I’ve been thinking about this lately. Usually, appeals to salvation emphasize the death of Christ as “payment” for our sin, this often coupled with commercial or judicial analogies. The resurrection if mentioned at all is more an after thought, a “confirmation” that payment has been made and accepted. My question is, can the resurrection be the primary object of saving faith?
I ask this because for me, emphasis on the death of Christ implies that I am a no-good piece of garbage who is so awful that God needed to die to save me from myself. On the other hand, the resurrection means to me the defeat of death, God’s “Yes” to humanity.
Your observation that resurrection is relegated to an after thought in a lot of Christian thinking is spot on. Christian theology is almost invariably self-centered in its concept of salvation. How do I do get right with God: my sin, my faith, my eternal destiny (going to heaven); me, myself and I: the reference point of all religions, including the Christian religion. This is not the Gospel. The Gospel is for the whole cosmos proclaiming to all that the creator God gives all that He is to all that there is. The Gospel of Jesus the Healer/“Resurrector” will be proclaimed in a new way and will soon be made experientially real to all creatures to the furthest reaches of the ever expanding universe.
The time for religion, including the Christian religion with its diluted gospel (which is no gospel at all) is coming to an end along with human civilization. Just as we are now approaching the mega death of extinction before the end of this century–as sin, injustice and madness abounds and grows in intensity each and everyday–there is the approaching (parousia) revelation of the Crucified/Resurrected One coming to us and bringing “heaven” with him–to all of us; especially the lost, confused, mad and the dead. The Gospel does not dwell on our sins, rather it is the proclamation of the goodness of God and that His grace (unconditional kindness, generosity of God) has come to us irresistibly, unequivocally and forever.
The resounding YES! of God that will overcome all the no’s.
The death and resurrection of Jesus the Healer are two sides of the same coin (event). It is the singular event of Jesus preparing the way of YHWH to come to all who are lost, broken, sick and in need of healing (resurrection). Jesus did not suffer the dereliction and agony of Golgotha because we are so irremediably depraved that God had to send his point man to do the dirty work of making the way forward to “pay for our sins” and so that once sanitized (the stink of our sin and death is removed) we can then approach him in repentance and beg for forgiveness and receive His blessings and bounty. No, at Golgotha Jesus takes the very life and presence of YHWH to the ungodly (the dead who cannot repent); he brings to them Himself: Life; he brings them the clean slate of the new birth of resurrection–our sins are remembered no more, the former things (all the things that enslaved us and harmed us) are erased from the slate and a new story is written on the slate of creation.
At the moment of Jesus’ death the new birth/resurrection of the cosmos occurred, its reverberations rising from the abyss of death, first as the resurrected Jesus and from him across all the space-time of the universe. Soon it will be made manifest in a moment, a twinkling of an eye, across the whole universe–the dikaiosune (equitableness/fairness) of God fulfilled.
Rob, the point I was trying to make is that it is way past the time for repentance, one person at a time, there is little time left for the personal salvation approach offered by the Christian religion. The Gospel has been subsumed by nearly two thousand years of the Christian religion. The time is at hand for resurrection which is God giving his life freely and indiscriminately to all creation. Repentance is a selective, individualistic process (religion) of people coming to God. Resurrection is God coming to us, all of us.