dale Allison is the epitome of intellectual honesty—he explores the purely historical-critical approach to Jesus to its limits, and to the limits of his own profoundly moving experience of death and its aftermath.

Modern American culture is extremely ambivalent about the place of suffering. The value of suffering is not presumed; it is outright rejected. The current ethos of “It is wrong to not be happy” is social dogma. So when more suffering occurs, it demands an even more desperate need for moral dialogue, law and order. The pursuit of happiness becomes a social and political responsibility.

In contrast, the highest forms of art and religion have been the traditional modes by which a culture finds meaning in pain and suffering. Pain is the physical representation and suffering is the psychic representation which challenge the moral precepts of fairness, equality, and justice. Pain and suffering are not aggrandized. No one is suggesting moral masochism. They are accepted as facts of human existence. The Christian understanding of the cross is the prime example, both in art and religion, of how Western culture in particular expressed meaning in pain and suffering.