The long struggle between nature and spirit was concentrated climactically in the body of Jesus, and by His bodily resurrection from death and the grave — and what other kind of resurrection from the grave could there be? — victory is shown to remain with .spirit. Death itself, the crowning manifestation of the seeming victory of material forces over spirit, has been vanquished and over- come ; and this supreme and crucial revelation of the power and character of God sheds its trans- figuring light over all other revelation in nature and history, illuminating the mysteries of life here and of destiny hereafter. By the Resurrection assurance of personal immortality is given to men, and the present life in the fullness of its embodied existence is lifted above the vicissitudes of time and invested with infinite meaning and eternal value. ' Wherefore ' — such is the conclusion of St. Paul's great argument in the Resurrection chapter in 1 Cor. — ' be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord ' (IS'"'). In a word, the resurrection of Christ was for the apostolic mind the one fact in which the world and history arrived at unity, consistency, coherence ; the pledge and the guarantee of ' the gathering together in one of all things in Christ ' (Eph 1'°). It was the breaking in upon human life of a new world of triumph and hope, in which were contained at once the pledge and the grounil of the consummation of God's purpose for the world. Hence the vitalizing and energizing opti- mism of the apostolic outlook on life — ' born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead '(IP P).
That the Resurrection holds this place of cen- trally determinative importance in the Apostolic Church is a fact which, if not always sufficiently realized by the friends of Christianity in subsequent centuries, is at all events acknowledged by her opponents. D. F. Strauss, e.g., the most trenchant and remorseless of her critics in dealing with the Resurrection, acknowledges that it is the 'touch- stone not of lives of Jesus only, but of Christianity itself,' that it 'touches all Christianity to the quick,' and is 'decisive for the whole view of Christianity' (New Life of Jesus, Eng. tr., 2 vols., London, 1865, i. 41, 397). If this goes, all that is vital and essential in Christianity goes ; if this remains, all else remains. And so through the centuries, from Celsus onwards, the Resurrection has been the storm centre of the attack upon the Christian faith. The character of this attack has varied from age to age. To-day it differs in im- portant respects from what it was even fifteen or twenty years ago. The application of new and more stringent methods of criticism to the evidence,
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the rich store of new material provided through recent researches in comparative religion and mythology, the re-discovery of .Iiidaistic apoca- lyptic literature, and the new interest in the psychology of relifjion — all this has given 'anew face' to the critical attack.
It is not, indeed, that the apostolic belief in the resurrection of Christ, or the centrality of this belief to Apostolic Christianity, is denied. Tliese are admitted on all sides as incontest- able. What is called in question is the v;ilidity of tlie belief, the historical reality of tlie fact or facts on which the belief was based. It is held that in the light of the new critical inetliods applied to the evidence, and the new knowledge made accessible to us to-day in the light of what is generally, though ambiguously, called 'modern thought,' it is no longer possible for us to believe in the Resurrection as the apostles believed in it. In particular, in much present-day discussion it is maintained that, in view of modern scientific- historical criticism of the evidence, it is impossible to believe in the resurrection of Christ in any other sense than that of a spiritual resurrection. The result is that to-day we are faced with this somewhat new situation, that not by the opponents of Christianity only, but by some of its most honoured supporters and advocates in their ellort to recommend Christianity to the ' modern mind,' the bodily resurrection of Christ is denied, or minimized as forming no vital or essential part of the Christian faith.
We shall first of all examine the nature and extent of the historical evidence which is pre- sented in the apostolic writings for the fact of the Resurrection, and thence educe the nature or character of the apostolic belief in the fact. Thereafter we shall consider the meanin" or signifi- cance of the Resurrection for Apostolic Christianity — this in itself is part of the apostolic evidence for the fact, as the true nature of a cause becomes apparent only in its eti'ects — and finally examine the main critical attempts to explain the belief without acknowledging the fact. In the course of the inquiry the conviction will be expressed and supported that the recorded evidence for the resurrection of Christ, though in many ways dis- appointingly meagre and when critically examined not devoid of ' contradictions,' or ' discrepancies,' is yet adequate and sufficient for the purpose in view, and that those critics who come to negative conclusions do so less because of difficulties con- nected with the evidence than because of pre- suppositions or /ij-oywrftcirt of a dogmatic or philo- sophical character with which they come to the examination of the subject. The evidence avail- able for the resurrection of Christ, it is recognized, can appeal aright only to those to whom the fact has a significance altogether different from that which an ordinary fact of human history can ever possess. Mere historical evidence is of itself in- competent to generate true Christian faith in the Resurrection. This depends on anterior and prior considerations determining our religious attitude to the fact — upon our philosophy of life and, in the last resort, upon our estimate of Jesus Christ Himself.