Still A Christian: I Believe

The Christian story is beautiful. And if we lived it out the world would be a place of greater human thriving. That was the bottom line of my post last week, Why I Am Still a Christian.

I got some good pushback, and realized that I needed to come clean about a couple more things. Because my reasons for persisting in Christianity don’t simply boil down to a wish that this kind of story would be true.

I do believe.

The Resurrection

For all my preference for defining Christianity for our faithfulness to Jesus rather than statements of belief, I do think that there is one article of faith that is inherent to being a Christian. It goes something like this:

Jesus the crucified Messiah is the resurrected Lord over all.

Ok, so maybe I squeezed in two or three things into that sentence. But still.

I believe that God raised Jesus from the dead.

For the purposes of answering the question, “Why am I still a Christian?” the most important implication for me is this: if they found Jesus’ body lying in a tomb tomorrow this would so demonstrably falsify Christianity that I would no longer be a Christian.

I’m not talking about the spirit of Jesus rising in his followers’ hearts. I’m not talking about Jesus’ spirit being liberated from his body to live and reign with the spiritual Father forever.

I’m talking about a body being raised and, yes, transformed. But a real body nonetheless.

If I won’t know my savior when I come to him by the mark where the nail has been, then this story is not true.

Not Just a Wish

When I was laying out that whole bit about the beauty of the Christian story I zeroed in on the hope it creates:

It’s the story that tells us that if we will give up our lives we will find them in ways beyond our imagining.

Because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, I don’t think that this is just a thin wish. It is a robust hope. Resurrection is not simply the fact that Jesus’ body is no longer in a tomb. It is the promise that God looks on the self-giving, loving acts of all God’s children and meets those with the surprise of new life that can only come from God’s hand.

Resurrection means that there is a God who oversees and approves and commends and celebrates the self-giving love of Jesus. It means that this same God is calling on us to entrust ourselves in the same way. It means that those who dare to follow on the way of the cross will find a life more worth living both in this lifetime and the one to come.

Resurrection means that in places of apparent death (a desert with no food) life can, in fact, spring forth (in five loaves being turned into a feast for thousands).

Resurrection means that in the spirits of the living dead (all of us, at some point or other, carrying around our guilt and shame), new life’s light can begin to dawn (in forgiveness and honor).

And these things can come not just through a mind game but from the hand of God itself. If Jesus has been raised from the dead.

Jesus Is Lord

The resurrection says something about God. It also says something about Jesus. Jesus’ resurrection is his enthronement. It is God’s great “I don’t think so” to the world’s powers attempts to silence and liquidate God’s Messiah.

God has the last word. And God speaks that last word by exalting Jesus to the literal place of glory and honor that was figuratively held by Israel’s royal (or prophetic) line: God’s right-hand man.

“Jesus is Lord” is not an invitation. It is a statement about a homeless, executed Jew being incorporated into God’s own rule over the cosmos.

It means that in whatever sense we confess that God rules over the world, Jesus is the agent of that rule.

The Jesus who did not spare his own life but gave himself up for us all is the one who will ensure that if we follow his steps along the way of the cross that we, too, will find the life that was given to him.

This is why the resurrection is at the heart of Christian faith: if Jesus is not raised from the dead then Jesus is neither Lord nor Messiah. Nor is there any hope for those who walk in his way.

Beloved Children

Among other things, the resurrection was Jesus’ adoption. It was his adoption into the royal family of God. It was when he, like the Davidic kings before him, was “begotten” into the family of God, enthroned to rule, and given the Spirit by which he would faithfully rule. (This is all Paul, I know that the Gospels say the same things about Jesus through his baptism [Mark] or birth [Matthew, Luke].)

This is not how most of us think about Jesus’ sonship most of the time. We tend to think in eternal categories. But recognizing the connection with resurrection is crucial—it’s how we can see that the “sonship” (include “daughtership” in that word, but know that daughters, too, get the full rights of firstborn sons) God gives to each of us is a share in the “sonship” that God gives first to Jesus.

I do believe in the Spirit. It’s the Spirit of power, and Spirit of sonship, by which Jesus was raised (Romans 1:4). And it’s the same Spirit by which our own filial relationship to God is marked.

I’m backing my way into this one, through the resurrection, through union with Christ. But here’s the bottom line: I do believe that I am God’s beloved son.

In my post I said that I don’t have a ton of daily “connections” with or “experiences” of God. That’s true. But I have had some. One of the most vivid was a voice in my head interrupting a prayer to tell me that God loves me.

Of course, it’s possible to interpret our experiences to death, but the knowledge that I am a beloved child of God is something that I remind myself daily and strive to have transform my self-understanding and posture in the world.

A Commitment to the Cosmos

The resurrection of Jesus means, in the Christian story, that “new creation” has begun. A (re)new(ed) humanity is being created for a world that will endure.

This, in turn, means that God’s project is bigger than our hearts and souls. It means that God’s is a worldwide project, a commitment to making God’s “mercies flow far as the curse is found.”

So that bit about loving the beauty of this story, and it offering us a bold dare to act in a radical, different way so as to transform the world—the reason I see that in the story is the same reason I think the story is true enough to follow. Jesus has been raised from the dead.

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