The first Christians proclaimed that the crucified Jesus was raised to life and exalted into the realm of God. For them, this equals salvation. This affirms both the beliefs that Jesus lives on in the faith of the community as well as God acting in behalf of Jesus thus He is alive. Furthermore, they believed that His resurrection is not a return to life in this world but it is rather a passage into another world, an assumption into the sphere of the ultimate and absolute reality who is God and who, as Creator, is other than creation. What occurred in His resurrection points to another reality that transcends this world because it is God's realm. Exaltation surfaces from this, which says that Jesus' destiny as ascent, glorification, a state of being with God, and a state of glory as Lord.
This is a metahistorical event because God as transcendent Creator and Savior is still linked with finite reality but is infinitely and qualitatively other than created reality.
Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglican Ch...
The Resurrection of Christ (Kinnaird Resurrection)
English: Resurrection of ChristBeing in God's sphere means transcending this world in a way that human imagination cannot follow. Jesus' resurrection is then not a historical event because the idea of a historical event is something empirical, something that could be witnessed and be imaginatively construed. A historical event is an analogous event that could be compared with others. It is something repeatable. However, Jesus' resurrection is something unique and it cannot be explained by reference to context or by analogy with the rest of reality.
Thus the risen Lord is the resurrection and the life, whose story continues in the story of the Christ-become-the-Church. The risen life of Christ is present in the gathering of the people who recall before God the promise that God will call on them again but the fact...