Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church > Status Update

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.

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.