Faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is absolutely central to the Christian religion. This book deals critically with some of the more serious attempts of the world's leading theologians over the past hundred years to handle the resurrection of Christ conceptually.

Explores ancient beliefs about life after death, highlighting the fact that the early Christians' belief about the afterlife belonged firmly on the Jewish spectrum, while introducing several new mutations and sharper definitions, forcing readers to view the Easter narratives not simply as rationalizations, but as accounts of two actual events: the empty tomb of Jesus and his "appearances." Simultaneous. Hardcover no longer available.

This book critically examines the attempts of the world's leading theologians over the past 100 years to deal conceptually with the resurrection of Christ. Finding such attempts ultimately unsatisfactory, Carnley articulates a logically coherent epistemology of faith in the resurrection that respects the authority of scriptural traditions as understood by contemporary New Testament scholars while preserving the transcendental dimensions of the resurrection as a divine mystery and the modern experience of the Easter Christ.

While its companion volume, The Resurrection in Retrospect, addresses the inadequacies of an approach to the Resurrection of Christ purely as an event of past historical time, The Reconstruction of Resurrection Belief articulates an alternative understanding of Resurrection faith as essentially a response of trust based upon a knowledge by acquaintance with the living presence of Christ today. In the hope that it may have some traction in an increasingly secular world of contemporary scientific realism, Carnley demonstrates an understanding of the nature of Resurrection faith in the language of today, with as much logical coherence as possible, and explains how the claim that the animating Spirit of the Christian community that Saint Paul spoke of as ‘the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ (Rom 8:2) may be justifiably identified in faith today as ‘the living presence of Jesus of Nazareth.’

Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists, working at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God. How does he reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable? In THE LANGUAGE OF GOD he explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes the reader on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry and biology -- indeed, reason itself -- are not incompatible with belief. His book is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?

Whether or not Jesus rose bodily from the dead remains perhaps the most critical and contentious issue in Christianity. Until now, argument has centred upon the veracity of explicit New Testament accounts of the events following Jesus's crucifixion, often ending in deadlock. In Richard Swinburne's new approach, though, ascertaining the probable truth of the Resurrection requires a much broader approach to the nature of God and to the life and teaching of Jesus. The Resurrection can only have occurred if God intervened in history to raise to life a man dead for thirty six hours. It is therefore crucial not only to weigh the evidence of natural theology for the existence of a God who has some reason so to intervene, but also to discover whether the life and teaching of Jesus show him to be uniquely the kind of person whom God would have raised. Swinburne argues that God has reason to interfere in history by becoming incarnate, and that it is highly improbable that we would find the evidence we do for the life and teaching of Jesus, as well as the evidence from witnesses to his empty tomb and later appearances, if Jesus was not God incarnate and did not rise from the dead. The Resurrection of God Incarnate offers a clear and penetrating new perspective on Christianity's central mystery. It will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians, and all those trying to discover the truth about the Christian religion.

In the companion volume to this, The Resurrection in Retrospect, Peter Carnley focuses on the inadequacies for faith in Jesus Christ of an approach to his resurrection purely as an event of past historical time. The Reconstruction of Resurrection Belief articulates an alternative understanding of resurrection faith as essentially a response of trust based upon a knowledge by acquaintance with the living presence of Christ today. This book seeks to articulate an understanding of the nature of resurrection faith in the language of today, with as much logical coherence as possible, in the hope that it may have some traction in the increasingly secular world of contemporary scientific materialism. It faces the key challenge of seeking to explain how the claim that the animating Spirit of the Christian community that Saint Paul spoke of as "the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" (Rom 8:2) may be justifiably identified in faith today as "the living presence of Jesus of Nazareth."