I consider the position thus described to be theologically possible. It would not destroy the Christian Easter faith. It by no means excludes God’s action (or the action of the Risen One) in the world. But from a historical point of view this position is untenable. It is a way of currying favor with the Enlightenment mentality, which wants to explain away everything unusual. It is impossible to eliminate the basic structure of a vision from Paul’s Damascus experience, for which we have personal testimony (1 Cor 9:1; 15:8). And the gospels also clearly show that we are dealing with typical phenomena of visions. That of Peter begins a long series of further visions that first affected the group of the Twelve and then a larger group of disciples who were later called apostles, and then no fewer than five hundred followers of Jesus at the same time. This could represent the original Jerusalem community. At some point the visionary phenomena even extended to Jesus’ family: it is said of James, the “brother of the Lord” (Gal 1:19), that the Risen One appeared to him (1 Cor 15:7). Finally, Stephen’s vision (Acts 7:55) is part of the long series of these early Christian visions.
Not far removed from the modern position of “disclosure experiences” as described above is a much older hypothesis according to which the Easter appearances were “subjective visions.” That position can be described somewhat as follows: The disciples simply could not come to terms with the fact that their Lord and Master, Jesus, was no longer with them, and so there arose in their deep unconscious minds an image of a Jesus who returned to them to give them pardon and peace. Added to this was the profound hope for the imminent reign of God that Jesus had planted in them. Could all that be over? No! The desires and fears, the hopes and longings of the disciples were suddenly transformed into a certainty that Jesus had risen. This certainty paved the way for and erupted in visions within their souls in which the disciples saw what they longed for and dreamed of. This purely psychogenic process, extending into the innermost levels of the personality, began with Peter. He then drew his friends along with him by suggestion, and the result was a kind of enthusiastic chain reaction.
Christian faith has always taken its stance against this emptying of the Easter appearances that reduces them to unusual but purely natural phenomena. In its defense against the position described it has emphasized the supernatural character of the Easter appearances, stressed God’s genuine action at Easter, and underlined the true revealedness of the Risen One in the sight of his disciples. So, since the Enlightenment, there have come to be two sharply opposed positions. On the one side it is asserted that the Easter visions were purely natural phenomena produced by the imagination or, more precisely, the unconscious of the disciples. Opposed to this, and in a constantly defensive position, stands the traditional view: no, the Easter appearances were purely supernatural events in which God, or the Risen One, intervened in history through revelation.
But it has become more and more clear that this alternative—either natural or supranatural—is most unfortunate and even falsely understood; a theological resolution to this false dilemma is long overdue. It is similar to what we saw in the case of Jesus’ miracles: when God acts on people he does not make them passive objects of divine action but acts with and through them. That is, God does not eliminate the structures, laws, frameworks, and potentials of the world but acts with the aid of these and in common with them. Therefore a real vision is both entirely a human production and entirely a work of God.
A genuine vision is first of all totally a human production: it is a bringing into play of the person’s history, past experiences, knowledge, hopes, imagination—and all this, obviously, in an unconscious process the person cannot control and in which the styles of the time and culturally conditioned forms of thinking play an important role.6 The time is long since ripe for acknowledging visions as a genuine human possibility. Then one can likewise take them seriously as also a genuine divine possibility, a way of speaking to human beings within the structures of humanity. For just as every vision is wholly and entirely a human work it can at the same time be wholly and entirely a divine work, as God thereby uses the productive imaginative power of the human in order to reveal God’s self in the midst of history.
The principle of the doctrine of grace, that God’s action does not suppress human action but instead frees it, must be applied to the inner structure of the Easter appearances. This means that the disciples’ Easter experiences can be regarded theologically as really and truly appearances of the Risen One in which God revealed his Son in power and in all his glory (Gal 1:16) but psychologically at the same time as visions in which the disciples’ power of imagination constructed the appearance of the Risen One. By no means does the one exclude the other.
Only if we understand the Easter appearances as thus described do we take them seriously, both theologically and anthropologically. Then we need no longer shrink from the idea that visionary phenomena spread, after Good Friday, in a kind of chain reaction, and that they were altogether inculturated in the respective visual and linguistic abilities of the recipients. We can then understand, for example, how the disciples could “see” and “hear” the Risen One and even “touch” him.
The considerations presented in this section are important because they put interpreters in a position to look without historical prejudice at visionary, pneumatic, and ecstatic phenomena in the earliest community and not, out of pure fear of what is unusual, to turn immediately to magical words such as “legend” or “community construct.” The Easter appearance phenomena really happened. That can be determined by purely historical means.
“Resurrection” as an Imaginative Model
In our inquiry into the structure of the Easter experience we have left one question open: namely, the problem of the imaginative model within which the Easter experience took place. That model must have been present already in the disciples’ unconscious. It must have been available as an existing form, an imaginative and linguistic possibility. Otherwise there could have been no perception of Christ at all, and it would have remained unutterable. But what was available in the Judaism of the time with which one could grasp such a profound reality? There were three possibilities:
The idea of the “exaltation” by God of a person humiliated by suffering and death. This model is found, for example, in Isaiah 52:13-15: the “servant of God,” crushed and pierced, is heard and exalted by God. But Psalm 110 was also an important background: this was about the true king of Israel, who is permitted to sit at God’s right hand as God’s throne companion and is thus exalted over all his foes.
Likewise available was a notion according to which an individual who stood out above others would be swept away from earth by God at the end of his or her life. The history of religions has adopted the concept of “rapture” or “translation” for this. The category of “rapture” also existed in the Old Testament: it is said of Enoch that God took him (Gen 5:24), and there is even a long narrative about Elijah’s translation (2 Kgs 2:1-18).