If, further, God’s purpose of identifying with our suffering and providing an example and instruction of how to live is to be fulfilled, he must show us that he is doing this. For God to bring to life someone condemned for a certain teaching would be to express his approval of that teaching. And since belief in the Resurrection . . . was clearly the force which led to the spread of the Gospel throughout so much of the world, if God brought this about his doing this constituted an intervention in history to make the life of Jesus successful. If God raised Jesus and thus gave impetus to the Church, which centrally thereafter taught that Jesus was God Incarnate (which there are also independent grounds for supposing Jesus to have implied), he showed that it was God himself who identified with our suffering. While the Resurrection would vindicate that and all the other teaching of Jesus, since a crucial element of that teaching concerned the availability for us ordinary humans of life after death, it would provide the first example of that to which it witnessed. Jesus was the forerunner. If God raised Jesus from the dead, he accepted his sacrifice and vindicated his teaching.
Richard Swinburne, University of Oxford
Posted from Salt Lake City, Utah
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