On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

by William Lane Craig

Mark’s Empty Tomb Account When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’” Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (Mark 16:1–8 NIV)

Historians think they’ve hit historical pay dirt when they have two independent accounts of the same event. But in the case of the empty tomb we have no less than six, and some of these are among the earliest materials to be found in the New Testament.

The Gospel of Peter’s Account of the Resurrection Early in the morning, as the Sabbath dawned, there came a large crowd from Jerusalem and the surrounding areas to see the sealed tomb. But during the night before the Lord’s day dawned, as the soldiers were keeping guard two by two in every watch, there came a great sound in the sky, and they saw the heavens opened and two men descend shining with a great light, and they drew near to the tomb. The stone which had been set on the door rolled away by itself and moved to one side, and the tomb was opened and both of the young men went in. Now when these soldiers saw that, they woke up the centurion and the elders (for they also were there keeping watch). While they were yet telling them the things which they had seen, they saw three men come out of the tomb, two of them sustaining the other one, and a cross following after them. The heads of the two they saw had heads that reached up to heaven, but the head of him that was led by them went beyond heaven. And they heard a voice out of the heavens saying, “Have you preached unto them that sleep?” The answer that was heard from the cross was, “Yes!” (Gospel of Peter 9:1—10:5)

The Earliest Jewish Response Finally, the earliest Jewish response to the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection presupposes the empty tomb. In Matthew’s gospel we find an attempt to refute the earliest Jewish response to the Christian proclamation of the resurrection: While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sum of money to the soldiers and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day. (Matt. 28:11–15 RSV)

Moreover, we have independent stories of this appearance in Luke 24:36–42 and John 20:19–20.

Most people are happy to agree that God exists; but in our pluralistic society it has become politically incorrect to claim that God has revealed Himself decisively in Jesus.

Paul explains that God’s power and deity are made known through the created order around us, so that all men are without excuse (1:20), and that God has written His moral law upon all men’s hearts, so that they are morally responsible before Him (2:15).

Worse, Paul goes on to explain that no one can redeem himself by means of righteous living (3:19–20).

The universality of sin and the uniqueness of Christ’s atoning death entail that there is no salvation apart from Christ.

The realization that much of the world’s population lay outside the bounds of Christianity had a twofold impact upon people’s religious thinking. First, it tended to relativize religious beliefs. People realized that far from being the universal religion of mankind, Christianity was largely confined to western Europe, a corner of the globe. No particular religion, it seemed, could make a claim to universal validity; each society seemed to have its own religion suited to its peculiar needs. Second, it made Christianity’s claim to be the only way of salvation seem narrow and cruel. Enlightenment rationalists like Voltaire taunted the Christians of his day with the prospect of millions of Chinese doomed to hell for not having believed in Christ, when they had not so much as even heard of Christ.

In our own day, the influx into Western nations of immigrants from former colonies and the advances in telecommunications that have served to shrink the world to a global village have heightened our awareness of the religious diversity of mankind. As a result, religious pluralism—the view that there are many roads to God—has today become once again the conventional wisdom.

Religious Particularism vs. Religious Pluralism Particularism is the view that only one religion is a means of salvation. Pluralism is the view that many religions are means of salvation.

For example, it’s frequently asserted that it’s arrogant and immoral to hold to any kind of religious particularism because you then have to regard everybody who disagrees with you as mistaken. Therefore, religious particularism is false.

This is a fallacy because the truth of a position is independent of the moral character of those who believe it.

For had the pluralist been born in Pakistan, then he would likely have been a religious particularist! Thus, on his own analysis his pluralism is merely the product of his being born in late twentieth-century Western society and is therefore false or unjustified.

The real problem concerns the fate of unbelievers outside of one’s own particular religious tradition. Christian particularism consigns such persons to hell, which pluralists take to be unconscionable.

The problem which has come to the surface in the encounter of Christianity with the other world religions is this: If Jesus was literally God incarnate, and if it is by his death alone that men can be saved, and by their response to him alone that they can appropriate that salvation, then the only doorway to eternal life is Christian faith. It would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved. But is it credible that the loving God and Father of all men has decreed that only those born within one particular thread of human history shall be saved?[1]

Here God literally pleads with people to turn back from their self-destructive course of action and be saved. Thus, in a sense, God doesn’t send anybody to hell. His desire is that everyone be saved, and He seeks to draw all persons to Himself. If we make a free and well-informed decision to reject Christ’s sacrifice for our sin, then God has no choice but to give us what we deserve. God will not send us to hell—but we shall send ourselves.

And in light of who God is, this is a sin of infinite gravity and proportion and therefore plausibly deserves infinite punishment. We should not, therefore, think of hell primarily as punishment for the array of sins of finite consequence that we’ve committed, but as the just penalty for a sin of infinite consequence, namely the rejection of God Himself.

So the problem posed by religious diversity can’t be simply that God would not condemn persons who are uninformed or misinformed about Christ.

1. God is all-powerful and all-loving. 2. Some people never hear the gospel and are lost.

Not necessarily; for the worlds involving universal salvation might have other, overriding deficiencies that make them less preferable. For example, suppose that the only worlds in which everybody freely believes the gospel and is saved are worlds with only a handful of people in them, say, three or four. If God were to create any more people, then at least one of them would have freely rejected His grace and been lost. Must He prefer one of these sparsely populated worlds over a world in which multitudes believe in the gospel and are saved, even though that implies that other persons freely reject His grace and are lost? That’s far from obvious. So long as God gives sufficient grace for salvation to all persons He creates, God seems no less loving for preferring a more populous world, even though that implies that some people would freely resist His every effort to save them and be damned. Thus, the pluralist’s second assumption is also not necessarily true, so that his argument is revealed to be doubly fallacious.

I want to emphasize that these are just possible answers to the questions we posed. But so long as they’re even possible, they show that there’s no incompatibility between God’s being all-powerful and all-loving and some people’s never hearing the gospel and being lost.