Objections to the Resurrection

Mark Driscoll answers some of the primary objections to the resurrection as historical fact, discussing some material from N.T. Wright.

 

 

General Thoughts on the Resurrection

I feel like the resurrection of Christ and of people in general tends to get shoved to the back of the line in a lot of Christianity, at least in my experience in churches. It doesn't always seem to be mentioned in such a way as to carry the criticality the Apostle Paul put on it in 1 Corinthians 15. With Paul, it appears to be the very hope of our existence. Jesus' resurrection (along with his crucifixion, death, and burial, since they are all are parts of the same story) is where life of humanity is reborn and what accomplishes for Christians the same promise of life after "life after death", as N.T. Wright has put it so clearly. It is not just life after death, in some disembodied angelic cloud world that so much of evangelicalism has mistakenly preached, that the resurrection accomplishes. The resurrection means that our bodies and the whole of creation will be remade and redeemed by the work of Jesus into that of which it was all intended to become by God's initial act of creation. The way I understand it is that through Christ, we who love and trust in him will have the same: all of man, including Adam onward, will be redeemed back into what God created us to be, to be glorifiers of him in all we do. And not only this, but we will continue on into eternity continually becoming that which he created us to become. This was initially disrupted by the Fall in which the whole of humanity collectively participated in rebellion against God and his creation, and in turn this created all acts of death and decay by God's curse on creation. But Christ's resurrection restores all that was lost and puts man back on the intended path of bringing glory to God and of enjoying him in everything forever.

The weight of this hope I don't feel is always stressed in evangelicalism. It's more of a hope of heaven and a vague "being with God" which to me conjures up images of floating on clouds and wearing diapers and playing harps (which sounds more like hell to me), than it is the New Heavens and New Earth, and our Resurrected Bodies, as it were, where our lives carry on in many ways as they do right now, but without sin, without suffering, only with pure joy in being with Jesus who has saved us and with people we love who do also.

I wish the resurrection of Jesus were more explicitly understood as being the core of the hope of the world. Sometimes this hope is only spoken of as being evident in the bloody death of Jesus, and mention is not always made of his resurrection (often only as a period to the sentence). While Jesus' crucifixion and death are the object of hope for the atonement of sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God (they are!), the resurrection is also our promise that God is not only forgiving us, but allowing us to actually live life in holiness and glory (instead of sin, pain, and suffering) with him forever! This includes not only being with Jesus forever, but participating in the community of saints, singing, dancing, loving, working, and rejoicing always in the lives that have been given to us, indeed redeemed, by Jesus' suffering, death, and resurrection on our behalf.

The Resurrection of Jesus

Happy Easter! This is the day Christians everywhere celebrate the fact that Jesus has risen from death and that it is for those who love and trust Jesus as the Messiah of God and King the impetus of our own resurrection, that we will also rise one day to live forever with him, reigning with him in a new and glorified body over a new creation. What could be better than that?

Also, Mark Driscoll provides a helpful summary of N.T. Wright's book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which echoes some of the things I have been writing about it here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

How can you explain the resurrection? 4

I finished the book, fittingly on Palm Sunday in the morning. It has been tremendous to read this wonderful scholarly work on the resurrection of Jesus. There is an enormous amount of information in it, and I struggle to see how anyone could be so dedicated to a topic to devote so much energy into developing an argument such as this one. I am immensely impressed with N.T. Wright as a scholar on this topic and I hope to read some more of his books at some point.

Regarding the content, I am obliged to agree with Tim Keller’s exclamation when he put it down at the end, and say “Wow, it did happen!”

This is Wright’s argument throughout the book, that something did in fact happen on the first Easter, and that something was that Jesus really was bodily raised from death after three days. The explanations modern scholars have come up with simply fall flat when examined, two of which include: what is called “cognitive dissonance”, basically meaning that the “supposed eye-witnesses” simply wanted to believe that Jesus came back; and what is best described as a “spiritualization” of the supposed events, meaning that Jesus didn’t actually rise from death, but the resurrection language used in the Gospel accounts is there because it represents something metaphorical about Christian faith, that Jesus is alive in some spiritual way in the faith of believers, and was not physically brought back from death.

But Wright shows in his next to last chapter how improbable these explanations are in light of the accounts of (1) the discovery of the empty tomb and (2) the appearances of Jesus to his followers, including women as the primary witnesses. Wright shows how (1) and (2) are sufficient and necessary historical conditions for the subsequent belief that Jesus physically rose from the dead.

By sufficient, it is meant that the empty tomb and the meetings with Jesus sufficiently explain the subsequent Christian faith and belief that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead.

By necessary, it is meant that the empty tomb and meetings with Jesus are necessary to explain the subsequent belief in his resurrection from death.

The necessary condition is essentially the attempt at proving that the resurrection is true, though I believe Wright intended it to carry a little less force logically (as he stated in The Resurrection of Jesus, Fortress Press January 2006, pg. 22). I would think though that this is what he truly thinks, that it does in fact serve as near proof of the historical reality of Jesus’ resurrection.

It’s fascinating stuff. I recommend reading this book. It appears to be an almost comprehensive survey of all scholarly work on the resurrection from the perspective of history.

How can you explain the resurrection? 3

I am nearing completion of N.T. Wright's work on the resurrection that's taken me close to 4 months to accomplish. I have read all the way through roughly 650 pages (including all footnotes), except the remainder of the section on early Christian writings (I read the first half or so and saw the development of his point and skimmed through to see that this point was continually supported in the rest of the chapter). I've just now gotten to the "good part", which is to say the part where the accounts of Jesus' resurrection are actually examined. Up until now, it has been regarding only the "pagan" writings (referring to works outside the realm of Judeo-Christian theology, such as Homer), Jewish and pre-Christian writings (including the Maccabees), and early Christian writings (including mainly the Apostle Paul and also all New Testament writers, but also many of the early Christian fathers and those such as Justin Martyr and Ignatius). It is remarkable to say I am about 9/10 through the book and the Gospel accounts have not been directly discussed. I am anxious to hear the remainder of the historical argument, and his conclusions (not that I already don't have suspicions about what that may be). I highly recommend the book if you can handle the in-depth often trudging nature through scholarly work. There are points when I've wanted to check out, but I've stayed with it the best I can and it has been enormously profitable to read I feel.

One point that stands out to me is the view, consistent in all four of the New Testament Gospel accounts, that a few frightened women were the heralds of the news of Jesus' (or is it Jesus's?) resurrection. This fact is unprecedented for the time period since women were not viewed as having any credibility when it came to public (or private I assume) testimony (in a trial or otherwise), and to have THEM be one of the few consistent matters of fact within the all the Gospel accounts is simply amazing. Were the accounts completely fabricated or distorted for political (or otherwise) reasons, as is so often contended by biblical scholarship on the more liberal side, it makes absolutely no sense why anyone would leave in the fact of the women's first testimony. Unless it were all true. I don't see much of any good argumentation against this point, and the most reasonable explanation, the explanation that Wright is putting forth and in my view which we are ultimately forced to consider, is that the account of Jesus' bodily resurrection is simply and historically true according to the eyewitness testimonies in the New Testament. This I feel is the gist of Wright's argument, and I am hard-pressed to see it in any other way.

How can you explain the resurrection? 2

If you don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus, you are taking a bigger leap of faith historically than you are if you believe in it. Since there is virtually no evidence that anything other than the resurrection took place (other than some wild speculation centuries later at best), and that making sense out of the ensuing happenings in the Roman empire and the rest of the world within short time is almost impossible apart from the truth of the resurrection of this man, the only path left for the skeptic is to invent some improbable conspiracy theories about "what really happened", which can only be loosely based in history, if even we can say that (which I would highly doubt).


Sometimes it's discouraging when I look at the world with all its division and problems, especially in the realm of Christianity it is difficult to cope with. But really, it is all simplified down to one thing: that being what happened the first Easter. It screams for a verdict to be rendered. There is no way to avoid it. This one event clears away all the fog and opens the mind to think clearly. As Paul said, if Christ has not been raised then faith in Jesus is futile and Christians are the most pitiful people that ever lived (1 Cor. 15 ). History and reality both hinge on this fact. If Christ is buried somewhere, the stupidest and most pathetic thing you can do is be a Christian, despite some people's attempts at claiming that it does not matter. But if he has been raised from death, the only thing in the world that makes sense is to love and trust Jesus because he is the only one who can defeat the most relentless and unstoppable perils there are: suffering, injustice, and death. And his defeat is once for all. Because he lives, we who trust in him will live also because God was pleased for all humanity in Jesus' life, death, burial, and resurrection. As N.T. Wright has put it, this pattern of life seen in Jesus is the prototype for humanity and hope, and is the pattern that has been promised by God thousands of years ago and that awaits all human beings. He is the human race's representative and imputes his resurrected life into ours if we believe in him through faith.

How can you explain the resurrection?

If you do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus after 3 days of burial following his crucifixion at the hands of the Roman government, what is the explanation for the change of the Roman world from pagan to Christian and the parallel explosion of the church and exponential growth and continuance today? Jewish followers of professing "messiahs" in the ancient world, when their leaders died or were killed, either ceased from following these fakers or found someone new to follow. The movements did not continue. But how can the Jewish movement of Jesus be explained apart from the historicity of the resurrection? Why did those professing Jesus as Lord continue to do so after he was killed if he wasn't raised from a state of death?

I'm currently reading N.T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God. I'm at approximately page 250 of 800, and it's taken me since Christmas to get there.