Introduction

It is universally assumed that to be a Christian one is committed to believing in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus where Jesus was raised from death in his natural body. One might even think that a Christian who does not believe in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus is like a vegetarian who eats meat. However, a common struggle that many Christians nowadays confront is the conflict between science and religion. At its core, this dilemma concerns whether a Christian’s faith must rest on the miraculous resurrection of Jesus, which implies bodily resurrection. Indeed, due to modern scientific and cultural conventions, some people who claimed to be Christians do not, or cannot believe in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus. Instead, they would believe in a lesser version of the resurrection, whether it be a spiritual resurrection where it is believed that Jesus had risen from natural body to spiritual body or a metaphorical resurrection where it is believed that Jesus’s resurrection is rather symbolic than literal.

The dilemma is by no means a contemporary one. Since the beginning of the long history of Christianity, its missionary core has necessitated the problem of the clash of belief systems. I argue that the threshold of becoming a Christion does not necessitate the belief in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus but only requires the faith in a reasonable version of the resurrection according to the new believer’s localized interpretation of the concept, while a righteous Christian will strive to achieve the belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Attempting to solve the dilemma in the following paper, I explore the rhetorical context of Corinthians and Romans where the speaker Paul employed distinct descriptions of resurrection to further his purpose of proclaiming God’s message to different audiences and test my theory in
various forms nowadays Christian beliefs that have or do not have faith in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus.

The Localization of Christianity

Christian missionaries exploited expedient means corresponding to the local culture to convert nonbelievers in different regions. The syncretism of Christianity and local culture served as a starting point for the Christian faith. I will examine the localization of Christian from the Corinthians in the Bible and the nineteenth-century Taiping Theology Movement in China and the preachers’ respective approaches to converting non-believers to Christianity. From the perspective of localization, the threshold of becoming a Christian does not necessitate a strict commitment to believe in the miracles in the pure Christian belief system but initiation of faith in the syncretic religion.

To begin with, the exigence of Paul’s preaching in Corinthians must be elucidated. In Corinthian 15, the speaker Paul, sent “expressly” by God as a preacher to all nations, aimed to persuade his gentile audiences to believe in the proclaimed knowledge of God (Easter). Paul’s ultimate purpose was to preach the message of Christ across churches and bring access to the gospel to those who were not in the Christian atmosphere and thereby lacked faith such as those in Rome and Spain (Knox). Since his targeted audience was all nations and not exclusively Jewish Christians who already had deep-rooted faith in God, his apolitical work mainly targeted the gentiles who had not yet initiated faith in God (Knox). Faith, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is “circular” and based on evidence only acceptable to those who are “already thinking within the relevant perspective” and thus presents great difficulties to nonbelievers to have faith in new ideologies or beliefs (Bishop).
Under such context, the gentiles who had no prior knowledge of the Torah were thus more difficult to be convinced, especially if bodily resurrection that contradicts their local culture, was said to be the requirement to become a Christian. To that end, when Paul preached to gentiles who had no prior knowledge of the Old Testament in the Bible, he strategically employed ideologies about the resurrection that was more acceptable and logical to his audience. Making an analogy between the body and snow in his explanation of the resurrection of the dead, Paul states that “it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (Corinthians 15:42, 44). Here, Paul referred to the resurrection as the process of transformation from the natural body to the spiritual body, in an endeavor to make this concept more easily acceptable for the gentiles than resurrection from a natural body to a natural body (Easter 204). For missionaries, it was already extremely difficult to convert nonbelievers to the unfamiliar Christianity, and it would only be more dubious for them to venture their faith in an ideology that contradicted the local worldview. Thus, a strategic combination of acceptable knowledge and Christian truth is used to appeal to the gentile listeners.

Similar localization of Christianity can be seen in other Christian missionaries such as the nineteenth-century Taiping Theology in China that had an emphasis on the localization of Christian preaching into Chinese culture. Although the Taiping Theology adhered to gender equality as they believed that all humans are created equal by God in the Bible, it normalized the

the inevitable transition for nonbelievers to believe in a new religion, the Taiping Theology exhibited connections to Confucian philosophy of female domesticity while maintaining the core Christian belief of equality. With the integration of local faiths with Christianity, Chinese people were thus more receptive to the newly introduced Christian religion.
subordination of women to men as it was a prevailing Chinese culture (
Kilcourse). Because of
The blend of Christian and local ideologies through history and across geography for a nonbeliever to initiate faith in God is necessary as proven in practice. Thus, it can be inferred that the threshold of becoming a Christian is to believe in any reasonable version of the resurrection, not necessarily the bodily resurrection.

The Ultimate Pursuit of a Righteous Christian

Once one meets the threshold of embracement, the expectation changes. Comparing Jesus’s expectations to Pharisees and Paul’s to Roman churches and the methods of preaching with those aiming at non-believers in the former section, I conclude that unlike the conversion, which merely necessitates the faith in a reasonable version of the resurrection, becoming a righteous Christian requires the belief in the miraculous, or bodily resurrection.

Righteous Christians’ actions should be based on their faith within, not on external factors. However, the Jews, such as the Pharisees, claimed that they believed in the resurrection of the dead and the afterlife and adhere strictly to the Torah, but their religious practice rests on the desire to be publicly recognized for their self-righteous religious worship, as Jesus strictly criticizes in Matthew 23:5 “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long” (NIV). Jesus implied here that to be a devout Christian, one has to commit to voluntarily acting out of faith rather than being driven by external factors.

In a different context than speaking to gentiles in Corinthians, Paul employed a divergent method to approach his Jewish audience from Roman churches similar to the Pharisees. Paul, in his preachers in Rome, urged the Jews in the Roman churches to strive to believe in the proclaimed knowledge to be a true righteous Christian. Since the Jews already had
faith in God and the prophecy of a messiah to deliver their sin, trusting that Jesus had physically risen from the dead merely necessitates belief, not their already existing faith. In addition, due to his audience’s familiarity with the shared Jewish custom that emphasized proper burial for everyone regardless of one’s way of death during peacetime and the requirement of burial for that person on the day of his death, Paul did not employ the same words as in his preacher in Corinthians verbatim (Evans).

Because of their shared burial convention, and under this assumption that Jesus rose from the dead three days later, Paul puts these two pieces of existing knowledge together to make Jews believe in the logic of resurrection, saying that “if you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Paul simply utilizes the clause “God raised him from the dead” to further his message without demonstrating the mechanisms of the transformation from a natural body to a spiritual body as in Corinthians. This direct message of “risen from the dead” implies the bodily resurrection of Jesus that Paul hoped the Jews would believe, suggesting that once a person met the threshold of becoming a Christian, the expectation changed to believing in the bodily resurrection rather than any version of a reasonable resurrection. The shift in Paul’s description of resurrection due to a differential audience confirms that Christians have different goals at different stages.

As argued, the Bible requires a righteous Christian to ultimately pursue a firm foundation of faith in the miraculous resurrection. Despite having faith in God, their faith needs to be nurtured to adhere closer to the authoritative version of Christianity.

Different Modern Christians
Being a Christian is not a status but a process. People who are in the range of believing any form of resurrection are Christian, with the reasonable resurrection and the miraculous resurrection at the two extreme sides of the spectrum. In this section, I will examine various forms of contemporary Christians and where they fall in this spectrum.

Strict Christian priests argue that a Christian must believe in the miraculous resurrection because this implies that God is omnipotent as He can transcend the natural human limit (Winston). Aiming to adhere to the authoritative version of Christianity, this type of Christian has a strong foundation of faith in God and a desire to elevate their faith to a higher level that requires a firm belief in the miraculous resurrection.

While other beginner Christians propose that the belief in superstitions and literal miracles is not essential for becoming a Christian. As Spong, a respected retired bishop suggested, a Christian’s faith should rest on the acceptance of the reality of God without the requirement of a literal belief in miracles (Winston). Indeed, 1/4 of the Christians describe themselves as Christians but don’t believe in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus (“Resurrection”). To them, the miracles of the resurrection are more symbolic than literal, which merely suggests that God has enormous power over men. They only initiated a basic faith in the reasonable resurrection of Jesus and therefore they merely met the threshold of becoming a Christian.

Although a Christian might believe in the resurrection by using love to make sense of the resurrection as a reasonable version, the reason for such belief lacks logical reasoning as such a miraculous event counters the scientific world view of natural human limits (Ambrosino). But this is not to say that it is not a target that many righteous Christians endeavors to achieve. The
belief in miracles shows one’s committed faith that there is nothing impossible with God, even if it might contradict societal conventions and science.

Conclusion

Christianity manifests to be a rather flexible religion throughout history. While the Bible requires devoted Christians to achieve the belief in the miraculous resurrection as their final objective, embracing the religion does not necessitate it, contrary to people’s assumption. The concept of the resurrection of Jesus is fuzzy: when the intended audience is different, the expectation is different, so Christians at different stages in their faith have different goals. From the time of the Bible up to today, to spread God’s message, missionaries tried various expedient means to convey the belief in an understandable and acceptable version to convert people of different backgrounds. Only after one step across the threshold of the Christian belief can one start to pursue the ultimate goal.
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