I just read through the last few chapters of Acts this morning (catching up on a bit of tardy Bible reading), and found it interesting that Paul repeatedly identifies his hope in the resurrection from the dead as the reason he is on trial. 23:6: “It is with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial.” 24:21: “It is with respect to the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial before you this day.” 26:7-8: “I stand here on trial because of my hope in the promise made by God to…

I have been reading, and greatly benefiting from, the chapters on the resurrection in Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, which is drawn from his lectures which formed the basis of his Space, Time and Resurrection. So far Torrance has been the most helpful theologian I have read on the resurrection after Richard Gaffin and N.T. Wright. From p. 221 (italics his): “What Jesus Christ is in his resurrection, he is in himself. The resurrection was not just an event that happened to Christ, for it corresponded to the kind of person he was in his…

Probably the greatest thing I have learned from my study on the resurrection thus far is: by the Holy Spirit, the resurrection is at work in the Christian’s life through our union with Christ. I remember reading Richard Gaffin’s Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology, by far the best book I have read on the resurrection, and as I was struggling to understand his exegesis of Romans 6 and the very mysterious and difficult-to-wrap-your-brain-around truth of union of Christ, all of a sudden it hit me that union with Christ was not for Paul merely an analogy of…

“The parallelism between Christ and the believer is not simply one of similarity. It is that, but more than that. The resurrection of the believer is regarded primarily as the effect of the resurrection of Christ, yet not effect in the sense of some new and subsequent event, but effect as something that is already involved in the resurrection of Christ. Our resurrection has already taken place and is already fully tied up with the resurrection of Christ, and therefore proceeds from it more by way of manifestation of what has already taken place, than as new effect resulting from…

Charles Spurgeon on the neglect of the resurrection: “It has been set down as a well known truth, and therefore has never been discussed. Heresies have not risen up respecting it; it would almost have been a mercy if there had been, for whenever a truth is contested by heretics, the orthodox fight strongly for it, and the pulpit resounds with it every day.” Quoted in Adrian Warnock, Raised with Christ: How the Resurrection Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010), 22.

“Take away Easter and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring problems of the material world. Take it away and Freud was probably right to say Christianity is wish-fulfillment. Take it away and Nietzsche probably was right to say it was for wimps.” N.T. Wright, quoted in Tim Keller, The Reason for God, 221.

Milligan on the (circular) relationship between the fact of the resurrection and its theological meaning: “The Preaching of the Resurrection of our Lord by His Apostles was not simply a display of evidence. It was that, but it was more. It was the assertion of a truth of Christianity, which, by its meaning, unified and irradiated all other Christian truths. The two things reacted on each other. The fact, resting on its appropriate evidence, invited to the consideration of its own transcendental meaning; the transcendental meaning, showing the place of the fact in the Divine economy of grace, gave probability…