the third day he rose again from the dead

The Text

The clause that turns the gospel. Everything that preceded it — the conception, the birth, the suffering, the crucifixion, the death, the burial, the descent — leads here. Everything that follows it — the ascension, the session at the right hand, the return to judge, the church, the resurrection of the body, the life everlasting — flows from here. Remove this single clause and the rest of the creed collapses into the eulogy of a tragic Galilean. Confess this clause and the gospel stands: God has done something to death itself, and the world is in a different state than it was three days ago.

Translation Notes

Tertia die / tē tritē hēmera. “On the third day,” counted by Jewish inclusive reckoning. The crucifixion was on Friday (the Day of Preparation, the day before the Sabbath); Saturday was the Sabbath; the rising was on the first day of the week (Sunday). Friday + Saturday + Sunday = three days, in the counting convention of first-century Judaism. The phrase is not a chronological detail dropped in to fix a date; it is a deliberate echo of Hosea 6:2 (“after two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up”) and the pattern of the Jewish week, and it is preserved in every form of the creed as part of the substance of the resurrection claim.

Resurrexit / anastanta. Re-surgere / ana-stēnai. Both Latin and Greek use a compound of “to rise / to stand up” with the prefix “again / back / up.” The image is bodily: a person who has been lying down (the corpse on the slab) stands up. The verbs are not metaphorical. The whole tradition has resisted any reading that makes the resurrection a spiritual event in distinction from a physical one.

The New Testament uses two verb families for the resurrection: anistēmi (to stand up, active) and egeirō (to raise, often passive). When Jesus rises (active), the emphasis is on his own divine action; when he is raised (passive), the emphasis is on the Father raising him by the Spirit (Rom. 8:11). Both are biblical; both are true; both belong to the trinitarian shape of the saving act. The Apostles’ Creed uses the active form: resurrexit, anastanta. He rose.

Ek nekrōn / a mortuis. “From the dead ones,” partitive plural. He rose out of the company of the dead, from among those whom death has held. The plural is significant: he rose from death not in isolation but as a first event in what will be a general rising. Paul makes this explicit in 1 Cor. 15:20 — “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” The single resurrection of the Son inaugurates a general resurrection still to come.

Historical Context

The resurrection is the oldest Christian confession. Paul’s recital of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15 — written in the early 50s AD, perhaps twenty years after the events — quotes an earlier creedal formula:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. — 1 Cor. 15:3–6

Paul’s “delivered… received” language is the technical vocabulary of rabbinic tradition: this was already a fixed formula in the church when Paul received it. The formula is therefore much earlier than Paul’s letter — perhaps within a decade of the resurrection itself, possibly within five years. This is the earliest stratum of Christian tradition we possess, and at its center is the bodily resurrection of Jesus on the third day, witnessed by named persons who could be questioned at the time of writing.

The early creeds (the Apostles’ Creed in its various forms, the Nicene, all the baptismal interrogations) preserve the same confession with minor variations. There is no period of the church in which the bodily resurrection has been a debatable element of mainstream Christian confession.

The polemical context, again, is twofold.

Against Gnostic spiritualizing. Early Gnostic groups taught that the divine Christ ascended at the moment of death, leaving the body behind; the “resurrection” was the soul’s escape from material flesh. The creed refuses this: he rose, in his body, the same body that was crucified and buried. The empty tomb is not incidental; it is structurally necessary to what the clause confesses.

Against early skepticism. Some pagan critics (Celsus, mid-2nd c., quoted by Origen in Contra Celsum) and some modern critics have proposed natural-historical alternatives: a swoon and recovery (rejected under the previous clause), a stolen body (the explanation Matthew 28:11–15 already records and refutes), a hallucination (which cannot account for the appearance to five hundred simultaneously). The resurrection narratives are written as if to anticipate and forestall these explanations. They are not naïve folk-tales; they are testimony, given by witnesses who knew what was at stake in giving it.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.31–35; Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh; Athanasius, On the Incarnation §§ 26–32

The patristic reading insists on three things at once. First, the resurrection is bodily — the very flesh that died is raised, transformed but continuous. Tertullian’s On the Resurrection of the Flesh is the most sustained early Christian polemic on this point, written against the Gnostic spiritualizers. Second, the resurrection is vindication — it is the Father’s public verdict on the Son, declaring that the one rejected by men is in fact the one chosen and given. Third, the resurrection is inaugural — it is the first event of the new creation, the firstfruits of a general resurrection that will come at the end.

Athanasius’s On the Incarnation §§ 26–32 puts the soteriological argument with classical force: the Son took flesh that he might die our death, and rose in flesh that he might give us his life. The resurrection completes what the incarnation began.

Strengths

• Holds bodily realism and saving significance together
• Refuses every form of resurrection-as-symbol from the start

Weaknesses

• The patristic emphasis on the realness of bodily resurrection can leave underdeveloped the question of what kind of body the resurrected body is (1 Cor. 15:35–58, the sōma pneumatikon)
• Some patristic discussions of the precise material continuity between the pre-mortem and post-mortem body went into speculation the later tradition gently retired

Scholastic

Tradition: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 53–56

Aquinas treats the resurrection in four questions: the necessity of the resurrection (q. 53), the quality of the risen Christ (q. 54), the manifestation of the resurrection to the disciples (q. 55), and the causality of Christ’s resurrection (q. 56). The framework is christological-soteriological: the resurrection is necessary for the believer’s justification (Rom. 4:25), for the instruction of the church, and as the firstfruits of the general resurrection.

Aquinas’s treatment of the quality of the risen body (q. 54) is careful: the body is the same body that died, but glorified — it has the four properties of the glorified body (impassibilitas, subtilitas, agilitas, claritas: imperviousness to suffering, subtlety, agility, brightness) — properties that all the redeemed will share in the general resurrection.

Strengths

• Holds the resurrection’s saving significance and the question of bodily continuity together with precision
• The four-properties framework, while medieval in vocabulary, names dimensions of glorification the New Testament itself attests

Weaknesses

• The medieval physics of glorified bodies has to be translated for contemporary use
• Some scholastic discussions are more interested in the modes of the resurrection than in the resurrection itself

Reformation — Calvin

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.16.13–17; III.25 (on the resurrection of the believer)

Calvin treats the resurrection of Christ as the necessary completion of the saving work: the cross effects the remission of sin, the resurrection effects the imputation of righteousness and the gift of new life. The resurrection is the public sign that God has accepted the sacrifice of the cross; it is the believer’s basis for justification (Rom. 4:25) and for hope of their own bodily resurrection.

Strengths

• Holds the cross and resurrection together as a single saving act
• Anchors the believer’s eschatological hope in the historical resurrection of Christ

Weaknesses

• The forensic-juridical framework, taken alone, can underemphasize the cosmic-transformative dimension of the resurrection
• The Reformed tradition’s strong emphasis on the resurrection’s meaning sometimes leaves the historical-bodily fact less developed than it deserves

Modern — Bultmann vs. Pannenberg

Tradition: Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology (1941); Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus — God and Man (1968); N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003)

The modern critical debate is the most consequential theological argument of the 20th century. Bultmann argued, in his “demythologization” program, that the resurrection accounts are kerygma (preaching) rather than history — the disciples’ experience of the meaning of the cross, not a bodily event in space and time. The “resurrection” is, on Bultmann’s reading, the rise of faith in the disciples, not the rising of Jesus from the tomb.

Pannenberg’s Jesus — God and Man (1968) was the major theological counter-move: the resurrection must be confessed as a historical event, attested by reliable witnesses, with public consequences, or the gospel evaporates. Pannenberg argued that the resurrection has the unusual status of being a historical event whose meaning is also eschatological — it announces the end from inside history. N. T. Wright’s monumental The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), 800+ pages of careful historical argumentation, is the major recent retrieval of the Pannenberg case with much greater historical-critical depth.

Strengths

• The Bultmann program forced the modern church to articulate what the resurrection actually claims and on what basis
• The Pannenberg / Wright response has produced the most historically serious defense of bodily resurrection in the modern theological literature

Weaknesses

• Bultmann’s “kerygma without event” reading evacuates what the creed actually says — Paul’s argument in 1 Cor. 15 explicitly rejects this option (“if Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain”)
• The Pannenberg / Wright response, while strong, can occasionally let historical-critical apologetics overshadow the trinitarian-doxological core of the doctrine

Liberation

Tradition: Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator; James Cone, God of the Oppressed

The liberation reading treats the resurrection as God’s public vindication of the crucified — and therefore of all the crucified of every age. The Father’s raising of the Son is the announcement that the verdict of the powers (Pilate, the religious authorities, the crowd) is not the final verdict. God has overturned the world’s judgment about who is guilty and who is innocent. The resurrection grounds the church’s permanent commitment to those whom the world has condemned.

Strengths

• Reactivates the political register of the resurrection — what it means that this particular execution was reversed
• Grounds liberation hope in the trinitarian act of God rather than in human optimism

Weaknesses

• Like all liberation readings, the strongest forms can press the political dimension at the cost of the eschatological and cosmic
• Must hold carefully that Christ’s resurrection is the first, not the only, event of vindication

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of the resurrection is unambiguous and bodily. The Articles of Religion (1784), Article III: “Christ did truly rise again from the dead, and took again his body, with all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature, wherewith he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth until he return to judge all men at the last day.” This article is among the Restrictive Rules of the United Methodist Church — unchangeable by General Conference action. The bodily resurrection is settled Methodist doctrine.

Wesley’s sermons on the resurrection are not as numerous as one might expect from a preacher of his output, but they are theologically dense. Sermon 137, “On the Resurrection of the Dead”, treats the bodily resurrection of believers at length, on the foundation of Christ’s resurrection. Wesley’s Notes on 1 Corinthians 15 take the chapter as the load-bearing New Testament treatment, and his glosses preserve a robust bodily realism.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the experiential and ethical register Wesley brings to the resurrection. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is the same Spirit who regenerates the believer in baptism and who, in the Wesleyan ordo salutis, sanctifies them toward Christian perfection. The resurrection is not only the believer’s eschatological hope; it is the present pattern of the new life into which the believer is born. Wesley’s hymnody (with Charles) extends this: the resurrection of Christ is, for Methodists, the daily resource of the Christian life, not only the end of the world’s history.

The practical Wesleyan posture: confess the bodily resurrection without apology; receive its power experientially as the Spirit’s work in the believer now; live the resurrection life into which one has been raised; hope, with the church, for the general resurrection still to come.

Hymnody

The Wesleyan resurrection hymnody is, with the cross hymnody, the doctrinal heart of the Methodist tradition in song.

“Christ the Lord is risen today” (Charles, 1739) — one of the most widely sung Easter hymns in English-speaking Christianity. “Lives again our glorious King, / Where, O death, is now thy sting? / Once he died our souls to save, / Where’s thy victory, boasting grave?” The hymn weaves 1 Cor. 15 directly into singable English verse.

“Hail the day that sees him rise” (Charles, 1739): a hymn that holds the resurrection and ascension together as a single movement of glorification.

“Soldiers of Christ, arise” (Charles, 1749): not a resurrection hymn directly, but rooted in the resurrection-life — “arise / and put your armor on” assumes a believer who has been raised with Christ to a new life of struggle and witness.

“Love divine, all loves excelling” (Charles, 1747) — already cited under the Father almighty — names the eschatological consummation that the resurrection inaugurates: “Changed from glory into glory, / Till in heaven we take our place, / Till we cast our crowns before thee, / Lost in wonder, love, and praise.”

The 1780 Collection’s sections on “Believers Rejoicing” and “For Believers Praying” return constantly to the resurrection as the present resource of the believer’s life. Methodist hymnic theology has always held the resurrection as a daily reality, not only an Easter one.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Why do Christians worship on Sunday? Not because the day is intrinsically holy. The Jewish Sabbath — the seventh day, Saturday — is the sabbath of creation, in which God rested from his works. Christians have kept the Sabbath as a structural feature of the week (one reason why we still have weekends), but the Christian gathering moved, very early, to the first day of the week. Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the day on which Christ rose from the dead. To gather on Sunday is to celebrate, every week, the resurrection.

In Christian reckoning, Sunday is the eighth day — the first day of new creation. The seven days of the old creation reach their completion in the Sabbath rest; the eighth day, beyond the cycle, is the inauguration of what God is doing in the new creation. Every Sunday is a little Easter; every Easter is the great Sunday. To worship on the Lord’s Day is to confess, week by week, that the new creation has begun in Jesus Christ and that we are living already in a different world than the one in which Christ remained dead.

This is why Christmas-on-a-Sunday is not a competition between two seasons. Some congregations have cancelled Sunday worship when Christmas falls on a Sunday, treating Christmas as a family-and-presents day. The instinct misunderstands what Sunday actually is. Christmas is partially for family; Sunday is the day of the Lord’s resurrection. We do not cancel the resurrection for Christmas.

The resurrection is bodily. The Bible has little time for disembodied souls floating around as ghosts. Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37) — the most extended biblical vision of resurrection — describes sinews binding to bones, flesh covering them, breath entering them, the whole army of the dead standing up on their feet. Jesus rose in the flesh; Lazarus rose in the flesh; even Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration are radiant figures, not ghosts. John Updike, in his “Seven Stanzas on Easter” (1960), put the bodily realism with the bluntness it deserves:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

What this means pastorally: at the empty tomb, the angel asks the women a question that the church has carried ever since. Why do you look for the living among the dead? It is a question that disciplines the church’s instincts even now. We sometimes look for the living Christ in the wrong places. We look in the comforts of memory and the satisfactions of being right. We look in church attendance treated as a social obligation, in faith treated as a cultural artifact, in religion that condemns others while sparing ourselves. The Christ confessed here is not in those places. The valley of dry bones is real, and we can stand in it. But Christ is not there.

The Christ confessed here also disciplines our experience of time. The Greek language has two words for time. Chronos is clock-time — the linear minutes of the schedule, the productivity-time of the organizational man, the time of the calendar and the deadline. Kairos is God’s time — the time of love, the time of grace, the time of the first cry of one’s child, the time of undeserved mercy. Chronos moves linearly and indifferently; kairos moves at the speed of love. When the church gathers on the Lord’s Day to confess the resurrection, chronos is suspended and kairos breaks in. The Spirit of the risen Christ does not work on the schedule we set; he sets our schedules in light of what he has done.

For pastors: this is also why the resurrection clause is the foundation of the Christian life, not only of Christian doctrine. We do not merely believe that Christ rose; we live, in baptism, the new life into which we have been raised with him (Rom. 6:4–5). Every Sunday is the renewal of that life. Every Eucharist is the meal of the risen Lord with his risen people. Every act of love in the midst of a world that still includes Roman crosses is a witness to the resurrection that has already begun. The question the angel asks at the tomb — Why do you look for the living among the dead? — is also an invitation: the living Christ is here, with his people, in the world he is making new.

Further Reading

• 1 Corinthians 15 — the earliest Christian creedal statement on the resurrection
• Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies V.31–35 — bodily resurrection against Gnostic spiritualizing
• Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh (c. 210)
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation §§ 26–32
• Augustine, City of God XXII (the resurrection of the body)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 53–56
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.16.13–17; III.25
• Heidelberg Catechism Q. 45
• John Wesley, Sermon 137, “On the Resurrection of the Dead”
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on 1 Corinthians 15
• The Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church (1784), Article III
• Charles Wesley, “Christ the Lord is risen today” (1739); “Hail the day that sees him rise” (1739)
• A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)
• John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter” (1960)
• Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology (1941) — the modern demythologization case
• Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus — God and Man (Westminster, 1968) — historical-theological response
• N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003) — the major recent historical defense
• Gerald O’Collins, Easter Faith (Paulist, 2003) — careful Catholic treatment
• Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2002) — Pauline reading
• Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator (Orbis, 2001) — liberation reading