I have been trying to finish N. T. Wright's book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church during Holy Week. A couple of nights ago I was reading the chapter The Strange Story of Easter and I got a bit carried away. I think I was declaring in a quite loud voice how amazing Wright's word were concerning the 
"knowing" that occurs through the resurrection of Jesus. Vicki asked me, "who are you talking to?" My reply, "I am just blown away by what I'm reading."
Wright states early in this chapter that "the most important decisions we make in life are not made by post-Enlightenment left-brain rationality alone." He then examines epistemology in the context of how Thomas, Peter and Paul "know" the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He discusses the fact that Thomas, "like any good historian, wants to see and touch." Jesus wants him to touch and examine but Thomas moves to a different type of "knowing" which leads him to profess, "My Lord and my God."
Here is a long quote from Surprised by Hope that should have you shouting hallelujah. This kind of understanding is what the world is looking for...
"If Thomas represents an epistemology of faith, which transcends but also includes historical and scientific knowing, we might suggest that Paul represents at this point an epistemology of hope. In 1 Corinthians 15 he sketches his argument that there will be a future resurrection as part of God’s new creation, the redemption of the entire cosmos as in Romans 8. Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen...
All of which brings us to Peter. Epistemologies of faith and hope, both transcending and including historical and scientific knowing, point on to an epistemology of love—an idea I first met in Bernard Lonergan but that was hardly new with him. The story of John 21 sharpens it up. Peter, famously, has denied Jesus. He has chosen to live with the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them. But now, with Easter, Peter is called to live in a new and different world. Where Thomas is called to a new kind of faith and Paul to a radically renewed hope, Peter is called to a new kind of love.
Here I go back to Wittgenstein once more... for a famous and haunting aphorism: "It is love that believes the resurrection." "Simon, son of John," says Jesus, "do you love me?" There is a whole world in that question, a world of personal invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster, of the refashioning of epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the new ontology, the question of what reality consists of. The reality that is the resurrection cannot simply be "known" from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death. But that’s the point. To repeat: the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing that involves us in a new ways, an epistemology that draws out from not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-scientific research but also that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is "love," in the full Johannine sense of agape. My sense, from talking to some scientific colleagues, is that, though it’s hard to describe, something like this is already at work when the scientist devotes himself or herself to the subject matter so completely that the birth of new hypotheses comes about not so much through an abstract brain (a computer made of meat?) crunching data but through a soft and mysterious symbiosis of knower and known, of lover and beloved.
The skeptic will at once suggest that this is a way of collapsing the truth of Easter once more into mere subjectivism. Not so. Just because it takes agape to believe the resurrection, that doesn’t mean that all that happened was that Peter and the others felt their hearts strangely warmed. Precisely because it is love we are talking about, it must have a correlative reality in the world outside the lover. Love is the deepest mode of knowing because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the point at which much modernist epistemology breaks down. The sterile antithesis of "objective" and "subjective," where we say that things are either objectively true (and can be perceived as such by a dispassionate observer) or subjectively true (and so of no use as an account of the real, public world), is overcome by the epistemology of love, which is called into being as the necessary mode of knowing for those who will live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t.
That is why, though the historical arguments for Jesus’s bodily resurrection are truly strong, we must never suppose that they will do more than bring people to the questions faced by Thomas, Paul and Peter, the questions of faith, hope, and love. We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun had risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn’t look like it did last night, and that would-be normal explanations for this won’t do. Maybe, we think after the historical arguments have done their work, maybe morning has come and the world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so, we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won’t rely on the candles anymore, not because we don’t believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home. All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than that of faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love." - N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, pg. 72-74
I read this and it affirms the unique ways that I personally interact with the world of faith that I live in. Wright explains this so beautifully and frees faith from life-sucking forensic formulas that so many in the church insist are the only way of "knowing" what we know. The reality that I desire to lay down my life to follow the Lord Jesus Christ comes from a knowing so much deeper than the strength of historical arguments alone.
Yes, HE IS RISEN.
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