Posted by
David Walker on Saturday, April 07, 2007 10:27:01 PM
One year ago this weekend I was finishing the thesis that was required of me by USC for graduation. For my thesis, as most of you know I wrote a Christian defense of the resurrection. “Does the resurrection need defending?” you might ask. Yes it does. From atheists to rationalists to liberals on down to plain old skeptics, the resurrection is target #1. And though it would still be true if none of us defended it, is this not the essence of sharing the gospel? “The resurrection is true!” “Jesus is alive!” I encountered many of these criticisms in my time at USC in the religion department. Most people dismiss the resurrection on the basis that is a miraculous event. So I wrote a defense of the resurrection that was based on historically verifiable detail, and not on miraculous claims. At this point it is important to note that as believers in God, we embrace the resurrection as a miraculous event. God raised Jesus from the dead, thereby validating his claims to be the messiah, and granting him victory over sin and death. What is important for us is to affirm the fact that an event can be both miraculous and historically true. We need not be cornered into defending the resurrection by trying to defend the idea of miracles in general. Of course, if a miracle is recorded in the Bible, we can trust it because the Bible is God’s word. In addition, we should know that the New Testament is supported by more empirical and historical evidence than almost any other work of antiquity. C.S. Lewis is helpful, “All I am in life is a literary critic and historian, that’s my job…And I am prepared to say on that basis that if anyone thinks the gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I’ve read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the gospels are not that kind of stuff.” The Bible is true in a historical sense as well as spiritual.
Of course, the most effective evidence for the truthfulness of the resurrection is our own stories about our own encounters with the risen Christ. We should all be encouraged to incorporate into our Easter celebrations the retelling of how we came to meet the risen Jesus ourselves. One year ago this weekend I had spent 8 hours a day for 6 days in a row researching and writing about the resurrection in order to finish my project by the due date. I worked late into the night on Saturday night, and got up early Sunday morning. As the sun rose on Easter morning I finished my defense of the resurrection. Seventy pages and six months of research later I was no more convinced of the resurrection than I was before I started. Is that because my research was inconclusive? No. It was just the opposite. Was the evidence I found unconvincing? No. It was overwhelmingly convincing. The fact of the matter was that eleven years earlier I had met the risen Christ on the pages of my bible, and through the lives of my Christian friends. It was then that I believed in the risen Jesus and embraced him as my savior and Lord. He has proved himself to me over and over again, and I did not need historical evidence to verify what my faith had already established. I hope however it will serve as a tool to further the conversation with curious individuals. That morning after I finished my paper I turned off the artificial yellow light of the lamp by my desk as the bright light of the rising sun shone into my windows. Eleven years earlier I had turned away from the artificial lights of the world because the true light of the Risen Son had chased away the shadows in my heart.
David