The stand Jesus takes to the world is different from ours. His attitude to people is different from that of one person to another. His relation to God is not that of a believer. His consciousness of his own existence, of his living and dying is utterly different from ours, already conditioned by the coming Resurrection. We are faced with an either-or that reaches to the bottom of existence. If we take ourselves as measuring-rod, our human lives, the world as it appears to us, our thoughts and reactions and attempt to judge Christ by them, can only conclude that the Resurrection was either the psychological result of a religious shock, or the product of a primitive community’s desire for a cult. In other words, individual or mass self-deception. Then logic demands that this whole chapter of Jesus’ life, with all its conditions and conclusions, be eliminated as swiftly as possible and a ‘pure’ Christianity formulated. Admittedly, what remains will be little more than very thin ethics and piety. This is one possibility. The alternative is to realize in our own lives what Christ’s whole existence demands: faith. Then we understand that he did not come to bring us new but world-born truths and experiences, but to free us from the spell which the world has cast over us. This means that we hear and accept his demands; that we measure him by the standards he himself has taught us; that we know, once and forever, that he was not born to further this existence, but that a new existence was born in him. Thus we accomplish the complete reversal of faith, which no longer judges Christ with worldly eyes, but sees the world and everything in and around it with his eyes. Then we do not say: There is no such thing as the return to life of one who has died; therefore the Resurrection is a myth, but: Christ rose again; therefore resurrection is possible, and his Resurrection is the foundation of the true world.
