The Resurrection is Not Just a Feeling

“The Resurrection of Jesus. Artist: Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1860)

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
1 Corinthians 15:13-19
 
This is perhaps the most unique passage in the entire history of religious texts.  In this passage, the Apostle Paul hangs the entire edifice of Christian faith on a historical event: the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  Understand the strangeness of this.  There is categorically no other religion in the history of Mankind that hangs its entire worldview and truth claims upon the tangibility of a verifiable occurrence in space and time.  You will not get this with Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Scientology, Secular Humanism, or Liberal Christianity.  While all these have origin stories, key founding figures, and calls spiritual wisdom and moral principles, none of them ground their essential doctrines, their whole worldviews, upon a historical event. 
 
Christianity is different.  Christianity starts not with “This is the way you should live,” as all other faith systems do, but with, “Here is what Jesus did in history, that you may live.”   Huge difference. 
 
In the passage above Paul says, “If there is no resurrection of the dead…your faith is in vain” (v. 14).  That word “vain” is the Greek word kenos, which means unreal, empty, without power.[1]  It is getting across the understanding that the faith we have as Christians is impotent, incapable of changing anything if the resurrection is but a useful myth or a mere symbol.  In short, Paul is making clear that Christianity is not less than emotions, but it is not relegated to mere emotions.  He is saying that it does not matter if you feel that the resurrection is true, it does not even matter if you have had a cathartic religious experience about it, and it does not even matter how many Easter sermonettes proclaim the joys of it.  No, he is affirming that if the resurrection did not tangibly happen in space and time, then Christianity is bunk.   The whole Faith is at best a fanciful delusion and at worst the greatest falsified travesty in the chronicles of Humanity. 
 
Easter, therefore, is the pivotal hinge of the Christian Faith.  No Easter, no Christianity. 
 
No Easter, then not only is Christianity bunk but all sense of identity, security, and peace in this life is bunk.  How so?  Well, if Jesus was not raised, then there is no hope beyond the grave, and if there is no hope beyond the grave then there is no objective standard of meaning and purpose in this life except what we conjure up in our three pounds of gray matter between our ears.  Countless Christian and non-Christian thinkers have made this point very forcefully in the history of human thought.[2]  The ardent atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) helps to summarize much of the literature on this when he said,
 
"Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving…. His origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms [and there is] no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, [that] can preserve an individual life beyond the grave… [All the] labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement [will] inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins ….  [It is only] within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built."[3]
 
This oxymoronic view of life is what our whole vacuous post-modern culture is about.  It proclaims: “You are an accident, there is no ultimate future, so live life to the fullest and be your best self!”  But we know that this is inane.  Such a “truth” means fundamentally that all our talk of objective “love,” all our fights for “justice,” all our language of “hope” for a brighter future, and all our desires for “identity” are at the bottom laid waste, eaten alive in the face of moral relativism and death. 
 
The electrifying message of Easter guts the absurdity of Russell’s message.  It affirms to us that God has entered history and that through love and justice He laid waste the power of death at the same to renewing our identity and giving us a glorious future.  Because of Easter, history regains objective meaning, our faith is vindicated, our identities are renewed, our purpose is established, and our hope is assured. 
 
THE TANGIBILITY OF THE EMPTY TOMB
This discussion of hope and identity is not emotional jargon, it is grounded in Reality.  Precisely because of the historical reality of the resurrection we can take comfort in the objectivity of our Faith, meaning, and future.  It is vitally important that you understand this Truth and teach it to your children and those around you.
 
The resurrection is as historical an event as Pearl Harbor, Washington crossing the Delaware, or the assassination of Julius Caesar.  Understand this.  There is actual historical evidence for such a claim.  There is a tremendous body of world-renowned scholarship that affirms the historicity of the resurrection and the N.T. writings.[4] I cannot get into the depths of it for sake of brevity but let me sketch out at least three points:
 
The fact that there was an empty tomb – This sounds insignificant, but it is profoundly important.  A tomb is a particularly definable objective geographic location.  This means to disprove the resurrection one need only provide the body of Jesus.  Why didn’t the Romans, the Sanhedrin, or any other skeptics of the time produce such a body?  Answer: Because it wasn’t there.  The fact is all the Gospel writers and many Jewish, Christian, and pagan writers of the time affirmed that the tomb of Jesus was empty.[5] 

The fact that women were the first eyewitnesses – The Gospels claim that the first eyewitnesses were women.  Have you ever thought of the importance of this easily looked over point?  You see women were considered intellectually, emotionally, and morally deficient compared to men.  Because of this their testimonies were not even permitted as acceptable evidence in the court of law in 1st Century Palestine.  As the famed Jewish historian Josephus (37-100 A.D.), who lived at the same time as the N.T. authors, said, 

"But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex, nor let servants be admitted to give testimony on account of the ignobility of their soul; since it is probable that they may not speak truth, either out of hope of gain, or fear of punishment."[6]
 
The point is if you are constructing your own resurrection myth in the 1st Century you would not use women as the chief eye-witnesses to justify your position!  People like Josephus would have disbelieved not merely on resurrection grounds but the fact of the absurdity of believing women to be legitimate witnesses to such an event. 
 
The Gospel writers cited women as the eyewitnesses…because women were the eyewitnesses.  In short, the fact that the Gospel’s record women as the eyewitnesses give historical authenticity to the truthfulness of the account.  If they were liars or mythmakers they would not have crafted a narrative in which people (women) who were considered unreliable were the central sources of establishing the truthfulness of the event.
 
The fact of the transformation of the disciple's beliefs – There is no doubt that the disciples themselves did not have any kind of a religious or cultural understanding about the kind of messianic resurrection Jesus achieved.[7]  They constantly misunderstood His true purposes.  But can we blame them really?  Second Temple Judaism did not have any rabbinical teachings and no theological perspective on a resurrection of a single person amid history, much less the idea that the Messiah would be a dying and rising Savior.  It is important to understand this.  To First Century orthodox Jews the conceptual category of “dying and rising Messiah” did not even exist.  For them, “resurrection” was an eschatological End of Days event for all Jews and the Messiah was to be the political figure who would come to redeem Israel from its oppressors and destroy her enemies.  

The question that deserves much attention then is, “What made these 1st Century Jews transform their entire religious and cultural identities overnight?”  What event could have happened that made these individuals  go from Unitarians to Trinitarians; or go from believing God cannot be a man to God becoming a Man; or go from a political Messiah to a risen Messiah; or go from celebrating the Sabbath on Sunday instead of Saturday; or go from kosher foods to freedom in what one eats?  What could possibly explain all these social, cultural, and religious transformations among masses of people all at once? 
 
Everything in their lives changed.  How so!?!  I would argue that the only viable historical explanation is the one they give.  As the Apostle Peter said,
 
For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
2 Peter 1:16
 
And the Apostle John said,
 
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. 4 And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
1 John 1:1-4
 
They had such extraordinary transformation because they experienced an extraordinary event: the bodily objective tangible resurrection of their leader Jesus of Nazareth.  If you do not believe this, then you have to come up with some other theory to make sense of all this historical data.  But as the renowned 20th Century N.T. scholar C.F.D. Moule (1908-2007) said,
 
“If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with? … the birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church therefore remain and unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.”[8]
 
In the same vein Shusaku Endo (1926-1996), the famed Japanese Christian novelist and thinker, put it like this,
 
"If you don’t believe in the resurrection, you will be forced to believe that something hit the disciples that was every bit amazing, maybe different, yet of equal force in electrifying intensity. For if you try to explain the changed lives of the early Christians, you will find yourself making leaps of faith every bit as great as if we believed in the resurrection to start with."[9]
 
A HISTORY THAT GIVES US HOPE
It is not enough to go away from this post with historical data about the resurrection.  While this is essential to ground the reality of faith, it is not sufficient to ignite it.  Easter must become more than an event we celebrate, a tradition we relive, or a feeling we have – it must become living and breathing and active.  Therefore, we must keep before us the Reality of the resurrection on the daily.  We must understand that this event in space and time changes all of space and time.  It makes our space sacred, our time sacred, our lives sacred.  As one author said, “The resurrection is not a stupendous magic trick but an invasion.”[10]  It demands our attention, it remakes us into a new creation, and it destroys the powers of insecurity, indifference, and fear in the present and the future. 
 
The Resurrection makes shows us (proves to us) that there is a future that is deeply personal, certain, and wonderful (paraphrasing Timothy Keller’s words in a sermon I heard once).  This means that whatever we do in this life has true lasting impact, it is not burned up into the sea of oblivion as Russell thought.  It means that Love, justice, and relationships transcend their particular moments and have real eternal significance.  It means suffering and evil has a purpose and are only to be tolerated – one day to be vindicated and swept away.  It means that death, the great equalizer, the tyrant of our souls, loses its hold over us – the great irreversibility of life is made reversible.  All of this is achieved because the Resurrection tangibly, historically, happened for us.  Easter actually happened!  I cannot say any better the words of N.T. Wright (1948-present) as I close this post,  
 
"The message of the resurrection is that this world matters!  That the injustices and pains of this present world must now be addressed with the news that healing, justice and love have won... If Easter means Jesus Christ is only raised in a spiritual sense - [then] it is only about me, and finding a new dimension in my spiritual life.  But if Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead, Christianity becomes good news for the whole world - news which warms our hearts precisely because it isn't just about warming hearts.  Easter means that in a world of injustice, violence and degradation are endemic, God is not prepared to tolerate such things - and that we will work and plan, with all the energy of God, to implement [the] victory of Jesus over them all.  Take away Easter and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring problems of the material world.  Take it away and Freud was probably right to say Christianity is wish-fulfillment.  Take it away and Nietzche probably was right to say it was for wimps."[11]

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[1] https://biblehub.com/commentaries/1_corinthians/15-14.htm
[2] Consider the works of Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Frederick Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, H.G. Wells and many others
[3] Bertrand Russell, “The Free Man’s Worship” (1903), Accessed from https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/br-free-mans-worship.html
[4] I would suggest to you but a small collection of works: N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003); Gary Habermas, The Case of the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2004); Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2017); Peter J. Williams, Can we Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018); David Beck & Michael Licona, Raised on the Third Day: Defending the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020)
[5] If you want a more meaty discussion on the historicity of the empty tomb then consider: William Lane Craig, “The Historicity of the Empty Tomb of Jesus” https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/historical-jesus/the-historicity-of-the-empty-tomb-of-jesus/
[6] Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, 4.219, accessed from https://lexundria.com/j_aj/4.219/wst
[7] N.T. Wright discusses the importance of this in Resurrection of the Son of God, pg. 28-31 and all of Chapter Two
[8] C.F.D. Moule as quoted in John Lennox, Can Science Explain Everything? (United States: The Good Book Company, 2019). Original work is Moule’s The Phenomenon of the New Testament: An Inquiry Into the Implications of Certain Features of the New Testament (United Kingdom: S.C.M. Press, 1967), pg. 13
[9] Quoted in Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, p. 108
[10] Timothy Keller, Hope In Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2021), pg. xxi
[11] N.T. Wright, For All God's Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church, p. 65-66