Resurrection and Redemption, Part I

Since life has a bit less required reading in it these days, I've been going back to some books that I only read in part during seminary, either because I didn't finish them or because they were only assigned in part. One of those is Gaffin's Resurrection and Redemption; I was assigned a large portion of the second half of the book, but read it quickly, and I was never assigned the first half. As Easter is coming, I thought this would be a perfect time to return to it, so what follows is the first of a series of overviews of the arguments in that book. After Easter, I hope to type some thoughts on the relationship between church and state - that topic seems to be coming up everywhere I turn lately. For now, though, Gaffin:

The purpose of Gaffin's book is to demonstrate the central place of the resurrection of Christ in the history of redemption, and in the Introduction he says that two things motivated him to write about this. The first is that while Reformed theology has always claimed to be Pauline, "it has not found particular dogmatic significance in Paul's statements regarding Jesus' resurrection." He blames this on two things. First, "access to the structure of Paul's teaching has been sought in terms of the ordo salutis." That is, it was believed that the center of Pauline teaching had to do with the application of Christ's work to the individual believer, and so the Pauline corpus has been approached with that range of questions in mind. But secondly, where attention has been given to Paul's statements regarding the accomplishment of redemption it has usually focused on the atoning effects of Christ's death. "Interest in the resurrection for the most part has been restricted to its apologetic value and as a stimulus to faith," Gaffin writes. When it is treated beyond this, it is usually noted in passing as the beginning of Christ's exaltation and the mark of the efficacy of His death (the latter of which almost subordinates the importance of Christ's resurrection to that of His death). Part of the purpose of this book, then, is to draw out the dogmatic significance of Christ's resurrection to a greater extent.

His second motivation is that the Reformed tradition has been slow to accept the methods of biblical theology: "Only gradually has orthodox scholarship come to recognize that biblical revelation is given as an organically unfolding process, that is, as a history, and that therefore dealing with the biblical writers in terms of their respective places in this history, that is, with respect to their individual contributions, is not only desirable but necessary." As a result, it has also been slow to consider Pauline thought as a distinct and self-contained unit standing in organic continuity with the history of revelation. The pioneering attempts at this within the Reformed tradition was in the work of Geerhardus Vos and Herman Ridderbos. And, Gaffin argues, "both men have, independently, come to the same basic conclusion." That conclusion, he says, is this: "The center of Paul's teaching is not found in the doctrine of justification by faith or any other aspect of the ordo salutis. Rather, his primary interest is seen to be in the historia salutis as that history has reached its eschatological realization in the death and especially the resurrection of Christ." Another major purpose of the book is to explain this statement more thorougly.

The goals of the book, then, are two - to bring out the centrality of the resurrection in the history of redemption and to bring out its centrality for Pauline theology, both of which have traditionally been underappreciated by Reformed theology.

With that said, Gaffin begins Part I of the book where he addresses matters having to do with methodology.