Most Modern Christians don’t Believe in their own Resurrection

Recently I’ve been studying the first few centuries of Christian history and one of the biggest contrasts I’m discovering between their faith and what I see today is around the kind of faith the early believers had in their own resurrection.

Few things totally transform the way someone lives like believing you can’t really die.

Imagine believing your own death is basically an impossibility?

Christian doctrine, because of the Bible’s teaching on the Resurrection, leads naturally to what I like to call Obi Wan Kenobi faith. When faced with his ultimate nemesis Kenobi, knowing he was about to die, says,

“You cannot win Darth. If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

How does someone live who has that kind of faith?

With supreme, maybe even reckless confidence.

What could be more glorious than to be killed for your faith? As your murderers boast over your dead corpse you rise again with a new physical body so powerful you can never be killed again.

You can’t lose.

Paul loved this topic. “So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.” -1 Corinthians 15

True belief in this would be to see death for the Kingdom as the most glorious way to go. The author Hebrews states how some people actually took this its logical conclusion, “There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection.” Hebrews 11:35

This was what motivated the Christians to joyfully die for their faith in the first three centuries of Christianity.

This is also what confused the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th and 5th century. They still held to this supreme confidence in their own resurrection but without any opportunity to be persecuted for their faith they started to do strange things like live for decades in caves or on the top of poles.

While I don’t personally recommend pole living as a lifestyle choice, we rarely see any examples of this kind of resurrection believing faith.

Why?

I believe the reason is quite simple.

Most Christians really don’t believe in their own resurrection.

Our faith in our resurrection being the climax of our story is so weak as to be almost non-existent.

You don’t discover what someone believes by what they say.

You learn what someone believes by what they do.

And our lives betray the fact that we have almost no faith in our resurrection.

I wouldn’t say zero faith but on a scale of 1–10 it’s hanging out close to the 1.

By the way, I’m largely preaching to myself here. I find I relate more often to a scared farm boy trying to get off the Death Star than an old Jedi looking for an opportunity to die for what he believes.

I’m writing this to work out my own weak faith.

It’s hard in a culture obsessed with safety to embrace the crazy implications of believing in your own resurrection.

So what has replaced this story?

Based on how we live I’d say most modern Christians believe something like this, “If there is a heaven I’ll probably go there after I die.”

This isn’t the same thing.

Resurrection is about the victory over the dark forces of death.

It leads to boastful poems like,

“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

Instead of active faith in our resurrection most of us try not to think about death until we need to a hope to cling to because of the passing of a loved one.

But this is not the Christian story we read in the New Testament.

This is not the kind of faith that can withstand serious persecution like what the early church endured.

What will it take for Christians to really believe again in their own resurrection?