There is a fresco depicting the resurrection of Christ in Istanbul, Turkey. The images are from the collection E+.
On April 4th, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a newly elected U.S. senator from Georgia, posted a message on his account that said the meaning of Easter is more important than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are Christian or not, we are able to save ourselves by helping others.
He later deleted the post, but not before a strong reaction from both conservative and progressive Christians. Some conservative Christians felt that the story of Jesus' bodily resurrection and the claim that humans can save themselves rather than God were offensive to them. Other Christians said that he was a theologian and pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church. They applauded him for sharing a message that included non-Christians.
I believe it is important to understand how Baptists hold differing views on the meaning of the resurrection.
The resurrection.
The story of Jesus Christ's resurrection is celebrated on Easter. According to the Christian faith, resurrection is the pivotal event on which God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day after he was crucified by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.
Matthew, Mark, John and Mark all give differing accounts of the events of the resurrection, but none of them describe the actual event.
The first message that Christ was risen from the dead was received by women who discovered the empty tomb. The narratives were passed down among the earliest Christian communities and were codified in the writings after Jesus died.
The Earliest Christians believed that Jesus was vindicated from the torture and death he had suffered at the hands of Pontius Pilate, and that he was now the "crucified and risen Lord", sharing in God's power to transform the creation and put an end to it.
Christians do not mean that Jesus was resuscitated. The New Testament scholar says resurrection means that Jesus entered into a new form of existence.
Jesus is believed to share God's power to transform all life and also to share it with his followers. The resurrection is believed to be an experience that happens to his followers as well as to Jesus.
The tile from the Cathedral of Siena, Italy has a picture of Christ standing before Pontius Pilate.
They were opposing views.
The doctrine of Christian faith has been the subject of passionate debates over the years.
The two major approaches were the liberal and conservative. Current perspectives on the resurrection have been dominated by questions such as "Was Jesus' body raised from the dead?" and "What relevance does the resurrection have for those struggling for justice?"
The emergence of these questions came after a European and North American movement that sought to adapt Christianity to accommodate modern science, history and ethics.
Liberal Christian theology was created to create an alternative path between the orthodoxies of Christian churches and the rationalism of other people.
If the beliefs of the resurrection of Jesus could not be explained against the bar of human reason, liberal Christians would be willing to revise them.
The Baptists believe in the resurrection.
Baptists are divided on the issue of the resurrection of Jesus. Baptists believe that no external religious authority can force an individual member to adhere to the tenets of Christian faith in any prescribed way. The person must be free to reject or accept the teaching of the church.
Baptists in the United States were split between the fundamentalist-modernist controversy and the other side in the early 20th century.
The Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist pastor who served First Presbyterian Church and later Riverside Church in Manhattan, rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection was viewed as a reflection of Christ's personality.
In 1922, Fosdick delivered his famous sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?", in which he criticized fundamentalists for their failure to tolerate difference on doctrine, such as the infallibility of the Bible, the virgin birthibility, and bodily resurrection, among others.
In his book, the late civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., states that he denied the resurrection of Jesus in his early years.
King wrote a paper while at Crozer Seminary in 1949 trying to understand what led to the development of the Christian doctrine of Jesus' bodily resurrection. The early followers of Jesus were the root of King's belief in his resurrection.
King argued that they had been enamored by his personality. The faith that he could never die was the result of this basic experience. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is not an actual event in human history and is simply the outward expression of early Christian experience.
Others within the movement disagreed. In 1976, conservative evangelical Baptist theologian Carl F.H. Henry argued that all Christian doctrine can be explained rationally and can be used to convince unbelievers. Henry argued that the resurrection of Christ was a historical occurrence, by appealing to the stories of the empty tomb and Christ's appearances among his disciples after his resurrection.
Henry used the two elements of the Gospels as historical records that can be verified through modern historical methods.
There are alternative views.
Christ with his arms raised, his head covered by a nimbus, wearing a tunic and mantle.
The liberal and conservative arguments on the resurrection of Jesus are not the only approaches held by Baptists.
Theevangelical approach is outlined in the book "Resurrection and Discipleship" by Baptist theologian Thorwald Lorenzen. He agrees with liberals that the historical reality of the resurrection cannot be verified in the modern sense.
Theliberation approach stresses the social and political implications of the resurrection. The resurrection is seen by Baptists as God's response to poverty and oppression, and they believe it to be a promise to liberate those like Jesus.
Baptists are not unique among Christians in engaging matters of faith practice. I think that Baptists may be different in how they engage the question of Jesus resurrection and why it matters for their faith.
The meaning of Easter goes beyond the question of what happened to Jesus, making resurrection a matter of what human beings can do to make a more just and humane society.
The meaning of the resurrection is a matter of what happened to Jesus in the past, which has implications for how Christians live out their beliefs today.
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