Eyre Lines

It’s that time of the year again. People are wrestling with the idea of the resurrection, and Jason Michaeli (among others) has weighed in with a post claiming you have to believe in a physical resurrection in order to be a Christian. A sample of his attitude is contained in his Easter Sunday sermon:-

“You don’t have to believe it. But you owe it to the first Christians to take their testimony or leave it. Do not turn it into something else entirely. They didn’t believe the resurrection message was a metaphor or a myth. They didn’t think Easter was really about timeless truths. They thought it was the truth. That it actually happened.

In history. At Jerusalem, under Pontius Pilate, during the reign of Caesar Augustus, on the Sunday morning after the Passover when he died between noon and 3 in 33AD. Around tea time, as Monty Python’s Life of Brian puts it. All the little details, they’re there to reinforce to you that it happened. In history.

And I don’t believe in it. I can’t, much as I might like to. I can just about manage to suspend disbelief enough to say that a physical resurrection is not quite an impossibility, but that is a long way from belief in the sense that Jason means it. I also have a really major problem with a view that God-the-creator would need to break the rules he (in this mindset) laid down for the operation of the universe, which were good in the first place (I blogged some time ago about this in several posts under the general title “And God saw that it was good”).

And it distresses me when someone whose writing (and podcasting) I like and respect effectively turns round and says “Chris, you can’t be a Christian”. Jason isn’t alone there, either – there are quite a few bloggers who are dusting off Paul’s “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain” from 1 Cor. 15, and saying effectively the same thing.

Unless you can bring yourself to give mental assent to something having happened which is supremely unlikely, you cannot be one of us, in other words. This smacks, to me, of the well known feature of cults, that they demand belief in something totally at odds with everything we know of reality.

Many of us can’t do that – indeed, most people I know, living in a fairly secular society in the UK of 2018, couldn’t do that. To insist upon this seems to me to evict quite a lot of Christians from the fold – I am by no means alone in my view, there are significant numbers of “Christian atheists”, and a lot of other people in the pews who, in conversation with me, will change the subject quickly if “physical resurrection” is mentioned and look uncomfortable; they manage to preserve themselves by not thinking about it, as (presumably) if they did, they would be with me.

It also has major implications for evangelism, and despite my liberal-to-radical theology, I actually take the “Great Commission” seriously. Asking that someone believe in the impossible (OK, the extremely improbable) as a start point is probably the 21st century equivalent of Paul’s opponents in the first century demanding that male converts slice of a chunk of their penis. Not a demand which is likely to get you many converts – which is very probably why Paul was so keen on avoiding this requirement of being Jewish…

I wrote at some length in response to a previous post of Jason’s back in 2013, which I’ve since updated substantially. Much of what I’d argue is there, including a detailled acocunt of why I don’t think (being a retired lawyer) that the evidence in scripture is actually in favour of physical resurrection. This time, however, the issue crops up during Holy Week, and on Sunday morning I will be getting up again at silly o’clock for the daybreak service, which is possibly THE highlight of the year for me in terms of church services. I will be responding to “Christ is risen” with “He is risen indeed” with the rest of the worshippers.

Why would I do that, if I don’t believe in a “physical resurrection”?

Because I do, absolutely, believe in a resurrection; every bit of evidence I know of tells me that Jesus was raised in the consciousnesses of his followers, starting shortly after his death and continuing to today. As Paul tells us, Christians are “the body of Christ“, Teresa de Avila says “Christ has no body but ours“, and history tells us that that body grew over the four or five centuries following the crucifixion to the point where it became the religion of the greatest empire the West had so far seen, and that it has continued to grow, with at least a presence in every nation in the world.

Beside that fact, what need to I have of a revivified corpse which, perhaps, talked with a few Judaeans during a month of so after the first Easter and then ascended into heaven? That would be a magic trick. I have no need of magic tricks, and neither does Jesus. The resurrection, from my point of view, is FAR MORE than just “physical resurrection”.

He is risen indeed.