On the Third Day He rose again...

Did Jesus literally rise from the dead? Twenty-five years after the event St. Paul gave this unambiguous answer: "If Christ has not risen, our preaching is in vain and so too is your faith" (I Cor.15,14).

The message of the first believers was not the Sermon on the Mount; it was Resurrection. "I recall to your minds the gospel I preached...what I also received...that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day." (I Cor.15,1-5). The risen Christ is not a reanimated corpse; "what is sown perishable, is raised imperishable" (I Cor.15,42); but raised he was. An un-risen Jesus is an un-divine Jesus, and instead of Christianity what we have is an ethical teaching shorn of the supernatural, a pallid deism, or what Flannery O'Connor famously called "the Church of Christ without Christ," "where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.

By Thomas G. Bohlin  |  March 24, 2008; 8:38 AM ET
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Posted by: MESSENGER | May 14, 2008 9:45 AM
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