If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God.... If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.
Resurrection does not mean resuscitation, the reanimation of a corpse that will die again someday. Easter does not mean that Jesus resumed his previous life as a finite person. Rather, resurrection means that he entered another kind and level of existence, "raised to the right hand of God."
Jesus was raised from the dead, never to die again. Jesus' pre-resurrection body was ordinary: fully human and therefore completely mortal. However, after the resurrection, his body was transformed and made immortal.
If resurrection does not mean resuscitation, then what does it mean? The first view, non-material resurrection, is the belief that Jesus' corpse need not come back to life in order for the resurrection to be significant. The second and opposing view, material resurrection, is the doctrine that the resurrection body must be a material body, if the resurrection is to have any meaning whatsoever.
The Importance and Nature of the Resurrection
Christians universally agree that the resurrection of Jesus is central to their faith. Popular apologist Josh McDowell wrote, "The resurrection of Jesus Christ and Christianity stand or fall together" (1982, p. 179). Terry Miethe, a Christian professor of philosophy at Oxford, has maintained that "`Did Jesus rise from the dead?' is the most important question regarding the claims of the Christian faith?" (p. xi, emphasis in original). Indeed, one cannot be a Christian unless one believes that God raised Jesus from the dead. For Paul, the earliest of the New Testament writers, the resurrection was central to his message. In a passage that is arguably the most important passage in the entire New Testament concerning the resurrection, he wrote,
If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God.... If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile (1 Cor. 15:14-17). However, while Christians may agree on the importance of the resurrection, they do not agree on the meaning of the resurrection. For example, was the resurrection an event in space and time? Could it have been captured on videotape? Was it bodily in nature? Must it be a bodily, physical resurrection in order to retain its importance? The Christian community is divided. By briefly considering the debate within the Christian community over the nature of the resurrection, we will be able to put into proper perspective the twentieth-century debate between skeptics and Christians over the resurrection.
Resurrection vs. Resuscitation
However, before I discuss the alternative interpretations of the resurrection, I want to make it very clear that resurrection does not mean resuscitation, the reanimation of a corpse that will die again someday. As Marcus Borg wrote (p. 15). Whatever happened at Easter, it was not resuscitation. Easter does not mean that Jesus resumed his previous life as a finite person. Rather, resurrection means that he entered another kind and level of existence, "raised to the right hand of God."
It is important to note that while there are other individuals in the Bible who "came back to life," so to speak, there is a fundamental difference between their experiences and that of Jesus. With the exception of Enoch and Elijah (who were translated), the rest of those people died again. In contrast, Jesus was raised from the dead, never to die again. The New Testament makes a clear distinction between Jesus' pre-resurrection body and his post-resurrection body. Jesus' pre-resurrection body was ordinary: fully human and therefore completely mortal. However, after the resurrection, his body was transformed and made immortal.
If resurrection does not mean resuscitation, then what does it mean? Two types of answers are possible. The first view, which I shall refer to as non-material resurrection, is the belief that Jesus' corpse need not come back to life in order for the resurrection to be significant. The second and opposing view, material resurrection, is the doctrine that the resurrection body must be a material body, if the resurrection is to have any meaning whatsoever. Let us consider each understanding of the resurrection in turn.
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