Resurrection Life
by William Lane Craig
This past week, leading up to today, I have been sharing writings related to the cross. We finish the week with this, from apologist William Lane Craig…
“There ain’t gonna be no Easter this year,” a student friend remarked to me.
“Why not?” I asked incredulously.
“They found the body.”
Despite his irreverent humor, my friend displayed a measure of insight often not shared by modern theologians. Many of them are perfectly willing to assert that Jesus died and rotted in the grave, but that the resurrection still has value as a symbol of “newness of life” or “new beginning,” so that Christianity can go on quite nicely as tough nothing were changed. My friend’s joke implied that without the resurrection Christianity is worthless.
The earliest Christians would certainly have agreed with my friend. The apostle Paul put it simply: “It 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 Corinthians 15:14,17). For the earliest Christians, Jesus’ resurrection was an historical fact, every bit as real as his death on the cross. Without the resurrection, Christianity would have been simply false. Jesus would have been just another prophet who had met his unfortunate fate at the hands of the Jews, and faith in him as Lord, Messiah, or Son of God would have been stupid.