A Series on Acts - #69 The Resurrection is Intellectually Credible and Existentially Satisfying
Speaker Notes
Collect for Holy Week
Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts whereby you have given us life and immortality: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Acts 13:30
30 But God raised him from the dead,
John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (1994), pages 163, 164:
Chapter 9 Eschatology
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The Christian hope is, therefore, for me not the hope of survival of death, the persistence post mortem of a spiritual component which possesses, or has been granted, an intrinsic immortality. Rather, the Christian hope is of death and resurrection. My understanding of the soul is that it is the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing pattern, carried at any instant by the matter of my animated body and continuously developing throughout all the constituent changes of my bodily make-up during the course of my earthly life. That psychosomatic unity is dissolved at death by the decay of my body, but I believe it is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is me will be remembered by God and its instantiation will be recreated by him when he reconstitutes me in a new environment of his own choosing. That will be his eschatological act of resurrection.
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Our hope is of the resurrection of the body. By that I do not mean the resuscitation of our present structure, the quaint medieval notion of the reassembling of bones and dust. In a very crude and inadequate analogy, the software running on our present hardware will be transferred to the hardware of the world to come. And where will that eschatological hardware come from? Surely the ‘matter’ of the world to come must be the transformed matter of this world. God will no more abandon the universe than he will abandon us. Hence the importance to theology of the empty tomb, with its message that the Lord’s risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning within history of a process whose fulfilment lies beyond history, in which the destiny of humanity and the destiny of the universe are together to find their fulfilment in a liberation from decay and futility (cf. Romans 8:18-25).
‘Pass It On’ The Story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message reached the world (1984), pages 120-121. Chapter Five
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Now, he and Lois were waiting for the end. Now, there was nothing ahead but death or madness. This was the finish, the jumping-off place. “The terrifying darkness had become complete,” Bill said. “In agony of spirit, I again thought of the cancer of alcoholism which had now consumed me in mind and spirit, and soon the body.” The abyss gaped before him.
In his helplessness and desperation, Bill cried out, “I’ll do anything, anything at all!” He had reached a point of total, utter deflation – a state of complete, absolute surrender. With neither faith nor hope, he cried, “If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”
What happened next was electric. “Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy – I was conscious of nothing else for a time.
“Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought ‘You are a free man.’ I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the light and the ecstasy subsided. I again saw the wall of my room. As I became more quiet, a great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.’
“Savoring my new world, I remained in this state for a long time. I seemed to be possessed by the absolute, and the curious conviction deepened that no matter how wrong things seemed to be, there could be no question of the ultimate rightness of God’s universe. For the first time, I felt that I really belonged. I knew that I was loved and could love in return. I thanked my God, who had given me a glimpse of His absolute self. Even though a pilgrim upon an uncertain highway, I need be concerned no more, for I had glimpsed the great beyond.”
Bill Wilson had just had his 39th birthday, and he still had half his life ahead of him. He always said that after that experience, he never again doubted the existence of God. He never took another drink.