I recently came across a blog post about an honest exchange between a student and a professor. Being at odds on various questions of faith, the professor asked him what would happen if it could be shown that the gospels’ claims of Jesus’ divinity and resurrection were simply incorrect?

The student replied, “it would shatter my faith.”

It’s a blunt response, but an honest one. In fact, even the Bible makes this very point:

…if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain….If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

–I Cor 15:14, 19 ESV (Full Chapter at link for context)

I’ve long felt that THIS more than any is the watershed issue in any discussion involving the Christian faith. We can go around in circles about the literary genre of Genesis or whatever today’s objection to Darwinism might be. We can quibble about what the word “world” means in the account of Noah, possibly differentiating between a true global catastrophe or a regional one. We can even discuss objections based on the various “evils” of the Bible and whether the Judeo-Christian God is a good moral compass or not. And, though this blog is only a small corner of the Great Conversation, I assure you we will.

But, while these issues are important to consider, they are not the crux of my faith. That core can be found in the simple fact that either Jesus was who he claimed to be and did what his followers claimed he did. Or he did not. And if he did not, then he’s at best another in a long line of moral teachers from whom I may learn a lesson or two but to whom I certainly owe no real fidelity. However, with his claims of deity and promises of the afterlife exclusively to his followers, I wonder if I could grant a discredited Jesus even that. In other words, without the Resurrection, Christianity is exactly the cruel and delusional fairy tale that the atheists claim it to be. And so it is important that we address this fact at the outset.

Some of you who have long been involved in such discussions may very well be rolling your eyes at this point, feeling you’ll have heard this all before. And you may have. Not being a historian of any sort, I will not claim that any of the forthcoming posts on this topic are any sort of original scholarship. However, as I stated in my introductory post, this endeavor is as much about me learning more about the objections to faith while exploring the reasons for it anew. As such, I hardly speak with any authority on the matter, but I hope you’ll follow along anyway, whether these ideas are new to you or if you’ve heard them all before.

And so I embark on this series which I’ll tag “The Question of Christ.”* I’ll warn you at the outset that the arguments for Christ’s divinity are cumulative so bear with me. In other words, those expecting me to produce the magic bullet of faith that shatters all skepticism within a single post or two will be sadly happily disappointed.**

In the continuation of the conversation above, the student turned the tables on his professor. When pressed for what his reaction would be if the student could prove the resurrection, the professor responded, “Randy, I don’t know. I don’t think it would change a whole lot.”

So hold that question in your head. Answer it here if you so wish. If Christ didn’t conquer death through his resurrection, my faith is a lie. If he did, what does that mean to you?

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*Because “The Case for Christ” was taken and I apparently am bereft of originality.

**Sorry, I misplaced the video evidence of the Resurrection.