Ten Quotes About the Resurrection

1. "The simple truth is that resurrection cannot be accommodated to any way of understanding the world except one in which it is the starting point."

– Lesslie Newbigin (Proper Confidence)

2. The assertion that Jesus is risen from the dead remains a matter of dispute in a special degree because it cuts so deeply into fundamental questions of the understanding of reality.

– Wolfhart Pannenberg (The Apostles' Creed in Light of Today’s Questions)

3. We may say without exaggeration: at the tomb in Jerusalem the ultimate choice will be made between two totally different world-views.

– Walter Kunneth (Theology of the Resurrection)

4. When we celebrate Easter, we are really standing in the middle of a second ‘Big Bang', a tumultuous surge of divine energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe. What a recent writer wonderfully calls ‘the fire in the equations’, the energy in the mathematical and physical structures of things, is here at Easter; and when in the ancient ceremonies of the night before Easter we light a bonfire and bless it and light candles from it, we may think of the first words of God in Genesis, ‘Let there be light!’.

– Rowan Williams (Tokens of Trust)

5. Is the body a shell that one sheds, or is it an intrinsic part of the personality that will forever identify a person? If Jesus, body corrupted in the tomb so that his victory over death did not include bodily resurrection, then the model of destruction and new creation is indicated. If Jesus rose bodily from the dead, then the Christian model should be one of transformation. The problem of the bodily resurrection is not just an example of Christian curiosity; it is related to a major theme in theology: God’s ultimate purpose in creating.

– Raymond Brown (The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus)

6. Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven.

– N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope)

7. Christ did not come into the world that we might understand him, but that we might cling to him, that we might simply let ourselves be swept away by him into the immense event of the resurrection.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer (The Mystery of Easter)

8. The risen life is not easy; it is also a dying life. The presence of the Resurrection in our lives means the presence of the Cross, for we do not rise with Christ unless we also first die with him. It is by the cross that we enter the dynamism of creative transformation, the dynamism of resurrection and renewal, the dynamism of love.

– Thomas Merton (He is Risen)

9. Whatever we can know historically about Christ’s resurrection must not be abstracted from the questions: what can we hope from it? And what must we do in its name? The resurrection of Christ is historically understood in the full sense in the unity of knowing, hoping, and doing.

– Jurgen Motmann (The Way of Jesus Christ)

10. Our death is already behind us, and our resurrection before us.

– Ephrem of Edessa (On Paradise)