Christ’s Resurrection and Human Destiny

In this scientifically sophisticated age, can anything at all still arouse our wonder and surprise? What event would leave a modern man dumbfounded and speechless?

Suppose President Nixon—or the American secretary of defense—were suddenly to defect to the Communists? Or suppose the Pope, the world leader of the Roman Catholic Church, were overnight to become a Protestant? Suppose in the midst of his massacres Hitler had suddenly declared Jews to be superior to Aryans, and inverted his national policy accordingly?

Only some such seeming impossibility can match the colossal conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Absolutely amazing was his sudden confession that Jesus the crucified had truly risen from the dead and was indeed the promised world Messiah of revealed religion. A brilliant Jew, trained by the Old Testament specialist Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), Saul had swiftly become the Sanhedrin’s official persecutor of the spreading Christian movement. Although more and more disciples insisted that Jesus had risen from the dead in proof of his messianic claims, the official verdict was quite different: Jesus, said the authorities, was a religious pretender and political revolutionary worthy of crucifixion, and his disciples were hiding the corpse.

Later, after Paul’s conversion to Jesus the Christ, when all Jerusalem was in an uproar and fellow Jews were determined to kill him, Paul told his captors: “I was as much on fire with zeal for God as you all are today.” He reminds them: “I am the man who persecuted this Way to the death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison, as the High Priest and the whole council can readily testify. Indeed, it was after receiving letters from them to their brothers in Damascus that I was on my way to that city, intending to arrest any followers of the Way I could find there and bring them back to Jerusalem for punishment. Then this happened to me …” (Acts 22:4, 5, Phillips). Saul of Tarsus silently assented to the execution of Stephen (Acts 7:58), who was stoned to death for witnessing to Jesus the Risen Lord after he outdebated those in the synagogue (Acts 6:9 ff.). And then Saul, “breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord, went to the High Priest and begged him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he should find there any followers of the Way, whether men or women, he could bring them back to Jerusalem as prisoners” (Acts 9:1,2, Phillips).

Then came his cataclysmic conversion: “I was … on fire.… I persecuted this Way to the death.… Then this happened to me …!”

Across twenty centuries the significance of Jesus’ resurrection has bound Christians everywhere to the Saviour and Lord they love and proclaim. Let us consider the factuality of that resurrection, the finality of that resurrection, and the fraternity of that resurrection.

The Factuality

The happening that changed Paul’s life and outlook was, of course, the personal appearance to him of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified. Jesus, whom Paul had demeaned as an enthusiast, he now acknowledged as Saviour and Lord; Christians whom Paul had persecuted to the point of death he now joined in a bold witness first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles, a mission in which Paul became world leader. Moment by moment he now stood ready even to die as a witness to the truth of the Gospel. In his first letter to the Corinthians he declared what is “of first importance” (15:3, RSV) or foundational to the “good news” of God’s forgiveness of sins and offer of new life, that is, “that Christ died for our sins, as the scriptures said he would; that he was buried and rose again on the third day, again as the scriptures foretold” (15:4, Phillips), and that the Risen Jesus, after he had appeared to his disciples and on one occasion had appeared to more than five hundred Christians who could still be summoned as witnesses, had appeared also to him, Paul.

Then follows Paul’s admission that he had been overlong an unbeliever, for it was “last of all, as if to one born abnormally late, (that) he (the crucified and risen One) appeared to me” (15:8, Phillips). The note of confession runs still deeper: “I passed on to you,” he writes, “the message I had myself received” (15:3, Phillips), or, as the New English Bible puts it, “I handed on to you the facts which had been imparted to me.” What Paul was now declaring to the Corinthians as historical fact, as gospel truth, was what the first Christians had been proclaiming in synagogues and churches when Paul was tracking them down, arresting and imprisoning them, and persecuting followers of the Way to the death. The difference is that what he had thought to be fictional he now knew to be factual.

In his Gospel, Matthew, the former Roman tax collector, tells us that although the authorities “made the grave secure, putting a seal on the stone and leaving the soldiers on guard” (27:66, Phillips), Jesus burst the bonds of death and appeared to his disciples. Then “the sentries went into the city and reported to the chief priests,” who, after consultation, bribed the soldiers and instructed them: “Your story must be that his disciples came after dark, and stole him away while you were asleep” (28:11–13, Phillips). There is no reason to think Saul of Tarsus received a bribe. But there is every reason to think that he believed the official version—that disciples had stolen the body of Jesus—and thought he would sooner or later get at the real facts by harassing and persecuting and imprisoning Jesus’ followers.

Nowhere does Paul mention the empty tomb, a silence on which some critics build grandiose theories against a bodily resurrection. The fact is, no one in the circles in which Paul moved doubted the emptiness of the tomb; how it became empty was the matter in debate. After the Damascus Road experience, when the Risen Lord appeared to him also, Paul declared the whole matter: Jesus the crucified had risen, not simply in spiritual union with the Father, but as he emphasizes, “on the third day” in bodily resurrection. Not the Christians but the Jerusalem religionists were deceived; the resurrection of Jesus Christ was an external event, a historical happening—indeed, an act of divine doing central to the salvation of sinful man.

The factuality of Christ’s bodily resurrection is a foundational doctrine, one that distinguishes Christianity from speculative religions; small wonder, then, that the enemies of revealed religion so zealously attack it. The Apostle Paul, declaring himself more fully dedicated than ever to the word of the ancient prophets (Acts 13:27), affirms that the faith of revealed religion is totally canceled out if Jesus the crucified did not, in truth, rise from the dead: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.… But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead” (1 Cor. 15:17, 20, RSV), or, as Phillips puts it, “But the glorious fact is that Christ did rise from the dead.” The first and foremost emphasis of Easter morning is still the factuality of the resurrection. All the evidence stands on the side of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; only unbelief stands on the side of its dismissal.

The fact of the resurrection remains fully as decisive for human destiny today as it was in Paul’s day. Secular philosophers in both ancient and recent times who affirmed the reality of an afterlife on the basis of other considerations have failed to make their case; in fact, the rationalistic notions of immortality are today totally discredited. Like the classic Greek idealists and the Roman Stoics, modern philosophers and liberal theologians believed the mind of man to be secretly divine, and hence indestructible; while they resigned the body to destruction and scorned the doctrine of resurrection, these thinkers were confident that the human spirit on its own would survive death.

The whole tide of modern history, however, has upset and challenged the notion that the spirit of man is essentially divine. Freud’s recognition that dark subconscious drives motivate man as we now know him, the barbarian actions of Hitler and the Nazis and of other totalitarian tyrants in their wanton devastation of men and nations, the yielding of the most brilliant achievements of scientific reasoning to destructive pursuits—such considerations make it wholly impossible to accept the myth that man is inherently divine and hence immortal. Every passing hour simply carries the whole man—spirit and body alike—nearer to a destiny of cosmic dust and ashes unless, indeed, Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

A second development in modern thought, in the area of psychology, likewise disputes the idea that man’s spirit will survive death apart from bodily relationships of some kind. Modern psychology emphasizes the unity of the human mind and body; man is a compound creature, and no empirical data support the notion that he can permanently survive as man if the unity of spirit and body is severed. Modern naturalism or materialism interprets this to mean that death terminates the existence of both the human spirit and the body. Biblical theology, on the other hand, has a far profounder understanding, for in the light of the resurrection man is promised a new body fit for the eternal order. The normative psychology of the Bible views the human self as a composite unity of soul and body, and emphasizes, moreover, that the factuality of Christ’s resurrection has implications for the final destiny of every last human being.

The Finality

Note the finality of the resurrection first in respect to Jesus himself, and then to our own destiny.

On the basis of the inspired writings, the Jews of Jesus’ day took for granted the doctrine of the resurrection from the dead. To be sure, the patriarchs and others from the past are even now truly alive, for God, as Jesus put it, is “not the God of the dead but of the living”; he is, indeed, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Matt. 22:32). Yet Jesus emphasizes that in one sense the dead are also asleep, and to make the point he raised from death the daughter of Jairus, the widow’s son at Nain, and Lazarus of Bethany.

There is a basic difference, however, between reanimating a body not yet fully decomposed, even if disintegration has begun, and transforming the very nature of a body. The body in which Jesus arose, while continuous with the body that had been placed in the tomb, was in evident ways released from material conditions. Jesus had taught that the resurrection body will differ in nature from our present body, for “the children of the resurrection … neither marry, … neither can they die any more” (Luke 20:36). Jesus was in fact raised to absolute life, never to die again. Resurrection signals a finality for human life under its present conditions and the beginning of a new phase of existence. The resurrection of Jesus was not merely revivification such as occurred with Lazarus and others who were called back to earthly life; it involved, rather, resurrection from death to unending life in a new bodily mode.

There is a further aspect of finality about Jesus’ resurrection: the Risen Jesus exhibits the character of humanity that God approves for eternity to come.

To be sure, Jesus is the firstfruits of a general resurrection from the dead; his resurrection casts light on the embodied afterlife that awaits all mankind. “Christ was raised to life,” writes Paul, “the firstfruits of the harvest of the dead.… As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be brought to life” (1 Cor. 15:20, 21, NEB).

Yet it was human nature manifested by Jesus of Nazareth that God approvingly raised from the dead, and the divine declaration of a future universal resurrection is given in the context of his victory over sin as well as over death. Jesus’ contemporaries had associated the resurrection with the final end of history and the beginning of the eschatological age. Jesus’ resurrection in history’s mid-course gave mankind a public preview of the end-time and its moral implications. The Easter event vindicated Messiah’s claims and repudiated the charges of his crucifiers. The Risen Jesus is unveiled in advance as the future judge of the whole human race.

Paul registers this point upon Greek philosophers in Athens no less than upon devotees of the ancient religious myths, that God has “appointed a day on which he will judge the whole world in justice by that man whom he has ordained, whereof he has given assurance to everyone in that he has raised Jesus from the dead” (Acts 17:31). That Jesus is the divine agent in judgment is the view of all four Gospels. “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22, RSV). Jesus can be and is the divinely appointed judge of all mankind only because in human nature he has lived a sinless life, a life of obedient sonship, that demonstrates God’s holy purpose for man as his special creation. God has already publicly identified Jesus Christ as the coming judge of all the human race by openly raising him from the dead—that is one of the finalities of the resurrection.

Another irreversible consequence of the resurrection, therefore, is that it marks human beings for very different destinies in the life to come. Everywhere the teachings of Jesus presuppose a resurrection to divergent destinies of the wicked and of the penitent one to judgment and condemnation, the other to the eternal presence of God. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit in state on his throne, with all the nations gathered before him. He will separate men into two groups, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (Matt. 25:31, 32, NEB). Gospels and Epistles alike testify to the distinction between the resurrection of the righteous and the resurrection of the wicked. “Do not be surprised,” Jesus admonishes, “the time is coming when all those who are dead and buried will hear his voice [that is, the voice of the Son of Man] and out they will come—those who have done right will rise again to life, but those who have done wrong will rise to face judgment!” (John 5:28, 29, Phillips). Paul reminds Felix, before whom he is on trial, “I have the same hope in God which they [the prophets] themselves hold, that there is to be a resurrection of both good men and bad” (Acts 24:15), and he tells the Corinthians: “All men shall be raised to life, each in his proper order, with Christ the very first and after him all who belong to him when he comes” (1 Cor. 15:23, Phillips).

These truths, then, are finalities of the resurrection: (1) that Jesus exemplifies in a new bodily mode the afterlife to which mankind is destined; (2) that Jesus mirrors the quality of humanity that God approves in the eternal order; (3) that Jesus was raised after his crucifixion in a divine identification of the coming judge of the human race; (4) that your destiny and mine turn on a cosmic conflict of sin and righteousness that involves two different destinies for mankind in the life to come.

The Fraternity

By the fraternity of the resurrection I mean that happy fellowship of persons whose outlook and character are shaped by the reality and power of Christ’s resurrection, and who even now have special access to the Risen One. I have met them around the world—men and women who rejoice in the redemption and the renewal Christ offers, a company of believers of every race and color on every continent and of every walk of life. All have this in common: whereas like Saul of Tarsus they were once unbelievers and considered Christians a strange lot even if they did not openly persecute them, now like C. S. Lewis they declare themselves “surprised by joy,” a matchless, incomparable joy.

The internal change wrought by the Risen Christ in the lives of his followers is so striking that some liberal thinkers exaggerate this subjective experience into the essence of Christianity and dismiss the propitiatory atonement and bodily resurrection of Christ as unimportant. Paul, however, declared to be basic to the Gospel “that Christ died for our sins … and rose again the third day” (1 Cor. 15:4). Similarly John affirmed, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).

God’s redemptive love all the more powerfully constrains forgiven sinners to latch their lives to the ongoing purposes of the Risen Christ. We sing, “You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart!,” not because we dismiss the objective atonement and historical resurrection of Christ, but because we know how personally powerful are the present realities of the Risen Christ. As the New Testament states, “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17), or as the Revised Standard Version has it, “the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”

Not only is sin covered and its power broken by the atoning work of Christ, but the Holy Spirit of God is already renewing in believers the moral image of Christ to which all the redeemed will finally be conformed. The Risen Christ not only embodies that quality of humanity in which God delights, but also by his character provides an ongoing challenge to men, enabling all to anticipate the meaning and nature of God’s coming judgment. Throughout the New Testament man’s relation to Jesus Christ determines his final destiny, and in the lives of all who know Him, Christ is already working moral wonders. “Now we are God’s children,” writes John, and while we don’t know everything that is in store for us, we do know that “we shall be like him,” that is, like Jesus (1 John 3:2). And to this image the believer for whom Christ is real is being progressively conformed.

We speak of “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” that is, “Christ in you bringing with him the hope of all the glorious things to come” (Col. 1:27, Phillips). Is it any wonder that Paul wrote the Ephesians: “God, rich in mercy … brought us to life with Christ even when we were dead in our sins.… And in union with Christ Jesus he raised us up and enthroned us with him in the heavenly realms, so that he might display in the ages to come how immense are the resources of his grace, and how great his kindness to us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4–7, NEB). To use the graphic imagery of the King James Version, God has “made us to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” The Christian, therefore, is to be God’s man among the masses of men, salt of the earth, light of the world, a mirror of that humanity which in both public and private affairs brings delight to God. This unique fraternity of the resurrection enfleshes the only enduring moral hope of a spiritually depleted race.

According to the New Testament, the quality of our future resurrection at the consummation of all things depends and turns upon our present relationship to Jesus Christ. This relationship offers us, moreover, a special anticipation or sample of the resurrection, for even now we have moral and spiritual life, a life that anticipates eternity. Jesus said: “I tell you, a time is coming, indeed it is already here, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and all who hear shall come to life” (John 5:25, NEB). If you refuse Christ’s voice now, you cannot escape it then, when the Son of Man summons mankind to judgment.

The time is coming, perhaps the day is at hand, when God will restore our faded and jaded sense of wonder. So fascinated are multitudes by the feats of science that they mythologize the God of creation and redemption and of the resurrection to come, and no longer marvel at the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth. God himself tells us not to boggle at the marvels of the Bible, but for quite another reason: “Marvel not at this,” he says—at this which has already occurred—“for the hour is coming when all that are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth” (John 5:29). What a coming day of wonder, what a wonderful day!

Forty years ago, on Long Island, when I was a young newspaper reporter and editor, I also moved with those who shrugged off spiritual priorities. Joking about Christian realities and profaning Christ’s name were commonplace. But something happened in the summer of 1933 when I took Christ at His word and allowed the crucified and risen Lord to become undeniably real to me. Since that time, God and I have been on speaking terms. I am no stranger to the One who will one day call my name in the resurrection. Having heard the voice of the Son of God this dead sinner came to life, spiritual life, life fit for eternity.

This triad of wonders is the glory of Easter: the factuality of the resurrection, the finality of the resurrection, and the fraternity of the resurrection.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

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