Opinion | Why It Matters That Jesus Really Did Rise From the Dead

Whatever else Christianity is, it is an assertion of historic fact. The New Testament invites us to examine the evidence. Its claim of a bodily resurrection was as strange and impossible — as Updike says, “monstrous” — when it was first made 2,000 years ago as it is now.It would be so much more acceptable if Easter were merely a ritual communicatin

Updike is pushing back on an idea that became ascendant among mainline Protestant churches around the turn of the 20th century and still exists in some places: that belief in a bodily resurrection is incompatible with modern science, technology and medicine. But many who rejected the literal Resurrection of Jesus wanted to maintain some kind of Chr

Updike’s poem, which he wrote in 1960 for an arts contest at his church (he won), is beloved by many, myself included. It tells the reader that the Resurrection is not a parable, not an event to mark the rebirth of spring. Easter is no tamed observance that respectable modern people can fit neatly into our sensibilities. The force of its claims mus