You wish to draw my attention to the Resurrection of Christ. “That,” you
say, “is either miraculous or nothing. The arguments by which you appear
to be driving miracles into non-existence—expelling them first from
profane history, then from the Old Testament, then step by step from
every part of the New—cannot make a stand at your convenience, so as to
except the Resurrection. Yet even St. Paul makes the Resurrection of
Jesus the basis of his own belief and Gospel. If, therefore, that final
miracle falls to the ground, the Pauline Gospel falls with it: and to
that downfall I fear your arguments all tend, although you yourself do
not see it or wish it.”
I entirely deny the quiet assumption of your first sentence; which, as
it stands (but I am sure you cannot mean it), affirms that the
Resurrection of Christ “is either miraculous or nothing.” I assert,
without fear of contradiction, that if the phenomena which convinced the
earliest disciples and St. Paul of the reality of the Resurrection of
Christ, were not miraculous but natural, they constitute the most
wonderful event in the history of the world. But what you wish to say, I
suspect, is this: “By the Resurrection of Christ I mean the Resurrection
of the body; now if Christ’s body was raised again, the act must have
been miraculous.” But how if the Resurrection was spiritual? St. Paul
himself speaks of a “spiritual body,” not a material body, as rising in
the Resurrection. Do you suppose that a “spiritual body” can be touched?
Or that St. Paul could have touched the presence that appeared to him
when he heard the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Now if
the Resurrection of Christ was spiritual and not material, there may
have been no suspension at all of the laws of material nature, but
simply a real, spiritual fact, manifested to the world according to
certain laws by which spiritual facts are manifested to the senses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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