My latest: a review of Wesley Hill’s new book on the resurrection

On Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Wesley Hill’s new book, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus. Titled “A Little Book About a Little Word That Contains the World,” it starts this way:

Only 25 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul wrote to some new believers that “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Cor. 15:14). The Resurrection is not the conclusion of the gospel; it is its beginning and center. Had Jesus remained dead, had the tomb not been empty, there would be no Good News to proclaim. In fact, there would be no news at all—corpses stay dead every day. One more wouldn’t muster interest.

For the apostles, theologian Michael Ramsey once wrote, “the Gospel without the Resurrection was not merely a Gospel without its final chapter: It was not a Gospel at all.” Put simply, “Christian theism is Resurrection-theism.”

It is passing strange, then, that so many people have tried so diligently to wrench Jesus away from the Resurrection—without, that is, accepting the consequences. Philosophers tried their hand at it during the Enlightenment, then skeptical biblical scholars took the baton and have been running with it since. 

When Ramsey published his little book The Resurrection of Christ about 80 years ago, he was responding to Protestant liberals who wanted to retain Jesus’ life and teachings but not his living presence. “The modern mind cannot accept the idea of a bodily resurrection for humanity,” he quotes from H. K. Luce’s commentary on Luke. (Ah yes, we meet again: the modern mind, that infallible fortress of scholarly prejudice. When you see its towers looming on the horizon, turn and run as fast as you can in the other direction.)

Click here to read the rest. Add Wes’s book to your reading list for the Lenten and Easter seasons this spring!

Denise Levertov: “Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell"

Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

By Denise Levertov

Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food—fish and a honeycomb.