| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Christ’s Resurrection is not a question
of mythology or
of mere symbolism, but a concrete event.
Jesus Christ is risen indeed!
By Eduardo J. Echeverria
The doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity express the central truth claims of the Christian faith that Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, is the Incarnate Son of God, that he is indeed God in the flesh, truly and fully like one of us, but of one being with the Father—that is, truly and fully of the same nature as God—who died on the cross to atone for the sins of man and rose bodily from the dead. In what follows, I will examine some reasons for believing both that Jesus is God and that he is risen.
Why should we believe these teachings? Is it simply a matter of a subjective attitude which one takes up to Jesus? If so, this would imply that the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity are simply the reflections of Christian experience on Jesus. But the main difficulty with this view is its denial that faith commits Christians to belief that certain things are true—for instance, that God exists, that Jesus is God incarnate, and that he was crucified and rose from the dead. In fact, this view gets it entirely wrong because the various subjective attitudes of which faith consists, for example, commitment, trust, faithfulness, wholehearted submission to his will as Lord and Savior, are in fact warranted by reference to these truths. Again, we ask why we should believe in these teachings?
Can reason tell us that Jesus is God and that God is Trinity? Here I can only repeat the answer of the Catholic Faith that strikes me as sound and cogent: the truths of the mysteries of faith are founded on objective revelation and can only be grasped by faith’s reception of revelation. But though faith itself remains a supernatural gift of God’s grace, and hence transcends reason, it doesn’t go against reason. There are convincing arguments showing the reasonableness of these teachings. Reason can tell us that there is a God who is the source, the Creator, of the existence of all things. It is also reasonable to argue that a personal God who creates man in his own image, a human person capable of interpersonal knowledge and love, would communicate to him something of himself and the mystery of his will in verbalized form. Furthermore, reason can even show that it is more reasonable to believe that Jesus is God than any other alternative explanation, such as that he was a liar, a lunatic, or a guru.
Simply and memorably, Peter Kreeft summarizes this last point in the quadrilemma “Lord, liar, lunatic, or guru?” Perhaps Jesus is a liar or a lunatic and not who he said he is. Well, then, if he is a liar, then he isn’t a good man, because someone who lies about who he is, is a bad man. In fact, if Jesus is a liar, his lie betrays the most clever, cunning, wicked deceiver ever known, since billions of people have believed him. But the Gospel accounts of Jesus support the belief that he was in every way morally impeccable. Perhaps, then, he is a lunatic, sincerely believing that he is God rather than deliberately deceiving people. But this explanation will simply not do because Jesus has the wrong psychological profile of those who possess a “divinity complex.” Says Kreeft, “Jesus has in abundance precisely those three qualities that liars and lunatics conspicuously lack: one, his practical wisdom, his ability to read human hearts, to understand people and the real, unspoken questions behind their words, his ability to heal people’s spirits as well as their bodies; two, his deep and winning love, his passionate compassion, his ability to attract people and make them feel at home and forgiven, his authority; and above all, three, his ability to astonish, his unpredictability, his creativity.” In short, both our knowledge of the Gospels and of people makes it highly implausible to entertain seriously the possibility that Jesus is either a liar or a lunatic.
We can also quickly dismiss the possibility that Jesus claimed divinity not as the absolutely original and absolutely unique God-man but as one of many gurus, yogis, spiritual masters, enlightened mystics who realized his own inner divinity, calling everyone to realize in turn their own. The main problem here is that it is unhistorical—Jesus is not a Hindu but a Jew. Jesus understood God to be Yahweh, the personal, theistic, transcendent Creator, and the God who has revealed himself in historical events. This God is not the impersonal, pantheistic, identical-with-everything God of the eastern mystics. In short, as Kreeft writes, “Jesus said he was God but not that everyone was. He taught sin and forgiveness, as no guru does.”
These arguments strike me as sound and I know of no cogent objections to them. Still, they do not entitle one to claim with full assurance that he is right. Human reason’s own resources are insufficient for warranted belief in the Incarnation and the Trinity—for “we need to be taught by God,” as Father Brian Davies, O.P., puts it. God reveals himself and the mystery of his will by sending us his Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This means that if we are warranted in believing that Jesus is God and that God is Trinity, these doctrines will have to be revealed by some identifiable divine person who, Fr. Davies says, “speaking from knowledge has said enough to allow us to conclude to the truth of these beliefs.”
This point is crucial to understanding the grounds of our Catholic faith. As Michael Dummett explains, “There would be no reason to believe Jesus to be God unless He knew Himself to be and gave us, through the Apostles, reason to think He knew Himself to be.” Divine self-communication justifies us in believing the interpretation the New Testament has of Jesus, followed by the doctrinal tradition of Christianity. Also he says, “We could have no valid ground for believing so extraordinary a doctrine of the Trinity, let alone making it an integral part of Christian teaching, unless Jesus knew that fact concerning God and said enough for us to come to understand Him as communicating it.” We would only be obliged to believe that Christ is God and that God is Trinity if we also believe that in saying what he does about God Jesus, as God, here speaks from knowledge. And we would be justified in believing this to be true if only we accept that the Gospels do give us a true account of the words of Jesus.
Finally, the New Testament texts prove upon examination to be remarkably historically reliable. Yet we can accept this to be true without engaging the views of those who disagree. For being justified in believing the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity logically commits one to accepting that the Gospels give us a true account of what Jesus said. To quote Fr. Davies again, “According to Vatican I, ‘The doctrine of faith which God has revealed is not, like a philosophical theory, something for ingenuity to perfect; but rather divine deposit from Christ to His bride, to be faithfully preserved and infallibly explained’. If that teaching does not suppose that the essence of Christianity has been given to us in history by the teaching of one who, as God, could authoritatively say what nobody else could, then black is white and 2 and 2 make 10.”
The central event of the New Testament is the resurrection of Jesus. In a recent address given by Pope John Paul II, he says, “Christ’s Resurrection is not a question of mythology or of mere symbolism, but of a concrete event. It is confirmed by sure and convincing proofs. The acceptance of this truth, although the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s grace, rests at the same time on a solid historical base.”
The New Testament writers assert the historical truth of the resurrection as an actual, literal event: Jesus Christ did indeed and in fact rise from the dead. They explicitly knew the difference between asserting truth and telling a story, between what was historical and what was not, between claims to truth and myth. For instance, the word “fables” or “myth” (translation of the Greek word muthos) is always used in the New Testament in a negative sense and in contrast to the truth of the Christian faith. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than when St. Paul claims that the truth of what is given in testimony is based on actual eyewitnesses of the events in the Gospel. As Roger Trigg writes, “This implies, indeed, that they would have been horrified if their claims were consigned to the world of myth, however politely defined. They believed that they were claiming truth. What they said, they believed was reliable and worthy of acceptance by all people everywhere. [For] the very notion of being a witness conjures up the idea of taking the witness-stand and being cross-examined.”
John Updike has written about the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection: “Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door . . . The stone is rolled back” (from Seven Stanzas at Easter).
Of course many people reject the Resurrection as a fact that historically took place. But if the Resurrection did in fact happen as the New Testament proclaims, as Christians have believed through the ages, and as the Church herself continues to proclaim joyfully as true, then holding this belief to be true must imply that those who disagree with us hold false beliefs. This is no more than simple logic. For the statement “Christ is risen—He is risen indeed” cannot be both true and false. The belief in the Resurrection cannot be true unless it really happened. The danger in neglecting this is that you will allow your beliefs to degenerate into arbitrary fancies.
Yet Updike notes above that some people try to have it both ways—they deny that the Resurrection is a historical fact yet they try to hold on to its significance. “It is like trying to hold on to the grin while the Cheshire Cat has long since departed,” says Trigg. It interprets the meaning of the Resurrection as a kind of symbol for the continuing influence of Jesus, still being able to call us to believe, giving us new life, and enjoining us to live lives in the Christ-like manner of self-giving love. But if the resurrection of Jesus is not an event that took place in space and time, then there is no redemption or forgiveness of sins or hope. “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. . . . If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:14, 17).
Why so, you ask? If Christ has not been raised, then everything remains as it is and “we are of all men the most pitiable,” says St. Paul—sin, meaninglessness, and death have the last word, and our only hope is in this life. Those who accept the resurrection of Jesus as a space-time event, constituting God’s victory-in-Christ over the powers of sin, death, evil, and, hopelessness, presuppose as true certain metaphysical and historical claims. This victory is undergirded by truths such as that God exists, that he commands us to live a life worthy of our calling in Christ, which he graciously enables us to do, that he miraculously raised Jesus from the dead, which necessarily entails, if true, that the dead Jesus genuinely lives again, and that his resurrection is both the foundation and model of our future resurrection (see Rom. 8:11; 1 Cor. 15:20, 23; Phil. 3:20-21; 1 Thess. 4:14; 1 John 3:2). If Christ’s resurrection is only a symbolic victory, then it leaves everything as it was because it wasn’t a real, true victory. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” (1 Cor. 15:32).
Some understand the death and resurrection of Jesus as a symbol of the greater reality of natural renewal, of returning life in the cycles of nature and even of the healing and forgiveness in human relationships. But as Loren Wilkinson rightly says, “the Christian gospel proclaims the exact opposite to that. It is rather that all life—from flowers to forgiveness—is rooted in God’s self-giving love.” The love of the Father manifested in the gift of the Son and communicated through the Holy Spirit. This self-giving love in Christ is indeed the foundation of creation. “All things were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16). Says Wilkinson, “[N]ature in its burgeoning life is a reminder of this one event [the death and resurrection of Jesus] that makes plain that the whole miracle of creation is rooted in the self-giving love of God, a self-giving that for our sake came to a bloody focus on the hill outside Jerusalem. . . . The death and resurrection of Jesus is not a copy of a pattern in nature. Rather, nature gives us a partial picture of the love of God.”
The writers of the New Testament could not accept that the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus could mean something to us subjectively even if it didn’t really happen historically or is based on historically unreliable testimony. “If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty,” insists Saint Paul (1 Cor. 15:14). Empty, because without an object of faith, a literal resurrection, faith is like a “hall of mirrors,” as Peter Kreeft puts it. For instance, interpretations of the resurrection that affirm “Jesus is risen” but explain away the miracle of the dead Jesus actually living again involve a self-contradiction or a self-deception. For keeping the message of these accounts while denying its foundational historical truth is to treat these accounts as fables or myths and not as truth claims based upon a fact that historically took place and was verified. And of course, since the New Testament writers were deeply committed to persuading people that Jesus Christ really rose from the dead, it makes no sense, as Stephen Davis puts it, “to go about convincing people that x rose from the dead without having to talk about ‘what really happened to x after x’s death.’”
What sure and convincing historical proofs confirm Christ’s resurrection as a concrete event in history? The case for this historical event rests upon the evidence, open to public scrutiny, for three great, independently established facts: the empty tomb, the post-resurrection appearances, and the origin of the Christian faith. I can here only consider very briefly some evidence for the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.
St. Paul testifies to the fact that there are many witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances. We have independent corroboration of many of these appearances in the four Gospels and hence a lot of cross-checking is possible. In 1 Cor. 15, Paul testifies that Jesus appeared to Peter, to the Twelve apostles, to 500 brethren at once, to James, to all the apostles, and finally, to Paul himself. In general one can say that Paul’s purpose in giving a list of witnesses is to try to persuade his readers of what he is saying. This is especially evident with the 500 witnesses to Jesus’ appearance where Paul adds that most of them are still alive. As William Lane Craig writes, “Why does Paul add this remark? The great NT scholar of Cambridge University, C.H. Dodd, replies, ‘There can hardly be any purpose in mentioning the fact that most of the 500 are still alive, unless Paul is saying, in effect, “The witnesses are there to be questioned.” Notice: Paul could never have said this if the event had not occurred. He could not have challenged people to ask the witnesses if the event had never taken place and there were no witnesses.” All these people are eyewitnesses to the physical presence of Jesus, which means that he was raised physically or bodily and that he was the same Jesus who had been crucified.
But how do we know whether these encounters with the risen Jesus were not personal hallucinations? For one thing, many saw Christ appear, and they saw him as a group, not individually. For another, he appeared to them several times, not just once; they also touched him, talked with him, and ate with him. The latter fact is particularly important because it proves that Jesus was not a ghost but that his bodily presence was authentic and real. Finally, the hallucination hypothesis fails to answer the question, where was the corpse —for the witnesses could not have believed that Jesus had actually risen from the dead if his corpse still lay in the tomb.
Furthermore, it is implausible to explain the resurrection appearances as legends because of the relatively short span of time between Jesus’ crucifixion and the writing of the Gospels. Peter Kreeft summarizes the unanswered criticism of this view by critics like Julius Miller and A.N. Sherwin White—“there is lacking the several generations necessary to build up a commonly believed myth. There is not even one generation. If [Paul’s] letters are not myth, then the Gospels are not either, for Paul affirms all the main claims of the Gospels.” Moreover, the presence of eyewitnesses and apostolic control of the Gospel tradition would have discredited the theological embellishments and legendary accretion of new, mythic versions of the Gospels as we find in the Gospel of Peter, a forgery from around A.D. 125. In short, the Gospel accounts of the resurrection appearances must be substantially accurate historically.
Christ’s Resurrection especially constitutes historical proof of the truth of his divine and hence believable message—his victory over death which grounds the believer’s hope of eternal life, his righteousness as Judge and Savior which guarantees the believer’s forgiveness of sins and justification before God, and his divine identity as the Son of God. As John Paul II writes, “All the truths, including those most impenetrable to the human mind, find their justification, even from the rational point of view, in the fact that the risen Christ gave the definitive proof, promised beforehand, of His divine authority. Thus the truth of Christ’s divinity itself is confirmed by the resurrection.” This Easter believe with your mind and heart, and confess with your lips, the truth of the saving fact that historically took place and was verified—Christ is risen, He is risen indeed.
Professor Eduardo J. Echeverria teaches philosophy and is chairman of the philosophy department at Conception Seminary College in Conception, Mo. He is also a weekly columnist for the Maryville Daily Forum. His last article in HPR appeared in June 1999.
Back to Catholic Information Center's Periodicals