Dr Gavin Ashenden, who is also a JEP columnist, was responding to a BBC survey carried out to mark Palm Sunday which found that 23 per cent of respondents who call themselves Christian ‘do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead’.
In a letter to the Times, Dr Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen, said: ‘Those people who neither believe in the Resurrection nor go anywhere near a church cannot be “Christians”.
‘As with so many things, the key is in the definition of terms. Discovering the evidence for the Resurrection having taken place to be wholly compelling is one of the things that makes you a Christian; ergo, if you haven’t, you are not.’
