Matthew Wright > Recent Status Updates

In the absence of real Hope, all that is left is feelings.
Persuasion is not enough, we will never just Believe in persuasion.

The resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event with within the present world; it is, Principle, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus.

Science & History confirm: there really was an empty tomb, and they’re really worse. Sightings of Jesus, the same, and yet transformed.
History then says: “so how do you explain this?”

We could cope — the World could cope — with a Jesus, who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples is mines and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus, who comes out of the tune, who inaugurate Godish, new creation, right in the middle of the old one.

In the question of Jesus is resurrection, though it may, and some sense is burst. The boundaries of history, also remains within them; that is precisely why it is so important, so disturbing, and so life-and-death.

The resurrection of Jesus… Is… The symbol and starting point of the new world. The claim advanced and Christianity is of that magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth, Ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic, or a new way of Salvation, but a new creation.

Resurrection in the first century Means, something physically, thoroughly dead, becoming physically, thoroughly alive again, not simply surviving, or entering a “purely spiritual” world, whatever that might be.

3. The disciples were hardly likely to go out and suffer and die for a belief that wasn't firmly anchored in fact. This is an important point, though subject to the weakness, that they might have been genuinely mistaken: they believed the resurrection of Jesus to be affect, and they acted on that belief, but we know (so it would be said) that they were wrong.

2. The early church's emphasis on the first day of the week as their special day is very hard to explain unless something striking really did happen then. A gradual or even sudden dawning of faith is hardly sufficient to explain it.

3 Small-Scare Arguments FOR the Resurrection:

1. Jewish tombs, especially those of martyrs, were venerated and often became shrines. There is no sign whatever of that having happened with Jesus's grave.

Answer: that is simply a description of a noble death followed by a Platonic im-mortality. Resurrection was and is the defeat of death, not simply a nicer description of it; and it's something that happens some while after the moment of death, not immediately.

7. Perhaps the most popular: what actually happened was that they had some kind of rich "spiritual" experience, which they interpreted through Jewish categories. Jesus after all really was alive, spiritually, and they were still in touch with him.

6. Lots of people have visions of someone they love who has just died; this was what happened to the disciples. Answer: they knew perfectly well about things like that, and they had language for it; they would say, "It's his angel" or "It's his spirit" or "his ghost.™ They wouldn't say, "He's been raised from the dead."

5. They began by saying, "He will be raised," as people had done of the martyrs, and this quickly passed into saying, He has been raisedi which was functionally equivalent. Answer: no, it wasn't.

3. Jesus only appeared to people who believed in him. Answer: the accounts make it clear that Thomas and Paul do not belong to this category; and actually none of Jesus's followers believed, after his death, that he really was the Messiah, let alone that he was in any sense divine.

4. The accounts we have are biased. Answer: so is all history, all journalism. Every photo is taken by somebody from some angle.

2. When the women went to the tomb they met someone else (per-haps James, Jesus's brother, who looked like him), and in the half light they thought it was Jesus himself. Answer: they would have noticed soon enough.

7 Arguments People have AGAINST the Resurrection:

1. Jesus didn't really die; someone gave him a drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he'd defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.

Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the worlds. True, Lord; Jesus is raised, so Godish new creation has begun — and we, his followers, have a job to do! Jesus is race, so we must act as his Harold, announcing his Lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on Earth, as it in heaven!

The point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not the red description of death; it is, it’s overthrow, and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it.

Resurrection, we must never see to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven, or escaping death, or having a glorious and Noble postmortem existence, but rather coming to Bodily life again after Bodily death.

The early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: 1st, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; 2nd, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world.

The first century Christians did not simply believe in life after death; they virtually never spoke simply of going to heaven when they died.
When they did speak of heaven as a post-mortem destination, they seemed to regard this heavenly life as a temporary stage on the way to the eventual resurrection of the body.