If we want to understand the Christian faith in the Resurrection, we must completely disregard the Greek thought that the material, the bodily, the corporeal is bad and must be destroyed, so that the death of the body would not be in any sense a destruction of the true life. For Christian (and Jewish) thinking the death of the body is also the destruction of God-created life. No distinction is made: even the life of our body is true life; death is the destruction of all life created by God. Therefore it is death and not the body which must be conquered by the Resurrection.
Only he who apprehends with the first Christians the horror of death, who takes death seriously as death, can comprehend the Easter exultation of the primitive Christian community and understand that the whole thinking of the New Testament is governed by belief in the Resurrection. Belief in the immortality of the soul is not belief in a revolutionary event. Immortality, in fact, is only a negative assertion: the soul does not die, but simply lives on. Resurrection is a positive assertion: the whole man, who has really died, is recalled to life by a new act of creation by God. Something has happened—a miracle of creation! For something has also happened previously, something fearful: life formed by God has been destroyed.
Death in itself is not beautiful, not even the death of Jesus. Death before Easter is really the Death’s head surrounded by the odour of decay. […] Whoever paints a pretty death can paint no resurrection. Whoever has not grasped the horror of death cannot join Paul in the hymn of victory: ‘Death is swallowed up—in victory! O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’ (1 Corinthians 15:54f).
Only he who apprehends with the first Christians the horror of death, who takes death seriously as death, can comprehend the Easter exultation of the primitive Christian community and understand that the whole thinking of the New Testament is governed by belief in the Resurrection. Belief in the immortality of the soul is not belief in a revolutionary event. Immortality, in fact, is only a negative assertion: the soul does not die, but simply lives on. Resurrection is a positive assertion: the whole man, who has really died, is recalled to life by a new act of creation by God. Something has happened—a miracle of creation! For something has also happened previously, something fearful: life formed by God has been destroyed.
Death in itself is not beautiful, not even the death of Jesus. Death before Easter is really the Death’s head surrounded by the odour of decay. […] Whoever paints a pretty death can paint no resurrection. Whoever has not grasped the horror of death cannot join Paul in the hymn of victory: ‘Death is swallowed up—in victory! O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’ (1 Corinthians 15:54f).
Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament (1964; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010), pp. 26–7, emphases in original
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Addendum (21 Sept. 2022). Oscar Cullmann (1902–1999) died on Saturday, 16 January 1999, aged ninety-six.
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