Resurrection: A Demonstration with Death

Published in 1953, J.B. Phillips’s fantastic little book, “Your God is Too Small” is a clear presentation of the reality , reasonableness, and wonder of the Gospel for moderns living in the Atomic Age. Thanks to the delightful country known as “Public Domain” you can read Phillips’s book online. The following is an excerpt of the book on the subject of the Resurrection, the central fact of human history.

…It is, of course, impossible to exaggerate the importance of the historicity of what is commonly known as the Resurrection. If, after all His claims and promises, Christ had died and merely lived on as a fragrant memory, He could only be revered as an extremely good but profoundly mistaken man. His claims to be God, His claims to be Himself the very principle of Life, would be mere self-delusion. His authoritative pronouncements on the nature of God and Man and Life would be at once suspect. Why should He be right about the lesser things if He was proved completely wrong in the greater? It is perfectly natural therefore that both Christians and anti-Christians should regard the question of whether the Resurrection really took place as the fundamental issue on which the whole Christian claim really depends. Argument on both sides has been continuous and vehement for centuries, and it is not very likely that at this distance from the event any fresh evidence, or even fresh opinion, will emerge. It does not seem to be a matter that can be finally settled by the most careful study or the most ingenious argument. The very lack of chronological arrangement and careful mutual endorsement that characterizes the stories of the Resurrection appears to one side as evidence of their slipshod and even imaginative nature, while to the other the same things seem to be the ingenuousness of those who were so convinced of what they had seen that they had no need to build up a foolproof body of evidence. Again, the fact that the recorded appearances were made only to those who were “on Jesus’ side” is enough for one group to conclude that they are of purely subjective value, while for the other it is plain proof that only those who are at heart reconciled to God can even see the reality of Life once it is detached from the present space-time limitations. We do not propose, therefore, to attempt to marshal the arguments on one side or the other, but merely to ask three questions which must in fairness be answered if the historical fact of the Resurrection is rejected.

1. WHAT CHANGED THE EARLY DISCIPLES? No fair reading of the records can deny that almost all the disciples of Jesus deserted Him at the disaster of the Crucifixion, and that afterwards, with their Leader dead and their hopes at zero, they were living in considerable personal apprehension. Yet within a very short time we find them, quite a considerable body of men, filled with an extraordinary courage and spiritual vitality, defying the power of both pagan and Jewish authorities. They are proclaiming openly that they had themselves seen Jesus alive, not once, but several times, after His public execution, and calling all men to share their belief that this Man was indeed God. Nor was this a short-lived spurt of defiant courage, but a steady flame of conviction which baffled, embarrassed, and infuriated the authorities for years as the movement began to spread throughout the then-known world. It is surely straining credulity to bursting point to believe that this dramatic and sustained change of attitude was founded on hallucination, hysteria, or an ingenious swindle. We may thoroughly disapprove of the Christian faith, but it is impossible to deny that the early Christians quite definitely believed that they had seen, touched, handled, and conversed with Christ after He had been crucified, taken down, and laid in a rock-hewn vault sealed and guarded by Roman soldiers.

2. IF THE RESURRECTION DID NOT HAPPEN, WHO WAS CHRIST? Many people, who have not read the Gospels since childhood, imagine that they can quite easily detach the “miraculous” element of the Resurrection and still retain Christ as an Ideal, as the best Moral Teacher the world has ever known—and all the rest. But the Gospels, all four of them, bristle with supernatural claims on the part of Christ, and unless each man is going to constitute himself a judge of what Christ said and what He did not say (which is not far from every man being his own evangelist), it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that He believed Himself to be God and spoke therefore with quite unique authority. Now if He believed thus and spoke thus and failed to rise from the dead, He was, without question, a lunatic. He was quite plainly a young idealist suffering from [dreams of glory] on the biggest possible scale, and cannot on that account be regarded as the World’s Greatest Teacher. No Mahomet or Buddha or other great teacher ever came within miles of making such a shocking boast about himself. Familiarity has blinded many people to the outrageousness of Christ’s claim and traditional reverence inhibits them from properly assessing it. If He did not in fact rise, His claim was false, and He was a very dangerous personality indeed.

3. WHY ARE SO MANY CHRISTIANS SURE THAT CHRIST NOT ONLY ROSE, BUT IS ALIVE TODAY? Though this question may enrage the critic, it is a fair one. The common experience of Christians of all kinds of temperaments and of a great many nationalities for nineteen centuries cannot be airily dismissed. Men and women by the thousands today are convinced that the One whom they serve is not a heroic figure of the past, but a living Personality with spiritual resources upon which they can draw. A man may find difficulty in writing a poem, but if he cries, “Oh, William Shakespeare, help me!” nothing whatever happens. … But if he is at the end of his moral resources or cannot by effort of will muster up sufficient positive love and goodness and he cries, “Oh, Christ, help me!” something happens at once. The sense of spiritual reinforcement, of drawing spiritual vitality from a living source, is so marked that Christians cannot help being convinced that their Hero is far more than an outstanding figure of the past.

The fact that this conviction only comes to those who have [centered] their inner confidence on Jesus Christ seems to rob it of all validity in the eyes of the hostile critic. Yet if, by an effort of imagination such a critic would concede for a moment that the claims of Christ were true, he must admit that the phenomenon is logical. If Christ revealed the true way of living and offered human beings the possibility of being in harmony with the Life of God (i.e. “eternal life”), it must follow that anyone living in any other way is by that continued action incapable of appreciating the quality of real living unless and until he “takes the plunge” into it. A man may write and argue and even write poems about human love, but he does not KNOW love until he is in it, and even then his knowledge of it only grows as he discards his self-love and accepts the pains and responsibilities as well as the joys of loving someone else. “If any man will KNOW whether my teaching is human or divine truth,” said Christ, “let him DO the will of God.” [John7:17] Those who accept this penetrating challenge are convinced that Christ is alive.