Christ's Death and Resurrection Include The Whole People Of God

An illuminating few sentences, to be read slowly, from C. H. Dodd:

All that is said about the significance of the work of Christ presupposes that he includes in himself the whole people of God, or redeemed humanity. His death and resurrection are not to be understood if they are thought of as no more than the death and miraculous resuscitation of an individual, but only if they are seen as the fulfillment of the whole purpose of God to raise up for himself, through suffering, tribulation, and disaster, a people made wholly one in him and devoted to his righteous purpose. Christ 'rose the third day,' says the ancient formula quoted by Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians, 'according to the scriptures.' But in the Scriptures--videlicet, in Hosea 6:1-3--it is Israel whom God will raise on the third day. The bold application of that prophecy to the resurrection of Christ in the earliest Christian confession of faith known to us lies behind the Pauline doctrine of the church as dead and risen in Christ.

--C. H. Dodd, 'The Old Testament in the New,' in The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Text? (ed. G. K. Beale; Baker, 1994), 180 ('videlicet' = Latin for 'clearly,' 'plainly')
Dane Ortlund