The Resurrection Of God Incarnate

Whether or not Jesus rose bodily from the dead remains perhaps the most critical and contentious issue in Christianity. Until now, argument has centred upon the veracity of explicit New Testament accounts of the events following Jesus's crucifixion, often ending in deadlock. In Richard Swinburne's new approach, though, ascertaining the probable truth of the Resurrection requires a much broader approach to the nature of God and to the life and teaching of Jesus. The Resurrection can only have occurred if God intervened in history to raise to life a man dead for thirty six hours. It is therefore crucial not only to weigh the evidence of natural theology for the existence of a God who has some reason so to intervene, but also to discover whether the life and teaching of Jesus show him to be uniquely the kind of person whom God would have raised. Swinburne argues that God has reason to interfere in history by becoming incarnate, and that it is highly improbable that we would find the evidence we do for the life and teaching of Jesus, as well as the evidence from witnesses to his empty tomb and later appearances, if Jesus was not God incarnate and did not rise from the dead. The Resurrection of God Incarnate offers a clear and penetrating new perspective on Christianity's central mystery. It will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians, and all those trying to discover the truth about the Christian religion.

Whether or not Jesus rose bodily from the dead is perhaps the most critical and contentious issue in the study of Christianity. Rather than depend on statements in the New Testament, Swinburne argues for a wider approach.

Whether or not Jesus rose bodily from the dead is perhaps the most critical and contentious issue in the study of Christianity. Rather than depend on statements in the New Testament, Swinburne argues for a wider approach.

For too long contemporary theology has downplayed the importance of holding together the incarnation and the resurrection when thinking theologically. Paul Molnar here surveys the place of these key doctrines in the thought of several influential theologians: Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, Thomas F. Torrance, John Macquarrie, Gordon Kaufman, Sallie McFague, Roger Haight, John Hick, and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Molnar demonstrates that whenever the starting point for interpreting the resurrection is not Jesus himself, the incarnate Son of the Father, then Christology and Soteriology are undermined because they are not properly rooted in a plausible doctrine of the Trinity. Fair, comprehensive, and balanced, Molnar's analysis, following Torrance and Barth, highlights the details of contemporary theology of the resurrection linked to the incarnation and maintains the necessity of the incarnation in its intrinsic unity with the resurrection as the beginning, rather than the end, of Christology.

“Captivating reading that builds the faith while it fills the mind with greatness.”—Sherwood Wirt, former editor, DECISION Magazine One of this century's greatest writers of fact, fiction, and fantasy explores, in utterly beautiful terms, questions of faith in the modern world: • On the experience of miracles • On silence and religious belief • On the assumed conflict between work and prayer • On the error of trying to lead “a good life” without Christ • On the necessity of dogma to religion • On the dangers of national repentance • On the commercialization of Christmas . . . and more “The searching mind and the poetic spirit of C.S. Lewis are readily evident in this collection of essays edited by his one-time secretary, Walter Hopper. Here the reader finds the tough-mind polemicist relishing the debate; here too the kindly teacher explaining a complex abstraction by means of clarifying analogies; here the public speaker addressing his varied audience with all the humility and grace of a man who knows how much more remains to be unknown.”—The New York Times Book Review

In this groundbreaking work, John Hick refutes the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Hick, Jesus did not teach what was to become the orthodox understanding of him: that he was God incarnate who became human to die for the sins of the world. Further, the traditional dogma of Jesus' two natures--human and divine--cannot be explained satisfactorily, and worse, it has been used to justify great human evils. Thus, the divine incarnation, he explains, is best understood metaphorically. Nevertheless, he concludes that Christians can still understand Jesus as Lord and the one who has made God real to us. This second edition includes new chapters on the Christologies of Anglican theologian John Macquarrie and Catholic theologian Roger Haight, SJ.

The orderliness of the universe and the existence of human beings already provides some reason for believing that there is a God - as argued in Richard Swinburne's earlier book Is There a God ? Swinburne now claims that it is probable that the main Christian doctrines about the nature of God and his actions in the world are true. In virtue of his omnipotence and perfect goodness, God must be a Trinity, live a human life in order to share our suffering, and found a church which would enable him to tell all humans about this. It is also quite probable that he would provide his human life as an atonement for our wrongdoing, teach us how we should live and tell us his plans for our future after death. Among founders of religions, Jesus satisfies uniquely well the requirement of living the sort of human life which God would need to have lived. But to give us adequate reason to believe that Jesus was God, God would need to put his 'signature' on the life of Jesus by an act which he alone could do, for example raise him from the dead. There is adequate historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The church which he founded gave plausible interpretations of his basic message. Therefore Christian doctrines are probably true.