Here is my annual reminder that it’s OK to still believe in the Jesus’ resurrection—and that it took a bodily form (see links for conversation).
#1: It Doesn’t Make You Stupid
You can affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus while also broadly affirming science, while also being a rational and thoughtful person, while also having a nuanced understanding of the Bible and a broad view of the atonement, and while living and loving other people like Jesus did.
Affirming the bodily resurrection of Jesus doesn’t make you a backward, ignorant, or bigoted Christian. And it puts you in line with worldwide, historic, orthodox Christian belief and practice for last 2 millennia.
But if you are in fact a hateful Christian, then your life is a denial of the truth of the resurrection, and you are in danger of hearing the words from Jesus, “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”
#2: Witnessing to the Resurrection Means Living / Loving Like Jesus
I agree with theologically progressive-liberal Christians on this point. The risen Jesus continues to live in and through his followers, compelling us to live and love like he did. And failing to do so is failing witnessing to the resurrection. It is not enough to affirm the resurrection of Jesus. We too must live it.
But—in profound disagreement with them—this living and loving as Jesus did IS BEST EXPLAINED historically because of Jesus’ bodily resurrection that gave MATERIAL reality and MATERIAL urgency and MATERIAL conviction to living & loving as Jesus did.
The origin, power, and message of the early Jesus movement are best explained by a bodily resurrection, for only Western intellectuals—who love ideas—would believe that a ‘spiritual’ resurrection could change the world so profoundly.
#3: It is not a ‘Spiritual’ Resurrection
A ‘spiritual’ resurrection (where Jesus and us are raised spiritually, but not bodily) makes it an abstraction— merely an idea—that will sooner or later be replaced by other engines of transformation (ideological, political, or therapeutic) once the nostalgic comfort of having the benefits of Christianity without the oddities wears off (this is the generational tendency of mainline churches).
A ‘spiritual’ resurrection will tend toward a spiritualization of the church (spiritual but not religious).But we know ideas don’t really change people. Embodied practices do.
A bodily resurrection of Jesus fuels an embodied faith with the living practice of love. And this is what the early church encountered—the continuing, living, embodiment of Love so that they too could and would continue to love like Jesus did.
One More Thing: Don’t be a living Contradiction
People proclaiming Jesus’ bodily resurrection as central but who also have the most disembodied and abusive theology trouble me to no end, and are causing people to leave the faith in droves.