Listen to Matthew Fox and Bruce Chilton as they explore the meaning of Easter in a two-session event hosted by Cameron Trimble. These conversations were recorded and are available now for purchase.

Session One: The Why of Resurrection

A Teaching from Matthew Fox:

Bruce Chilton’s important book, Resurrection Logic: How Jesus’ First followers Believed God Raised Him from the Dead, allows us to move on from “obsessing” (his word) with an empty tomb (or not) to setting the cosmic story of the Resurrection into a context that he calls a scientific or cosmic worldview. We will address questions like these: What do our experiences of ancestors who have left us yet return and address us signify? What is the meaning of Resurrection and how does it address questions that all humans and all religions have asked about over humanities lifetime? Why does Otto Rank (who is not a Christian) say that the idea of the Resurrection is the most revolutionary idea ever proposed by humanity? Mystics like Meister Eckhart talks about resurrection as “waking up” and “getting up” and contributing to a “new creation.” So too does Paul.

A Teaching from Bruce Chilton:

St. Paul is the only figure in history who both encountered Jesus after the resurrection and put his experience into writing. His own words make explicit an interior, mystical conviction of the divine presence of Christ. For Paul, Christ is the presence that points to the future of humanity as what he calls spiritual bodies. Paul also speaks of other encounters with the risen Christ, prior to his own, first of all by Peter and the Twelve Apostles. Their convictions also come to voice in the New Testament. Peter understood that the presence of Christ comes to power in the liberating force of forgiveness. He himself was forgiven for his denial of Christ, and his teaching insists on the capacity that Christ endows to change both society and the nature of the world. Among the Twelve, the crisis of Jesus’ death involved a tragic realization that his teaching as a rabbi, his mishnah, was incomplete. The resurrection meant that they could continue his legacy because Christ was with them always, with results of that included the Gospels.

Session Two: The Prophetic Calling of Resurrection

A Teaching from Bruce Chilton:

Prophecy, the discernment of what lies beneath the surface of perception, is the wellspring of the resurrection. Mary Magdalene, the first known person to speak of that reality, delivers the insight that Jesus had risen from the dead on the basis of her personal vision, which she also taught others to practice. Visionary realization of the presence of Christ-centered the experience of a group of more than Five Hundred People at once. They are the source of one of the most consequential claims in the New Testament: that the Spirit that Christ releases from heaven is not limited to any one people, but belongs to humanity as a whole. Other prophetic teachers, lesser known today but influential, nurtured the perception of Christ’s continuing presence within meals, a sacramental and tactile practice that animates the Eucharist.

A Teaching from Matthew Fox:

Prophecy begins with discernment but culminates in speaking and acting boldly, putting justice, compassion and a new creation into history. It is said that the prophet is the mystic in action and Rabbi Heschel says the essence of the prophet’s work is to interfere. How did the actions of those who experienced resurrection interfere with history and affect history? What imperatives did they receive from a risen Christ that added to his other teachings and how does that apply to us today? What does Christ’s resurrection ask of us today? To our and our species waking up and getting up and engaging in a new creation?

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