Resurrection of Jesus
“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
Definition
The resurrection of Jesus is God’s act of raising Jesus Christ bodily from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion (Luke 24:46), the first of the several steps of his exaltation.1 The resurrection is not a detail among others in the gospel but its foundation: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17).
Confessional Definition
The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that Christ, having been crucified, dead, and buried, “remained in the state of the dead, yet his body did not decay. On the third day he rose from the dead with the same body in which he had suffered, with which he also ascended into heaven, where he sits at the right hand of his Father making intercession for his people.”2 The confession’s insistence on “the same body” rules out the resurrection being merely spiritual or figurative: the body that died is the body that was raised.
Biblical Basis
Paul hands on the resurrection as first-order apostolic tradition: Christ “was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and… 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” (1 Cor. 15:4-6), an appeal to living, checkable witnesses. The risen Christ himself refused any suggestion that the disciples had seen only a spirit: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). Bavinck reads the resurrection as the first of the “steps” of Christ’s exaltation (resurrection, ascension, session at God’s right hand, and return), by which the glory hidden during his humiliation is now made manifest: Christ is “the firstborn of all creation, the one who has the keys of death and hades, the one who has power to give eternal life.”1 Paul also grounds the believer’s justification in the resurrection specifically, not the cross alone: Christ “was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25).
Objections and Responses
Even if the resurrection didn’t literally happen, doesn’t the story still work to inspire faith? Paul treats this as incoherent, not a live option: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain… you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:14-17). A gospel that depends on the resurrection cannot be salvaged by treating the resurrection as optional to it.
How do we know the resurrection is more than a later legend the church told about itself? Bavinck points to how thoroughly the earliest church’s own memory contradicts a triumphant legend: “all the disciples had been offended by the cross; when Jesus was taken prisoner and killed, they had fled and gone into hiding,” refusing at first even to believe the women’s report of the empty tomb. Their public, confident proclamation began only after they were convinced, against their own prior disposition, that they had actually seen the risen Christ — so much so that being “a witness of Jesus’s resurrection” became a required qualification for the apostolic office itself (Acts 1:22).1