Resurrection as Trauma
An extract from Atheism After Christendom
Resurrection is an event in the darkest, bleakest and loneliest moment of human desolation: In the abysmal, stateless, agonizing silence – there, without consolation, without meaning, without love, there and precisely there, in the place of absolute loss, where anything and everything is cruelly engulfed by the darkest, coldest nothing. An emptiness unsympathetic and infinite, where there is nothing but nothing, reveals itself as the origin and the end, the alpha and the omega of human existence. Millions throughout history have no doubt experienced something of this sheer absence, and though they have tasted it this side of the grave, the only language available should they attempt to describe it, is language associated with death. Resurrection is not an antidote to such comfortless experiences, nor does it offer any short cut around them, nor even a happy ending to them. Resurrection, if it is to have any genuine force in relation to death, is something beginning inside death. Those who believe well in resurrection believe that – precisely in the midst of such inconsolable, impersonal and all-encompassing nothingness, there is something. Resurrection is the emergence of ‘something’ out of the dark, abysmal ‘nothing’.
The modernist reaction to such claims is to extract this ‘something’ away from its context, and abstract it away from the experience of death. This ‘something’ may then be defined, categorised, and analysed, until eventually an objective and rational assessment can be made from a safe distance. The explosive, disruptive charge that makes this unquenchable ‘something’ what it is, is thereby ignored. Resurrection thus evades modern attempts to classify it.
Alternative approaches to engaging with the scriptures reporting the resurrection are available: to ‘enter into’ a text, to en-counter its impact in one’s inner being, rather than observing it safely from outside. To hear the voice of a text is not simply to try to extract the correct meaning out of it, but to enter fully enough into the author’s world to see what that author is pointing towards. To view resurrection from the perspective of the scriptures is to enter a region undergoing an earthquake. The closer one comes to the authors, the nearer one comes to the epicentre. This earthquake destroys the myth of a detached, dispassionate observer. This is – at root - what makes scripture ‘holy’: it is the place where the reader is exposed to radical otherness. Here is the distinct possibility that the reader’s entire worldview will come crashing down.
