| Summary: | Paul’s view of Jesus as risen and alive raises a basic puzzle of Christian experience. Knowing Jesus to be alive and exalted, does Paul therefore assume him to be present or absent to the believer on earth? <br/>At one level this question is of course so basic that it has impressed itself on all forms of Christian experience and theology ever since antiquity. And in that sense it has evoked a seemingly interminable variety of sometimes highly specified explanations. In the contemporary West, for example, Christians of a traditional Catholic mindset might reply that Jesus is present most concretely in the Eucharist; Lutherans, in Word and Sacrament; many other Protestants, in the reading or proclamation of Scripture; charismatics, in the experience of the Spirit; and so forth. Within this range of Christian expression, some may appeal to a sense of Jesus’ presence in experiences of the heart, Ignatian imagination, visionary experience of Jesus or Mary, or in their response to imperatives of charity, community-building or social justice. <br/>What does seem clear from all this is that the temporarily absent Jesus is sublimated to popular Christian experience in remarkably varying ways, which may themselves be a function of theological, cultural and indeed temperamental or psychological diversity.
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