THE APOLOGETICS OF THE RESURRECTION
Easter Sunday Evening, April 12, 1998
Matthew 28:1-20

From the very beginning, the Christian message has been argued. Those who proclaimed it to be true, supported their claim with arguments. I chose to read the resurrection account in Matthew because it draws attention to the fact that, as well, from the very beginning, the message confronted counter-arguments. There were people who were explaining away the Christian faith, offering reasons not to believe the claims that Christians were making, in this case, about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Jesus didn't really rise from the dead -- his body was stolen. And ever since there have been such counter-explanations offered: the swoon theory, various theories of psychological and spiritual experience among the disciples themselves, visions, hallucinations, etc.

I chose this text also because it highlights the very interesting and important fact that since the beginning, the arguments for and against Christianity have, to a great degree, been arguments for or against the resurrection. The entire edifice of Christianity stands or falls with this single claim: that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. And no wonder: it was the centerpiece of early Christian preaching as we read in Acts ("proclaiming the resurrection"), it was the demonstration of the significance of Jesus and his death on the cross, and it was the embodiment of the gospel -- eternal life in the fullness of humanity for those who trust in Christ.

In the generations since, as the resurrection fell further and further into the past, it was no longer possible to appeal to eyewitnesses as the apostles did or to tell a skeptical governor that he could check out the story for himself "for these things were not done in a corner (Acts 26:24-26). Other arguments came to be offered for the truth of Christianity. Especially as Christianity began to encounter hostile philosophies and religions, it became necessary to provide a more comprehensive argument for the Christian system: both as a historical claim and as a philosophy and theology of God, man, and salvation.

From Augustine onwards, the church developed these arguments in ever more sophisticated forms. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. [The idea of a most perfect being, which idea includes his existence, since a most perfect being must exist, is itself proof that he does exist.] Before you think that is pettifogging, be aware that most of the great philosophers of Western Civilization -- DesCartes, Leibniz, Kant, etc. -- have thought that in one form or another this argument holds. Alvin Plantinga has refashioned the argument in a way that has gained new attention in our own day.

Thomas Aquinas' five ways: four cosmological arguments (arguments from existence) and one teleological argument (argument from design or purpose). [1. A modification of Aristotle's "unmoved mover." It is impossible to conceive of an infinite serious of motions; there must be, therefore, a first mover who gets it all going, "and this everyone understands to be God" (ST I,ii,3). 2. or causes... 3. or contingencies... 5. The existence of design, order, and purpose in nature carries with it the assumption that there is a designer. [Even Voltaire thought as much: "If a watch proves the existence of a watchmaker, but the universe does not prove the existence of a great architect, then I consent to be called a fool" (EDT, 449). Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis has a chapter entitled, "The Puzzle of Perfection" (the wing of a bird; the eye; the mammalian kidney; ad infinitum). And so now the new cause of "intelligent design" being argued by Michael Behe, Johnson, etc.]

The moral argument we considered last Sunday evening. A personal, moral God, who both created mankind with a moral life and sense and holds man to account for his morality, is necessary to account for that fundamental moral sense that human life demonstrates at all times and in every way and for the universal human experience of guilt, of the uneasy conscience. In its negative form, made particularly relevant by the events of the 20th century, the moral condemnation of mass-murder, for example, a condemnation that transcends mere tastes and social mores, requires a foundation for moral judgment that has supernatural dimensions. Naturalism cannot validate moral judgment of any kind, much less the judgment of something as a monstrous evil. Without God and judgment human moralizing is pointless: a "preaching relativist" is a kind of comical self-contradiction. Through the years, many other such arguments have been added to these. (E.g. Pascal's "wager." In view of the consequences, it makes sense to "bet on" God's existence and Christianity's truthfulness. In spite of Paul's "if Christ be not raised...most to be pitied"!)

Now, as many of you know, all of these various arguments have been subjected to vigorous criticism, as much by Christian thinkers as by unbelievers. Sometimes it is claimed that the arguments are fallacious -- that is, actually unsound or incoherent -- though the fact that very bright and intelligent people continue to discuss them after these thousand years perhaps should make us doubtful of any claim that the arguments are actually worthless or impotent.

Others argue that the arguments simply do not prove what Christians desire to prove. For example, suppose you gave Thomas Aquinas his "first or unmoved mover." He says, "this everyone understands to be God." But, of course, that is not actually true. And the God of the Bible is not Aristotle's "first mover." He is much, much more than that.

Little was made of these types of arguments by the Protestant Reformers. With their high view of the effects of sin upon the thinking of man and with their confidence in the sovereignty of divine grace, they did not rest much of their confidence in the power of the gospel on the persuasiveness of arguments for it. But, they always acknowledged that such arguments and many others did serve, in one form or another, a useful purpose in lending encouragement to the people of God.

We may not be able to "prove" Christianity true in either the sense of a formal deduction from premises or in an unanswerable argument from history, but it is good for Christians and for non-Christians to be reminded again and again that many arguments can be advanced for our faith, arguments that the world of unbelieving scholarship has never been able to refute and which continue to serve today, as they have through the centuries, as powerful affirmations of the truth as it is revealed in Christ and his Bible. In other words, Christians are never asked to believe against the facts. The truth will always be on our side.

And this is so supremely with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We cannot "prove" that it happened in the sense of providing a set of unquestionable premises from which a conclusion of rigorous logical necessity can be drawn, but there are evidences for the resurrection which wonderfully demonstrate the reasonableness of the Christian faith. We know it is true because the Spirit of God has taught us that it is, but reality is one and it is encouraging to our faith to find the facts of nature or history so wonderfully confirming the truth the Scripture has taught us.

For example, there was a debate held at Liberty University in 1985 between Gary Habermas, an evangelical apologist, and Antony Flew a British professor of philosophy (he has taught at Aberdeen, Oxford, and Reading) who is one of the most serious and widely published critics of supernaturalism in the world. The debate was over the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus and was judged by ten American University professors, chosen for the wide spectrum of views and positions they represented. Five of the judges were concerned with the content of the arguments advanced (they voted for Habermas 4-1) and five for the manner in which the arguments were presented, the debating technique (they voted for Habermas 3-2).

One judge of the content of the arguments pro and con wrote this afterward:

"I was surprised (shocked might be a more accurate word) to see how weak Flew's own approach was.... When I completed my reading of the debate and the following dialogues, I was left with this conclusion: Since the case against the resurrection was no stronger than that presented by Antony Flew, I would think it was time I began to take the resurrection seriously. My conclusion is that Flew lost the debate and the case for the resurrection won." [Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate, xiv.]

John Polkinghorne is a professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University as well as an Anglican priest. He gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1993 and these were published as The Faith of a Physicist. In some ways the lectures were Polkinghorne's account of why a distinguished scientist would be, could be a Christian. And I was interested to see how the historical evidence for the resurrection figured so largely in his argument for Christian belief today.

What then are some of those arguments?

1. The Christian movement.

At one point in his argument (p. 110) Polkinghorne, discussing some of the counter-explanations for the resurrection remarks, "I must confess to an instinctive feeling that hallucinations, however vivid, could not have been the enduring basis of the vitality of the Christian movement."

How did the Christian church come to be? How did it achieve such a remarkable influence so quickly? How is the purity of its moral vision to be explained? Remember, the claim the Christians made, as we read this morning, was not that Jesus was a teacher of good and virtuous living, but that he was the Messiah, the Son of God, and had died for sins and risen from the dead. This is not Mohammed bringing a message about God; this is the Son of God who claims not only to be one with his Father, but to be the Savior of the world. And thousands upon thousands in the early days of the church took that astonishing claim seriously? Why?

A. It is not as though other pretenders did not arise claiming to be the Messiah or the Savior of some sort. They did in those days before and after, even in the first century. They rose, failed, and disappeared. Why did Jesus not suffer the same fate?

B. Acts represents the Jewish authorities as utterly unable to quell the fledgling movement, even large numbers of priests were entering it, and the message that was galvanizing all of this enthusiastic support was that Jesus had risen from the dead. Something like this must have happened, otherwise it is impossible to explain how Christianity had the momentum to leap out of Judea on to the rest of the world with such astonishing effect. But surely, a message that remarkable, that unusual, that "unbelievable" -- remember, the miracles reported in the Bible were just as unbelievable to folk in those days as they would be today. The Bible does not present us with a picture of rubes, credulous and easily led, who were quick to believe absurd stories. The picture the Bible paints is one of skepticism and astonishment overwhelmed finally by acceptance and belief.

C. The disciples themselves are presented as having their hopes completely dashed at Christ's crucifixion and having no expectation of what was to come. Men do not express themselves this way fictitiously (and in many other ways the resurrection accounts do not bear the mark of legend or myth -- the prominence of women, the restriction of the appearances to the disciples, the lack of public vindication, etc.).

Now many liberal scholars have admitted the force of these arguments and have felt compelled to explain how, without the resurrection, the disciples could have been transformed as they were so suddenly, how the Jewish authorities were unable to stem the floodtide of converts to Christianity, or why Jesus succeeded in being recognized as the Messiah. But, as Polkinghorne suggests, they ask for a great deal of faith to believe that the sort of perfectly ordinary phenomenon they propose could have produced such an effect. Such phenomenon never produced it before and haven't since.

The idea of the resurrection as not an "event" in the ordinary sense of the word but rather a "faith-event" in the minds of the disciples is, as Polkinghorne rightly says, a "wholly unconvincing interpretation of NT attitudes" [109]. He goes on, "[the] reading or remembering a passage of Scripture which speaks in a general way of a hope for the righteous beyond death would [not] have been nearly percussive enough to produce in Peter and the others the radical turn-around or conversion they had at that time" [110].

He then quotes a NT historian, E.P. Sanders -- a skeptic, but one who has no real explanation for what he recognizes is an astonishing development.

"What is unquestionably unique about Jesus is the result of his life and work. They culminated in the resurrection and the foundation of a movement which endured. I have no special explanation or rationalization of the resurrection experiences of the disciples. Their vividness and importance are best seen in the letters of Paul... We have every reason to think that Jesus led them to expect a dramatic event which would establish the kingdom. The death and resurrection caused them to adjust their expectation, but did not create a new one out of nothing. That is as far as I can go in looking for an explanation of the one thing which sets Christianity apart from other 'renewal movements.' The disciples were prepared for something. What they received inspired them and empowered them. It is the what that is unique." [Jesus and Judaism, 320]

Polkinghorne then responds. "I cannot rest content with that. It seems necessary and reasonable to go on to ask, What was the explanation offered by the disciples themselves? The New Testament answer is that they believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that 'To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs' [Acts 1:3]." [111] But see the point. Everyone realizes that there is something that has to be explained: how did the Christian movement begin and what rendered it so powerful and so pure? But the counter-explanations offered to suggest non-supernatural reasons all have about them the air of desperation, and, increasingly, skeptics make no real effort to explain. They simply evade and go on.

Here is J. Gresham Machen speaking of the suggestion -- made in various forms -- that the disciples did not actually see the man, Jesus of Nazareth, after his death, but only had a vision of him still living or believed that in some way his principles had survived him, or that they had had a hallucination and thought him alive again.

"I think we ought to understand just exactly what that vision theory means. It means that the Christian Church is founded upon a pathological experience of certain persons in the first century of our era. It means that if there had been a good neurologist for Peter and the others to consult there never would have been a Christian church." [The Christian Faith in the Modern World, 205]

No one doubts, of course, that very soon after the time of Jesus Christians thought that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead. It is theoretically possible that the Christian movement originated in a hoax, or a lie, or in the delusions of some highly credulous Galileans. But the improbabilities of such theories are so gigantic that not a one of these theories has ever really established itself as a credible explanation for this potent new religion that was exactly not the kind of religion that should have succeeded in gaining a hearing in the Roman world. These are the kind of explanations that seem reasonable only in university and seminary classrooms, not in the cold light of day.

I read not so long ago the new biography of C.S. Lewis by A.N. Wilson. The intriguing thing about Wilson is that he, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, claims that it was his study of Lewis that convinced him not to believe in Christianity. Wilson says that he was surprised by the weakness of the classic Lewis argument (which Lewis took over from Chesterton and others): aut malus homo aut Deus! For, as Wilson puts it, Lewis ignored the obvious problem that the only thing we know about Christ is what the NT tells us about him and that was written later and reflects not an accurate picture of what was true in Jesus' own lifetime but rather the theology about Jesus that was developed later. I then listened to another scholar comment on Wilson's criticism of Lewis' argument. He pointed out, first of all, that Lewis was one of the most highly educated men and one of the most brilliant scholars working in the world of his day and that he was particularly a scholar of ancient texts. There was probably no one in the world more capable of judging ancient texts than C.S. Lewis. He, of course, was well aware of the charge that liberal scholarship made about the reliability of the NT. He was unimpressed, as he had every right to be. Fact is, we are back to the point we are just making. It is an implausibility of the first order that the NT and the picture of Jesus in the NT is a witting or unwitting fabrication of a group of men who purported to be eyewitnesses of Jesus' life.

Polkinghorne is exactly right to say that such proposals do not provide an adequate basis or explanation for the Christian movement. The explanation these honest and good men gave, as astonishing and wonderful to them as it sounds to us, was that Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead. It is no small thing to explain how and why we are to set that explanation aside and still account for NT Christianity.

2. The same sort of argument can be made in respect to the Christian Sabbath, the Lord's Day.

These early Christians were Jews, so much lovers of the Jewish traditions that they were to find it a difficulty to make the transition to a Gentile dominated Christianity. Circumcision and the Sabbath day were the very center, the most precious elements of Jewish spirituality. Yet it was Jewish Christians that changed the day of worship to Sunday. What could have produced such a change? The more one knows of first century Judaism, the more remarkable that change becomes!

3. The same argument can be made as well about the NT itself.

Is this book the product of a lie, a hallucination, a mythical elaboration of the teaching principles of an otherwise unremarkable Jewish rabbi? Can we believe this, really, of Peter, James, and John? Can we face the fact of the NT honestly and believe that its origin lies in some development utterly unlike that which it itself claims. Can we believe these writers to be either frauds or dupes? Or can we believe them to be the inventors of this new faith and message? The astonishing claim made by those who will not accept the NT account of Jesus Christ is that Jesus Christ himself was not the inventor and founder of Christianity -- but Peter or Paul. And to believe that means you must completely repudiate what these men themselves claim and teach about Jesus Christ and their relationship to him? How can we justify doing that except with this one argument: (which is the argument these skeptics use, really) viz. we can't believe that message and so we must find another explanation that does not require the supernatural account of the NT.

4. The Christian experience.

The Apostle Paul is the supreme exemplar in the NT, but he was followed by multitudes of others. Machen's The Origin of Paul's Religion was a magnificent effort to make this simple point. You can't explain Paul, not really, not adequately, as a non-conformist Jew, you can't explain him as influenced by religious forces abroad in the world of that day, there is no explanation adequate to explain his astonishing experience other than his own straightforward explanation: viz. his encounter with the risen Christ. Do we have any other reason to doubt that this man -- this man of his thirteen letters -- is telling us the truth. He understood that nothing would account for the revolution in his life but that he had met Jesus.

These are arguments for our faith. And I want to leave you this Easter evening with this thought: after all the effort that unbelief has made through the ages to set these arguments aside, they remain and ever shall remain pretty darned good arguments!