Is the Resurrection Safe?

“Aslan is a lion — the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh,” said Susan, “is he-quite safe?”
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver, ‘Course he isn’t safe!
But he’s good.”

Last week, delegates to the LCMS’s 69th Regular Convention gathered in Phoenix under the theme “Christ Is Risen Indeed,” which was drawn from the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians.

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep... For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” — 1 Corinthians 15:20, 22

Rather than take a celebratory approach to this passage, the Convention decided to take an apologetic one. In the convention’s own Bible study, Pastor Timothy Pauls opens by citing a 2017 finding that roughly a quarter of self-identified Christians don’t believe Jesus rose bodily from the dead. Pauls reads this study and sees that a fear is at work in the twenty-five percent, a failure of nerve, he calls it, to hold onto a claim that costly. He answers with confidence that the Synod can supply what they lack.

But is confidence actually the fix Pauls makes it?

Eternal Denial

What’s actually driving people to let go of the bodily resurrection in the first place? At the very start, we have to acknowledge that “failure of nerve” is an uncritical judgment from Pauls. It shows a lack of curiosity about people with whom he disagrees. I suggest something else is happening. There are three potential explanations I can think of.

First, some who deny a bodily resurrection appreciate our cultural and philosophical inheritance from Greek concepts, especially within a Christian context. A primary example of this is the immortal soul. The soul comes from the Greek philosopher Plato.^[1] His Phaedo argues the soul is simple and akin to the eternal Forms, incapable of death by nature. In Republic, he imagines it as three ranked parts (reason, spirit, and appetite) with reason meant to rule. This soul entered Christian anthropology most directly through Augustine, who said of Plato, “And therein I read, not indeed in the same words, but to the selfsame effect, enforced by many and various reasons, that, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made by Him...”^[2]. Augustine found Plato very helpful in describing aspects of Christianity. On the soul specifically, Augustine defined a human being as “a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body.”^[3] This means the soul was the person, and its body was the instrument. By his own account in the Confessions, that hierarchy came from Plato before it came from Scripture. As time went on, however, Plato’s picture of an immortal soul and Augustine’s reliance upon it came into doubt. In fact, Oscar Cullmann, who was a French Lutheran theologian who taught at the Sorbonne in Paris, said that “the concept of death and resurrection is anchored in the Christ-event... and hence is incompatible with the Greek belief in immortality.”^[4] Further, a 2024 study by Matthew Chambers traces in detail how the early church absorbed Plato’s doctrine of the soul, because it was innately immortal anyway. Chambers called this a “profoundly unbiblical” influence on the tradition. To examine that claim, we must go to the text.

In Hebrew and Greek, the words typically translated “soul” are actually better rendered as something else. Take nephesh, the Hebrew word usually translated “soul.” Genesis 2:7 tells us that God formed the dust and breathed into it. Then, the man becomes nephesh: a living being, constituted by a breath he did not supply himself. That means nephesh, whose root means “to breathe,” is a living being sustained by breath moment to moment, not a possession secured in advance. The New Testament makes a similar point in its own vocabulary. It does so by flipping normal categories. See, in classical Greek, bios was the noble word for a life of conduct, career, moral choices. Zoē, on the other hand, named something closer to bare, animal existence. Then the gospels and Paul come around, and the meanings are reversed. Bios now describes physical life, livelihood, or “the cares of this life.” Zoē becomes the noble word. Images like the crown of life, the tree of life, and even Jesus’ saying, “I am the life,” are contained within this word. Neither word in either language describes a soul that survives on its own. Both describe a life that depends, breath by breath, on the God who keeps giving it.

What’s the point of this? Well, for many, the reality of the absence of “soul” language in the scriptures comes as a shock. They have been told that the scriptures testify to the embedded soul. So, many who notice that the immortal soul floating off to heaven is informed by Plato, not the Scriptures, simply let “eternal existence” go. For them, it feels like intellectual hygiene, not denial of truth.

Second, there is the moral weight of eternal conscious torment. Many conservatives see this as a modern squeamishness invented by a therapeutic age. However, Arnobius of Sicca, a rhetoric teacher in Roman North Africa who converted to Christianity as an adult under Diocletian, wrote his defense of the faith partly to prove his sincerity to a skeptical church. He was troubled enough by eternal torment to break with the very philosophical tradition he’d spent his career teaching. Ultimately, he denied that the soul is naturally immortal at all.^[5] Bertrand Russell, no friend of Christianity, aimed his sharpest criticism of Jesus at this same doctrine: “I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”^[6] Later, David Bentley Hart made the same discomfort the center of a book. He concluded that the traditional doctrine of eternal damnation is “morally corrupt, contrary to justice, perverse, inexcusably cruel, deeply irrational, and essentially wicked.”^[7] An ancient church father, mid-century atheist philosopher, and contemporary Orthodox theologian all demonstrate that this discomfort spans many times and contexts.

What so many Christians do not take time to understand is that it’s hard to sit with the idea that God tortures the wicked forever. Actually, that misstates the real issue. For many Christians, the wicked deserve it (and we’ll set aside that question altogether). For many who grapple with this problem, the idea that God tortures anyone AND still claims to be loving is inexcusable. The common move is to shift toward holiness and justice instead. But that move concedes the point. They agree that a loving God wouldn’t do it. They admit they do not worship a loving God, but a holy God. At best, that means you have to make damnation sound like the loving thing to do.

Beyond all that, the real issue is the God of damnation, not damnation itself. Many who give up the idea of eternal life (as bodily resurrection or otherwise) do so because the God who promises it sounds like a monster. They do not distinguish between heaven and hell, because they’re focusing on the God behind both. So, they have no interest in reforming hell or relocating heaven. God, who is supposedly loving, has already disqualified eternal existence because of the separation and torture of billions of people.

Third, there is the modern demand of “reasonable” evidence. David Hume made the argument quite well when he said, “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”^[8] It is important to know that this certainly applies to the extraordinary evidence some ask for. However, it is also a lifetime of ordinary, unmiraculous experiences that just keep raising the same questions.

“Eternal life” survives the recalculation; it just gets redefined to quality of life now, participation in God’s life, participation in God, or anything that doesn’t require the claim that you, specifically, will rise again. There is an irony here worth following. Namely, this move to make eternal life more “realistic” by modern standards isn’t an opposite move from confident evidentialist apologetics. It’s the same evidentialist wager, placed by two different people with two different lifetimes of experience to weigh it against. Interestingly, the Convention Bible study shows this move happening. In Pauls’s third lesson, he describes officiating a graveside service where the funeral director closed her remarks by telling the mourners, “As Pastor Pauls said, take comfort that your loved one lives on in your memories.” He hadn’t said that. She rewrote his message into something she found more possible. She reached for “lives on in your memory” because the actual claim, a body, this one, raised imperishable, was harder to hold than a claim that costs nothing and can’t be proven wrong.

These are three explanations with one pattern underneath them. Each is a way of trading the costly claim of eternal life for a safer one. None of what we outlined here is a failure of nerve. It’s people paying close enough attention to notice that the actual claim of the Christian gospel costs more than the substitute standing in for it.

The Turn

Here’s where the convention material seems to offer a corrective. It starts with Matthew Harrison, who writes, “We will not be taken ‘captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ’ (Col. 2:8).” With that expectation set, Pauls’s Bible study spends a full lesson, “A Well-Witnessed Resurrection,” walking through Paul’s list of witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15:1–11, addressing the objection that they were a conspiracy of liars. The rhetorical posture throughout is confidence: this is what we believe, undiluted, and here’s why.

Before getting into the apologetic, we should take a moment to discuss the “we” in “this is what we believe.” Harrison’s letter doesn’t engage the reasons anyone brings to the conversation. Instead, it evokes institutional memory, especially the Seminex crisis of the 1970s, which is emotionally charged in the LCMS. Harrison remembers the line he’s leaned on for years: “no matter what I’ve had to deal with, J.A.O. Preus had it a hundred times worse in the ‘70s.” That’s not an argument about the resurrection. It’s a reassurance about the Synod’s own durability, delivered by tying the reader to a lineage of survivors. Rhetorically, this puts the LCMS above any apologetic it may have, which is just incredibly fascinating and telling.

As for the actual apologetic, we return to lesson two in the Convention Bible Study. There, Pauls piles up witnesses, checks how many are independently verified, and rehearses the response to a conspiracy theory. All of this is simply an evidentialist strategy, which attempts to make the resurrection a matter that enough historical proof could settle. What’s just as fascinating and telling is that this lesson assumes faith is downstream of sufficient evidence – a classic modernist move. The clearest tell, though, is lesson five, “Life Out of Dust.” Here, Pauls actually engages 1 Corinthians 15:35–50, the Convention passage. In this passage, Paul actually asks the hard question: how are the dead raised, and with what kind of body? One would expect that the LCMS would engage the claims about transformed matter, continuity with this actual body, or what it would concretely mean for you to be raised imperishable. But Pauls doesn’t go there. Instead, he leans almost entirely on Lazarus, Jairus’s daughter, and Tabitha. These three people got their mortal lives back and, presumably, died again later. None of them received an imperishable resurrection body. They’re resuscitations, not resurrections, but they’re vivid and narratively satisfying in a way “spiritual body” isn’t, so the lesson uses them as its emotional center. When it does reach Paul’s actual language, it restates his analogies without extending them, calls the resurrection a “mystery,” and pivots to a devotional reflection on personal identity.

That’s not incidental. A lesson built to answer resurrection questions spends its energy everywhere except that question. The avoidance is doing the work. It’s hard to say who this is actually for. It’s not the reader whose trouble is the hell problem or the Greek graft. Those who would actually need such an argument will recognize the dodge immediately. One can only surmise that the intended reader is the one who was never troubled to begin with. They certainly don’t need six lessons and a study on transformed bodies to stay convinced.

Two Names for the Same Thing

Now that we’ve gone through both arguments, we’ll see where they align. For simplicity's sake, I’ll name the denial of the resurrection “liberal” and the LCMS’ position as “conservative.”

First, the conservative position asserts certainty in the resurrection. Unfortunately, the LCMS material isn’t claiming more about the resurrection than the tradition has always claimed: bodily, imperishable, and eternal. What gets defended is the self wrapped around the certainty in the doctrine. Pauls’s own “Concluding Thoughts,” lesson after lesson, land on the reader’s security rather than new discussion about the resurrection. For example, ‘you will be most you when you are raised imperishable; be steadfast and immovable, friends.’ That phrase comes at the close of 1 Corinthians 15, but Paul earns it after fourteen verses of argument. For the Convention Bible study, it arrives instead of one. As noted earlier, Harrison’s letter also does this at the institutional scale.

Where the conservative move inflates the self and leaves the claim untouched, the liberal move refuses to inflate the self and shrinks the claim instead.

Call this move by its theological name: theologia gloriae. Security is claimed through confident, defended righteousness rather than through the actual cost the empty tomb requires. Luther drew this line precisely in the Heidelberg Disputation, when he said the true theologian “comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.” Contrarily, the theologian of glory, he wrote, “prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil.” That’s the substitution happening here. A study built to sit inside the hardest, most ridiculous claim offers the reader strength instead. A president’s letter built to address that same claim offers institutional survival instead.

Second, the liberal position asserts that the resurrection is something other than the reemergence of the conscious self. For this reason, nobody redefining eternal life as ‘quality of life’ is inflating their own self. Yet, do not be mistaken. They are making the same move as the conservatives. They are still securing themselves. Instead of making the self certain, they make the claim smaller so that it is easier to believe.

Call this move by its name too: minimalism. Historical criticism uses this term for a commitment to only the smallest set of claims that can survive scrutiny. Minimalism substitutes certainty for caution: hold only what’s defensible, and treat everything past that as more than you were ever obligated to claim. Eternal life becomes quality of life now, participation in God’s ongoing life in the physical world, the persistence of your effects on others, or anything short of the specific claim that you, specifically, will still be around. Each version of this resurrection is real enough on its own terms. At the same time, each of them is also smaller than what it replaced. The minimal claim isn’t easier to hold because it’s better evidenced. It’s easier to hold because there’s less of it left to be wrong about.

The conservative and liberal approaches to the resurrection both accomplish the same thing. They make it possible for the claim of resurrection, no matter its form, to be digestible and controllable. I suspect that fear resides under this move, but cannot say for certain. Whatever the reason, both are a modern approach to the resurrection. They are two sides of the same coin. So, when an entire Bible study aims its sight at the opposite side of the coin, it just means we’re all playing a game to say our side is better. What neither side asks is whether the actual claim, unsafe as it is, might also be good.

What’s Actually Being Avoided

Now, we can pull the lens back to the specific site where both have avoided. In 1 Corinthians 15:35–50, Paul offers analogies for the resurrection: seed and plant, one kind of flesh for humans and another for animals, or the sown body and the raised body. He attempts to describe it, but he doesn’t resolve the strangeness. He names it and pushes forward anyway. There’s a difference between what Paul is doing and what either of our two moves is doing. Let’s call that difference exposure. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins [and] we are of all people most to be pitied.” That’s not a comforting sentence. It stakes everything on a claim that could be false and refuses to hedge the bet in either direction.

Søren Kierkegaard gives this refusal a shape. Faith, in his definition, is “objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness.”^[9] That is, faith means staking your whole self on something you can’t be certain of and doing it with everything you have. Specifically for our purposes, Kierkegaard shows us that faith is not the resolution of uncertainty in either direction, but its full retention alongside total commitment. Against the conservative move, Kierkeegard places Christendom,^[10] which is an entire apparatus built to let you borrow your safety from the crowd instead of making the leap yourself. Unfortunately, as he boldly declares, “the crowd is untruth.”^[11] Against the liberal move, he insists that Christianity’s claims are supposed to be offensive to reason. Softening them until reason can digest them costs you the very thing that made them faith rather than conclusion.

In Philosophical Fragments,^[12] Kierkegaard argues that faith was never going to be produced by sufficient evidence. Even someone standing in the room with the risen Christ has no advantage over someone reading about it two thousand years later, because historical testimony can mediate the encounter but cannot manufacture the faith. If it could, faith would just be a more demanding kind of knowledge. Piling up five hundred witnesses doesn’t get you closer; it’s a category error dressed as an argument.

Interestingly, Kierkegaard gives us vocabulary for both our moves. He does so by suggesting that the cause of these moves is despair, albeit a despair that does not typically feel like despair to the person inside it. The despair of not being oneself but of being absorbed into a role, a crowd, or an institution, until there’s no self left outside it is called “leveling.”^[13] That’s the conservative move.

The despair of wanting to be rid of the self rather than face what the costly claim would require is what Kierkegaard scholars name “the despair of weakness.”^[14] It chooses escape over confrontation. That’s the liberal move. Dietrich Bonhoeffer names the same failure from the discipleship side rather than the epistemic one. Cheap grace, in his account, is grace that costs nothing and asks nothing. It is forgiveness without repentance, belief without any actual following. “Even if the resurrection isn’t true, I would still want to live my life as a Christian”^[15] sounds like humility. It sounds like someone who has outgrown needing a payoff to keep the faith. But if the claim of the resurrection is true, they keep everything. If it’s false, they still keep everything. Nothing is at stake either way. That’s the opposite of Paul, who put his whole claim where it could make him ‘of all people most to be pitied’ if he was wrong.

The Third Way That Isn’t a Third Way

It’s tempting to read all this as a call for some moderate position between certainty and escape. A little less confident than Harrison. A little more committed than the funeral director. But faith, on the account built out of Paul, Luther, Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer, isn’t a point on that spectrum at all. It doesn’t average the two failures. It refuses the question underneath both: how much of this can I believe without being exposed?

The faith of Lutheran theologians stays in the exposure. They call it theologia crucis. Not glory arriving later to explain the suffering away, but God found precisely inside the suffering, nowhere else, with nothing held back for later. Luther already told us what that costs. The theologian of the cross doesn’t get a vantage point above it, a safe distance to view the claim from once the hard part is over. There isn’t a safe distance. You stand exactly where Paul stood: in a claim that makes you to be pitied most among everyone if it turns out to be false. Nothing about having faith removes that risk. You don’t get handed proof for believing. You don’t graduate into certainty once you’ve believed long enough. Faith is the whole of what’s being asked. It isn’t a safer position than either failure. Aslan was never safe either. It’s the only version of the claim that was ever actually good.

That’s not the same as offering no comfort. The comfort is real. It’s just not self-manufactured. This comfort doesn’t reduce what’s at stake. It accepts the exposure Paul names with its full weight. It doesn’t come from belonging to the largest confessional body still holding the line. It doesn’t come from believing something that couldn’t disappoint you either. It comes from outside: a promise held and received rather than secured, available only by trusting it. And, beautifully, it also reminds us we do not carry that weight alone.

The Funeral

Picture the actual scene instead of the arguments about it. Dirt turned over. A box being lowered. People standing there who loved this person, whose voice they can still hear, whose hands they know, and whose absence is about to become a reality for many lives starting today. Paul walks straight into that scene and the countless like it and says the body itself, this one, the one going into the ground, is going somewhere. Not somewhere else. Somewhere more. A seed goes into the ground and what comes up isn’t a memory of the seed. It’s the plant the seed was always going to become, unrecognizable and still, somehow, entirely the same thing continued. Paul pushes that same claim onto a corpse. What’s weak now gets raised strong. What’s dishonored gets raised in glory. This ordinary, failing, mortal flesh gets raised imperishable, and it is still, unmistakably, still the person who died. Not a replacement for them. Not a kinder story told about them instead.

That’s a very strange claim that doesn’t ask anyone to move the person into memory, where they’re safe because they’re no longer real. It doesn’t ask anyone to accept a mystery and change the subject. It doesn’t resolve how a decomposed body becomes an imperishable one any more than a seed explains how it becomes a plant. It just promises it happens and leaves the strangeness in the sentence. It asks us to trust something we can’t picture yet. It asks us to believe death was not the end of this particular person’s story. It invites us into the rest of the story. Death doesn’t get explained or made into something smaller here. It gets outlasted. Swallowed, Paul says, not softened.

Christ is risen!
He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

Lutherans declare that at Easter and, potentially, at the funerals of those we love. Here’s the thing about that liturgy: it was never the hard part. The hard part is standing at the graveside of a beloved, trusting that the person you once walked beside will walk in the gardens of paradise with you once again. This is good.

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^[1] Some research suggests Persian ideas shaped parts of Second Temple Judaism’s picture of the end of history as well. I cannot attest to that research as I’m not very familiar with it. However, it should be noted that this might not just be a Greek import.

^[2] Augustine, Confessions, Book VII, chapter 9, §13. Translation by J.G. Pilkington, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886); public domain, available via New Advent (newadvent.org/fathers/110107.htm) and CCEL.

^[3] Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, I.xxvii.52.

^[4] Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (London: Epworth Press, 1958). Later in that same introduction, he says that Christianity and Platonic immortality of the soul are “irreconcilable.”

^[5] Not everyone who shares this discomfort lands on conditional immortality — some resolve the same moral pressure through universalism instead, which has very different implications for what “eternal existence” means. I’m not attempting to adjudicate between them here, only naming that annihilationism isn’t the only exit from the hell problem.

^[6] From “Why I Am Not a Christian” — originally a lecture delivered March 6, 1927, to the South London Branch of the National Secular Society at Battersea Town Hall. Published as the title essay in Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (ed. Paul Edwards, 1957).

^[7] David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

^[8] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, “Of Miracles,” Part I (1748). Standard modern edition: ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), §10.13.

^[9] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

^[10] Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity (1850), trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)

^[11] Kierkegaard, “On the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual,’” appendix to The Point of View for My Work as an Author (written 1848–49, published posthumously 1859), trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939)

^[12] Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (1844), trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)

^[13] Kierkegaard, The Present Age, from A Literary Review of Two Ages (1846), trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper & Row, 1962)

^[14] Kierkegaard calls this being “in despair not to will to be oneself,” Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849), trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

^[15] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (Nachfolge, 1937), trans. R. H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1959)