What Is at Stake in the Harris-Geisler Dispute?

When experts argue, it is often hard for laypeople to sort out what really matters from the finer details of the debate. CHRISTIANITY TODAY asked senior editor J. I. Packer to tell our readers what is at stake in the debate between Murray Harris and his critics. This article is a sidebar to our news report:

The bodily rising from the dead of our Lord Jesus Christ is as crucial to Christianity as is the cross itself. Easter Day, when Christians traditionally tell each other “The Lord is risen!” is the highest of the high spots of the Christian year. Paul pointed to Jesus’ resurrection as proof of his divine identity (Rom. 1:4), of the reality of atonement through his death (1 Cor. 15:17), and of the certainty that he will return for judgment (Acts 17:31). No Christian beliefs are more basic. A muddled witness to the nature and significance of the Resurrection must therefore be most damaging.

The meaning of change

In 1985, Murray Harris criticized England’s bishop of Durham for muddling the resurrection witness by affirming Jesus’ risenness while denying the empty tomb. Since 1987, Norman Geisler has been attacking Murray Harris for muddling this witness by affirming that Jesus’ body was so changed in the event of his rising as to be henceforth invisible to human eyes, being no longer material, in the sense in which our present bodies are material.

Harris holds that in the resurrection appearances, Jesus resumed flesh, bones, a digestive system, and solid visibility as before, for the purpose of showing his disciples that he was the identical person who had been crucified (Luke 24:36–43, etc.). It is Harris’s view that this is what the relevant Scriptures most ...

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