You can subtract a surprising amount from Christianity and still have something recognisable. Subtract the institutional church and you have a private faith, a little impoverished but real. Subtract any number of secondary doctrines and you still have a person trying to follow Jesus. There is one thing, though, that cannot be subtracted from the centre without the entire structure collapsing in on itself.
The resurrection.
Paul’s blunt version
Paul writes to a church in Corinth that seems to have been quietly downgrading the resurrection — treating it, perhaps, as a metaphor for the inner life, or a spiritual reality that did not require an actual emptied tomb. He does not soften his response:
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God … if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor. 15:14–19, NIV)
That is not the language of a man defending a useful symbol. Paul is saying that if the bodily resurrection of Jesus did not happen in time and space, the Christian faith is a waste of a life — of all people most to be pitied. The whole religion is built around this one event, and Paul has no interest in rescuing it as metaphor.
Not a metaphor
In an age that finds the supernatural awkward, it can be tempting to relocate the resurrection inward, to the experience of the believer. We were dead in our hopelessness; the story of Jesus brought us back to life; that is the resurrection. This is moving, partially true, and completely inadequate as a description of what the New Testament actually claims.
The earliest Christians said something stranger. They said a man who had been publicly executed by Roman soldiers in front of witnesses was, three days later, publicly alive again. He ate broiled fish in front of his disciples. He let Thomas put hands on him. He walked on roads, held conversations, and made breakfast for his friends on a beach in Galilee. The earliest record of these claims is older than the Gospels themselves: a short creed Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, naming specific witnesses, including more than five hundred people who saw the risen Jesus at once, most of whom are still living. The phrase is a dare. Go ask them.
The Christian claim is that the resurrection happened in the same category of event as the crucifixion. Both happened. Both could be examined at the time. Neither was a metaphor for the other.
What it means if it is true
A few things follow from the resurrection that follow from nothing else.
Death turns out not to be the last word. That sentence reads like a slogan, and it can be heard as one, but it is much sharper than a slogan if Jesus actually walked out of his own tomb. A universe in which one man came back through death is a universe where the New Testament’s promise that the same future awaits his followers (1 Cor. 15:20–23) reads less like poetry and more like a forecast.
Jesus turns out to be who he said he was. Many people across history have died for moral teachings. None have come back to keep teaching them. If Jesus did, his claims about himself — that he had authority to forgive sins, that he stood in some unique relationship with the Father, that the kingdom of God was somehow arriving with him — are not just unusual claims for a teacher to make. They are vindicated. The resurrection functions as God’s signature on the rest of Jesus’ ministry.
And the world turns out not to be the closed system most modern people quietly assume it is. A world in which resurrection happens is a world where God acts in time and space. The resurrection is not just the end of one remarkable biography. It is, in Paul’s word, the firstfruits of what reality is finally going to look like.
A test you can run
When Paul preached to a sceptical audience in Athens, he did not soften the claim for the philosophical crowd. He told them, plainly, that God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead (Acts 17:31, NIV). The Greek word for proof in that verse is a legal term, the kind used for evidence presented in court. Paul thought the resurrection was the kind of thing reasonable people could weigh.
That weighing is still available to anyone willing to do it. Read the resurrection accounts in Luke 24 and John 20–21 the way you would read any other ancient document. Pay attention to the small things: the women who arrive at the tomb first (an embarrassment, in a culture where women’s testimony was not admissible in court), the disciples who refuse at first to believe Mary, the unembarrassed admission that some of them doubted even after seeing him with their own eyes. None of those are marks of a fabricated story.
Christianity stands on a single historical claim. If it is false, the rest of the religion is sentimentality and we should move on with our lives. If it is true, then very little else in the universe matters more.