But, it may be said, the Easter message, though tlius needful, from the point of view of the early Christian community, to re-establish their faith and thus set the Church agoing — all the more so that for them as Jews a resurrection without an empty grave was unthinkable — • is no longer nece.ssary to the Christian faith, and may be dropped without allecting it in any vital way. Essential to the first disciples, so essential that as a matter of history the Apostolic Church sprang from the conviction that the body of Jesus was not left in the grave, it is no longer essential to us to-day. The Christian fftitb, it is urged, is not bound up with holding a particular view of tlie relation of the Glorified Christ to the body that was laid in Joseph's tomb. Faith, it is said, is to be exercised in the Exalted Lord, and of this faith belief in a resuscitation of the Body is no vital part. This is the position taken up in the latest outstanding illustration of the attempt to conserve a spiritual Resurrection while denying or minimizing the fact of a bodily resuscitation — that of Sanday in his pamphlet Bishop Gore's Challenge to Criticism (1914). Sanday is of opinion that we ought to be satisfied with a heart-felt expression of the convic- tion that the Risen Lord as Spirit still governs and inspires His Church, while sitting loose to the question of what became of His body. In regard to the resuscitation of the body of the Lord from the tomb, ' the accounts that liave come down to us seem to be too conflicting and confused to prove this. But they do seem to prove that in any case the detail is of less importance than is supposed. Because, whatever it was, the body which the disciples saw was not the natural human body that was laid in the grave. . . . The central meaning of the Resurrection is just that expressed
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in the vision of the Apocalypse : " I am the first and the last, and tlie Living one ; and I was dead, and l>eliold, I am alive for evermore" (Kev 1")' (p. 20). All else in the ajiostolic representation is unessential for us to-iiay, and can be spareii. I'lie bodily Resurrection is but a ' symbolical ' repre- sentation of the essential fact, the result of the world of ideas in which the first disci]iles moved. Their world of ideas was one in which the Resur- rection was conceived as a bodily resuscitation. Their 'minds were steeped in the Old Testament' and their ' thoughts naturally ran into the moulds which the Old Testament supplied' (pp. 24, 25), with its belief in ' nature-miracles' gathering round great personalities in a pre-scientiiic age — a belief which 'perpetuated itself in the New Testament' (p. 27). For the first disciples, therefore, the 'nature-miracle' of the bodily Resurrection ' seemed necessary to the completeness of the idea, but it is so no longer.' It ' has done its work and can be spared. It is like a lame man laying aside his crutches' {p. 28).
Sanday's position maj' be further elucidated by reference to a sermon of his published some years previously in Miracles (London, 1911). ' It was in Jewish circles that the belief in the Resurrection first sprang' up. . . . But among the Jews the characteristic form of the belief in a life after death, or (as they expressed it) "life from the dead," was the Pharisaic doctrine of a bodily resurrection. This was the form of the belief which the first disciples had in their minds, and which naturally and inevitably shaped and coloured all their experiences. This was pre-eminently so with St. Paul, who before his conversion had been a zealous Pharisee. ... So it was in the last resort this Pharisaic doctrine that was taken over by the Christian Church, and that from the first dict.ated the form of the Christian con- ception. It could not be otherwise. It was the one alternative open to those who believed in life from the dead at all. In that mould the belief of the first disciples was cast, and it has remained dominant in the Church down to our own time' (p. 16 1.). But it is characteristic of our time to attempt ' to go behind this form of the belief,' to show how it arose naturally in certain circumstances, and to distinguish between the question of its origin and that of its permanent validity. ' And I for one do not feel that I can condemn those attempts. I do not think that we are called upon to regard the precise form of the Pharisaic doctrine as the last word on the subject. It is . . . only the relative expression or outward clothing of a Divine revelation. ... It was through the medium of minds possessed and dominated by these ideas, and, indeed, practically not con- scious of the existence of any other, that the first announcement that Christ was alive and not dead was gii'en to the world ' (p. 17 f.). But we have to distinguish between 'what the ancients themselves really thought' and 'what we moderns should think.' Indeed this is 'the main problem before us at the present day ' (p. 23).