The Anchor - Jesus' Resurrection

Right then. May as well start with the foundations...

Paul puts the importance of the resurrection quite clearly in 1 Corinthians 15.

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

Anyone who's done the rounds of apologetics talks or has thoughtfully considered the Christian faith to any degree will have already encountered this idea, it's hardly new. Essentially, the gospel accounts make claims that Jesus is the Son of God - the start of Mark's gospel is a good example. These claims stand or fall on whether he was raised. If Jesus was raised from death, then we can have a reasonable degree of tolerance for loose ends in obscure bits of old testament narrative or thorny philosophical debates about free will and predestination because we know that our confidence is in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. The achievement of the resurrection is put across in 1 Peter 1v3-4

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

So the certainty of having been born again, and having a future in heaven rests on the resurrection - elsewhere Jesus' resurrection is described as the first-fruits, and after our death we will be raised at the final harvest. I went to a funeral yesterday where it was hard to be sure what the teenager whose life we were remembering had believed about Jesus. His destiny and ours rest on two things - the facts, and our response to them. This is no trivial question.

It seems to me there are a couple of questions to be asked about the resurrection.
1) Can we know for certain whether or not Christ has been raised.
2) Can we know with sufficient confidence to merit putting our trust in his death and resurrection or rejecting it outright.
3) What is the role of the supernatural gift of faith that enables us to trust - is faith a persuasion in spite of the evidence? in the light of insufficient evidence? or a putting of firm, active trust in something which we are already convinced of?

To be continued...