Tumblr Rhys

The intellectual coup d’etat by wich the Enlightenment convinced so many that ‘we now know that dead people don’t rise’ … goes hand in hand with the Enlightenment’s other proposals, not least that we have now come of age, that God can be kicked upstairs, that we can get on running the world however we want to … To that extent, the totalitarianism of the last century were simply among the varied manifestations of a larger totalitarianism of thought and culture against which postmodernity has now, and rightly in my view, rebelled. Who, after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Ceasars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant’s last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the post-mortem validation of the true King of the Jews. And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of enquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century.