"By His resurrection from the dead He was openly declared to be the Son of God in power. His excarnation was as much a part of the process of manifestation as His incarnation. Indeed, the real Christ has not become known in His essential glory, until He is known no longer after the flesh, but as the risen, exalted Christ, the conqueror of death and sin." (James M. Campbell. The Heart of the Gospel: A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of the Atonement. Fleming H. Revell Co. 1907. pg. 137)

"The early church did not ask its followers to simply imitate or observe some static principles of Christianity, but rather to so comprehend the significance of the Christ event that they could dynamically actualize its implications in the situations in which they lived. The freedom for this actualization and application to the concrete, existential situation can only be comprehended when one recognizes that these early Christians were not worshipping some dead prophet of Nazareth; rather, essential to their very existence was the conviction that this Jesus was raised from the dead by God, was now the Lord of the Church, and present in its very life. It is this presence of the Risen One that both compelled and allowed the early church to engage in such vigorous and dynamic teaching and proclamation." (Karl Paul Donfried, The Dynamic Word: New Testament Insights for Contemporary Christians. Harper and Row. 1981. pg. 3).

"The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reports in the Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences were the "gospel" or good news which the Christian brought: what we call the 'gospels,' the narratives of Our Lord's llife and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had alrady accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracles of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. Nothing could be more unhistorical than to pick out selected sayings of Christ from the gospels and to regard those as the datum and the rest of the New Testament as a construction upon it. The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection." (C.S. Lewis, Miracles. pgs. 143,144).