Wittgenstein once wrote: ‘Only love can believe the Resurrection’.

Only the way of love leads the heart – flesh and blood – to salvation. Speculation is of no use. Yet speculation, the exercise of the abstract mind, has long been thought the only way to a true and certain knowledge of Christ and the promise of salvation in his name. This was the interest of Enlightenment rationality, which sought to validate, and later refute, Christian themes at the bar of positivist reason. The intent was to render the reasonableness of the Christian story, and in this endeavour history played a large part. The critical historian insisted that before faith could get to work, the historical intelligence must reconstruct what really happened – at the first Easter as elsewhere. Only then could faith play its part.

Enlightenment objectivism still has force today. The reasonable person must establish the historicity of the resurrection as a deduction from the historical data. She must establish its plausibility as a sufficient cause for the Church's proclamation of the risen Christ. Hugo Meynell argues that Christianity stands or falls by the truth of certain historical propositions that can be tested by ‘an objective investigation which does not presuppose a conclusion one way or the other’.