Hitchens on the Resurrection

One person said, “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”

“Ok,” you might say, “Guess I would agree with that. What preacher said that?” Well, it wasn’t a preacher who said it. While it sounds like preacher talk, that was actually said to someone who at least called herself a preacher. It was said to Pastor Mary Sewell, a unitarian pastor who said that she really didn’t believe the “stories” of scripture in any literal sense. She would consider this occasion we celebrate today to be a nice religious ceremony, but not an actual event.

But this pastor’s doubt is not the most shocking part of this story. The most shocking part of this incident is not that some pastor, so called, had to be told of the essential nature of the resurrection. It was the person who said these words to her. You see, the person who corrected this Unitarian’s theology was none other than avowed atheist and Christian antagonist, Christopher Hitchens.