In Resurrection, God Defends Against Death, not Dying

I’m reading a bit of Robert Jensen’s Systematic Theology at the moment. I like how he emphasizes the narrative identity of God (though I dislike his commitment to male gendered language for God). Jensen argues that the identity of God as rendered in the Bible requires that the beginning be interpreted in light of the end. All narrative events are contingent–but these contingent events all make up the story of God, which is the same as the story of God within historical life. He distinguishes the God of Israel from other then-available deities by suggesting that Yahweh does not offer to protect Israel from the vagaries and violence of history. Rather, Yahweh relates to Israel through the mode of promise of a good future. He writes,

Gods whose identity lies in the persistence of a beginning are cultivated because in them we are secure against the threatening future. The gods of the nations are guarantors of continuity and return, against the daily threat to fragile established order; indeed, they are Continuity and Return. The Lord’s meaning for Israel is the opposite: the archetypically established order of Egypt was the very damnation from which the Lord released her into being, and what she thereby entered was the insecurity of the desert. Her God is not salvific because he defends against the future but because he poses it.

While God does not promise to secure Israel and the Church against trouble and difficulty (that’s neither the identity of God nor the story of Israel and the Church), the promises of God regarding a good and definite future closure are available within the present. This availability of the promise constitutes the hope upon which the people persevere through difficulty.

The inevitability of death is a great difficulty. But God promises that, eventually, “death would be no more.” As Jensen writes, “From first to last of biblical faith, God is death’s opponent.”

The end of death is the anticipation of the story. The basis for this anticipation is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, whom God raised from the dead–just as God will raise us from the dead.

The resurrection matters because death will be no more. Its end is announced in the risen Christ. But this is not the end of dying. It just changes the way we think about it.