Pitiable, Foolish, Keyless "Christianity"
If Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable. 1 Cor. 15:17-19, NKJV.
But," Paul goes on to say, "now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. But each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, afterward those who are Christ's at His coming. Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father" (1 Cor. 15:20-24, NKJV).
A resurrectionless Christianity is the height of folly, making Christians, as Paul put it, the most pitiable of all people. People who claim the name of Christ without His resurrection have kept the husk but have thrown away the fruit. They are living a powerless falsehood.
Yet that is exactly what some of the Corinthians had done. Paul's massive assault on the topic in 1 Corinthians sought to put them straight by highlighting the truth of the Resurrection and the foolishness of rejecting it--a path that leads to meaningless "Christianity."
The interesting thing about the Corinthian crisis is that theologians and ministers reinvented it during the Enlightenment period, and it became a major plank in the belief system of the mainline Protestant denominations of the twentieth century.
Modern people were just too smart to believe in such foolishness. Dead people didn't come to life. The disciples invented the idea to cover up their mistake. H. Richard Niebuhr summed up modernistic Christianity when he penned that "a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." And, he could have added, "without a resurrection." The result was a form of religion focused on ethics and doing good.
The upshot was powerless churches that would eventually begin to shrink and die. They had thrown away the core of the biblical message. And with that one stroke, as I have said in my Apocalyptic Vision and the Neutering of Adventism, they managed to emasculate themselves.
Such will be the fate of any movement that turns its back on the pillar truths that made it strong. And for all Christianity there is no more vital and important fact than the risen Christ.
If Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable. 1 Cor. 15:17-19, NKJV.
But," Paul goes on to say, "now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. But each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, afterward those who are Christ's at His coming. Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father" (1 Cor. 15:20-24, NKJV).
A resurrectionless Christianity is the height of folly, making Christians, as Paul put it, the most pitiable of all people. People who claim the name of Christ without His resurrection have kept the husk but have thrown away the fruit. They are living a powerless falsehood.
Yet that is exactly what some of the Corinthians had done. Paul's massive assault on the topic in 1 Corinthians sought to put them straight by highlighting the truth of the Resurrection and the foolishness of rejecting it--a path that leads to meaningless "Christianity."
The interesting thing about the Corinthian crisis is that theologians and ministers reinvented it during the Enlightenment period, and it became a major plank in the belief system of the mainline Protestant denominations of the twentieth century.
Modern people were just too smart to believe in such foolishness. Dead people didn't come to life. The disciples invented the idea to cover up their mistake. H. Richard Niebuhr summed up modernistic Christianity when he penned that "a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." And, he could have added, "without a resurrection." The result was a form of religion focused on ethics and doing good.
The upshot was powerless churches that would eventually begin to shrink and die. They had thrown away the core of the biblical message. And with that one stroke, as I have said in my Apocalyptic Vision and the Neutering of Adventism, they managed to emasculate themselves.
Such will be the fate of any movement that turns its back on the pillar truths that made it strong. And for all Christianity there is no more vital and important fact than the risen Christ.
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