The Resurrection and the Atoning Work of Christ

“...in the resurrection God's Yes is finalized in and through the No of his resistance to all corruption, evil and death. It is in the resurrection, then, that the ultimate content and purpose of atonement and reconciliation come to fruition and to view – in the recreation of man in communion with God. This involves the restoration of true creaturehood to man, the affirmation of man in the fullness of his human existence and reality. This is the ontological side of redemption, the healing and restoring of being in relation to the creative Source of all being. The resurrection means that as applied to man the term is now has new meaning, and has meaning in objective depth for us, in a profounder reality than ever we had or were aware of before. As Athenagoras argued in the second century, apart from the resurrection, and its link with the creation, man could not survive as man. The resurrection is the actualization of human reality, the humanizing in Jesus of dehumanized man, the establishing of the fact that man is – the end of all illusion, and all existentialist philosophies of nothingness, the end of all futility and the void, of all mē on (negated being) and the mataiotēs (vanity) bound up with it.” (pp. 78-79)