"God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt."--Robert Jenson, quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in the March 28 issue of The Living Church.
I find this a rather breathtaking statement in its combination of simplicity and profundity. How easy it is for Christians to forget that we worship a particular God, not a generic "god." If we indeed know God as a "first cause" or as a guarantor of hope for life in the dimension of Eternity--and I believe there is merit in both of those assertions--then it is only because we first know him as the one who raised Jesus from the dead. The resurrection is not some deduced or derived data point, having previously postulated a set of abstract propositions about God's nature (omnipotent, omniscient, etc. etc.). It is itself the starting point of theology, the original fact from which everything else is derived and on which everything else depends.
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