Why Christians can believe that Jesus rose from the dead

 Unusually brief 'blood moon' lunar eclipse happens this Saturday

Christianity is not and cannot be a faith of “biblical fundamentalism”, because the Bible is a work of symbolism and mythology that does not contain “evidence” — or, if it does, it does so accidentally. But the moral and spiritual truths that have lit up countless human lives for the past 2,000 years are intimately entwined, in these narratives, with the conviction that “the Lord is risen indeed”.

The Easter story, the resurrection and the gospel truth

AN Wilson

Why Christians can believe that Jesus rose from the dead

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Orthodox Christians take part in the ‘holy fire’ Easter ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City

The Easter vigils — in both the Orthodox east and the Catholic west — begin in complete darkness, usually outside a church building. A fire is lit. From this blaze the priest ignites a taper and intones: “The Light of Christ!” With this taper is lit a neighbour’s candle. That neighbour passes it on to another. Little by little, a darkened church is irradiated by little patches of light, which eventually fill the whole building. Later in these ceremonies, all the lights go up, and the resurrection is proclaimed. The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed! The symbolism rings true. For while Christianity is sometimes spoken of as one of the “religions of the book” — the other two being Judaism and Islam — it would be more accurate to call the Christian Bible the “book of the people”. Christianity, although it treasures the scriptures of the Bible, has always been an organic faith, growing from innumerable personal experiences of Christ, and passed from individual to individual.

The light of Christ is handed from neighbour to neighbour not only in the Easter ceremony but down the ages. The huge majority of Christians have derived their faith not from reading books but from contact with other people. One of the things that liturgy, or public prayer, does is link you and me now with all the many who have gone before us; not as a club, or a party or a political movement is linked — collectively — but as a series of flickering candle-flames, each distinct, each ablaze with a different light, though touched by the common source, which is Christ. Those of us who count ourselves (even if, as in my case, wishy-washily) among the Christian number do so because we have been shown the light by other Christian lives — by friends or family, or by lights in history. In my lifetime, three of the most impressive world events have been the collapse of the Soviet Union, the miraculously peaceful ending of apartheid in South Africa, and the US civil rights movement.

The profoundly Christian witness of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was led from arid atheism to belief by watching Baptists in the gulag reading the gospels on tiny bits of paper, was a major part of the dissolution of the Marxist materialist tyranny in Russia. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was overtly Christian, and the part played by Desmond Tutu makes him, for me, one of the great men of our times. The biography of Martin Luther King, and the fact that his (totally non-fundamentalist) prophetic reading of the Bible inspired his leadership of the civil rights movement, remains, to me, a very bright candle, passed on, when the idiocies or nastiness of contemporary Christians make me feel greater kinship with the agnostic majority. The Easter story, the resurrection and the gospel truth