…as well as an excellent pastoral thinker, and he has forgotten more about the scholarship on the Resurrection of Jesus than most of us will ever know (or even have heard of). So Easter week is a good time for this. My favorite summary of the Christian understanding of the afterlife comes from him, who said, “Christians don’t believe in life after death. We believe in life after life after death.” If you don’t think the doctrine of the resurrection is extraordinarily weird, you have not given it any thought. So far from tidying up an awkward story of a crucified holy man, it makes everything a thousand times harder for the apostles. They had no reason to invent it and a thousand reasons not to. The only reason I can see for it is that the thing happened and they were stuck with the fact of it.
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