Evidence For The Resurrection - John Lennox

And when they went into the tomb, John saw something that utterly intrigued him. It was a Jewish tomb, and the body would have been wrapped in grave cloths, and heavy spices put on them. And he saw, it says, the grave clothes rolled up, and the headcloth by itself. And then it says this: he saw and believed. And he left the tomb. There was nothing more to be seen, because what he had seen convinced him of the resurrection. What was it?

I spent my life from boyhood, convinced that this is the message that needs to be unpacked and explained to the world. But I've noticed that people's reaction to explanations of that fact over time has changed. Now, I do believe there is considerable evidence that establishes the credibility and believability of the resurrection of Jesus. Time is not going to permit a lot of delving into that tonight, but that's why I'm going to do a bit of shameless advertising. I've written this little book called Gunning for God. And the last two chapters of it are an analysis from a biblical perspective, but with a particular angle, which I'll explain later, of the biblical evidence for the truth of that resurrection.

But where I find a problem, not only in academic circles but with the general public, is there's no point in looking at it. "Don't talk to me about the resurrection of Jesus." Why? Because miracles cannot happen anyway. And the miracles cannot happen anyway. There is no point in discussing the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And I understand that. That's a perfectly logical stance. The problem often is a direct refusal to look at evidence. I chatted to Richard Dawkins once about the resurrection, and he said, "I cannot even imagine anybody being interested in it." And the reason for that is Dawkins thinks that the 18th or 19th century was the last time that anybody could credibly believe in such things. The reason is, of course, the bottom line is science has rendered miracles impossible. So there is simply no need to go there.

Now, a lot of that goes back to the Enlightenment philosopher, the Scotsman David Hume. But to see why such scientists, myself included, do not feel remotely threatened by the accusations that miracles cannot happen because they're violations of the laws of nature, we must look just a little bit more carefully at that plane. One of Richard Dawkins' forerunners as the world's most famous atheist was Professor Anthony Flew of Reading University, a famous philosopher who was Hume's leading interpreter. And before he died a few years ago, I had the privilege of spending a couple of hours with him in his home and talking about these things. And it's very humbling to listen to a world-class philosopher claim that for most of his life he'd been wrong. He said to me directly, he said, "I was wrong about you, and all my books would have to be rewritten, but I will never get round to that." It's very humbling when you hear someone of that class do that. And I talked at great length; he wrote a book, he wrote a very interesting book, "There Is a God." And it's in two halves. He writes the first half as to how he came to believe in God, very interestingly, through his understanding of the nature of the complexity of DNA. It's a linguistic complexity. And he could see, like most people can see when they think about it, that the moment you see language, the moment you see language up on the screen there, you know that whatever physical, chemical, natural processes are involved in putting that up on the wall, there's a mind involved in it. Because there is no adequate explanation of linguistic phenomena without postulating a mind. And he extrapolated like that, not unreasonably, as I would do, to DNA and came to believe in a God. He became a kind of deist. But then he invited his friend N.T. Wright to write the second half of the book, because he said, "If I was going to go for any religion, I would go for Christianity. So I'll get my friend N.T. Wright to write about the resurrection of Jesus." So you have this very interesting book with a scientist who's got so far. Being honest, I haven't got quite that far. So I get my friend to write the book. So I have Anthony Flew's word for it: Hume is simply wrong, and his arguments do not have that power.

I'll quote Anthony Flew: "Generations of humans have, in consequence, been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak, because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws." Hume's skepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are, of course, jettisoned the moment he leaves his study. It's strange that Christopher Hitchens thought that Hume wrote the last word on the subject. But then Hitchens isn't a scientist. And I said publicly, and you can see it in the debate, I said, "Hume was wrong about this, and I could explain it to you in several sentences." And afterwards, he came to me. I got on very well with Christopher Hitchens. He said, "That was heavy stuff. You know, that was very heavy stuff about Hume." I said, "Of course it was." But he said, "But Richard Dawkins..." I said, "Richard Dawkins hasn't a clue about you, and all you've done is follow him." He says, "I suppose I have." He was pretty honest about some things when you got close to him.

But not everybody who regards miracles as violations of the laws of nature would argue like Hume, because many of my colleagues resent, and it really is a resentment, any idea that some God could arbitrarily intervene and alter, suspend, reverse, or otherwise violate the laws of nature, because that would seem to contradict the immutability of the law. Stephen Hawking goes along with this notion, and to support it, they come up with a number of arguments. The first is: "Which is this belief in miracles in general, and in the New Testament miracles in particular, arose in a primitive, pre-scientific culture where people were ignorant of the laws of nature and so readily accepted miracle stories." Now, this is Hume again, in a different part of his book. That's exactly what he says. But that's a very curious thing. That explanation, that they didn't know the regularities of nature, is actually logically absurd, because in order to recognize any event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity that you know, to which that event is an apparent exception. You cannot spot an abnormality if you don't know what's normal.

And here is where the only scientifically trained person who writes the New Testament comes into his own: Dr. Luke. He was a polymath, a brilliant historian, and a medical doctor. And he begins his biography of Jesus, the Gospel of Luke, by raising this matter. This is something that's weighed with me for years as being extremely important. The very first issue he raises is the difficulty people of his day had in accepting anything supernatural. He tells the story of Zechariah, who was a priest, and his wife Elizabeth, and they prayed for a child for many years, and they had no child, and then they got very old. And in his old age, he was leading the worship in the temple in Jerusalem, and an angel appears, Luke tells us, and says, "Your prayers are answered, and your wife is going to have a son." And he said, "Absolutely not. He said, 'We're too old.'" You see, he knew as well as any gynecologist today that you get to a state where you cannot bear children. Now, he wasn't an atheist. He was a priest. He was praying. So he believed God. He believed in prayer. And he appeared to believe in angels, because he spoke to one. But answering his prayer involved a reversal of nature's powers, a regeneration. And he couldn't believe that. You see, this is the problem. He knew the course of nature. That's why he said, "This is absolutely ridiculous." And by the way, and this is just an aside, he was struck dumb for being silly. He had no message when he went out to the people. And neither do you, if you profess to be Christian, and at your heart there nestles unbelief in the miracles of Jesus and the supernatural. But I'd be in danger of preaching a sermon, and I mustn't do that because it isn't Sunday. Um, so we better get back to this central thing. It was sheer power of evidence that convinced Zechariah. So get this: these New Testament writers were not primitive. They faced the 21st-century problem. It's exactly the same problem.

Now, did Jesus' resurrection break the law of nature that people normally stay dead? No. You see, if I was claiming to you that Jesus rose from the dead by natural processes going on in the tomb before it happened, then it would be breaking the laws of nature. But I'm claiming no such thing. What the New Testament claims is God raised him from the dead. That is, there was an injection of power and energy from outside the system. It didn't happen by any natural means. It happened by supernatural intervention or input of power from outside. And we recognize that by all the tests of investigating the evidence that's given to us in the New Testament and elsewhere. You see, saying that God can't intervene in nature would be like claiming that the moment you understood the laws of internal combustion, that that made it impossible to believe that the designer of a motor car could or would intervene and remove the cylinder head. Of course, they could intervene. Moreover, the intervention wouldn't destroy the laws of internal combustion. The very same laws that explained why the engine worked with a cylinder head on would now explain why it doesn't work with a cylinder head off. So, we need to clear this up. The laws of nature are not like the laws of a country that you violate. They are descriptions of what normally happens. But God, who is the creator and stands above his creation and outside it, is perfectly free to input events into the system. And that is exactly what the miracles of Jesus are, and what the resurrection is. So Christians, far from denying the laws of nature, have got to believe in the laws of nature in order even to talk rationally about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There's a widespread impression these days that faith is believing where you know there's no evidence. That's what Dawkins thinks. Ladies and gentlemen, faith in the New Testament is never that. It's believing where there is evidence. The word "faith" in English comes from the Latin word "fides," which means trust. We get "fidelity" from it. And the normal use of the word is trust based on evidence. And you'll discover that, what that means, the next time you go to get a loan from your bank manager. He'll want evidence before he gives you the loan, won't he? His trust in you has got to be evidence-based. But unfortunately, in the world of the academy that I inhabit, there's a widespread impression that faith is a religious word, and it means believing where there's no evidence. That is completely wrong.

And John, the writer in the New Testament, who gives us a lot of evidence on the resurrection of Jesus, he sums up what he's doing by saying this: "Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name." Here's the evidence upon which faith can be based. If Christianity wasn't evidence-based, you wouldn't have the New Testament, because it claims to be evidence. It's a completely false idea.

And Hume is right. And he's saying a big claim requires big evidence. Of course, it does. And therefore, we need to investigate those things that will lead us to a reasoned assessment of why we should believe that Jesus raised from the dead. And one of the things he says is, "If the falsehood of the testimony to an event like the resurrection would be more miraculous than the event itself, then I would have to believe the testimony. But not until then." You see, if someone claims something like, "Jesus rose from the dead," I have to decide whether it's true or false. If the character of the witness is dubious, then you might dismiss the story out of hand. But then you investigate the moral integrity of the witness. What about the people that wrote the New Testament? Were they morally compromised? No. They went out into the world in the name of truth and purity and morality. They stuck to this story. That's powerful evidence that they themselves actually believed it. How otherwise would you explain their stance? Were they fraudsters?

Well, I shall never forget sitting in Trinity College, Cambridge, listening to one of the brightest legal scholars in the world of his time, Professor Sir Norman Anderson. And he's written a lovely little book, which I recommend to you even today, "Evidence for the Resurrection." And he says this: "Easter is not primarily a comfort but a challenge. Its message is either the supreme fact in history or else a gigantic hoax. If it is true, then it is the supreme fact of history, and to fail to adjust one's life to its implications means irreparable loss. But if it is not true, if Christ be not risen, then the whole of Christianity is a fraud, foisted on the world by a company of consummate liars, or at best, diluted simpletons." St. Paul himself realized this when he wrote, "If Christ be not risen, then our preaching is meaningless, and your faith is worthless." And centuries before Hume, Paul saw the issue clearly: either Christ has risen from the dead, or he and the others are deliberate perpetrators of fraud. But then the question cannot be avoided: Is it possible to believe that Christ's disciples were the kind of people who not only would concoct a lie but foist it on other people and watch them go to their deaths for it, and themselves go to their own deaths for the whole thing? I find that very difficult to believe. But that has been investigated by many forensic scientists. And I leave you to them to investigate that.

The other thing I want to mention is the historical fact of the meteoric rise of the Christian church from a non-proselytizing religion, Judaism. What is adequate to explain the transformation of the early disciples from a frightened group of men and women who were utterly depressed and disillusioned by what to them was the calamity that had befallen their movement when Jesus died? There suddenly explodes this powerful international movement which rapidly established itself all over the Roman Empire. The early disciples were all Jews. The religion not noted for its enthusiasm in making converts. And if you ask the early church, they will tell you immediately that what started it was the resurrection of Jesus. And their very existence, the meaning of their existence and its purpose was to bear witness to this fact. Professor C.F.D. Moule of Cambridge wrote, "If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of the resurrection, what does a secular historian propose to stop it up with? The birth and rapid rise of the Christian church remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the church itself."

Now, I'm coming towards the end of this section of the lecture. There are many, many more things that could be said, and I would encourage you, if you're beginning an interest here, to begin yourself to interact. I just want to mention one thing. Many years ago, I was perhaps about 17 when I first listened to a very bright academic, a classicist by training, talk about the resurrection. And he said, "There are innocent things that you'd hardly notice in the Gospels that are pointers that would never have been invented, never have been thought up in a fake story." And one of them is recorded in John's Gospel in chapter 20, where the women came and they said that the tomb was empty. Now, that's very striking, because Judaism did not regard the testimony of women very highly. And nobody faking a story would have ever claimed that women were the main bearers of the testimony. It's there because it's highly likely to be true. And they came and they said the tomb was empty. And Peter and John ran to the tomb. And they went into the tomb. And when they went into the tomb, John saw something that utterly intrigued him. It was a Jewish tomb. And the body would have been wrapped in grave cloths, and heavy spices put on them. And he saw, it says, the grave clothes rolled up, and the headcloth by itself. And then it says this: he saw and believed. Believe what? And he left the tomb. There was nothing more to be seen, because what he had seen convinced him of the resurrection. What was it? He was like a detective. What he saw, according to the text, was the grave clothes were rolled up exactly as they had been on the body. How could that be possible? Because, you see, if somebody had removed the body, they would have had to unwind them and then wind them up again. That would have been practically impossible. Would have taken hours. But if nobody had removed the body, John, it was like lightning going through his head. He saw and he believed. And that sticks in my mind over all those years. And there are many such things that bring us step by step. It's cumulative evidence.

But you know, there's more to it than that. And I want to read to you just a few words, if I can find them. 20 centuries ago, in the dawn of an oriental day, a woman distraught at finding an empty tomb in a garden near the place of crucifixion, saw a man standing in the shadows. Thinking that he was the gardener, she asked him if he'd removed the body of Jesus. He spoke her name, Mary. And in a moment of overwhelming understanding, she realized that this was not the gardener, but the owner, the Lord of creation, the one who was ultimately responsible not only for all the beauty of flowers and trees, but for the whole universe in all of its prodigious glory. Jesus had risen from the dead. Death itself had been overcome.

Atheism is no answer to death, ladies and gentlemen. No ultimate hope to give. It's an empty and sterile worldview which leaves us in a closed universe that will ultimately incinerate any last trace that we ever existed. It is quite literally a hopeless philosophy. Its story ends in the grave. But the resurrection of Jesus opens the door in a bigger story. It's for each one of us to decide whether it's true or not.

Now, my final point is this. I'm a scientist of sorts, and people say to me, "Come on, you can't believe this stuff." Because in science, in practical science, you do experiments, you test your hypothesis. Christianity is not testable, isn't it? Isn't it? You see the difference between the two last things I read, where the difference between seeing something like those grave clothes and working out an intellectual conclusion that something utterly remarkable has happened, that's not quite the same thing as meeting the risen Jesus. And you see, ladies and gentlemen, if it is true that Jesus rose from the dead, then he's still alive, and it's possible to meet him. Now, you can do an experiment. And it's this: this Jesus who claims to be risen tells us that if we're prepared to trust him, repent of the mess we've made of our own lives and the lives of other people, and we're prepared to receive him as Lord and controller of life, as the risen Son of God, then he will give us forgiveness. Does the word forgiveness mean anything to you? He'll give us new life and a new power.

And you know, I meet many people in life. And I'll tell you just one story to illustrate this. I was speaking to a huge crowd at Harvard University. And when I'd finished, a young Chinese student stood up at the balcony and he shouted to the whole crowd, "Look at me." And of course, we all looked. And I said, "Why should we look at you?" He said, "Listen." His face was radiant with joy. He said, "Six months ago, my life was in a mess as a student, and I don't know all the things he mentioned that were wrong with his life and so on. He was in total despair. And he said, 'Someone brought me to a lecture that you gave at one of the Ivy League universities, but not Harvard.' And he said, 'Just look at me now.' He said, 'I've found peace with God. My life has been completely transformed. I've discovered meaning.'"

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is the test. When you see that in life again and again and again and again, when you see people with narcotic or alcohol dependence, and they've no food to put on the table in front of their children, and you meet them then a year later, and something has happened, and you say, "What's happened to you?" and they say something like, "Well, I met Jesus," or "I became a Christian," or they put it different ways. When you see that again and again, you add two and two and you get four. I wouldn't sit here for a nanosecond if I didn't believe that not only is the resurrection of Jesus intellectually credible, but I believe it's existentially credible, because the central part of my life, and that of my wife and family, is to walk with him from day to day. Now, that may sound like absolute jargon and mumbo jumbo to you. But we're living in a universe where we discover that we are persons. And every analogy we know tells us that our origin cannot be subpersonal. It's supraspersonal. And if we enjoy human friendship, what a magnificent thing it is. If God makes a way where we can, through faith in Christ, become his sons and daughters and enjoy the biggest friendship and the most exciting friendship in the universe, and that is friendship with the risen Christ. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.