I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. AMEN.
On the third day risen from the dead…
Here we are told that Jesus truly died and rose again after three days. The fact that He “descended to the dead” denotes that He truly died (1 Cor 15.1ff);[1] and therefore, when the creed declares that Jesus rose from the dead, it is a proclamation of resurrection not simply resuscitation. The Christian proclamation is of death being overcome by life-of the dead rising again to new life that has both continuity and discontinuity with the old. [2] As such, we must proclaim that “the resurrection was not a return to life as we know it; it was a transformation into an entirely new life.”[3] Christ Jesus was not raised from the dead as He had raised Lazarus or the widow’s son (Jn 11; Lk 7), but He dies and rises to new life. It is a transformed bodily resurrection that is in some sense a paradox-viz. the resurrected Christ may be recognized and at the same time may not be so.[4] Thus, it is a rising that overcomes, or more aptly, transforms death.[5] “Easter faith can never mean that the dead Jesus returned to this life which leads to death…Resurrection means ‘life from the dead’ (Rom 9.15), and is itself connected with the annihilation of the power of death.”[6]
“If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, your faith also is in vain” (1 Cor 15.14). Here we see the centrality of the resurrection event in Christian belief: if Christ has not been raised, we are hopeless. As such, the empty tomb points to the resurrection-it is the sign and symbol of our hope for life overcoming death. The darkness of the cross is transformed in light of the resurrection. However, the empty tomb is not the basis of our hope per se. “The Christian faith does not call on us to believe in the empty tomb; it calls us to an encounter with the living Christ Himself.”[7] The empty tomb has been explained in other ways (cf. Mt 28.11-15); and the creed proclaims Christ crucified, dead, buried, and risen again from death without any mention of the empty tomb. The tomb is indeed empty, but it is so because of the resurrection. Therefore, our hope and faith cannot merely be in a tomb that is empty, but in the one who actually rose from death to new life (Eph 1.18-23).
“We cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4.20). Such is the proclamation of Peter and John. The same men who had fled when Jesus was arrested and later locked themselves in a room for fear of the Jews (Mk 14.50-52; Jn 20.19) are now proclaiming that “there is salvation in no one else” but Jesus Christ, the crucified. Something happened that transformed these men that can only be explained by the resurrection which became the basis of the Christian proclamation. Without the resurrection the cross is a defeat and we have no basis for our hope (cf. 1 Cor 15). With the resurrection we too are raised to new life (Col 2.11).[8] “In the Christian story God…goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him.”[9]
Our faith can be explained in no other way than by the fact of the resurrection. Jesus transformed the notions of Messiah to that of a suffering servant who comes near to human need. Yet he dies, and his followers flee-confused, disillusioned, distraught. But then this: “He is risen! He is risen indeed!” The fearful now boldly proclaim the cross and resurrection-the core message of Christianity-which explain and interpret one another. Without the darkness of the cross there can be no resurrection; but without the resurrection the cross is defeat. “The resurrection from the dead qualified the person of the crucified Christ and with it the saving significance of His death on the cross for us, ‘the dead’…It is not His resurrection that shows that His death on the cross took place for us, but on the contrary, His death on the cross ‘for us’ that makes relevant His resurrection ‘before us.’”[10]
[1] Berger, 103.[2] Acts 2.24; Rom 5.10; 6.4; 2 Cor 4.10; Phil 2.1-11; 3.10; 2 Tim 1.10 [3] Pannenberg, The Apostles’ Creed, 97. [4] cf. Lk 24.13-35; Jn 20.10-18; 1 Cor 15.42-49 [5] cf. Barth, Dogmatics, 122; Küng, Credo, 110-111; Pannenberg, 89. Pannenberg makes an excellent point here when he asserts that the “communion between our human dying and the dying of Jesus is the essential substance of the representative significance of Jesus’ death. Because Jesus gathers up our dying into his own, the character of our dying changes” (89). He seems to be laying the groundwork for his argument in the chapter on “Forgiveness of Sins” where he argues that “it is hardly evident any more that sin and the forgiveness of sin are a matter of death and life” (162). He argues that the feeling of guilt over sin is not the primary problem or question facing most people today. As such, the presentation of the Gospel message that focuses on individual faults of the person goes astray precisely because of its presupposition, namely, that “the nature of man is supposedly good;” and, as such, he seems to imply that it moves toward Arianism (164). Rather, he asserts that sin is “going astray, failing to find the source of life in our search for life.” All humanity lives under this understanding, and thus our fundamental question lies in the “inescapability of death, which threatens life with the feelings of meaninglessness in view of the subjection to death of all human achievements and ideas” (164). Therefore, Pannenberg argues that the Gospel needs be presented in a manner that touches this need. It is a proclamation of good news that death has been overcome by life, that this life is not meaningless precisely because there is life beyond death because of Christ Jesus. His thought seems very close to that of the writer of Hebrews, who proclaims that “since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself [viz. Christ] likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage” (Heb 2.14-15, emphasis added). [6] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 170. [7] Küng, 104. [8] cf. Ratzinger, Introduction, 306-307. Ratzinger ties the resurrection together with the power and love of God. “Love is the foundation of immortality, and immortality proceeds from love alone…Only His love, coinciding with God’s own power of life and love, can be the foundation of our immortality” (306). [9] C.S. Lewis, Miracles, 179. [10] Moltmann, The Crucified God, 182-183.
