I've been attempting over the past few days to lay out what unapologetic preaching looks like.
Let me turn to that event most discussed (as Evidence That Demands a Verdict in building The Case for Christ): The Resurrection of Jesus.
Is this event something we can prove either historically (e.g. Pannenberg, NT Wright) or probabilistically (e.g. Richard Swinburne) or scientifically (e.g. various nutty apologists)? In my view, such proof is neither possible nor even a good thing. Resurrection isn't a natural or historical possibility, but it is precisely a contradiction of the whole order of the possible. It's not one event alongside other events within world-history, but it is the end and boundary of history as such.
I'm not talking here about all that silly Deism stuff that insists the universe is Newtonian and therefore a closed system. "Divine intervention", as most readers here know is a problem only in what it assumes.
Instead, my point is that to understand the resurrection you need theology first. That's because Jesus' resurrection is God's eschatological act. The existing structures of world-history are ripped open and something new begins.
Or, as the early Christians put it: Jesus' resurrection is the inauguration of the "new age" and is therefore the "eighth day of creation". The tension of the Church between realization and except action that I wrote about yesterday demonstrates that the fulfillment of history has already come, but its consummation is yet to be.
Since Jesus' resurrection contradicts the very structures of "reality", it's rightly called the impossible event. Impossible in the strictest sense of the word! It's not "historical", since it punctures world and history with their own shattering "end". In short, the resurrection of Jesus is the world's judgment and dissolution, and the startling re-creation (even out of the dark chaos of the world's sin) of the cosmos. Resurrected Jesus is "the first and the last, the beginning and the end".
All this means that the concept of resurrection can never be introduced as the most likely explanation for any historical data. To introduce the resurrection in this way is simply to forget the very meaning of it. All such apologetic strategies aim to reduce the resurrection to one particular possibility within the structures of world and history -- so that the resurrection is "proved" only by first being rendered innocuous.
We might seek to prove historically that the tomb of Jesus was found empty, and that the disciples had certain experiences after Jesus' death. Such historical proofs have their own significance -- but they are in no sense proofs of the resurrection. Similarly, it's worth remembering that the early Christians narrated stories of the empty tomb and of the appearances without once attempting to narrate the event of resurrection itself. (Contrast this to the final scene of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, where the camera gives us direct "objective" access to the event -- and in this very "objectivity", the event is rendered meaningless, absurd, and godless. At precisely this point of the film, it becomes clear that Gibson's Christ is in fact a pagan figure, and that this figure is encountered in the objectivity of voyeurism rather than in the subjectivity of faith.)
The only apologetic for the resurrection of Jesus would be the "body of Jesus" -- the Church. And at precisely this point, you need eyes of faith.
If folks want to know how the resurrection looked phenomenologically, the only answer that we Christians can give is that "it looks like God". The resurrection isn't something that can be seen by an objective observer is some view from no where in particular. Hence, it demands "eyes of faith".
This isn't just the resuscitation of a dead corpse. It's "the new creation" of "the same body"!
I'm not saying it never happened. Everything depends on the historicity of Jesus rising from the dead, on the empty tomb, on the eyewitnesses of the Resurrected One himself. I'm merely saying the resurrection of Jesus isn't like the historical events we know.
When the early Christians wanted to speak of the resurrection, they realized that the event can be named only by speaking (or stammering) of God -- after all, as Karl Barth has put it, the word "resurrection" is really just a paraphrase of the word "God".