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The visible, bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ

The Christian Church uses a famous creed called The Apostles’ Creed.  The likely source of this creed is the training of new believers in preparation for baptism and communion in the early centuries of the Christian faith.  With Easter now in our rearview mirror, let’s think about the big deal about Easter: the Christian teaching that Jesus rose again from the dead.

The Creed simply states:  “The third day he rose again from the dead.”

A quick glance at the texts of the gospels and the other passages that discuss the resurrection (Acts 1:3, 1 Corinthians 15) show us that the gospel writers taught a visible, physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Jesus rose again with a real human body (though of a different nature than our own) that could be seen and touched, and could consume the same food we eat here on earth.  No problem, right?  Everybody who claims to be a Christian has always believed that!  Unfortunately throughout history there have been groups who attached the label “Christian” to themselves who deny this central doctrine of the Christian faith.

In the early centuries of the church, Greek thought influenced some people in such a way that the physical body of Christ was denied altogether.  Not only did some deny the bodily resurrection of Christ, they did not believe Jesus ever had an real human body like ours.  These people mixed some Christian ideas with the Greek idea that only souls were good and pure, while bodies were bad and evil.  The early church creeds addressed this confusion about Biblical teaching with creeds like the Apostles’ Creed, as well as other famous Christian creeds like the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds.

Today the challenge to the resurrection of Christ has come from another angle.  In recent centuries the divine nature of Christ has been much in question.  When Darwin shook the scientific world with his theories, the theological world of thought was rocked as well.  The impact was staggering.  By the early 1900’s seminaries in Europe and the USA began denying that anything supernatural in the Bible was true.  Jesus was a godly man, but not God in human flesh.  The miracles of the Bible were considered to be the result of an ignorant ancient world view that believed in a triple-decker universe with heaven in the sky, the earth below, and hell even further below that.  The ancient “foolishness” needed to be rejected, while the core “truth” would be affirmed.

Mainline Protestant churches obviously continued to worship and meet, but their leaders were trained in a way that denied almost every tenant of the Apostles’ Creed.  As you might imagine, with the divine removed from Jesus, not much was left of the Christian faith for those who embraced these errors.  One writer distilled Christianity to “universal Fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.”  No miracles, resurrection, or divine nature of Jesus was necessary or useful for the “Christian” to believe. The mainline Protestant church was left so devoid of any clear meaning of purpose that counter- movements emerged, like neo-orthodoxy led by Karl Barth and others. These teachers taught a view of miracles that avoided whether they actually happened as recorded.  The faith that could believe in the resurrection was as important as whether it actually happened.  It was in our personal encounter with God in a Bible story that it became the Word of God to us.  Some of this idea starts to sound like our own beliefs in a personal encounter with God in the Scripture, with the difference being that we believe it matters very much whether the Bible is telling us the truth in its stories.

During this same time period, faithful pastors and scholars emerged to challenge the denial of the supernatural and divine.  Theologians like B.B. Warfield and later on, J. Gresham Machen put forth logical and reasonable arguments in favor of the miracles of the Bible and the truth of Scripture.  The earliest leaders of this movement called themselves fundamentalists, because across denominational lines they had adopted a set of fundamental doctrines that all true Christians believe.  Later that term became associated with “don’ts”: don’t drink, smoke, or dance.  The first fundamentals were called so because of their affirmation of historic Christianity, not because of their strict code.  They gave rise to the Evangelical movement of whom Billy Graham is the most recognized name.

At Grace Community Church we stand on the shoulders of those defenders of the faith like Warfield and Machen who spoke so articulately for the Christian faith.  We believe the Apostles’ Creed teaches us Biblical truth about Jesus of Nazareth.  Moreover, we believe that the resurrection doctrine is definitive, or as others said years ago, fundamental.  All believers in Jesus believe in a visible, bodily resurrection.  To deny the resurrection is to deny an essential teaching of the Christian faith.  To embrace this doctrine is to find your own life in Christ alone. It is pointless to seek to distill out the miracles from the Bible in search of the ethical teaching of Jesus.  It is in and of itself an unethical practice.  For if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, our faith is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14).  If he didn’t rise, then Jesus’ ethics are themselves unethical because he misled people.  And it is unethical to distill the resurrection out, because the resurrection is a part of the central message of the Christian faith.  Romans 6:1-14 explains that through faith we too have died and been raised again.  Our new life is found by believing in Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Should you someday be visiting another church and wonder where they stand on this issue, here is a suggestion.  What do they believed happened on Easter?  Do they believe that if we had a video camera at the empty tomb that we would have seen a miracle, or a grave robbery?  Simple question, isn’t it?  The answer makes all the difference in the world, in our lives,å and in the church.

 

In Him,

Don

 

 

Don Ward

Senior Pastor

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