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TRUTH AND
THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
(1 Corinthians 15:12-20)
SUBJECT:
F.C.F:
PROPOSITION:
INTRODUCTION:
A. As we have studied through John’s
account of the empty tomb, we realized that John was
giving his own eyewitness testimony. He explained
what it was that made a believer of him. He gave
strong evidential support for his conclusion that Jesus
was dead but has now risen from the dead. We then
explored alternative explanations of what might have
happened to the body of Jesus and found them all less
credible than the truth. And we noted also the strong
evidence of the empty shell of the almost undisturbed
grave clothes through which the resurrected and
transformed body of Jesus passed. And we
considered the many eyewitness accounts of those
who saw him alive after he had died on the cross, and
the logic is inescapable: if he was alive after he died,
then he has certainly risen from the dead.
B. And John means to leave us with an
inescapable decision we must make: either we follow
the best evidence and believe that Jesus is risen, that
his claims are true, and then bow to him in
submission and surrender; or we must declare that
John is somehow deluded or deceitful and reject the
resurrection of Jesus and his claim to be the Christ,
the Son of God who offers eternal life to all who
come to him. We realize as did King Agrippa when
Paul was making his defense before him in Acts 26
that Paul was actually trying to convert him! “In a
short time would you persuade me to be a
Christian?” And that’s precisely what John is doing
in his gospel.
C. But…remarkably, there is in our day a
third option, devised in my lifetime, roughly in the
1960s about the time of the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy. It is a kind of last refuge of the
unbeliever who wants to maintain intellectual
credibility and yet ignore the claims of Christ, and it
is called “postmodernism.” John declares that Jesus
Christ has truly risen from the dead, objectively so in
real time and space, and that the evidence for this is
more than sufficient. And postmodernism responds
by neither declaring this claim to be true or false, but
by declaring that all truth claims like this are false.
Nothing is truly true. Nothing is objectively true for
all people. We only have relative truths: my truth,
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your truth, personal truth.
More than fifteen years ago I spoke with a
young man who was attending a secular university. In
one of his classes he said that he had witnessed to his
hope in Christ. I thought, “This should be
interesting.” I expected him to say that he was
attacked and ridiculed for his nonsensical beliefs.
Instead, he said with great joy, he was applauded by
all. “We’re happy for you! We’re glad you found
something helpful and meaningful for your life.” Did
that mean that they all became followers of Jesus
Christ as well? Not at all. They were simply good
disciples of the reigning philosophy of
postmodernism. Christianity was true for him, but
that did not make it truly true for all. They had a
different set of beliefs. And even though their beliefs
might be in complete logical contradiction to my
friend’s Christianity, no matter. Since nothing is truly
true, then anything can be relatively true and nothing
is truly false.
I. PREMODERN, MODERN, POSTMODERN.
Let me rehearse a bit of the history of how we
got to this very strange world where nothing is truly
true so everything can be relatively true. When we
use the word “modern” we roughly mean that which
benefits from the advances of science and
technology. We speak of modern appliances and
conveniences and modern ways of thinking and
living. But to the philosopher and historian the term
“modern” refers to a specific era in the history of
western thought, the period between “premodern”
and “postmodern.”
A. The pre-modern era of western thought ran
roughly up to the time of the so-called
“Enlightenment,” roughly in the 1700s. Prior to that
time, Christianity dominated western thinking, and its
outlook could be described as one of confidence.
Because of the deep influence of the Bible on the
western world, the pre-modern worldview was
essentially biblical: God made all things, sin has
ruined us, God gave his Son for our redemption, and
God has spoken in his works of creation and through
his written Word, the Bible. So the dominant attitude
was one of confidence: we can know God and his
way and even though life is filled with many
uncertainties of war and poverty and death, God has
promised a better world and we can hope in him.
B. The modern world (again, not simply the
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one we live in presently, but “modern” or modernity
as a particular philosophy or worldview) began at the
time of the so-called “Enlightenment.” And the while
the pre-modern world was largely “confident,” the
modern world grew “arrogant.” Modern thinkers
rejected any need for God to reveal himself to us and
imagined that the world contained truth that could be
discovered and employed not through revelation but
through reason. God, if there was a God, was set
aside and truth was exalted in his place. Modern
thinkers expected great discovery through the
burgeoning disciplines of science and achieved
phenomenal success, many of the innovations in
medicine and technology that we now enjoy without
even thinking about them.
Now the reason this venture was so successful
was not that God was unnecessary and that we could
discover the so-called laws of nature and harness
them for our benefit, but because God truly was
gracious and had revealed his truth through what he
had made. The so-called laws of physics, for
example, are not independent, but simply reflect
God’s faithfulness. Borrowing on this expectation
that these “laws of nature” (God’s faithfulness)
existed gave western thinkers decisive advantages
over the merely superstitious peoples of the rest of
the world who attributed actions to spooks and spirits
and not the consistent and unified work of one God.
This explains the rapid technological advances of the
west over the rest of the world.
But this arrogance and the advantages it
produced came at a price. Western man learned to
exploit nature and other peoples. They made great
engines of war and unleashed them in the quest to
conquer. The modern mindset gave us two world
wars and the atomic bomb. These realities tended to
put a damper on the great optimism that modernity
could discover all the universal truths of the universe
and lead to unity and prosperity for all.
C. And the postmodern worldview was born
in a backlash against the exploitation and oppression
that grew out of modernity. Where the pre-modern
world was confident and the modern world was
arrogant, the postmodern world is now uncertain.
Postmodernism is basically a reaction to the abuse of
universal truth claims. According to postmodern
thinking, all universal truth claims are given for the
purpose of the exploitation and oppression of others.
And so the only way to avoid this is to deny from the
outset the validity of any, any universal truth claim.
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Now it is very true that some have used truth
claims to exploit and to oppress or control others.
Religious truth often falls into this category because
of its totalistic nature. Religion often makes absolute
truth claims which call for an absolute response:
believe this or perish in hell. Totalitarian states can
only threaten the death of the body. But religion
claims to be able to do more, to condemn the soul to
everlasting torment. Karl Marx famously declared
that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” keeping
them calm so that they would not rise up against their
overlords in class warfare. Postmodernism seems to
say that “religion is the oppressor of the masses,”
keeping them subdued and controlled, under the
thumb of those who make such claims.
So, again, because truth claims have been
used to exploit and to oppress, postmodern thinking
rejects any and all truth claims. In fact, it asserts that
all truth claims are exploitative in nature and so must
be rejected out of hand. Now I know what you are
probably thinking, and you have seen one of the fatal
flaws of postmodern thinking. To assert that there is
no such thing as truth is a truth claim itself.
Moreover, it is a truth claim that cannot be validated
since it rejects from the outset any means of doing so
or even any point of doing so. In the postmodern
world you cannot “prove” any truth claim because no
truth claim is true and must be rejected. But how do
you prove your first principle, namely the truth claim
that all truth claims are false?
One of our MTW missionaries, Hugh Wessel,
serving in France, told me that he first became
interested in Christianity when he was hungry and
homeless in Western Europe and was looking for a
place to stay at a Christian commune named “L’bri,”
which had been started by Francis Schaeffer. He told
the first person he met there that he did not believe in
absolute truth, that all truth was relative. The man
immediately pointed out that the claim that all truth
was relative was an absolute statement, and Hugh
Wessel said that at that point his carefully
constructed philosophical foundation crumbled
beneath him, and he soon came to faith in Christ.
So the watchwords for postmodernism, the
dominant, popular philosophy today are “openness,”
rejecting any absolute truth claims, and “tolerance,”
rejecting all absolute moral claims. And we must now
admit that we live in a situation that is truly crosscultural. When John declares in his Gospel that Jesus
Christ rose from the dead and gives evidence to prove
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it, the postmodern refuses to listen to the claim at all,
not because it does not seem reasonable, that would
be a modern objection which still hopes in the reality
of truth. The postmodern would reject it for the
simple fact that it claims to be true at all, truly true.
D. Let’s go back to my friend in the
university witnessing to his faith in Christ. You can
see that his classmates were all very postmodern.
They only heard him say that Christianity was
personally meaningful and helpful to him, and that
they could applaud. They didn’t believe it, of course,
but if it worked for him, wonderful! But if my friend
had shaken his head, and instead said, “No, you
misunderstand me. I’m not simply saying that
Christianity is personally comforting and fulfilling to
me, but that it is true, truly true, objectively true in
real time and space for everyone,” then their reaction
would have been very different. Either they would
have begun to ridicule him because this poor fool was
only “modern,” and he apparently did not get the
memo that nobody believes in truth anymore. Or they
would have taken great offense at him and accused
him of close-mindedness, of bigotry, and intolerance,
and would have suspected that he would be
something akin to a terrorist who would soon be
attempting to oppress and shackle people with his
heavy-handed truth claim.
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1. Even a simple statement such as we find in
Hebrews 6:18: “it is impossible for God to lie,”
makes a huge assumption. It absolutely presupposes
the existence of objective truth, for if there is no
objective truth then nothing can be objectively false
and then it would be pointless to say that “it is
impossible for God to lie.”
2. The existence of objective truth is assumed
in the test for true and false prophets in Deuteronomy
18: “21 And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we
know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’— 22
when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if
the word does not come to pass or come true, that is
a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet
has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid
of him.” Notice the assumption: if the prophet’s word
truly comes to pass, that is, it is shown to be
objectively true in time and space, then it is proof that
he has spoken for the Lord. The postmodern
worldview has no similar test for a truth claim like
this because it does not accept the validity of any
truth claim.
3. In 1 Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul also
assumes the validity of objective truth. He employs a
very common logical device known as a syllogism in
verse 16: “For if the dead are not raised, not even
Christ has been raised.”
II. THE BIBLE ASSUMES OBJECTIVE
TRUTH.
Major premise: “the dead are not rasied”
Minor premise: “Christ was dead”
Conclusion: “therefore, Christ has not been
raised.”
A. And here’s where we have to assume that
sharing the gospel, the good news of salvation in
Christ will always now be a truly cross-cultural
experience today. The gospel was born in a different
world, in the pre-modern world, and it cannot be
communicated effectively to postmoderns because it
specifically requires what postmoderns deny as their
first principle: the existence of true truth or objective
truth.
B. The Bible assumes and does not seek to
prove the existence of objective truth. It assumes
what has been described as the first law of logic, the
law of non-contradiction. “Something cannot be and
not be at the same time.” If X is true then the
opposite of X, non-X cannot also be true at the same
time. The Bible does not seek to prove this: it only
everywhere assumes it as a foundational principle,
and this truth is rooted in the character of God
himself.
But undergirding all of this is the reality of objective
truth claims: “the dead are not raised” (a false claim)
and “Christ has been raised,” a true and universal
claim with implications: “17And if Christ has not
been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in
your sins.”
C. So when we are sharing the gospel with
others, we must be aware that the situation has
become more complicated. We may seek to prove as
John does that Jesus Christ is the Son of God because
he has been raised from the dead, and we should then
surrender to him as Lord and Christ. But we may
meet blank faces and absolute disinterest because
people are being trained that there is no such thing as
truth, that they need not respond in any way to any
truth claim (openness), and that they really should be
a bit suspicious and even offended that you would
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assert that your beliefs are true or better than the
beliefs of anyone else (tolerance).
III. POSTMODERNISM AND THE CHURCH.
A. What concerns me more, though, is the
encroachment that postmodernism has made into the
church, into your heart and my heart. We are all
products of our culture, and the extreme relativism of
postmodernism is in the very air we breathe. All of
the popular media reflect this view. “Tolerance” is
the highest virtue today while “judgmentalism,
bigotry, and intolerance” are the only sins left, and
any claim to objective truth is condemned as all of
these.
B. This effect has been seen most recently in
the debate that has gone on regarding homosexuality
in the church. One can make a wonderful, powerful,
rationally compelling and convincing argument
against homosexual practice, and it is immediately
dismissed with only three words in response: “That’s
your opinion.” What’s the philosophical foundation
that undergirds a response like that? It is the
postmodern commitment to openness, that there is no
such thing as objective truth, only personal truths,
and if your personal truth tells you that
homosexuality is wrong, then that’s fine. But if you
express that view in public and insinuate that
homosexual practice is then wrong for others, you
have broken the first rule, and you are intolerant and
bigoted.
Or one can easily demonstrate from Scripture
that homosexual practice is everywhere forbidden in
the Bible, and that will be set aside by the
postmodern with three similar words: “That’s your
interpretation.” One of the remarkable tenets of
postmodernism is that a written text has no objective
meaning except the meaning that the reader gives it.
It makes no difference what the author intended it to
say, it only matters what the reader interprets it to
mean, and then the meaning is only personal and not
universal.
C. You can see the havoc this raises with any
Bible study whatsoever. That’s why I never ask the
following question in a Bible study, “What does this
mean to you?” It gives away too much ground. It
permits this fuzzy thinking of postmodernism to turn
the text of Scripture, of God’s own Word into a wax
nose that can be twisted to mean whatever we want it
to mean. D.A. Carson titled his book on the
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postmodern understanding of Scripture The Gagging
of God. If the Bible can mean anything then it means
nothing. If we can interpret whatever God has said to
mean whatever we want it to mean, then we have
gagged God and he no longer speaks at all.
CONCLUSION
So when we witness to others, we need to
make sure that they understand that we are not simply
talking about personal beliefs or personal truth but
about true truth, objective and universal claims.
But even more: when we are having
disagreements among those who claim to follow
Christ and when we hear responses like, “That’s your
opinion,” or “that’s your interpretation,” then we
need to stop and have a conversation about the nature
of truth itself. “You seem to think that everything is a
matter of opinion. Do you think that anything is more
than mere opinion, say the existence of God, for
example? Is that really true or is that only an
opinion? Because if all there is is opinion and all
opinions are equally valid, then nothing is true and so
nothing right or wrong or worth defending, nothing.
And that is a terrifying world, a world which is
unsustainable, in which no two people could live
together or have any kind of meaningful relationship.

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