Christ’s resurrection is an essential matter of faith. Together with his death it sits at the very heart of biblical belief in God — and without it, Christian teaching loses its identity and meaning.

Proclaiming Christ without his bodily resurrection, and the hope of ours that follows from it, evacuates the faith of its essential substance (1 Cor 15:12-13). The gospel of Christ is the gospel of his death and resurrection, directly linked to the resurrection of the whole human race. And individual confession of it is a basic condition of a person’s own salvation (Rom 10:9).

Resurrection is no less possible than creation.

Why It’s Hard to Believe

None of which makes it easy to accept that Christ’s maimed and mutilated corpse returned to life. Nor is the related belief — that our own bodies, having died, decomposed, dissolved and been obliterated, will live again — anything other than difficult to comprehend.

Part of the difficulty is that it lies so far outside routine experience. Part is distance: none of us were there when it happened, and none of us has yet reached the general resurrection at the end. Small wonder this is the very point at which teaching about Jesus is most often opposed and thought ridiculous (Acts 17:18, 30-32).

But the deeper difficulty is the obvious power of death over every person and, as far as we know, every other material thing in space and time. Death appears inexorable — impossible to prevent — and irreparable. Out of our own resources there is nothing we can do to stop it and nothing to reverse it.

The process of dying is grievous and traumatic. The decay of the body afterwards is distressing and repulsive. So the suggestion that a corpse’s dispersal may be reversed, restored, and replaced with something much better seems frankly fantastical. ‘Our eyes see that all the world is swept away by death.’¹Martin Luther, Sermon on John 20:1 [1529]; as cited in Oden, Systematic Theology, 2:493.

Most Religions Expect Something

Hope of an afterlife isn’t unusual. Most religions, ancient and contemporary, expect it in some form. But they usually assume the immortality of our non-material self, conceiving ‘resurrection’ as a disembodied continuance of soul or spirit. The ancient Greeks understood immortality as the spirit’s release from the body. Only Judaism, Christianity and Islam uphold immortality as physical resurrection — the deliverance of the body from sin and corruption.

‘Modern people may prefer immortality of the soul rather than resurrection of the body, not realizing what the traditional resurrection emphasis conserves: the permanence not merely of abstract personality and values but of the individual, with consciousness, relationships, memories, and love, against theories of absorption (“a drop in the eternal ocean of being”), generic survival (“continuing to contribute to ongoing humanity”), or sentimental immortality (“to live in the hearts of those we love is not to die”).’²White, ‘Resurrection of the Dead,’ 746.

And the specifically Christian claim is narrower still — defined exclusively by Christ’s re-embodied life after death. Every worldview other than the Christian one denies it. Judaism and Islam confess a general resurrection but deny Christ’s. Which makes Christianity’s insistence on his physical resurrection highly conflictual, and teaching about the resurrection of all people based on his a direct contradiction of every other philosophical, scientific and religious perspective.

Christ’s resurrection as literal fact is a fundamentally abnormal proposal. It has some claim to be the unique distinguishing conviction of Christianity — and it sets itself in opposition to every other belief system in every era.

What You Already Believe Decides This

That said, belief here isn’t a private matter of preference. The resurrection occurred in the public realm of space, time, matter and history, and its evidence can be established and verified through ordinary critical procedures of study and research.

The evidence is extensive and impressive. But belief in it requires broader and more basic convictions about God’s existence and the nature of reality:

‘Our judgment regarding the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus depends not only on examining the individual data … but also on our understanding of reality, of what we regard as possible or impossible prior to any evaluation of the details. In this regard Paul is right that if we do not think the dead can rise in any circumstances, then we cannot regard the resurrection of Jesus as a fact (1 Cor. 15:13), no matter how strong the evidence may be that supports it.’³Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (T&T Clark, 1994), 2:362.

So belief operates according to worldview. Faith that God raised Jesus is trust in an event so irregular, so without parallel, so momentous and far-reaching — particularly regarding the general resurrection of all the dead and a future final Divine judgment — that believing it logically rests on the more basic belief in the infinite power, might and competency of God as Creator.

It requires, in brief, faith in God, and more particularly trust in his promises. Which means mere argument, however strongly evidenced, cannot by itself produce belief in resurrection. Rather, ‘faith is that which completes our argument.’⁴Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 29.21 [The Third Theological Oration. On the Son]; NPNF 2.7:309.

That isn’t an evasion. It’s a description of where the real disagreement lies. Two people can examine the same evidence about an empty tomb and reach opposite conclusions, not because one has weighed it carelessly, but because they arrived holding different views about whether such a thing could happen at all.

—

• 1
  Martin Luther, Sermon on John 20:1 [1529]; as cited in Oden, Systematic Theology, 2:493. ↩︎
• 2
  White, ‘Resurrection of the Dead,’ 746. ↩︎
• 3
  Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (T&T Clark, 1994), 2:362. ↩︎
• 4
  Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 29.21 [The Third Theological Oration. On the Son]; NPNF 2.7:309. ↩︎