The Resurrection

It is frequently asserted that the old reasoning on the evidences of Christianity, or of such a fact as that of the resurrection, will no longer answer in view of modern objections. It might have done, they say, fifty years ago, but the higher criticism has given a new aspect to the whole matter. Paley and Lardner did very well against the more shallow infidels of their day, but there has arisen a race of unbelieving Anakim far surpassing Hume and Voltaire. The defender of the Scriptures needs new armor to meet them. German rationalism has rendered all the old arguments obsolete. This is repeated continually. By sheer reiteration, often without the attempt to give a particle of evidence, the impression is produced, especially on the minds of the young, that there has somehow arisen some new and terrible form of doubt, some most formidable difficulty unknown to other times and unassailable by any former arguments. It is an undefined specter. It is everywhere haunting our modern literature, though taking no precise form. It is the shadowy presence of some new enemy never clearly seen, but who has rendered unavailing, it is said, all former tactics, whether of assault or defense. In defending Christianity, if it can be defended, we must take a new start and succeed on grounds differing altogether from the old.

Now this is all an impudent falsehood. We say it unhesitatingly. There is no new difficulty, or any so surpassing former difficulties as to be entitled to the name. There is no substantial objection to the Gospels, or to the Bible generally, that has not been known to scholarly and thinking men for more than a thousand years. Some aspects of Bible authorship have been changed; some ecclesiastical writings have been pronounced spurious, though very few that had not always been suspected; some new various readings have been discovered, but

in no respects, except in the most unessential points, have they changed the general aspect even of the critical field, much less that great argument, remaining the same from age to age because built on the unchanging foundations of our deeply investigated human nature. There is, in short, no vital, no essential difficulty, no one going to the root of the great debate, that was not as familiar to the learned men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as it is to the best scholars now.

Equally unfounded are the ignorant assertions, so often and so flippantly made, in respect to what science has done or is going to do. Owe modern investigations have furnished no stronger objections to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body than such as were familiar to Celsus, or even to the Corinthian sophist whom Paul seems to have had in view and who so confidently asked: “With what body do they come?” All that need be contended for is that it remains just where it was. The modern infidel has here no advantage over the ancient unbeliever. We may safely defy any man to show wherein the position of the argument has, in this respect, undergone any essential change.

Tayler Lewis.

Introduction to Nott’s “Sermons on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

The remembrance that our risen Lord was the veritable first fruits of them that sleft that as he rose shall rise, tvill always fress on us the thought that the nature of his resurrection body must involve somethings at any rate, remotely analogous to the nature of the future bodies of his glorified servants. — Bishop Ellicott.

Besides the principles of which we consist and the actions which flow from us, the consideration of the things without us and the natural course of variations in the creature will render the resurrection yet more highly probable. Every space of twenty-four hours teacheth thus much in which there is always a revolution amounting to a resurrection. The day dies into night and is buried in silence and darkness; on the next morning it appeareth again and reviveth, opening the grave of darkness, rising from the dead of night. This is a diurnal resurrection. As the day dies into the night, so does the summer into winter; the sap is said to descend into the root, and there it hes buried in the ground; the earth is covered with snow or crusted with frost, and becomes a general sepulcher. When the spring appeareth, all begin to rise; the plants and flowers peep out of their graves, revive, and grow and flourish. This is the annual resurrection. The corn by which we live and for want of which we perish with famine is, notwithstanding, cast upon the earth and buried in the ground with a design that it may be corrupted and, being corrupted, may revive and multiply; our bodies are fed by this constant experiment, and we continue this life by a constant succession of resurrections. Thus all things are repaired by corrupting, are preserved by perishing, and revived by dying; and can we think that man, the lord of all these things which thus die and revive for him, should be detained in death, never to live again? Is it imaginable that God should thus restore all things to man, and not restore man to himself? If there were no other consideration but the principles of human nature, of the liberty and remunerability of human actions and of the natural revolutions and resurrections of other creatures, it were abundantly sufficient to render the resurrection of our bodies highly probable. — Pearson on the Creed.

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