The Centre of the Faith

The resurrection is the pivot of Christian belief, celebrated as the chief feast at Easter and confessed in every historic creed; from it the tradition draws its hope of eternal life and its proclamation that death has been overcome. It is affirmed across all the historic churches, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant alike, even where they differ on much else.

The dating of Easter has itself been a source of division rather than unity. Eastern and Western churches generally calculate the feast differently, the West following the Gregorian calendar reform of the sixteenth century and the East largely retaining the Julian calendar for the purpose, so that the two traditions often, though not always, celebrate the resurrection on different Sundays, a visible reminder that even the church's most unifying feast carries a real historical fracture in how it is observed. As the vindication of Jesus and the ground of salvation, the resurrection is inseparable from the Trinity and the incarnation, completing the account of who Christians hold Jesus to be, and it distinguishes Christianity's central proclamation from readings of Jesus's life and death as significant only in an ethical or purely spiritual sense, a distinction the tradition itself regards as decisive for what it means to be Christian at all.