This was the question asked for the end of the past week by the editors of The Washington Post and Newsweek for the "On Faith" conversation. Here was the question as stated by the editors: Do you have to believe the resurrection is literally true -- that Jesus came back to life in his body -- to be a Christian?
A similarly framed question is often asked about various Christian doctrines and such questions are unavoidable. If the word "Christian," used as a noun, is to mean anything, it must be defined -- and the definition must include some essential doctrinal elements. The New Testament leaves no choice here, for essential beliefs are explicitly mentioned within the Bible's presentation of the Gospel.
Bishop Wright's response can be read in more detail here:
a. Literal and metaphorical. The word 'literal' is misused if we try to make it mean 'it actually happened'. The word 'literal' refers to the way words refer to things -- that they refer to something 'literally'. If we intend to refer to an event that happens in the space/time/matter world, the way to do so is to say it is a 'concrete' event as opposed to an 'abstract' one. We should note that 'metaphorical' is in that respect like 'literal' -- it refers to the way words refer to things, rather than to the things themselves.
Now we've got that out of the way:
b. The word 'resurrection' in the first century, whether used by people who believed in it (Christians and some Jews) or by those who didn't (pagans and some other Jews), ALWAYS meant something to do with people being physically, concretely, bodily alive having been physically, concretely, bodily dead. It acquires metaphorical meanings (e.g. to do with baptism and holiness) early on but still doesn't lose its basic meaning. Thus if the early Christians had wanted to say 'Jesus died and then went to heaven in an exalted state', or 'Jesus died but his cause lives on', or 'Jesus dies but we can still sense his presence with us', they would never have used the word 'resurrection'. They had perfectly good ways of saying those other things, and the word 'resurrection' (i.e. its Greek or Aramaic equivalents) wasn't one of those ways.
c. Thus to say Jesus was raised but to mean something that didn't involve a body being alive again was, and still is, a contradiction in terms. But -- and this is hugely important -- this does NOT mean that Jesus' resurrection is simply a very odd thing that Christians are required to believe even though nobody in their right mind could sensibly do so. The New Testament presents the resurrection of Jesus not as a bizarre event within the old creation, the present world of decay, corruption and death, but as the foundational, prototypical and generative event within the new creation, the renewal of heaven and earth which Israel's God had long promised and which was decisively launched when Jesus came out of the tomb (not, we note, as a mere 'resuscitated corpse', as some have accused me and others of suggesting, but in a transformed physicality that decay and death could no longer touch).
Comments:
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The short answer is “yes”. One who does not believe in the concrete bodily resurrection denies the basic truth upon which all other Christian truths hang.