A recent email advertisement promised to provide helpful responses to the four main reasons why people reject the resurrection. So, I deleted the email.
Was I not interested in what the four reasons might be? Would it not be good to know where doubters stand in order to convince them of God’s truth? Do I not care about the salvation of the lost? Those are all good questions which are basically irrelevant to the issue.
For centuries Christians have sought to explain God’s salvific actions in Jesus Christ in ways which they hoped would make sense to non-believers. To do so, one usually borrows on human philosophy, experience, religion, or other aspects of sinful human life to make Jesus somehow more understandable, relevant, intellectually credible, and so forth.
Why Christians do this is understandable and not understandable at the same time. On one hand, Christians want to communicate the gospel to other people so that they may believe, and if something “stands in the way,” then Christians try to work around such obstacles. On the other hand, the gospel and the faith are matters solely the prerogative of the Holy Spirit through the gospel. He creates faith where and when he wills.
Compounding the problem of the church’s mission in general is the particular nature of Christian mission. As St. Paul reminds, “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles …” (I Cor 1:23). Despite all human efforts, the cross cannot be made into something which it is not, and God’s action on the cross cannot be made to make any sense to sinners. The cross signifies the reality of the death of God’s son, and likewise it signifies the reality of death to sinners.
God’s action on the cross makes no sense to sinners because we are so enmeshed in our sin that we cannot see the removal of our sin as anything but the removal of life itself. So, to save our skins, so to speak, we remove sin from the equation, gold plate the cross, and turn the gospel into self-help strategies of one form or another to make the faith attractive or relevant or meaningful or … Then we ask ourselves, “How in the world did God get it so wrong on the cross?”
Saving our skins, however, seems to be an ironic illusion. None of us gets out of life alive. At best, we can just forestall death as best as we can, which in the end is not terribly successful. Despite humanity’s monumental failure to overcome sin and death, it has never become quite convinced of the resurrection as God’s overwhelming solution to death. Perhaps this is the case because human beings must pass through death to be resurrected. So, from that perspective, it might not seem like much of a solution. Thus, in that regard the resurrection makes even less tangible sense than the cross. Why, then, should Christians attempt to explain either one at all to non-believers, much less attempt to counter the top four objections to the resurrection (top four by whose counting)?
There is one and only one reason why people object to the cross and the resurrection. It is the nature of sinners to reject God. Trying to make God’s actions in Christ’s cross and resurrection understandable to others is, in fact, just another expression of human sin. In so doing, sinners act as God’s intermediary, and like Adam and Eve in the garden seek to be like God, thinking that they know good from evil. Our personal, church, and world histories show how misguided that notion is.
St. Paul did not engage in explanations or apologetics. Instead, he preached Christ crucified. He unapologetically and unashamedly communicated to others what God has done in Christ because if there had been another way to express the depths of God’s love and forgiveness to sinners, God would have taken it. So, let us also prepare unashamedly to teach and preach Christ crucified and resurrected so that we and others may have a living faith in the one true living God.
