There is no Christian faith without the Resurrection.
"Christian faith" means two things: one is the "body of faith," the teachings, the Gospel, the historical "Christ-Event" that is the substance of our faith. What people call "the Christian faith." Without a Resurrection, that simply wouldn't be, any more than it could exist had there never been any Jesus at all.
The other thing "Christian faith" means is, a Christian's faith, the believer's own relationship of trust, devotion and fellowship with the Risen Christ through the Holy Spirit. Obviously, that is only possible if the Risen Christ is there, as indeed He is. And so, that kind of Christian faith, likewise, the immediate personal Christian experience, couldn't exist were there no Resurrection.
Someone might reject the idea of the resurrection but admire Jesus as a noble humanitarian figure. But as C.S. Lewis pointed out so well, anybody who wants to reduce Jesus to that will have to do a lot of cherry-picking, cutting out all the parts that are inconvenient to the preferred profile--like things Jesus said that people would have written off figures like Ghandi and Martin Luther King as lunatics for saying had they said them. Once you start down that road, then on what basis do you argue that ANYTHING in the story of Jesus is true--just because it's the part you like? That's a doomed experiment, a quixotic, deluded quest, utter chasing after the wind--one might say, after a ghost.
A Resurrection-less Christianity is not the Christian faith in EITHER of its essential meanings, neither the true message of God's redeeming act in Christ nor the believer's real, lived experience of it.
