Really, Truly Resurrected

Over at On Faith, the panelists are weighing in on the question,

Do you have to believe the resurrection is literally true—that Jesus came back to life in his body—to be a Christian?

I have answered this before saying that I do believe in a literal resurection and that I think that this belief is at the core of the Christian faith as it fits not only with scripture and my own experience of God in prayer in worship, but this belief is also affirmed by being the only thing to explain Christian history. What else could turn a rag tag group of followers into fired up disciples?

N.T. Wright says in part,

The New Testament presents the resurrection of Jesus not as a bizarre event within the old creation, the present world of decay, corruption and death, but as the foundational, prototypical and generative event within the new creation, the renewal of heaven and earth which Israel's God had long promised and which was decisively launched when Jesus came out of the tomb (not, we note, as a mere 'resuscitated corpse', as some have accused me and others of suggesting, but in a transformed physicality that decay and death could no longer touch).

His full response is here: Resurrection Revolution.

Chuck Colson writes,

People will give their lives for something they believe to be true. They will never give their lives for something they know to be false. Had they not seen the resurrected Christ with their own eyes, the Apostle Peter would have been the likeliest candidate to become the John Dean of the first century church.

All of the panelist responses are online here: Resurrection.