The Centrality of Christ's Resurrection

It is not uncommon in Protestantism to hear preachers and teachers say that the cross of Christ is the center of the faith and the Gospel. If all that is meant by this is that the cross is essential and supremely important, fine. No quibbles here. But often the cross is spoken of as so central that the resurrection of Christ and other elements of the Gospel are made peripheral. At least this is functionally, if not confessionally, all too often the case. And it is an error.

Michael Bird says this good word about this error:

One of the benefits of the NPP has been to demonstrate that Jesus Christ's resurrection is far more integral to God's saving righteousness than is often supposed. N.T. Wright in particular sees Paul's theology constructed in such a way so as to emphasize that the resurrection of Christ is the apex of God's plan to redeem Israel from exile and to renew creation from the bondage of sin and death. This is a helpful corrective since Protestant theology has traditionally emphasized the cross as the immediate basis of justification and unfortunately marginalized the significance of the resurrection in Paul's gospel and soteriology. Accordingly, theologians have located justification as occuring primarily through the atoning and redemptive death of Christ. . . . The problem is that Paul's gospel knows no divorce between the cross and the resurrection and their ensuing effect. The resurrection figures equally prominently in Paul's most concise summaries of the gospel (The Saving Righteousness of God, 40-41). 

The resurrection is every bit as fundamental as the cross. Bird is right. Wright is right. And here is one of those places where the Church should thank God for Wright and embrace his teaching. And I'm convinced that the first Christians thought about these things far more organically than we tend to do in the West, we who divide things into bits and separate things God intends us to hold together.