by Dan Baumgartner

They say that people today have almost lost the ability to focus on one idea for even a short time. Short attention spans make lectures difficult. With audiences like this, anyone wanting to talk about an idea for more than two minutes might be frustrated. I’m going to risk it, though, and give you “two cents worth” of theology.

We are a people of extremes. We live in a culture of extremes, and Christians are by no means immune. Though we say things like “I’m trying to be a balanced person,” the truth is that in most areas of life our pendulum swings drastically back and forth. It happens in our own lives, it happens in the larger movements of history and it happens in our faith. Accordingly, our best politicians, poets, theologians and writers spend most of their time trying to talk us back towards the middle where the truths of different parts of the spectrum can be acknowledged or at least not forgotten.

Case in point: Easter. We still have some distance to travel before we will read, hear and sing of the empty tomb, the defeat of death and Christ’s resurrection, but it’s coming. Resurrection Sunday. From the earliest days of Christianity, the resurrection has been a critical part of the faith. But when we celebrate it on Easter Sunday - what are we celebrating? What does it really mean to us?

As with other things, the meaning-of-resurrection pendulum swings between the far left camp and the far right one. The far left involves what was once called the “Social Gospel” and Christians who passionately live out their faith by meeting human needs, especially physical ones. The far right features people embracing a classic “ignore-the-body-and-save-the-soul” Gospel lived out mainly by winning souls (any connotations to current religious or political jargon are totally intentional).

In recent centuries, the most prevalent view among evangelical Christians (I am certainly one) has been the right side of the spectrum. Resurrection has been thought of as a substitute word for “eternity.” We have jumped directly from Jesus’ empty tomb to our arrival at the pearly gates: “The resurrection of Jesus means I’ll go to heaven.” As far as it goes, it’s not wrong. Clearly Jesus’ defeat of death opens the door for us, and eternity as a resurrected being with God is an amazing future we inherit.

But restricting the meaning of resurrection to “afterlife” costs us a great deal. It perpetuates an artificial division of body and soul (resurrection has to do with re-embodiment, not floating soul-beings). Over-focusing on eternity can and has served as a justification for a lack of compassion and unfair distribution of material resources. Evangelism tilts to counting “saved souls” rather than seeing people made whole by Christ. Resurrection only unto eternity ignores the ministry of Jesus on earth which included healing, feeding and relationships. It ignores the preaching of Jesus who spoke constantly about the kingdom of God on earth. However, the pendulum has hovered here for a long time.

More recently, I have heard whispers nudging us off of the right-hand extremity. I find it in some of the voices you hear me quote regularly: the theology of N.T. Wright, the Biblical scholarship of Richard Hays, the pastoral writing of Eugene Peterson, even the poetry of Wendell Berry. By no means is it a 2-handed shove to the opposite “Social Gospel” side of the spectrum, where resurrection is hazy and current life is everything. Rather, Wright talks about resurrection ministry. Hays critiques the eternity-only view as a “thin” understanding of resurrection, Peterson writes of “living the resurrection” and Berry urges us to “practice resurrection.” Their voices are merging to say “we’ve gone too far and forgotten that resurrection also applies to me, the here and now.”

In the resurrection of Jesus, God started a mighty work of restoration and healing, and handed us lives that need not be lived in fear of death. Things will be set right and are being made whole. It has begun: health not sickness, people not things, life not death. Eternity as restored creation. And we are free to participate by caring for people and pointing them towards a loving and saving God. One serves the other. And somewhere in that joyous work is the middle of the pendulum. We desperately need both parts.

As Bethany Elder Brian Beaumont likes to say: “That’ll be two cents, please.”