THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION.

Max I. Reich

[The Friends, (Philadelphia), Eleventh Month 16, 1916.]

This Document is on The Quaker Writings Home Page.

There is an orderly progress of teaching concerning the Resurrection in the New Testament. In the Gospels we have the historical fact of the Resurrection. In the Acts, the proclamation of that fact as the great demonstration of the truth, of the Gospel In the Epistles the doctrine, the spiritual significance and meaning of the Resurrection are unfolded to the churches who had already been gathered into the faith of the Risen Lord of Glory. The Resurrection of Christ was set forth as a witness to Christ's personal glory and to the efficacy of His death It was also regarded as a pledge and prophecy of the resurrection of His people. And above all, Christ's rising out of the darkness and bondage of the tomb was set forth as the symbol of our new life in the world.

Of course, to accept the veracity of the apostolic record is tantamount to the confession of the supernatural, that the spiritual world, which is the world of causation, has verily revealed its reality in the world of matter. The apostles were as certain as evidence could make them that Jesus had actually triumphed over death.

Now the story of Jesus as we have it in the New Testament is the record of the supernatural from start to finish. To eliminate that feature from it is to lose the record as history altogether. The simplest and perhaps the oldest Gospel (that of Mark) is, if anything, fuller of miracles than any other.

A non-miraculous Christ is substantially a mythical Christ. If we reject the supernatural in the New Testament; if we accept one or other of the various theories whereby from earliest times the apostolic testimony concerning the crowning miracle, the Resurrection, has been refused; we are driven to the conclusion that the most beneficent influence in history, that which has been the pioneer and safeguard of civilization in every progressive land, is the result of a bundle of myths.*

But while no event in history universally accepted to have actually occurred can produce stronger evidence for itself than the resurrection of Christ the mere belief in it did not suffice for the apostles. Paul longed to know "the power of His resurrection." He called it "the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe." If the mighty power of God did actually triumph in the grave of Jesus; if that dishonored and crucified body, wrapped in linen clothes by loving hands, and laid in the rock-hewn sepulchre, was really raised, leaving behind the cerements of death; the angel coming to roll away the stone not to let the Lord out, but to show to the weeping women that He had already risen; if the Way the garments were left, showed how complete the victory over death, no sign of a conflict even in the grave; and that they were left at all, an evidence that the body had not been stolen, but that it had slipped out of its wrappings as a butterfly slips out of the chrysalis, a "spiritual" body, unhampered by material obstacles; then we have an Evangel to "souls in prison." The power that acted then is available to-day to deliver souls in the grip of moral evil, energizing them to walk as "risen with Christ" in newness of life.

That was the preaching that established the Church. It was carried by the apostles into the great pagan world. It explains the very existence of Christianity. The passing on of the teaching of Jesus only would not have produced such results. The presentation of Jesus as a mere pattern to copy would have been a mockery to men struggling with their lower nature The glad tidings were that the death and resurrection of Christ had liberated and set in motion spiritual forces available for every man, even if in the lowest depths of despair, to lift him out, as he by faith takes hold of that power, and to raise him up as a personal witness in his own experience to the historical reality of what took place outside Jerusalem in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, on that blessed Easter morn.



*There is the theft or imposture theory (started by the Jews). The swoon theory (adopted by Mahomet). The hallucination or self-hypnotization theory (advanced by the older materialists). The ghost or apparition theory (the modern spiritualist explanation). It is not part of my present task to deal at seriatim with these ancient and modern forms of unbelief. Their irrationalism has been shown up over and over.