Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And 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, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
1 Corinthians 15:12-19
In 1 Cor. 15:12 Paul introduces the problem he’s about to address: “how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” Thus, the “occasion” for the seven verses to follow was the denial by some in the Corinthian congregation of the very possibility of resurrection (how can some of you?). Paul’s response is a series of if/then type arguments:
If there is no resurrection, then Christ is not raised
If Christ is not raised, then we remain in our sins
If we remain in our sins, then what we preach is not good news (gospel)
The Greco-Roman world into which the early church first spread was not know for its gullibility regarding miracles. As N.T. Wright has observed: “Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believed that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection….everybody knew dead people didn’t and couldn’t come back to bodily life.”
The intelligentsia of the day scoffed at the idea of bodily resurrection. The Pythagoreans believed in “the soul being released from the body at death, with good souls flying to the upper realms.” Plutarch similarly wrote of a incorporeal afterlife: “the soul attaining the realm of the gods by freeing itself from the attachment to the sense and becoming ‘pure, fleshless, and undefiled.'” In Athens, Paul’s declaration that the God of creation had raised Jesus from the dead was met largely with mockery, indifference, and disbelief.
Neither was the Jewish world gullible about miracles. As C.S. Lewis so wittily described it: “When St Joseph discovered that his bride was pregnant, he was ‘minded to put her away.’ He knew enough biology for that.” (God in the Dock, 26) Belief in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection was no more a gimme in the ancient world than it is in today’s more “scientific” world.
Regardless of time and place, what must in fact be true of “ultimate reality” in order for there to be even the possibility of a bodily resurrection?
Against atheism, a “theistic” God must exist. That is, there must be a God who is neither identical to the world nor contained within the world, but One who both transcends the world and can act within it as He so wills. Apart from theism, miracles, including the resurrection of Jesus, are impossible.
Against pantheism, God must be transcendent. Pantheism is the idea that God and the world ultimately describe one Being, that there is no ontological (“ontology” is the study of “being”) distinction between God and the world but they are one in being. In such a worldview, miracles are impossible because by definition, a miracle is an act of God that transcends the laws of nature, whereas in pantheism “acts of God” are indistinguishable from laws of nature.
Against deism, God must be immanent. The god of deism (a fashionable theology of 17th century England and 18th century America, held in one degree or another by leading lights of the American founding such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) does not act in His creation. He made the world, then walked away to work on other things. To employ the famous metaphor, the God of deism is like a Divine Watchmaker who wound up the universe then left it to itself. Such a god does not perform miracles, not because He lacks the power, but because He simply does not intervene in His creation.
So truth regarding ultimate reality matters for Christian belief. if atheism is true, God does not exist. If pantheism is true, God is not distinct from the universe. If deism is true, God does not act within human history. If theism is not true, in other words, the dead are not raised. And if the dead are not raised, the preaching of the gospel is false and our faith is literally worthless.
Just to be clear, the claim here is not that the existence of God has to be proven before one can believe in the resurrection of Christ. Rather, certain things must be true about reality – God does in fact have to exist – for the resurrection to be possible. It’s the ultimately consequential reality: “More consequences for thought and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.” (Mortimer Adler)
The famous “demythologizer” of the Bible, Rudolf Bultmann wrote this: “there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age.” And: “if the bones of the dead Jesus were discovered in a Palestinian tomb, all the essentials of Christianity would remain unchanged.”
Really? The Apostle Paul would beg to differ. To borrow again from A.M. Ramsay: “For [the apostles] the gospel without the resurrection was not merely a gospel without its final chapter. It was not a gospel at all.” The proclamation of the resurrection went hand in hand with the preaching of the gospel. The two are literally inseparable. So Bultmann is just plain mistaken to suggest that even once we dismiss the “pre-scientific” idea of resurrection, Christianity can continue on as if nothing ever changed. That is a patently false statement.
I’ll examine the actual historical evidence for the resurrection in other posts, or you can listen to more in-depth messages here or here. The point to be emphasized presently is not the details of the historical evidence (which are legion) but the meta-claim that historical truth matters for our belief. Put bluntly, as Paul did, if the resurrection of Christ did not happen within human history, then whoever says God raised Jesus from the dead is a false witness and a blasphemer.
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. (1 Cor. 15:15)
To say that integrity was a matter of tremendous importance to the apostle Paul would be quite the understatement. As a dedicated and exemplary Jew (Phil. 3:4-6), Paul would have known and honored the proverb: A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape (19:5). Paul in fact made this bold claim: “I have lived my life before God in all good conscience up to this day” (Acts 23:1).
The force of Paul’s logic in 1 Corinthians 15, therefore, must not escape our attention. “If God did not raise up Christ from the dead, yet we say God did, we are in fact misrepresenting God.”
**By claiming God raised up Christ, we’re claiming God’s unqualified approval of Christ
**By preaching that God raised up Christ, we’re claiming God’s vindication of Christ’s perfect sinlessness
**By claiming God raised up Christ, we’re claiming that God put a special stamp of approval on Jesus’ truth claims
**If none of these are true, then we are misrepresenting God – we are nothing less than false prophets.
Adding insult to injury, if we falsely claim that God raised Jesus from the dead (if the dead are not raised), then not only have we misrepresented (blasphemed) God, we have misled those to whom we have preached this allegedly false message! Not only the atoning death of Jesus, but also His triumphant resurrection are integral to the objective foundation of our faith.
Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Romans 4:24b-25)
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. (Romans 5:10)
As Charles Spurgeon succinctly remarked: “The dying Christ has purchased for us our justification, but the risen Christ will see that we get it.” If Christ is not raised, dead Christians are just that: dead. There’s no real hope and no real gospel. Truth, including historical truth, matters for belief. Christian faith is not a leap in the dark, but a step into the light. It’s based on the solid foundation of both metaphysical reality (existence of God) and historical reality (resurrection of Jesus from the grave).
Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli in their excellent book Handbook of Christian Apologetics offer this concluding insight: “The existential consequences of the resurrection are incomparable. It is the concrete, factual, empirical proof that: life has hope and meaning; ‘love is stronger than death’; goodness and power are ultimately allies, not enemies; life wins in the end; God has touched us right here where we are and has defeated our last enemy; we are not cosmic orphans, as our modern secular worldview would make us.”