So I heard about a recent survey where 75% of people who do not call themselves Christians believe in the resurrection. That is, they believe that Jesus bodily rose from the grave but they apparently give it little weight in terms of how they live their lives or where they place their worship.
As an aside, I think that this is the death-knell of much mainline, theologically liberal "Christianity" that capitulated throughout the 20th century to the demands of modernity which insisted that miracles (the immaculate conception and the resurrection chief among them) could not have happened.
I was talking with my brother on Friday. He was preparing for the Easter sermon for his church in Philly. He was talking about how he came to realize at one point in his life that he had a basic Christian framework where the resurrection was pretty much useless. Not that it was bad, it just didn't matter very much in his scheme of the Chrisitian life that Jesus had risen from the grave. Somehow, that didn't quite match up with the Biblical writers, so he began to re-evaluate his framework. His operating assumption was that this was true for most Christians, so he was going to try to help folks understand the significance of the power of the resurrection.
As an aside, as he described his previous theological framework that somehow had the resurrection MIA, I pondered that I, too, might have an under-developed appreciation for the significance of the resurrection.
So basically there are non-Christians who don't know what to do with the resurrection and there are Christians who don't know what to do with the resurrection--alas, even including yours truly. I'll emplore my brother to post in the "comments" section some of his thoughts from the sermon he gave this morning, but in the mean time I think it's worth asking: anyone out there know what to do with the resurrection--I mean, besides eat ham after hearing about it at church?
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Not in direct answer to your question - yet not completely off topic: I am becoming convinced that a cross-centered life is inadequate for the Christian. The cross should be at the center - with other things like say the resurrection, and even the person of Christ himself(!!!). So, I like the Christ-centered life better ... or perhaps the Trinity-centered life ... but as for how the resurrection impacts my daily life ... do I live in the power of his resurrection? Yeah, sometimes.
It's scary having a casual conversation quoted on someone's blog! I hope to have a link to my sermon up on my blog in the next day or so--I was told that it was already up and available online, but I haven't been able to find it yet.
I preached on Rom 8 yesterday; "Resurrection is Everything," was the title. Here is a rough outline:
The Spirit of the resurrected Jesus gives us participation, now, in the resurrection life of Jesus. We are able to live lives pleasing to God (sanctification) because we get a share in Jesus' resurrection life.
This "inner" transformation is our adoption as God's children, but adoption is participation in resurrection life. Thus, we are already God's beloved children, but we wait for the time when we will receive the consummation of our adoption: the redemption of our body. The "already" participation in Jesus' resurrection life assures us that there is a "yet to come" participation in his resurrection that includes our bodily transformation.
Our participation in Jesus' resurrection, because it is an adoption, transforms our relationships with each other (we are bros and sisters) and with God (who is now our loving father). God's love for us as his children is in the resurrected Jesus, where we are (in Christ), and thus will never leave us.
The resurrection of Jesus means that evil loses, God wins--and that not only on the level of humanity but on the level of the whole creation. The creation goes the way of the humans who are set over it to rule it on God's behalf. Jesus, as new human, 2nd Adam, etc., introduces a new hope for creation. The world will not be destroyed so that we can live disembodied lives in heaven; the world is being redeemed. Our task: to take the future resurrection glory and cause it to impinge on the present. I worked out some implications for our work beyond the walls of the church: creating some of that "glory of the nations" that God is pleased to receive to himself.
Finally, the resurrection of Jesus also transforms the final judgment. Being renewed after the image of Christ, and having Christ interceding with the Father on our behalf, we can have full assurance that we will be vindicated then as we were when we entered the people of God.
I've worked out a few things.
1. The Resurrection, if it happened, it did NOT happen as literally outlined in the Biblical Gospels. There are too many contradictions.
Rather, and I'm quite convinced of this, the Resurrrection accounts were written by people who heard only annecdotal stories and they used their theological bias as detail gap-fillers.
(same with the trial part, there is no way that a disciple was in Pilate's court transcribing the conversation, and the Romans surely didn't take notes. Again, look the differences between the Gospel accounts to figure out the bias of the individual Gospel writer)
2. Nevertheless, the Resurrection is still important because people who claimed to have seen or witnessed it, later died for it.
royale, your point #2 seems to strongly contradict your point #1. who dies for a big, gigantic lie? the whole nt is incessant that this if jesus was not resurrected it's all a big sham. and the resurrection was not exactly what they were expecting.
i think the problem we have with understanding history as it's recorded in the bible is that we take 21st post-enlightnement western expectations of what "accurate history" is and foist them upon 1st century palestinians. the story-tellers were the historians who told and recorded stories that conveyed truths about who God was based on how he acts. this is why i'm not someone who jumps on the "inerrancy" bandwagon (i need to post on this, maybe later). it's anachronistic to put that particular label on the biblical writers (not to mention that everyone's got their own agenda by what they mean by "inerrancy").
Alex, please actually read what I write. You're not going to trap me in a contradiction, so don't try to force it.
I didn't say the resurrection was a lie. I did say, that it did NOT happen as written in the Bible.
The Biblical accounts are recordings of annecdotes and heresay. As you suggest, they should not regarded as literal history as we would in our modern day world would record it. In fact, as literal historical recordings, the Biblical Gospels would not be allowed in a modern-day court.
Rather, proof that it DID happen was that people died for it. So, at the very least, people then believed it occurred.
The exact, precise details of which are forever lost to history. That is my point.
I had a similar discussion with Wonders on his blog, but this is what I think the role of a 1st century AD myth is, as opposed to the 10th century BC myth.
Relatedly, I there were definitely other resurrection cults in the Roman Empire. I've never bothered to study the extent that they were persecuted, but I'll keep my eyes open.
i would submit that while the different resurrection narratives in the gospels may not provide the same details, there are certain underlying assumptions that may be made about the historicity of the resurrection (aside from the fact that so many people have died from it).
Most notable is the fact that we have no accounts from Romans or Jews of the time of having ever found Jesus' body. We know that Jesus had many enemies within the Jewish priestly and pharasaic orders, as well as the Romans, who would have like nothing better than for this guy Jesus to be dead and done with . . . so when Jesus' followers started running around claiming he had risen from the dead, you would think they would have done anything possible to produce the body and quell this upstart Jesus movement. Funny thing is that never happened.
So when you hold that together with the fact that so many people have died over this claim, I think you begin to have the foundations of a more convincing historical basis for the resurrection.
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I liked your post, Alex. We don't think enough about our theology . . . and we should probably have a better grasp on something as critical as the resurrection. Romans 5:10 (i think) is a verse that i've come back to a lot when pondering these questions. i feel like it's hard to really talk about this outside of a good discussion of systematic theology, but it seems that Jesus' death and Jesus' resurrection accomplish two different things. The former being reconciliation with God (demonstrating God's mercy) and the latter being the possibility of new life (demonstrating God's redemptive puroses of the world). As others have commented, I think we tend to focus a great deal on justification and lose out on the beauty of the new life that God leads us into through justification. It seems that it would have been sufficient for Jesus to simply die and us to be reconciled to God, but we find that God's purposes were for more than that - he intended to bring new life and continue the process of redeeming his creation. Justification without resurrection seems so empty . . .
So much to think about - definitely don't have it figured out . . . I'd love to hear some more of your "arm-chair theological musings" on this, Alex!
"Most notable is the fact that we have no accounts from Romans or Jews of the time of having ever found Jesus' body. We know that Jesus had many enemies within the Jewish priestly and pharasaic orders, as well as the Romans, who would have like nothing better than for this guy Jesus to be dead and done with . . . so when Jesus' followers started running around claiming he had risen from the dead, you would think they would have done anything possible to produce the body and quell this upstart Jesus movement."
The contemporary Romans and Jewish enemies claimed the body was stolen. They didn't need to find it.
But that's beside the point, the reason Jesus had so many enemies was because the Roman and Jewish leaders feared the large crowds. In my reading of Acts, the crowds sort of died down after Jesus' death to just the core following. It would take decades, if not centuries, for the Christians to actually wield serious political power enough to inspire a massive crackdown. In the meantime, they were regarded as an obscure cult with bizarre ideas and if they said the wrong thing at the wrong time, they were beheaded.
But a large crackdown in the time after Jesus' execution? No evidence for that in either the Bible or contemporary records.
That’s precisely my point, the Romans and Jewish enemies claimed the body was stolen because they couldn’t find it. (Can’t find the body . . . just say it’s stolen!)
It was in part the large crowds that the Roman and Jewish leaders feared, but they also feared for their own skins since the Romans were accountable to the emperor and the Jewish leaders sought to maintain their power through the approval of the Romans. Gives both parties reason to want to come up with some way of justifying their lack of a body.
When I read acts, I don’t really find evidence of the crowds dying down. I would argue in fact that the number of people joining the movement actually increased tremendously. In the Acts 2 alone we find that 3,000 people join the movement and we are also told at the end of the chapter that “the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” In addition to this we find that crowds continue to gather to be healed by the apostles as they continue the work Jesus began. At one point (Acts 6) the number of Greek Jews was growing so rapidly that the disciples called a special meeting to choose additional leaders for the people. There are also the accounts of the spreading of the message through Paul and the various churches that he established. I could go on, but I think you probably get the idea.
Acts 8 actually records a large scale crackdown on all the disciples in Jerusalem. There is documentation of other incidences as well, including extra-biblical material (Josephus, Pliny, etc.). But, you’re right, when we consider a crack down based on the political clout of the movement, it probably wouldn’t be until a few decades later that anyone would have serious concerns. But the goal of the empire was to keep any one group from achieving that kind of power in the first place.
The question of persecution does not lie so much in the numbers and political power of the movement, but rather in where the allegiance of Christians laid. The Roman emperor demanded (each one to different degrees) that he be recognized as “Lord.” Really a brilliant strategy to govern a tremendously diverse empire of peoples and cultures. So long as folks were willing to confess the emperor as Lord, they could practice their own religious rites as they chose. The problem for Christians is that only Jesus is Lord. Thus the beliefs of the early Christians made a political statement over and against the empire – leading to their persecution. So I would say that the persecution was likely more pervasive than Christians saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
All that to say . . . the Romans (and Jewish leaders) could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had only produced the body!
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