The Riddleblog

"The Gospel: Christ's Death, Burial, and Resurrection" A New Episode of the Blessed Hope Podcast (1 Corinthians 15:1-11)

Episode Synopsis:

If someone walked up to you and asked, “What is the gospel?, what would you say? If you cannot come up with the answer immediately, then please carefully consider what follows. The definition is given us in a concise form by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5. The gospel is called “good news” because it is the proclamation of a set of particular historical facts—Jesus suffered on a Roman cross, died as a payment for our sins, was buried, and then was raised from the dead by God after three days as proof that his death turned aside God’s wrath toward sinners. And all this, Paul says, is in accordance with the Scriptures (the Old Testament). The gospel is a nonnegotiable and fundamental article of the Christian faith. To deny it is to reject the Christian faith.

When Easter rolls around, I often look at the flyers and social media from neighborhood churches to examine the sermon topics for Easter Sunday. I am amazed and saddened by how many local churches virtually ignore the biblical emphasis on the empty tomb and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, which is both a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith and an objective fact of history. Instead, many churches focus on the so-called “Easter experience” of the apostles. If the meaning of Easter is the experience and change of heart felt by Jesus’s apostles—who at first did not believe, but then later did so—then Easter is yet another experience that we can share with the early followers of Jesus. For these folks, Easter is a time of new beginnings, a time to change our life’s course. Sadly, it is not the account of a crucified savior raised from the dead who came to save us from our sins.

But to remove the resurrection from ordinary history and proclaim it as an example to follow, or to downplay or ignore the fact that Jesus was crucified, dead, buried, and was then raised bodily to life for the forgiveness of our sins, robs the resurrection of any redemptive-historical and biblical significance. The first Easter is not about an experience the apostles had in which we can share; rather, it is the apostles’s account of Jesus being raised bodily from the dead. The empty tomb tells us that Jesus’s death was the payment for our sins, the new creation has dawned, and God has conquered our greatest enemy, death, by overturning the curse. Easter is not an experience in which we share; the bodily resurrection of Jesus is both a fact of history and a biblical doctrine that we must believe.

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Blessed Hope PodcastKim RiddlebargerMarch 10, 2025Christ's resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15:11Comment

Warfield on The Fact of Christ’s Resurrection

In an age when “spirituality” has replaced being “religious” (see, for example Michael Horton’s outstanding bookShaman and Sage), B. B. Warfield’s remarkable essay tying Christianity necessarily to historical events comes as a breath of fresh air—even if it has the slight sense of coming from more than a century ago.

Warfield’s essay, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historic Fact, begins with something quite obvious, yet too often assumed, overlooked, or rejected. Christianity is absolutely dependent upon what Jesus said and did (especially in his dying and bodily rising again from the dead), and not with any possible response to the message coming from the “spiritual self,” pushing me to find “my truth within” quite apart from the historical facts of the life of Christ. Warfield makes his view crystal clear in this regard.

It is a somewhat difficult matter to distinguish between Christian doctrines and facts. The doctrines of Christianity are doctrines only because they are facts; and the facts of Christianity become its most indispensable doctrines. The Incarnation of the eternal God is necessarily a dogma: no human eye could witness his stooping to man’s estate, no human tongue could bear witness to it as a fact. And yet, if it be not a fact, our faith is vain, we are yet in our sins. On the other hand, the Resurrection of Christ is a fact, an external occurrence within the cognizance of men to be established by their testimony. And yet, it is the cardinal doctrine of our system: on it all other doctrines hang.

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B. B. WarfieldKim RiddlebargerAugust 28, 2024Christianity and history, the risen Jesus, Christ's resurrectionComment

How Much Evidence Is Required for Christ’s Resurrection?

Here’s a simple and effective argument to use when contending for the truth of Christ’s resurrection.

According to John Warwick Montgomery . . .

The issue here is a miracle: a resurrection. How much evidence is required to establish such a fact? Could evidence ever justify excepting it?
Phenonmenally (and this is all we need worry about for evidential purposes) a resurrection can be regarded as death followed by a life, D. then L. Normally, the sequence is reversed, thus L. then D.
We are well acquainted with the phenomenal meaning of the constituent factors (though we do not understand the “secret” of life or why death must occur), and we have no difficulty in establishing evidential criteria to place a person in one category rather than in the other. Thus the eating of fish (Luke 24:36-43) is sufficient to classify the eater among the living, and a crucifixion among the dead. In Jesus' case the sequential order was reversed, but that has no epistemological bearing on the weight of evidence required to establish death or life. And if Jesus was dead at point A, and alive at point B, then resurrection has occurred.

From John Warwick Montgomery, “A Revelational Solution” in Human Rights and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1986), 154-155.