Such evidently was not the way the Apostle Paul regarded the subject. To him the confession of Christ's resurrection was vital. It is his great argument in I Corinthians 15. The whole passage is of central importance, and shows us what the primitive Church regarded as the truth on the subject, before the generation which had been an eye witness of the resurrection had passed off the scene.
Now, when Paul declared Christ as risen, he did not mean merely that his spirit survived the ordeal of death. If that had been his doctrine, when he preached at Athens the philosophers would not have "mocked." The immortality of the soul was one of the corner stones of Greek philosophic thought. That was nothing new for Greek ears. But the resurrection of the body provoked their derision, as it does that of many today. The Corinthians likewise denied the bodily resurrection--not, as I take it, on philosophic grounds, but for graver reasons. They abused and belittled or indulged the lower passions of the body. They did not always remember that their body was the temple of the Holy Ghost. They had to be reminded that the body with which they had sinned would be raised again, and they would have to give account of the deeds done in the body. It was not done with when laid down in death. How practical and regulating then the expectation of a real resurrection!
And how tremendous in its consequences the fact of Christ's rising again from the dead! For here is the true starting point of Christianity. It is a new beginning, so that Christians still start the week with the celebration of the victory of their Lord on the first day, thus leaving behind the Sabbath of a former dispensation.
With Christ's resurrection the evangel stands or falls. "If Christ be not risen then is our preaching (i.e., the thing preached) vain." The Gospel message is emptied of its contents if the resurrection is denied. It is a hollow Gospel which leaves the crucified One unraised, it makes His crucifixion a defeat, when in reality it was His method of combating the kingdom of hell and His gateway to victory and enthronement.
Christ's claim to be the Son of God in a special and unique sense goes if He be not risen. His resurrection declares Him to be the Son of God with power. It was His sign that He was greater than the Temple, even the true Master of it. "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it again...He spake of the temple of His body." There was no element of corruption in that body, for it was formed by a special act of the Holy Ghost in the womb of the virgin, therefore also that Holy thing that was born of her is called the Son of God. That body could not see corruption, it was not possible for it to be holden of death. Death had no claims upon it.
The efficacy of His death as a propitiatory sacrifice goes if the resurrection be not a fact. And if this be so--"If Christ be not risen ye are yet in your sins"--your guilty past has not been wiped out, there is no justification, no peace with God.
Now, I ask, if (1) the miraculous be denied, if (2) the divinity of Christ be rejected, if (3) the vicarious sacrifice be reduced to a martyr's death at the most, is there any Christianity left? Oh, yes, say the critics: "You have His beautiful words. You have His lovely character. You have His holy example." But I answer: Where is the saving power? Conscious of my weakness, my soul's maladies, my sin and shame in the pure light of spotless holiness divine, I need more than beautiful teaching and the pattern of a lovely character. I want to know how a confessedly sinful man can become holy, and how the incubus of past guilt may cease to shadow my present and no longer handicap my progress into conformity to the likeness of the radiant holiness I see in my Lord! I must know the virtue of His death and the power of His resurrection!
This is the first great argument the Apostle hurls at the adversaries of the resurrection. He has others. We will not dwell on them in detail--the greater includes the lesser. But with the resurrection stands or falls the character of the witnesses. There are just two questions under this head:--
(1) Did the Apostles tell pious lies for God when they startled the world by announcing the resurrection of the one whom Jew and Gentile had combined to crucify?
(2) Were the apostles the victims of a delusion, believing their dear Lord to have come back to them as a Risen Man in the very body in which He was crucified and buried, which event never really took place, except in their imagination?
I answer: (1) Liars they were certainly not. If they were deliberate deceivers, they not only preached the loftiest, self sacrificing morality, they lived it. Such pure and unselfish lives have never been lived on the basis of hypocrisy and conscious fraud.
(2) Deceived they could not have been, for the simple reason that not one of them expected the resurrection. It came to them as a surprise and a shock; it found them unbelieving and distrustful. They did not hypnotize themselves into the idea.
The psychological state favourable for such a phenomenon was altogether absent in their case. The only reasonable explanation is: The resurrection was an objective reality, and not a ghostly apparition, or a mental hallucination, or twelve religious scoundrels playing on the world the confidence trick.
The faith of the primitive Christians was that the Son of God overcame sin and death (our two greatest enemies) in humanity, and that in His human nature the triumphant Christ is now glorified; and that His glorified condition has become the Fountain of a new life, the Holy Ghost in overflow to all who believe in Him as the Scripture hath said. This is the evangel worth preaching. It makes our faith solid. It delivers from sin. It gives us joy in the very presence of death and the tomb.