Was It Designed?

Originally posted by zbusc: ↑

Apparently you are not a Christian :-
Can you not believe in the resurrection and still be a Christian?The short answer is no. Jesus being put to death and rising again on the third day should form the core of a believer’s faith.In John 11:25, Jesus tells Martha that he is the resurrection and the life, and that anyone who believes in him will live even after dying. Jesus constantly prophesied his death to his twelve disciples and even cryptically to the Pharisees (John 2:18-22). Jesus’ death and resurrection was arguably prophesied in the scriptures as early as Genesis 3:15.Those who tick a box saying 'Christian' but don't have a true faith are nothing new. Paul addresses this issue in 1 Corinthians 15 where he writes, “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith.”He goes on to say “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” In others words, you’re no different from an unbeliever.And that’s the problem with these types of surveys. They are completely unreliable because they cannot accurately distinguish between ‘tick-box’ Christians and genuine believers, but instead it groups them all together in the same bracket.Matthew 25:31 tells us that it is only Christ himself who is able to separate the sheep (believers) from the goats (heathens), because he alone knows all things, and some who are believers now, will decide to become heathens later, and some who are heathens will eventually become believers.If we say we are Christians we must believe that all scripture, including the gospel, is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16) because we walk by faith and not by what we can prove (2 Corinthians 5:7). At the end of the day, if we say we are Christians but we don’t believe in Jesus’s resurrection, the only person’s we’re deceiving is ourselves.

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I'm as Christian as your good self, in the sense that I believe in the divinity of Christ.

I certainly would be excluded from your tribe because I don't believe in a physical resurrection of Christ. But I do believe in the resurrection of Christ in the sense that after three days of grief and feeling hopelessly lost thew lovers and followers of Christ pulled themselves together and began to teach again as Christ had taught them and this was as if Christ Himself had arisen amongst them.

This was the greatest resurrection because it led to Christianity reaching the entire planet.

In the scripture you quoted it says, he will live after dying, there it is, can it be any clearer than that, Jesus lived after dying by the very fact that His Message filled the world.

Christ raised, means His spirit, His Teachings, the effect of Christ became much stronger after they put His body to death. This is what all the prophecies mean, this is what Christ was trying to get across to the disciples, my physical death is not my death, in physical death I will be more alive and the power of my word will be unstoppable.

As for real and unreal Christians, well there are no real Christians, the Christian era has passed, besides that, it's beyond our pay scale to make that judgement on anybody.