Description: musings on life, faith, theology & culture
Christian belief in the resurrection is misunderstood and misguided if taken to imply a kind of escapist pipedream optimism, which distracts us for a short time (maybe while in church) from the troubles, challenges, and sufferings we face in the world. Such escapism tends to lead to sectarianism, disengagement from the world, and naivety mixed with inauthenticity. This is exactly what Freud thought about the function of ‘religion.’
But this is not what characterized the earliest Christians who were witnesses and devotees of the Risen Jesus and whose experience of the Resurrection radically altered their existence. For them, the Resurrection meant that death does not have the last word , and therefore its instruments and servants – fear, despair, lies or untruth, sickness, poverty, egoism, apathy, hatred, violence, and the preservation of self and tribe by any means possible – are exposed as deceivers and destroyers .
Belief in the resurrection (which wasn’t simply assent to an idea but fundamentally included an experience of the Risen Christ by the outpouring of God’s Spirit) transformed their vision of what is ultimately real, what actually matters, where the future of the cosmos is destined to end (and then be renewed, metamorphized into a new creation), and thus what concerns, activities, and goals should define their lives and reorient all their ambitions and resources.