Jesus and the Demise of Death: Read An Excerpt

Platonism?)" that, in Wright's view, distorted Christian eschatology in an otherworldly direction.23 This position mirrors that of the mid-twentieth-century biblical scholar Oscar Cullmann, who contrasted the biblical doctrine of resurrection with the Greek doctrine of immortality and argued that the latter too often prevails among Christians.24 The philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others, concurred: "Soon after the end of the first centuries the eschatological problem was concealed. Afterward, the original meaning of Christian concepts was not recognized. In contemporary philosophy too, the Christian formations of concepts are concealed behind the Greek attitude."25 We might also think of Tertullian's trenchant remark against the Gnostic and Marcionite heretics: "What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? . . . Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition!"26

Agreeing with Cullmann and Wright, contemporary theologians often criticize the use of Greek philosophy in Christian eschatology. Singling out Thomas Aquinas, but with the broad sweep of traditional Christian eschatology in view, Jürgen Moltmann articulates this standard criticism: "Thomas did not translate the biblical language into any other language or mode of thought, but basically liquidated it. His 'theology of hope' is in truth not the theology of a biblical 'hope' but the anthropology of the natural desire (appetitus naturalis) of the inner self-transcendence of human beings which finds its answer in the metaphysical theology of the supreme good (summum bonum)."27 Despite his own criticisms of Moltmann's eschatology as overly horizontal, Hans Urs von Balthasar expresses from quite a different perspective a broadly similar concern: "Platonism clearly dominated Western, even Christian, thinking down to the threshold of modern times; we have only to think of the stress laid on the 'immortality of the soul', and how the resurrection was held to be an almost unnecessary 'accidental blessedness' superadded to the substantial blessedness already possessed."28 The philosophical sources of Balthasar's eschatology, like Moltmann's, are generally not Greek but German, especially G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. Other major twentieth-century theologians, such as Sergius Bulgakov, Karl Barth, and Karl Rahner, also rely upon German idealism and its existentialist offshoots for philosophical underpinnings in eschatology.29 R. R. Reno's recent commentary on Genesis sums up the concern that the Platonic search for "the sweet nectar of the eternal that will palliate

our vulnerability to decay and death" will lead us away from the divine Son who became incarnate, suffered, and died for us in order to give "us a new future in the flesh, not a new metaphysical location."30

As a young professor, Joseph Ratzinger sought in his own way to develop a "'de-Platonized' eschatology."31 Although his mature eschatology retains many points in common with his German contemporaries, he concludes that Scripture itself does not permit de-Platonization: "the more I dealt with the questions and immersed myself in the sources, the more the antitheses I had set up fell to pieces in my hands and in their place I saw the inner logic of the Church's tradition stand forth."32 In his Eschatology, he argues against portraits of Plato "as an individualistic, dualistic thinker who negates what is earthly and advocates a flight into the beyond."33 In his 2006 Regensburg Lecture as Pope Benedict XVI, he emphasizes that Greek philosophical thought is inscribed within Scripture itself, from "the later wisdom literature" through the New Testament: "biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment."34

Does this view of Scripture as related fruitfully to Greek philosophical thought find support from other scholars?35 Treating what he terms "the perennial issue of the Christian encounter with Hellenism" in his Gifford Lectures on the Cappadocian Fathers' natural theology, Jaroslav Pelikan observes that words such as "logos" (John 1:1) and "hypostasis" (Heb 1:3) came "to the Septuagint and then to the Christian vocabulary from the language of Classical and Hellenistic philosophy and science."36 Similarly, in his Judaism and Hellenism, Martin Hengel describes how the Wisdom of Solomon, which significantly influenced the New Testament texts, has affinities with Stoic philosophy.37 Richard Bauckham notes the Stoic influence on a key text for traditional Christian eschatology, 2 Peter 1:4, "he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature."38 Elsewhere Bauckham examines the use of "Hellenistic true-god-language" in the Letter to the Hebrews.39 We might also point to Ben Witherington III, whose Jesus the Sage makes clear the Hellenistic influences in late Second-Temple Jewish and Christian texts.40