We All Have to Answer for the Resurrection

A letter to a deconstruction Christian.

Note: In celebration of Easter, here is a re-post from 2022.

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Dear friend,

I hear what you’re saying about being fed up with the stuff you’ve seen in the church. For the record, let me say that I agree with you that your youth pastor should have had better answers for your (very legitimate) questions about theology. When he said, “It’s just a faith issue,” I hope what he meant was that at the end of the day, arguments alone don’t suffice to make human persons see the glory of Christ in Scripture. If that’s what he meant, he’s right. But unfortunately I suspect what he meant was, “I don’t have good answers for you right now and wish you would stop asking.” In that instance, your youth pastor was not only unhelpful, he was actually unbiblical. The Bible never once substitutes faith in exchange for understanding. Sometimes faith must go where understanding cannot reach, but this is much different than using faith as an excuse to stop trying to understand.

As it happens, the resurrection of Jesus is actually a great example of this. It’s interesting to me that in all you’ve told me about your considering deconstructing, you have not mentioned once the biblical or historical evidence of the resurrection. You don’t say, for example, that you’re no longer convinced it happened. You haven’t said that some recently discovered research or evidence has changed your mind. The issues you’ve brought up have been more about your experience of the church. Now this is obviously important. But I think you might be missing something even more important. If you are on the threshold of abandoning your Christian faith, and you haven’t yet consciously decided that you no longer believe Jesus Christ is who he said he is, then it seems to me like you are risking making the same mistake your youth pastor made.

When you became a Christian, I imagine you did not think very much about the historical data supporting the reality of the resurrection. I know I didn’t. My own conversion centered on my realization that I was a sinner who had behaved in such a way to deserve death. Perhaps I’ll say more about this in a future letter. But for now, my point is that I came to Jesus because I realized he was exactly the kind of person that I needed. I needed someone like him who did what he did, and I needed him to have done that for me. And that’s exactly what I heard in the gospel. So I believed.

In that sense, I was convinced of the resurrection in an indirect way. But interestingly, the Bible doesn’t only speak of the resurrection indirectly. It doesn’t insist that we can only believe that Jesus is alive on the basis that we feel his presence in our hearts. On the contrary, Paul in particular insisted that Jesus’ resurrection was a historical event that could be subjected to historical tests of trustworthiness. Look what he says in 1 Corinthians 15:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Most New Testament scholars believe that the reason Paul name drops Cephas (Peter) and James is the same reason he mentions that most of the five hundred brothers who saw the resurrected Christ are still alive. Paul is including these as historical benchmarks that his readers can appeal to for corroborating evidence. This is important because it speaks to the point that first century Jews did not (contrary to popular perception) readily believe that anybody could come back from the dead. This was a historical event, and Paul knew that historical events need eyewitnesses and evidence. He didn’t rebuke Christians for thinking this. Instead, he gave them witnesses and evidence.

Now this goes back to the point about faith and understanding. In our conversations about deconstructing, you’ve referred to the way your church seems to be annoyed or uncomfortable by your questions. But I’d like to convince you that to walk away from compelling evidence of Jesus’ resurrection on the basis that some Christians in your life are mishandling your questions is not the compelling existential crisis that you think it is. In fact, I think such a decision would be to do the very thing you are criticizing: pitting faith against understanding.

Part of the problem here is that you, like me, were raised in an evangelical culture that didn’t consistently know what they were talking about when they talked about the gospel. For some evangelicals the gospel is simply the belief that life and society are better when people go to church, don’t get pregnant as teens, and vote Republican. When this belief is approached by serious theological inquiry, it tends to turn evasive. I’ve seen it so often.

It is perhaps exemplified by a question that gets asked in Sunday school a lot: “If you were convinced tomorrow, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jesus had never come back from the dead, would you still be a Christian?” I am always bothered by how many people I’ve seen answer “yes” to that question. I certainly would not. If I were really convinced in my soul that Christianity’s main claim was wrong, then to continue in Christian community, committed to its teachings and principles, would be to waste my life. Interestingly, you know where I get that? I get it from Paul. Paul believed that if Christ has not been raised, everything the church is doing is “futile.”

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Now let me ask you a very pointed question: in your thinking about deconstructing, how often have you thought about the resurrection of Jesus? How hard and long have you thought about the evidence for it, the meaning of it, the miracle of it, the implications of it for you and everyone you know? I think you need to consider this very, very carefully, because from the New Testament it sure seems like it’s the resurrection that makes Christianity. Which means that in walking away from Christianity, you are choosing to walk away from the resurrection. You are saying, “I don’t believe that.”

Are you ready to say that? Have you considered the historical documentary evidence for eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection? Have you asked yourself why the apostles would invent a faith in order to gain social capital and control (this is what many allege) and then say that faith depends entirely on a supernatural event that would have been easily falsifiable? Have you tried to put yourself in the shoes of the Christians who were marched off to the gladiator arenas and fed to lions? Would you have died for a metaphor? Would you have become a traitor to the state for a myth? Or would you do that for something you persuaded of deeply in your soul…perhaps because you’d seen it?

Let’s bring it home now. You are considering abandoning your Christian faith partially because the Christian culture you have grown up in doesn’t seem to take truth seriously. But is what you’re considering any better? Friend, you really need to consider the fact that walking away from Christianity without accounting for the resurrection of Jesus is an act of not taking truth seriously. You need to consider that the silly way some of your teachers have behaved is not, in fact, evidence that Jesus is still in the grave. The hypocrisy you see in the church, the worship of politics, the harsh way people are treated…none of this is good or right, but none of it puts Christ in a tomb. Friend, what are you considering doing is abandoning understanding in the name of your own kind of faith: a faith that life gets better as long as you don’t have to put up with these Christians anymore.

I don’t think you get to do that. Eternally, I think the question will be asked of each of us: “My Son rose from the dead. What did you do with that information?” No matter how many times you might have been discouraged from using your mind growing up, you can use it now. You must use it now.