{"id":1796,"date":"2024-03-29T13:42:13","date_gmt":"2024-03-29T17:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theconversation\/?p=1796"},"modified":"2024-03-29T13:42:13","modified_gmt":"2024-03-29T17:42:13","slug":"how-christians-hold-differing-views-on-the-resurrection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theconversation\/2024\/03\/how-christians-hold-differing-views-on-the-resurrection\/","title":{"rendered":"How Christians Hold Differing Views On The Resurrection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\n Resurrection of Christ depicted in 14th-century fresco in Chora Church, Istanbul, Turkey.
\n

LP7\/Collections E+ via Getty Images<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption>\n<\/p>

By Jason Oliver Evans<\/a> of University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Every year, Christians from around the world gather for worship on Easter Sunday. Also known as Pascha or Resurrection Sunday, Easter is the final day of a weeklong commemoration of the story of Jesus\u2019 final days<\/a> in the city of Jerusalem leading up to his crucifixion and resurrection.<\/p>\n

Most Christians refer to the week before Easter as Holy Week<\/a>. In Western Christianity, Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, which commemorates Jesus\u2019 triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Easter is the third day of the larger three-day festival known as Holy Triduum<\/a>, which begins on the evening of Maundy Thursday, marking the night of Jesus\u2019 Last Supper with his disciples. Good Friday marks Jesus\u2019 suffering, crucifixion and death. Holy Saturday marks Jesus\u2019 burial in a tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea. The festival reaches its climax on early Sunday morning with the Easter Vigil and ends on the evening of Easter Sunday.<\/p>\n

As a Baptist minister and theologian<\/a> myself, I believe it is important to understand how Christians more generally, and Baptists in particular, hold differing views on the meaning of the resurrection. <\/p>\n

The resurrection<\/h2>\n According to the Christian faith<\/a>, resurrection is the pivotal event when \u201cGod raised Jesus from the dead<\/a>\u201d after he was crucified<\/a> by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.<\/p>\n While none of the four canonical Gospels<\/a> of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John describe the actual event of the resurrection in detail, they nonetheless give varying reports about the empty tomb and Christ\u2019s post-resurrection appearances<\/a> among his followers both in Galilee and Jerusalem.<\/p>\n They also report that it was women who discovered the empty tomb and received and proclaimed the first message that Christ was risen from the dead. These narratives were passed down orally among the earliest Christian communities and then codified in the Gospel writings<\/a> beginning some 30 years after Jesus\u2019 death.<\/p>\n The Earliest Christians believed<\/a> that by raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, God cleared Jesus from any wrongdoing for which he was tried and unjustly condemned to death by Pilate.<\/p>\n By affirming the resurrection, Christians do not mean that Jesus\u2019 body was merely resuscitated. Rather, as New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson<\/a> writes<\/a>, resurrection means that \u201c[Jesus] entered into an entirely new form of existence.\u201d <\/p>\n As the risen Christ, Jesus is believed to share God\u2019s power to transform all life and also to share this same power with his followers. So the resurrection is believed to be something that happened not only to Jesus, but also an experience that happens to his followers<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n <\/a> \n Christ before Pilate: Detail of a tile from the Cathedral of Siena, Italy.<\/span>* *\n DeAgostini\/Getty Images<\/a><\/span>* *\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\nOpposing views<\/h2>\n*** ** Over the years, Christians have engaged in passionate debates over this central doctrine of Christian faith.<\/p>\n ** ***Two major approaches emerged: the \u201cliberal\u201d view and the \u201cconservative\u201d or \u201ctraditional\u201d view. Current perspectives on the resurrection have been predominated by two questions: \u201cWas Jesus\u2019 body literally raised from the dead?\u201d and \u201cWhat relevance does the resurrection have for those struggling for justice?\u201d <\/p>\n These questions emerged in the wake of theological modernism<\/a>, a European and North American movement dating back to the mid-19th century that sought to reinterpret Christianity to accommodate the emergence of modern science, history and ethics.<\/p>\n Theological modernism led liberal Christian theologians to create an alternative path between the rigid orthodoxies of Christian churches and the rationalism of atheists and others. <\/p>\n This meant that liberal Christians were willing to revise or jettison cherished Christian beliefs, such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus, if such beliefs could not be explained against the bar of human reason. <\/p>\n Baptist views on the resurrection<\/h2>\n Just like all other Christian denominations, Baptists are divided on the issue of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Arguably, what may be unique about the group is that Baptists believe<\/a> that no external religious authority can force an individual member to adhere to the tenets of Christian faith in any prescribed way. One must be free to accept or reject any teaching of the church. <\/p>\n In the early 20th century, Baptists in the United States found themselves on both sides of a schism within American Christianity over doctrinal issues, known as the fundamentalist-modernist<\/a> controversy. <\/p>\n The Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist pastor who served First Presbyterian Church and later Riverside Church in Manhattan, rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus<\/a>. Rather, Fosdick viewed the resurrection as a \u201cpersistence in [Christ\u2019s] personality.\u201d <\/p>\n In 1922, Fosdick delivered his famous sermon \u201cShall the Fundamentalists Win<\/a>?\u201d rebuking fundamentalists for their failure to tolerate difference on doctrinal matters such as the infallibility of the Bible, the virgin birth and bodily resurrection, among others, and for downplaying the weightier matter of addressing the societal needs of the day.<\/p>\n In his autobiography<\/a>, civil rights leader and Baptist minister the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. explained that in his early adolescence he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus. <\/p>\n While attending Crozer Seminary in 1949, King wrote a paper <\/a> trying to make sense of what led to the development of the Christian doctrine of Jesus\u2019 bodily resurrection. For King, the experience of the early followers of Jesus was at the root of their belief in his resurrection.<\/p>\n \u201cThey had been captivated by the magnetic power of his personality,\u201d King argued. \u201cThis basic experience led to the faith that he could never die.\u201d In other words, the bodily resurrection of Jesus simply is the outward expression of early Christian experience, not an actual or, at least, a verifiable event in human history. <\/p>\n It is not clear from his later writings that King changed his views on the bodily resurrection. In one of his notable Easter sermons<\/a>, King argued that the meaning behind the resurrection signaled a future where God will put an end to racial segregation. <\/p>\n Others within the Baptist movement disagreed. Like his fundamentalist forebears, conservative evangelical Baptist theologian Carl F.H. Henry argued in 1976<\/a> that all Christian doctrine can be rationally explained and can persuade any nonbeliever. Henry rigorously defended the bodily resurrection of Christ as a historical occurrence by appealing to the Gospels\u2019 telling of the empty tomb and Christ\u2019s appearances among his disciples after his resurrection.<\/p>\n In his six-volume magnum opus, \u201cGod, Revelation, and Authority<\/a>,\u201d Henry read these two elements of the Gospels as historical records that can be verified through modern historical methods.<\/p>\n Alternative views<\/h2>\n \n <\/a> \n Christians hold a diversity of perspectives on Christ\u2019s resurrection.<\/span>*** ***\n Bruno Balestrini \/ Electa \/ Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images<\/a><\/span>*** \n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n ** ***Despite their predominance, the liberal and conservative arguments on the resurrection of Jesus are not the only approaches held among Baptists. <\/p>\n In his book \u201cResurrection and Discipleship<\/a>,\u201d Baptist theologian Thorwald Lorenzen<\/a> also outlines what he calls the \u201cevangelical\u201d approach, which seeks to transcend the distinctions of \u201cliberal\u201d and \u201cconservative\u201d approaches. He affirms, with the conservatives, the historical reality of the resurrection, but agrees with the liberals that such an event cannot be verified in the modern historical sense. <\/p>\n[3 media outlets, 1 religion newsletter.<\/em> Get stories from The Conversation, AP and RNS.<\/a>]\n Other than these, there is a \u201cliberation\u201d approach, which stresses the social and political implications of the resurrection. Baptists who hold this view primarily interpret the resurrection as God\u2019s response and commitment to liberating those who, like Jesus, experience poverty and oppression<\/a>.<\/p>\n Given this diversity of perspectives on the resurrection, Baptists are not unique among Christians in engaging matters of faith practice. However, I argue that Baptists may be distinct in that they believe that such matters must be freely believed by one\u2019s own conscience and not enforced by any external religious authority.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a>, a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good. .<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Resurrection of Christ depicted in 14th-century fresco in Chora Church, Istanbul, Turkey. LP7\/Collections E+ via Getty Images By Jason Oliver Evans of University of Virginia Every year, Christians from around the world gather for worship on Easter Sunday. Also known as Pascha or Resurrection Sunday, Easter is the final day of a weeklong commemoration of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4361,"featured_media":1799,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,14],"tags":[276,285,215],"class_list":["post-1796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christianity","category-religion-and-society","tag-christian","tag-easter","tag-resurrection"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Christians Hold Differing Views On The Resurrection<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Resurrection of Christ depicted in 14th-century fresco in Chora Church, Istanbul, Turkey. 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