CREATED ORDER AND EASTER FAITH

Christianity emerged from the religion of the Hebrew Bible as a consequence of one single event – the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If Jesus of Nazareth had lived as an obscure Galilean carpenter's son and a less obscure Jewish prophet and simply been crucified as another political subversive by the Roman state in Palestine we would have heard no more of this man. The resurrection changed his ignominious death from a sad and apparently ill-judged end into a triumphal sacrifice, and his followers from a disillusioned band of peasants into the founders of a missionary religion which ultimately converted the Roman Empire.

The resurrection is not only the historically pivotal event in the birth of Christianity, but, as Oliver O'Donovan argues, the pivotal doctrine of Christianity in relation to the Hebrew understanding of created order. The basic thesis of O'Donovan's powerful theological restatement of Christian ethics, Resurrection and Moral Order, is that the resurrection is the starting point of a Christian approach to ethics because ‘it tells us of God's vindication of his creation, and so of our created life’. The original telos of the created order, its fundamental goodness and harmony, is reaffirmed by the being of God uniquely embodied in the material creation in Christ's life, death and resurrection. The relational alienation – between God and humanity, between persons, between humans and non-humans, and between non-humans – which issues from the Fall is transformed and redeemed by the restoration of created order which is presaged in the resurrection of Jesus Christ who, Christians came to see, was indeed God incarnate, God in a human body, transforming from within the disorder of a fallen creation.