Biography
Dr. Elizabeth Achtemeier is Adjunct Professor of Bible and Homiletics at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Elizabeth was born in Oklahoma and graduated from Stanford University. She received her theological training at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church USA. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Christian Center"
At the center of the Christian faith stands the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We sometimes forget that and think that Easter should be celebrated only once a year. But actually every Sunday—the first day of each week—celebrates the empty tomb, and apart from Christ risen from the dead there can be no Christian faith.

St. Paul knew that. In his great chapter on the resurrection of the dead, which is now preserved for us in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul makes this statement: "If Christ has not been raised your faith is futile and you are still in your sins." If God has not raised his Son, as the New Testament tells us he has, then there is no basis for our Christian faith. We have not been restored to communion with our God. The Christian Church is preaching an illusion. And we might as well just give up all of our Christian activity and proclamation and go do something else. The Christian faith stands or falls on the resurrection of its Lord. Jesus Christ risen from the dead is the central tenet of our belief.

I suppose, in a way, our secular culture acknowledges that, for every year when Easter rolls around in March or in April, the crowds stream into the church doors. To be sure, there are those among them who come just to show off their new clothes. And there are many who have not the foggiest notion why they are there. But I wonder if it is not some common, deep-seated hunger that drives us all to the church on an Easter—some longing to hear that our final foe, death, has been defeated. "The last enemy to be destroyed is death," writes Paul, and certainly any religion that cannot deal with death is not worth its salt. For that awful finality, that grave, that dark, that door closed forever is the one obstacle that we human beings have never been able to overcome. And so we go to church on Easter Sundays hoping, perhaps against all of our usual cynicism, that someone has overcome death's barrier for us.

Oh, to be sure, the church's proclamation of the resurrection has its enemies these days, just as it had its enemies in the time of Paul—in our society, those post-Christian theologians who are telling us that Easter morning never really happened; those new nature worshipers who maintain that we just die as nature dies; those supposedly rational, common-sense souls who scoff at our childish beliefs, and who never could turn and become like little children in their trust, in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Indeed very often, even though faithful Christians believe in the resurrection, some of them have a rather narrow view of just what it means. Some of them see it as only a guarantee of their own personal immortality. And so perhaps for all of us, we need to examine the event more closely. But let's put it in the form of a contrast, friends. Let's ask it this way: What would it mean for you and me and for all the world if Jesus Christ were not raised from the dead, if there really were no resurrection with its triumph and empty tomb? What would it mean if we were clutching a lie to our hearts, if we were finding joy and living day by day with what turned out to be an illusion? What would be the consequence of walking by a faith that has no basis in fact?

Paul says that we would be of all persons most to be pitied and indeed we would. For you see, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, and there is no Christian Gospel, no Easter good news, then there is nothing more to this world than that jungle out there on our city streets. For persons without that victory, evil and violence and vulgarity are just going to have their way, until they slowly destroy all that is lovely and pure and innocent, and society comes crashing down around the heads of our children and grandchildren. If Christ be not risen from the dead, if people cannot be assured of that, then there remains in their hearts the conviction that the Pilates and Herods of this world have won, and that they had better get busy therefore looking out for number one. If life is to the ruthless and strong, then never mind who gets hurt in the scramble. It is the guy who is shrewd and knows how to take care of himself who is going to survive the battle. Jesus loved people, someone could reason, but look what it got him; He got nailed to a cross for his compassion. Let's not make the same mistake and end up poor and dead. And that is the life-style this weary world is left with if Jesus Christ was not raised from the grave, for you see it has managed to kill forever the goodness, the love, the justice of the Son of God.

If the resurrection has not taken place, then it also is precisely as Paul says it is—all faith is futile. There is no meaning to our history. There is no guiding hand. There is no loving purpose being accomplished, no divine plan being worked out. You and I and all folk are just living out our 70 or 80 years, pouring out our work, our care, our love and suffering for a world going nowhere at all, for an evil joke called human life, perpetrated by chance.

Do you realize what that would mean if it were true? How many gentle, gracious lives would have been faithfully lived in vain? How many Christian martyrs would have given their blood for no cause at all? How many sufferers would have born their pain patiently for naught? How many common prayers would have echoed futilely through the reaches of an empty heaven?

For you see, if Christ be not risen from the dead, then there is no goal to it all. We shall all simply fall off the edge of time into the black hole of void. There will be no face of a loving Master waiting for us there, no countenance shining with the radiance of the knowledge of God's glory. There will be no voice to say to a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or to a Martin Luther King, Jr., or even to you and me, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you." If Christ be not raised from the dead, the face at the end is the mask of death, and it is that dark, dumb, dreaming thing which turns the handle of this evil show.

Worse still, if Jesus Christ is not risen, then there is no forgiveness from the Father. Christ's compassionate prayer for us from the cross, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do"—that prayer has been heard by no one, and it reflects no heart of divine love, for if Christ be not raised there is no God of triumphant goodness and we are still in our sins. And can you imagine what it would mean not to know any forgiveness in a world such as ours? Never to know any pardon for those multitudinous evils of our society in which we are daily implicated? Never to experience any grace toward our own personal failures? Never to have the chance of starting over, in a new beginning? Never to be able to escape the guilty burden of a past which can only be done away by God?

Some years ago, when we lived in Pennsylvania, the newspaper one day carried the story of a farm woman who had walked out with her little daughter to collect the mail at the rural mailbox. The box was on the other side of the road, and the mother sent the little girl across to it. There was a good deal of traffic on the road, and the daughter waited for the mother's signal before coming back. Finally the mother called out, "O.K., come on, there's no one coming," and the daughter started back across the road. At midpoint, she was struck and killed by a car which the mother had simply failed to see.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be without God and to live as a parent with that guilty burden? Not only to lose one's child forever!—but never to know any final forgiveness, never to have any heavenly Father who knows what a child's death is like, to bend over one and to wipe away the tears and to ease the aching heart, never to have any day when the past is pardoned and a new beginning is given? And that is what we all are left with if there is no truth to that story of Christ raised from the grave, that story written there in the Scriptures by the God and Father who has forgiven us all our evil—all our sin, all our shortcomings, all our terribly human mistakes.

Not to know and trust Christ risen from the dead means finally not to be human, for it means really that there is nothing and no one beyond this world to whom we owe our being. If God did not have the power to conquer the grave, then he had no power to create in the beginning, for surely a God defeated by death could not make the wonders we find in this universe, much less the amazing creatures we call human beings. And so you and I and all our loved ones are just chance agglomerations of atoms, and we owe our world and all we experience to nothing more than fortune. Think of it, friends! Not to have a Creator to thank for the glories of the morning! Not to stand under the stars at night and to marvel at the love of Him who made them! Not ever to sense that there is Mystery beyond that we can see and feel and hear, and that somehow we were made to respond to the Mystery with all our hearts and souls and minds.

But it is in fact as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, isn't it? In fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. In fact, Jesus Christ lives and now dwells in our midst as Lord. You and I know those things, good Christians—despite all our failures in the church, we know them to the depths of our being. And we know them precisely because God has come to us in his risen Son and spoken to us through his Word. He has spread out his table before us. He has nourished our lives with His merciful message. He has filled our cup to running over with His incarnate Word of love.

We now know from whence we came and to whom it is we are going. We now experience God's forgiveness in Christ as our daily sustenance. We now live in hope by his promise of a final kingdom, where God will be all in all, and where evil and pain, and sorrow and sighing will be done away forever. We now experience, like meat and drink, His meaning and purpose, His comfort and guidance, and our souls are fed and our lives are sustained in joy, through our daily round.

Oh yes, good Christian friends, in fact the resurrection is true. It is the one truth that underlies all other truth in this world of ours. It is the one fact that makes our life worth living. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. He is risen indeed! Amen.

Interview with Elizabeth Achtemeier
Interviewed by Orley Herron

Orley Herron: Betty, you gave a wonderful message today. Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we would not even be sitting here today.

Elizabeth Achtemeier: That's true. Without the resurrection there is no God, Orley. God alone has breathed the breath of life into our nostrils and sustains your lungs and my lungs in their pumping as they go in and out. That is true of all living creatures and all human beings.

Herron: That's so right. Betty, you have written eighteen books and I've written five. I sit in awe at the profound ability you have to write commentaries about the Old Testament. You have written about the family and family relationships. You have written about preachers and you have some pretty good insights there. Then, you have been involved in the pro-life movement. We have a lot of topics to discuss.

Let me ask you a general question. How can we live an authentic Christian life?

Achtemeier: In order to live an authentic Christian life these days, and in every age it has been true, there is a discipline that one has to undergo. Jesus said the words, "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me."

To live a Christian life is to wear a yoke, to be guided by a Master. The Christian life is not just autonomous freedom. The Christian life is wearing a yoke, that means you wear a discipline in the Christian life.

The Christian life has to include a regular study of the Bible, and I emphasize regular. If people would just read it, they would gain something from it—just reading through it day by day, every day. There has to be regular prayer in which one responds to this revelation that is given through the scriptures in which one pours out one's heart to God like the Psalmist did.

There has to be worship with the company of the saints, the Communion of the Saints which is the church in all ages. You commune not only with the congregation there on Sunday morning, you commune with Luther and Calvin and Amos and Isaiah and all of the generations to come. I believe in the Communion of Saints as in the Apostles' Creed. There has to be that regular worship because God finally gives His spirit not simply to individuals, He gives it to a corporate body and that is the Christian church.

Finally, there has to be practice. I think any Christian knows that. If you try to put the promises and the word of God into practice, you go out and you find out. "By George, these things are true." That deepens your faith.

It is this ongoing process of living in obedience, finding out that God's word is true, living further in obedience, and you grow. You grow in what theologians call "sanctification." No one speaks about sanctification these days. Who wants to be good any more? We want to be thin; we want to be self-fulfilled; we want to be aggressive; we want to be rich, but good? It is no longer an ideal in our culture but we are to grow up into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

That is the Christian life. You cannot do that apart from these regular disciplines in which God feeds you with His word and also His sacrament in the church and in which you respond to that in prayer and obedience.

Herron: Betty, I've been in about one thousand different churches. I have been blessed by many of the preachers of those churches, but on occasion I meet a very authoritarian preacher. Tell me, how do you deal with pastors of that sort?

Achtemeier: Well, pastors who think they have their own authority are just kidding themselves, of course. A pastor has no authority whatsoever. I have no use for these preachers who get up and say, "It is my opinion," or "I believe," or "I think." Who cares?

You go to church to hear the word of God. The only authority, the only authority that any preacher can have, is the authority which comes from the word of God, which comes from the Bible. If the pastor or the preacher is not preaching from the Bible, then he has no authority whatsoever. He is just one other voice in the midst of millions of voices. There are preachers, as you say, who will get up and try to lay the word on you.

It is interesting. I was teaching in the satellite course for the seminary one time. I had a guy down in Norfolk, Virginia, who could not preach his way out of a paper bag, small or large. I worked with this guy trying to find out what was the matter.

Finally, I discovered he hated his congregation. His picture of preaching was that he and God were on this side and the people were over there. He and God were telling the people what to do. Well, he was kidding himself because God was over there with the people, of course, and he was all alone.

You have to identify with your people in preaching. It is never "You folk out there." It is, "We together, both of us standing under the authority of the word of God."

Herron: One other question. You are involved in the Pro-Life Movement. Tell me why?

Achtemeier: Well, I was brought into the Pro-Life Movement in the last General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church because I wrote the minority report when the Presbyterian Church was discussing formulating a new paper on abortion. The more I studied that whole question, the more I got a whole new perspective on it. I didn't start out pro-life.

First of all, I had to go to the scriptures to see what the scriptures said. The difficulty with the whole abortion debate is we are all proceeding by slogans written on placards out there on the street and we have never put that in the whole context of the Church's faith.

You start with the lordship of Jesus Christ, the fact that God is our Creator. He has made you and me. That is the Confession of the Christian faith. We all are made by God. What is more, we all belong to God. "You are not your own," says St. Paul. "You were bought with a price."

Of course, we recognize this in baptism. We baptize a child or an adult into a congregation and we say that they no longer belong to the world; they belong to God.

That is true also of that child in the womb. That child in the womb belongs to God. We have no right to destroy what belongs to God. The old argument comes back that life doesn't begin until the quickening or birth or whatever. Any good biology teacher will tell you that it begins at conception.

Herron: With that note, we need to stop.

Achtemeier: All right.

Herron: In another time in another place, we will continue.