Not many Christians these days turn the pages of the classic treatise The Death of Death in the Death of Jesus Christ by the great 17th-century Puritan theologian John Owen. In a nutshell, Owen's thesis was this: we live and die while Christ died and lived.
The renegade Anglican bishop David Jenkins wanted to call the resurrection of Jesus "not an event, but a series of experiences". Real cart-before-the-horse stuff, indeed, because if one thing shines through in the New Testament accounts it is that the resurrection became a series of experiences only because it was first an event. In church tomorrow, thousands will affirm that Jesus rose "on the third day", underpinning that what happened was an objective, historical event. The words bear witness to the bodily resurrection in precisely the same way as "under Pontius Pilate" confesses the historicity of his death.
The epistle reading will continue through 1 Corinthians 15, the magnum opus from the mind and heart of St Paul on the irrevocable reality of future resurrection for the Christian believer because Christ himself has risen. The key to the chapter is in verse 12, where the apostle confronts those members of the church in Corinth who were saying there was "no resurrection of the dead", no general resurrection at the end of history. This was the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul, not the resurrection of the body, seeping in to do potentially mortal damage to the future hope of Corinthian believers.
Paul's logic is a steamroller argument. If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, the apostles have been whistling in the wind and are false witnesses of God, while the church's faith is void of content. Pastorally, the consequences are then catastrophic, for believers are still left in their sins and those Christians who have died are lost. Faith in an unresurrected Christ is senseless and futile and so, to plug the leak, the rest of the chapter is inaugurated with the ringing affirmation: "But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep." John Owen's razor-sharp analysis points up that in his death, Jesus of Nazareth was dead and done for, finished spiritually, physically, politically and judicially. He had been wiped off the face of the earth and no power on earth could ever rescue or reinstate him. Thus there is something breathtaking and sensational in the apostles' preaching of his resurrection: "You killed him, but God raised him."
Owen sees the resurrection as the great reversal by God of the verdict passed on Jesus, turning all human opinion of him upside down. Condemned for blasphemy, he is now designated God's glorious Son by his resurrection; executed for treason for claiming to be a king, God has now made him "both Lord and Christ." Hanged on a tree under God's curse, he is vindicated as the Saviour of sinners because the curse he bore was ours, not his. Will preachers tomorrow, though, take their listeners beyond a dry, intellectual faith in the resurrection and give a taster of the awesome joy of knowing the risen Lord today? Hopefully, they will yet still hold fast to the New Testament's teaching that the resurrection is not the same as our felt experience of the living presence of Jesus in our hearts by the ministry to us of his Holy Spirit. That presence is, very wonderfully, a genuine experience, but the resurrection which makes it possible was a historical event by which his body was transformed, his tomb became empty and the power of death was defeated.
We may pray that we shall hear this core teaching of the New Testament clearly and accurately from our pulpits tomorrow, because there are no consolation prizes for those who embrace Christianity without the resurrection.
G.F.