Christ's Resurrection.
Surprise of Disciples.
The Fact Accounts for History.
Faith in this seems to me to depend on how far we have accepted Christ's Deity and His incarnation. If by the Holy Ghost we have been able "to say that Jesus is the Lord;" if by that blessed energy we perceive His Divine mastership; if by the same energy we feel that He has transformed us into the image of His dear Son; raising us "from the death of sin into the life of righteousness" it is not difficult to believe that Jesus "the power of the Resurrection" rose from the dead. "The fact of the Resurrection and belief in the fact is not explicable by any antecedent conditions apart from its truth."[5] The disciples did not expect what they saw. His death was for them so far as we can see, without hope. They were not able yet to interpret His prophecy that He would build again His temple, nor understand the spirituality of His kingdom. These facts seem to me utterly to demolish the theory of a vision called up by eager, yea, agonizing, expectation. The idea of the Resurrection justifies His prophecies as to Himself and the fact accounts, better than any theory which denies the fact, for the faith and founding of the early Church as well as for the course of subsequent history and of the believer's experience.
Slow Belief in Resurrection.
It is much to see that belief became belief only with great difficulty. The idea of the Resurrection was strange and alarming to the disciples. "They were terrified and affrighted and supposed they beheld a spirit." Slowly by tests of sense as well as by persuasions of teaching did the disciples come to believe that the Christ of the Resurrection was the same Christ who suffered on the cross.
Not an Invention.
An Eye-witness Story.
It seems impossible that the Resurrection could have been an invention or that the account of it could be a work of the imagination. The last is almost as great a miracle as the Resurrection itself. In detail, in naturalness, even in the presence of difficulties and hindrances to easy belief of the story, the narrative seems that of an eye-witness. No reasoning can bring faith, however, to one who denies the miraculous. As a fact, the Resurrection is incapable of naturalistic explanation. To those who deny the miraculous I can only again point out how Huxley cuts out the a priori argument from Hume as worthless. As quoted in his biography, Huxley says: "We are not justified in the a priori assertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us, can not change. The assumption is illegitimate because it involves the whole point in dispute."