Even those of us who have a Christian paradigm subconsciously create a filter for how we interpret things out of our own modern context.
This produces a struggle for many modern Christians, particularly when it comes to thinking about subjects such as physical resurrection. In an article from Modern Reformation, Alan Noble expounds on this subject and offers us guidance on how we can approach such a difficult, yet crucial subject:
For the resurrection to be sensible to modern hearers, we need to know our bodies matter. Not that the endless preservation of our bodies matters, or the autonomy of our bodies, but that because of Christ's bodily resurrection, our bodies are valuable and good beyond this life—and that is difficult for a secular people to imagine.
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The challenge of the resurrection is that modern people really don't have a good category for this kind of event. If the point of the resurrection is to simply be evidence of Christ's divinity, then we can comprehend it. Evidence is something we get. Or if the point of the resurrection is to inspire us to overcome our deepest fear of death, we can get that too. But we don't have a category for historical events outside of the standard, closed physical world, let alone historical events that affect us specifically and personally. And that's what the resurrection does. In the resurrection, I was raised with Christ as a new creation. And while the particulars of this new creation may yet come to fruition, the fact that I was affected is an objective reality.
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We need a teaching of Easter that reveals the failure of the secular imagination and offers a compelling alternative. The nature of the resurrection has not changed in two thousand years, and neither has the need to preach Christ crucified and risen for our sins and justification; but how we understand this event has changed, as we have moved from a premodern world of porous individuals to one of buffered selves. Christ's resurrection does something and means something that cannot be captured empirically and is not dependent on our inner assent. This is a resurrection worth declaring.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2016 edition of Modern Reformation and is reprinted with permission. For more information about Modern Reformation, visit www.modernreformation.org or call (800) 890-7556. All rights reserved.
May 12, 2016
