The Architecture of Redemption · Christology and Soteriology
Article 5 of 5
The Third Day
Paul stakes the entire faith on a single historical claim and invites its falsification. If the resurrection did not happen, he says, stop — and he means it.
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Christianity is unusual among religions in that it can be disproved. Most systems of belief are arrangements of moral teaching and inward experience, and no discovery could refute them. Paul deliberately places Christianity outside that safety. He names an event, in public history, and says that if it did not occur then the whole structure should be abandoned — not adapted, not reinterpreted, abandoned.
This is the boldest thing in the New Testament, and it is astonishing how rarely it is treated as the risk it is.
The thing handed over first
(KJV)
That which I also received. Paul is quoting something older than his own letter — a formula the church was already reciting within a few years of the event.
Notice the shape of what he delivers first of all: died, buried, rose, was seen. Not a philosophy, not an ethic — a sequence of events with a body in it. The burial is included precisely because it makes the claim falsifiable. There was a location.
The wager Paul is willing to make
Then, having stated it, he does something no religious founder does. He argues against himself, at length, to show what follows if the claim is false.
(KJV)
Then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Both — the message and the trust placed in it.
(KJV)
Ye are yet in your sins. Without the resurrection the cross settles nothing, because there is no receipt.
That is worth pausing over. Paul does not say a Christless Christianity would still be a fine way to live. He says it would leave us exactly where we started, guilty, and — a few verses later — that it would make the apostles liars () and Christians the most pitiable people alive (). He offers no consolation prize. Either the tomb was empty or the faith is worthless.
A religion that cannot be disproved cannot be trusted either. Paul hands his critics the means of destroying him, and then dares them to use it.
Why it had to be bodily
A resurrection of the spirit only, or a survival of Jesus in the memory and courage of His followers, would answer nothing. Death is a bodily fact and requires a bodily reversal. This is why the accounts insist so awkwardly on physical detail — the eating of fish (), the invitation to touch (), the wounds still present in the risen body.
(KJV)
Declared to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead. The resurrection is the Father's public verdict on the Son.
(KJV)
Delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification. The two are one transaction, and the second half is the proof that the first was accepted.
This is the answer to a question that troubles thoughtful believers: how do I know the sacrifice was enough? The answer is not introspection. It is a fact outside yourself. The Father raised Him. The payment cleared.
The Exegetical Nexus
ἀπαρχή (aparchē) · G536
The firstfruits — the first sheaf of the harvest, brought to the temple while the rest of the crop still stood in the field. It was not a sample of what might happen. It was the opening instalment of what was already happening, and the guarantee of the rest. Paul calls the risen Christ the firstfruits of them that slept, which means the Christian dead are not a separate hope but the remainder of one harvest already begun.
More on ἀπαρχή · G536 →(KJV)
But now is Christ risen. After eight verses of ruthless hypotheticals, Paul turns on a single adversative and never looks back.
The common misreading
The disciples were grieving men who saw what they desperately wanted to see. Visions of the recently dead are common.
They are, and the parallel breaks in three places. Grief visions come to those expecting them; these came to a persecutor on the Damascus road () and to a brother who had not believed (). They come to individuals; this came, on Paul's account, to more than five hundred at once (), most of whom he says are still alive and can be asked. And grief visions do not empty tombs. The authorities in Jerusalem had every motive and every opportunity to end the movement in an afternoon by producing a body, and the earliest counter-story they circulated conceded the one point that mattered: the tomb was empty. They argued about where the body had gone, not whether it was gone.
The claim made to everyone
Paul told the philosophers at Athens that the resurrection is not merely a comfort to those who accept it but a summons to those who have not heard of it.
(KJV)
He hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead. Assurance — evidence offered, not merely a claim asserted.
The Altar
If you are weighing Christianity, weigh it here. Not at the miracles you find difficult, not at the parts of church history you find shameful — here, at the tomb. Everything else is downstream of this one question, and it is a question about what happened, not about what you find meaningful.
If you already believe it, let it do the work it was given to do. Your acceptance with God does not rest on how convinced you feel this morning. It rests on a verdict the Father delivered publicly, on a particular Sunday, outside a particular city — and He has not revised it since.
Scriptures cited
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All quotations are from the King James Version.