#937 Goff, Allison, and Jesus’ Resurrection

Dr. craig’s response

Sure! Goff’s view is that Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into heaven are the same event (what he calls the Identity Theory). This was in fact the view of certain liberal scholars like Rudolf Bultmann in the mid-20^th century, who were sceptical of physical resurrection appearances of Jesus. On their view, Jesus, rather than being raised from the dead in the space-time universe, was extracted from the world and assumed directly into heaven.

As I mentioned during the podcast, it is the burden of  N. T. Wright’s massive The Resurrection of the Son of God to show that such an interpretation misrepresents the view of antiquity. One of the merits of Wright’s exhaustive study of ancient texts concerning resurrection of the dead is his demonstration that the notion of resurrection was not a translation to an other-worldly, non-spatio-temporal realm but inherently involved the restoration of life in the realm of space and time. Although Bultmann, unlike Goff, also denied Jesus’ empty tomb, Wright’s sharp critique of Bultmann’s equation of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension is apropos to Goff:

The idea that there was originally no difference for the earliest Christians between resurrection and exaltation/ascension is a twentieth-century fiction, based on a misreading of Paul. Actually Bultmann’s account is slippery at the crucial point: though he says there was no difference between resurrection and ascension, what he means is that there was no early belief in ‘resurrection’ at all, since as we have seen the word ‘resurrection’ and its cognates was not used to denote a non-bodily extension of life in a heavenly realm, however glorious. Plenty of words existed to denote heavenly exaltation; ‘resurrection’ is never one of them. . . . Bultmann therefore has to postulate – though he has covered up this large move – that at some point halfway through the first century, someone who had previously believed that Jesus had simply ‘gone to heaven when he died’ began to use, to denote this belief, language which had never meant that before and continued not to mean it in either paganism, Judaism or Christianity thereafter, namely, the language of resurrection. . . . What is more, Bultmann has to assume that, though this theory about a risen body was a new thing within the already widely diverse Christian church, it took over almost at once, so that all traces of the original view – that Jesus was not raised from the dead, but simply ‘went to heaven,’ albeit in an exulted capacity – have dropped out of historical sight. . . . But at this point, the historian must protest.[1]

Goff’s theory is thus historically flawed.

I was especially surprised when Goff in his article “Christianity and a God of Limited Power” (p. 10) attributes such a flawed view to the eminent New Testament scholar Dale Allison, whose book The Resurrection of Jesus (2021) is probably the best treatment of that subject. Goff says,

The following discussion builds on the defence of the identity theory (not under that name) we find in Dale Allison’s recent book The Resurrection of Jesus. Allison references many Biblical scholars (Enslin 1921: 60-73, Goppelt 1981: 246, Pannenberg1977: 91-3, 1994: 354-5, Stuhlmacher 2018: 197-8) who have argued that the early Christians equated the resurrection and the ascension. For what it’s worth, the thesis that the early Christians held the identity theory is not a fringe view.  

As Wright shows, it is a fringe view, and I was stunned by Goff’s claim that Allison defends the theory in his book, since I knew that that was not the case. Moreover, having studied under Pannenberg, I knew that he did not defend such a thesis either, and I suspected it was the same for the other scholars cited. Since Goff did not cite any page numbers in Allison’s book, I wrote personally to Allison asking about Goff’s claim. Allison replied with the surmise that Goff was probably interpreting what Allison says on pp. 81-82 (with fn. 257) and pp. 258-61. There Allison opines that “The first Christians probably did not imagine significant chronological space between Jesus’ resurrection, ascension, and enthronement in heaven.” Later in “A Theological Footnote,” he says, “Traditionally most Christians have believed that, at some point, Jesus passed into ‘a new mode or sphere of existence.’ I see no theological deficit in supposing that this happened before he appeared to Mary and Peter.” This is hardly a defense of Goff’s view and does not even equate passing into a new mode of existence with the ascension.

What Goff has done, I think, is to confuse the so-called objective vision interpretation of Christ’s resurrection appearances with the identity of resurrection and ascension. He says, “One way of resolving the tension is by holding that the appearances in the gospels, despite superficial impressions, are more like the visionary appearance to Paul in Acts. This is precisely what the identity theory says” (p. 10). No, it is not. Allison and Pannenberg do construe the resurrection appearances as objective visions, that is to say, purely intra-mental events that are nonetheless caused by God and therefore distinct from subjective visions or hallucinations. Some proponents of the objective vision theory, like Hans Grass, denied that Jesus’ body was physically raised from death but still affirmed that the resurrection appearances were objective visions. The objective vision interpretation was popular during the 1950s and 60s but is now in decline. In his recent book On the Resurrection (2024), Gary Habermas documents that today most scholars hold that the first Christians believed in physical resurrection appearances of Jesus after his death, not merely visionary experiences.[2] Be that as it may, the construal of Jesus’ resurrection appearances as objective visions rather than physical appearances is not to equate his resurrection with his ascension, as Goff imagines.