Life, Logic, and the Resurrection: Contemporary Expressions

[The fourth in a series of posts on the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus]

We are now ready to look at actual theologians responding to questions about the resurrection. Its hard to avoid Karl Barth, so I'll place him first.

The New Testament is speaking about an event in time and space. It must not be overlooked that in this event we have to do on the one hand with the telos, the culminating point of the previously recorded concrete history of the life and suffering and death of Jesus Christ which attained its end in his resurrection, and on the other with the beginning of the equally concrete history of faith in him . . . Since the presupposition and the consequence of the Easter message of the New Testament are of this nature, it would be senseless to deny that this message, does at least treat of an event in time and space. It would be senseless to suppose that it is really trying to speak of the non-spatial and timeless being of certain general truths, orders, and relationships, clothing what it really wanted to say in the poetical form of narrative. . . We therefore presuppose agreements that a sound exegesis cannot idealise, symbolize or allegorise, but has to reckon with the fact that the New Testament was here speaking of an event that really happened, as it did when it spoke earlier of the life and death of Jesus Christ which proceeded it and later of the formation of the community that followed it.
(Church Dogmatics IV, 1)

 Barth appears to come down on the side of ontology, but the viewpoint he is opposing is viewing the resurrection as an eternal truth like "the ability of the human spirit to overcome adversity" that might have been expressed in a different way. Barth wants to avoid this and say that something really happened in time to the followers of Jesus in order to allow for the creation of the Christian community. Recall Pascal's question about what made the disciples act the way they did. On the other hand, Barth’s 1924 exegetical lectures on "The Resurrection of the Dead" are a polemic against historicising approaches to the resurrection. In these lecture he insists that the “empty tomb” is irrelevant, and that there is no historical basis for belief in the resurrection.


Rowan Williams is similarly vague, but notes some reasons why he believes we must be. These include the manner in which the gospels themselves are written, the inherent limitations of human language, and the theological lessons we might learn.

Even in the Gospels, one thing is never described. There is a central silence…about the event of resurrection. Even Matthew, with his elaborate mythological scenery, leaves us with the strange impression that the stone is rolled away from a tomb that is already empty…It is an event which is not describable, because it is precisely there that there occurs the transfiguring expansion of Jesus’ humanity which is the heart of resurrection encounters. It is an event on the frontier of any possible language because it is the moment in which our speech is both left behind and opened to new possibilities. It is as indescribable as the process of imaginative fusion which produces any metaphor; and the evangelists withdrew as well they might. Jesus’ life is historical, describable; the encounters with Jesus risen are historical and (after a fashion) describable, with whatever ambiguities and unclarities. But there is a sense in which the raising of Jesus, the hinge between the two histories, the act that brings the latter out of the former: it is not an event, with a before and after, occupying a determinate bit of time between Friday and Sunday…however early we run to the tomb, God has been there ahead of us…he decisively evades our grasp, our definition and our projection.
Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, 2003

N. T. Wright's monumental 700 page book published in 2003, The Resurrection of the Son of God, furthers the discussion by establishing the historical (Jewish and Roman) context in which the claim of resurrection took place. Wright emphasizes the transphysical nature of the body of Jesus in the New Testament writings and believes that this way of understanding the texts makes for a coherent statement of faith across the various stories. Wright is also keen to show the importance of the continuity of the body of Jesus that was crucified with the resurrected Jesus because this is essential to a Christian worldview---the importance of this world and physical matter in distinction from docetic and gnostic beliefs.

The challenge for any historian, when faced with the question of the rise of Christianity, is much more sharply focused than is often supposed. It is not simply a matter of whether one believes in 'miracles', or in the supernatural, in general, in which case (it is supposed) the resurrection will be no problem. If anyone ever reaches the stage where the resurrection is in that sense no problem, we can be sure that they have made a mistake somewhere...No, the challenge comes down to a much narrower point...the direct question of death and life, of the world of space, time, and matter, and its relation to whatever being there may be for whom the word 'god', or even 'God' might be appropriate. Here there is, of course, no neutrality.

Wright goes on to suggest that, at this impasse, the story of Thomas in John 20 mirrors our own interests in how to balance objective and subjective considerations, but that the issue always involves a level of commitment is inescapable.

Sarah Coakley attempts to fuse the evidentialist (OH), or 'Lockean' position, with one she calls 'Barthian' (probably closest to my ONH) together, by saying that they have a single underlying assumption, that the way of faith is in relation to history. Supplying empirical evidence (Pannenberg, Swinburne) or removing faith from any historical scrutiny do not match what the texts are saying. In an essay entitled "Not with the Eye Only: The Resurrection, Epistemology, and Gender",  Coakley notes that

It is especially the narratives that chart a change of epistemological response that are noteworthy here, or else indicate the possibility of simultaneous and different responses to the same event, such that some vital shift is again required for recognition of the risen Christ to take place.

I'm sure Barth would feel misunderstood, but that aside, several writers have noted the same. Coakley seems to want to take this in the direction of mysticism, but in some ways it is also further support for Wright's statement about the impossibility of uncommitted neutrality.

Since Coakley has brought up Pannenberg, it might be a good time to present his views. Reminiscent of the OH view, Pannenberg sees theology as a public discipline related to the quest for universal truth, which, by nature cannot be only subjective, although it can be personal. The key to Pannenberg is that ultimately truth is not known in its entirety until the eschaton. Here I'm reminded of the existentialist dictum, first formulated by Soren Kierkegaard, that, "Life is lived forward and understood backward." As a result, all dogmatic statements, such as the resurrection, are hypotheses to be tested for coherence with other knowledge. Pannenberg and Wright are quite similar and perhaps complement each other as Ben Myers suggests.

One of the great values of Wright's book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is that it demonstrates, through massive historical research, that for first-century Jews "resurrection" was essentially an eschatological, rather than a soteriological, concept. For a first-century Jew, to say that God had raised Jesus from the dead was to say that the end of the world had arrived...I myself would approach the resurrection of Jesus in a way similar to Pannenberg's -- so that Jesus' resurrection from the dead is seen to be truly and literally the proleptic eschatological event, the "end of the world" arriving ahead of time. If anything disappoints me about Wright's work on the resurrection, it's the fact that he doesn't really take any steps in this direction. For this reason, I think Wright's historical work is best supplemented by Pannenberg's brilliant theological work on resurrection.

Jurgen Moltmann also incorporates issues of time into his discussion of the resurrection, but he is less confident than Pannenberg of being able to say what actually occurred. In order to explain this he uses a distinction between time as we experience it now, at time at the end of history (the eschaton).

 Anyone who describes Christ’s resurrection as ‘historical’, in just the same way as his death on the cross, is overlooking the new creation with which the resurrection begins, and is falling short of the eschatological hope. The cross and the resurrection stand in the same relation to one another as death and eternal life. Since death makes every life historical, death has to be seen as the power of history. Since resurrection brings the dead into eternal life and means the annihilation of death, it breaks the power of history and is itself the end of history. (The Way of Jesus)

What 'the resurrection of the dead' really is, and what "actually happened" in the raising of Jesus, is thus a thing which not even the New Testament Easter narrative profess to know. From the mutually radically contradictory experiences of the cross and the appearances of Jesus, they argue to an event in between as an eschatological event for which the verifying analogy is as yet only in prospect and is still to come. (Theology of Hope)

   

On the purely psychological/non-tangible side, there is Rudolph Bultmann. Bultmann, you know, was famous for de-mythologizing the New Testament. I imagine that he would have got on well with Thomas Jefferson. Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist, in a kind of play on Bultmann's statement about how vastly indifferent the historical matter is from the view of faith once wrote

There had to be a sequel  I quite see that. The man on the cross who had given up the ghost must rise from the dead as a living God; the resurrection followed the Crucifixion as inevitably as day follows night. And, indeed, in a sense, it clearly happened. Otherwise, how should I, a twentieth-century nihilist, who asks nothing more than to live out his days without any concern for a God, living or dead be worrying his head about this cross and a man who died on it two thousand years ago? Whether it happened as described in the Gospel narrative, and endlessly repeated by Christian apologists, is another question. In any case, what does it matter? I even prefer to suppose that some body snatcher, accustomed to hanging about Golgotha to pick up anything that might be going, heard in his dim-witted way that the King of the Jews was up for execution. Good! he thinks, there are bound to be pickings there. So he waits till the job is done, finds out where the corpse has been laid, drags the stone away, and then, making sure no one is watching decamps with the body. What a appointment for him! This King of the Jews has no crown, no jewels, no orb, no scepter, no ring; he is just a worthless, wasted, broken, naked body. The man contemptuously abandons the body to the vultures, who in their turn leave the bones to whiten in the sun--those precious, precious bones! ("The Crucifixion")

This comes to about as pure a statement of PNH as you can get. The only thing that matters is that I have been changed. I am not the person I once was, or might have been. Muggeridge lived in the last century, but in our day New Testament scholar Marcus Borg holds a similar position. This of course brings up the question of how to define faith. Is faith primarily an experience of the risen Christ or is it an assent to various propositions. Borg highlights the disjunction when he speaks and uses it to show the most important problem -- the fact that belief statements keep changing. The question then becomes, what is the relationship of history to faith? Is there none at all?


Kim Fabricius, a theologian in the Reformed tradition, says,

I don't like the discourse of "You have to believe X, Y or Z in order to be a (proper) Christian", and Jenson too says that "doubts about the empty tomb are not in themselves doubts about the resurrection"; and, obviously, the empty tomb is not a sufficient conditon for resurrection-faith. But it does seem to me to be a necessary condition. The exegesis against it is laboured, counter-intuitive, unconvincing. And if a "spiritual body" may be unimaginable, and its metaphorical language verge on collapse - what else?!;  the idea of a "spiritual resurrection" is just plain bizarre. It is, in fact, gnostic - docetic - which is an inevitable characteristic of liberal (idealist) theological thought. Jesus was created blood and guts and he was re-created blood and guts; the new heaven and new earth will contain beauty for eye (visions) and ear (symphonies); and meanwhile we eat bread and drink wine.

Fabricius incorporates elements of Barth along with a nod to the larger sacramental view that Wright alludes to. In fact, the sacramental perspective can provide an interesting analogy. Phillip Clayton, a professor at Claremont theological, uses the doctrine of the 'Real Presence' as a type of middle way between ontology and psychology, between a vision and the tangible body of Wright.

Various options are open to those who accept this hypothesis, which we might call the personal but nonphysical theory of Jesus’ post-mortem presentations. There can be no talk of proof here, but there may be ways of showing that, at least in principle, a real albeit nonphysical presence of a person after death is compatible with the presumption against miracles..One of these approaches involves postulating that the early disciples must have experienced a certain kind of event that no longer occurs today. Advocates of this view seek to do justice to the indications in the New Testament texts that, even if Jesus remains somehow present, the nature of his presence changed radically after the finite series of events that occurred soon after his death. They reason that something must have been different in the days or weeks after Jesus’s death, even if what occurred did not involve the resuscitation (even in some significantly transform condition) of the physical body. (The Predicament of Belief)

Clayton's "presumption against miracles" is founded on the problem of evil and a general Humean skepticism. As mentioned before, like Wright, he believes that we can reason by inference to the solution that puts everything together best, but unlike Wright, he believes that there is a strong burden of proof on the religious interpretation. Furthermore, Clayton
 attempts to tie statements about the "Spirit of Christ" in the New Testament to an embodied self-surrendered engagement with God. Jesus is "form, model, and condition of their [the disciples] own engagement with the divine."

John Cobb, another process theologian, gives us yet another nuance on the resurrection, this time with the help of process categories.

If this means that the whole created order will cease to exist and will be superseded by this glory, I am not able to follow. But it may not mean that. In I Cor.15 Paul speaks of a transformation from a physical body to a spiritual body. Did he mean that the physical body ceases to exist when the spiritual body is raised? In that case, the tomb must have been empty, but Paul never mentions an empty tomb. We will not have to break much with Paul if we suppose that the person who once existed as a physical body now exists as a spiritual one. The physical body is dead and behaves as physical things do. The spiritual body is alive and behaves as spiritual things do. If we pursue this line of thinking it turns out that Whitehead’s vision of how all events are included and transformed in the consequent nature of God is not so far removed from the glorification of the cosmos anticipated by Paul. We can say that believers, all people, and all things, are resurrected to a glory that we share with the Jesus whom Paul saw on the road to Damascus. I agree with Whitehead that this is of critical importance. Apart from God, all things are ephemeral...Another explanation is that the apostles had authentic experience of the risen Jesus. Unfortunately, this is too often associated with “ghosts,” which are usually understood quite negatively. But there are many convincing stories of recently deceased persons appearing to their loved ones and communicating with them. Unless one assumes that this is impossible, the most natural interpretation of the New Testament accounts is in these terms. If one accepts that such things happen, then one assumes that personal existence does not end with death. Belief that Jesus appeared after his death confirms this general belief in personal survival of some sort. That belief, of course, also has religious importance. But it is clear that the reasoning is circular....Such an understanding by no means answers all our questions. On the contrary, it opens the way to many and diverse speculations. It is very important for Christians not to attach primary importance to such questions. But it is perfectly legitimate to wonder about them and to form opinions about them. Whitehead’s conceptuality opens the door to multiple possibilities without settling the decision among them. One who judges that the apostles hallucinated is not rendered thereby a less faithful disciple. One who judges that the tomb was emptied by a strictly supernatural act of God is not thereby a better Christian. The critical issue is our discipleship, not our opinions on such matters.

Even though process metaphysics is enjoying a cultural renaissance today, the unitiated often complain that it is too abstract and academic. It is fairly clear, without a discussion of that terminology, that Cobb is suggesting something closer to Wright's transphysicalism than a vision. Cobb's pluralism, and openness to a range of interpretations, even if they are relativized by our ignorance, is refreshing. His statement is also reminiscent of Jesus' words to the Sadducees.

Finally, my last exhibit is John Polkinghorne, former professor of Mathematical Physics and more recently an ordained priest in the Anglican church. Polkinghorne is a traditionalist in religion, but it is evident that he has also thought creatively about the relationship between science and religion, having lived in both worlds. Clayton's presumption against the miraculous carries little weight for Polkinghorne. To him miracles are credible, especially if taken as 'signs' (semeia) of a deeper disclosure and self-revelation of God. This coupled with an understanding of the universe as incredibly dynamic, and a willingness to leave unresolved problems of theodicy, make for the compatibility of belief in a tangible resurrection with modern scientific understandings. Additionally, Polkinghorne's views on post-mortem survival may have value.

What is the real me? It is certainly more than the matter of my body, because that it changing all the time. The atoms are always changing – but in some sense it is the pattern of how the atoms are formed. That, I think, is what the soul is (agreeing with Thomas Aquinas). It is an immensely rich pattern that doesn't end at my skin. It involves my memories, my character, my personality. I think it involves all the relationships I take on. It is complex and we struggle to even say something about it. But I do not think that God will allow that pattern to be lost and I think that God will recreate that pattern after resurrection. Faith and Science are in conversation about what could be the continuity between this world and world that has yet to come.

The usefulness of information theory alluded to in this quote has been a central feature of discussions about Christianity and the nature of the soul. It is used in similar ways by Clayton and Nancey Murphy.

Logic, Life, and the Resurrection: Options

[The third in a series of posts on the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus.]

I find it helpful to keep two aspects of this discussion separate. Making some distinctions, at least initially, will help us to get our bearings. There is the issue of definition.What does "Christ is risen" mean? What does "the resurrection" refer to? Then there is the issue of epistemology. Can we "know", in any sense of the word, what occurred? The two strands obviously can have an impact on each other.The weight given to various aspects of what we know and don't know can influence definitions and our definitions, as well, can cause us to see what we expect to see.

First, having already laid the ground for this, I would like to sweep one option away. As I see it, the resurrection should not be defined as a re-knitting together of the exact same atoms that made up the body that died on the cross. Origen in the second century already anticipates problems with this view, and our modern scientific understanding of the body as more of a process than a substance makes it even less attractive. Add to this that Paul, as we have seen, seems to have a more 'transphysical' (N.T. Wright's word) or 'more than, but not less than' physical perspective. I believe we can safely discard Updike's definition.

 Still, in some ways, this doesn't get at the heart of the matter. It is still a body, even if it is, to use the seemingly oxymoronic term found in many English translations, a "spiritual body". So let's agree that the traditional meaning is something like a new body, a resurrection body, that is different from but is also in continuity with the old body. To make the typology that follows simple to understand, I'll call this traditional perspective the 'ontological' as opposed to the 'psychological' definition of the resurrection. By 'psychological' I don't mean to disparage the view or to imply that there is nothing 'real' at stake. I use the term merely as a way to describe something that primarily happens in the realm of the psyche.

We also need to posit a basic division on the epistemological issue. Either the event is 'historical' or 'non-historical'. By 'historical' I mean that the story as such is capable of more than just historical investigation that locates it in a particular time and place. Clearly there are some aspects of the story that historians agree upon. Instead I mean something stronger like, "the story as a whole (or as basically given) is potentially able to be be shown to be superior to competing theories by reasonable historical argument". Wright (a conservative) and Clayton (a liberal), for example, are both champions of a form of abduction called 'inference to the best solution'. The 'historical' view, understood in this way, believes that we can, at minimum, use historical argument to decide upon the solution that fits the evidence best. The 'non-historical' view, by contrast, believes that the issue cannot either in principle be known by investigation because it contains miraculous elements, or that the evidence is so sparse that the result is the same.

The options that now result from placing the question of definition and the question of epistemology together are as follows:

1. Ontological-Historical (OH)
2. Ontological-Non-historical (ONH)
3. Psychological-Historical (PH)
4. Psychological-Non-historical (PNH)

These four perspectives often overlap in contemporary discussions about the resurrection, as we will see. Taking them as pure types, however, is a useful heuristic, and it allows us to better see how a creative solution that incorporates the insights of each might be possible. The first (OH) attempts to treat the resurrection in a similar manner to the evangelical apologists. In our postmodern world, as mentioned before, foundationalist assumptions have usually been dropped for inference to the best explanation. The cross and the resurrection are on the same plane of knowable history even if the evidence is sparse. Here the distinction between 'geschichte' and 'heilgeschichte,' used as technical terms, is blurred. The second (ONH) is more or less typical of theology that goes under the banner of 'narrative' or 'postliberal' theology. It is essentially fideistic, but often theologians in this trend have quite sophisticated arguments that are related to either the coherence of Christian theology or make slightly more ambitious claims about plausibility. The third and fourth (PH and PNH) emphasize the importance of the transformation of the person over any kind of ontological statements about what occurred  The essential difference is that the PH perspective would make a stronger claim that the New Testament texts are actually being misread by traditionalists, whereas the PNH view remains ultimately unconcerned about how the texts are read. PNH is the "All that matters is..." view. Again, these are just pure types and they interact in a variety of ways with each other.

Logic, Life, and the Resurrection: Biblical Data

[Note: This is the second of a longer series of posts where I am trying to answer my own questions about the possibility and meaning of the resurrection of Jesus]

There are several interesting things about the New Testament's stories of the resurrection, but two things in particular stand out. The first is that there were no eye-witnesses of the 'event' of the resurrection itself. Mark, widely assumed to be the earliest gospel, has the women visiting an empty tomb and running away terrified by an angelic messenger. Presumably, this is the core testimony upon which other 'details' were added. The other thing to notice is that there is never an agreed upon definition of the resurrected body. In several places an implied transfiguration is substantial enough to make him unrecognizable. At the end of  Luke he walks for hours with some on a dusty road, and isn't recognized until he 'breaks bread' with them. In John, Mary of Magdala thinks he's the gardener until he speaks her name. In several stories the body of Jesus has both ghostly and strangely material qualities at the same time. He walks through walls (or just appears?) and eats fish. No effort is made to explain  how this could be, and I wouldn't expect one. Leave it to Paul, however, to try to stitch these all together.

Paul, of course, had his own experience with the Jesus after the resurrection, but the Damascus road story seems to move away from the kind of stories presented in the gospels toward something closer to what we might call a vision, such as ones recorded throughout the Old Testament. Still, he interprets the experience as an encounter with "the risen Christ"and spends a good deal of his time defending his apostleship on the basis of it to his detractors. In 1 Corinthians 15, for example, Paul is reviewing the appearances (in tradition) of Jesus to his disciples and followers and includes himself last in the list.

In the section that follows (15.12-34), he explains the importance of the resurrection for the church. It had to have happened, because Jesus is the beginning of the general resurrection of the dead (you believe in that, don't you?), and if the dead stay dead forever, we might as well break out the booze and celebrate the little time that we have remaining. In the next section (15.35-58), he attempts to answer his critics by explaining what a resurrected body is. Here is where it gets interesting. I encourage you do read the passage yourself, but here is my summary of it:

1. Each kind of thing has its own particular nature and dignity/beauty. (Paul uses 'flesh' and 'glory').
2. Like a seed contains what it will grow into, the body starts out corruptible and becomes    
    incorruptible ('physical' and 'spiritual' in many translations can be misleading)
3. Adam-people are corruptible but Jesus (now that he is resurrected?) is incorruptible.
4. In our present state we cannot inherit the kingdom, but we who bear Jesus' image shall be changed.
5. For those alive at the general resurrection, metaphorically speaking, transformation is like putting
    on a imperishable-immortal garment.
6. In both cases, both before and at the general resurrection, death has been defeated.

Maybe Paul was clear in his own mind what he intended to say (notice his "don't be a dim-wit"), but I'm missing a few things. On the top of my list is the question of how the analogy of a seed growing into wheat fits with the reappearance of the same 'cells, molecules, and amino acids' (Updike). Perhaps it doesn't. I've already cast some doubt about the easy proofs offered by the old apologists. Is it possible that those apologists were also wrong in stressing a 'physical' resurrection? In what sense can we say that the resurrection is 'physical? Is there a better way to describe resurrection?

This, of course, is not all the New Testament has to say about resurrection. Often it is used metaphorically to refer to a way of being alive to God. Jesus, for example, emphasizes this aspect in a debate with the Sadducees.

"He is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

Then there is the phrase "Christ is risen", a continuous present participle in Greek. This would have reference to the "firstfruits" concept we just met in 1 Cor. 15, but it may also allude to the taking up of mortality, exemplified in sorrow, pain, and struggle, into the resurrection.

Now, these metaphorical meanings do not necessarily have to be in conflict with the historical dimension that Paul's definition seems to imply. But, conversely, they could potentially stand on their own without a ontological event to ground them. This is the typical "liberal" solution, to make resurrection a metaphor for a deep psychological experience of transformation.

So far, I've tried to show that the naive conception of the resurrection as an event amenable to normal historical investigation and packaged in a box of near certainty is problematic.There are also questions about how to best describe the event of the resurrection even if it was a space-time event in history. Updike's perspective, a view meant to uphold the biblical tradition, is called into question by Paul's explanation in 1 Corinthians. The path of interpreting the resurrection naturalistically as a "historicized" inner experience is clearly an option. Are there others?

Logic, Life, and the Resurrection: The Old Evangelical Apologists

When I was a young evangelical, the resurrection of Jesus was both a vitally important and easy topic to address. It was important because I believed that the message of the church stood or fell on the reversal of death in space-time reality. The first section of John Updike's poem, "Seven Stanzas at Easter", captures the perspective as well or better than any prose description. 

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall. 

 It was also easy because I had been armed with arguments carefully cultivated by old-school apologists engaged in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s. These arguments often attempted to show that not only might the resurrection have happened a straightforward, literal-physical sense, but that it was just about as certain as you could get in matters of history. Not all of them were as crass. I was attracted to the slightly more sophisticated versions that I could find. C. Stephen Evans and Peter Kreeft, a philosopher at Boston College, became a trusted guides for me among the skeptics and liberals (a.k.a. wolves in sheep clothing). Kreeft, in particular, argued that there were only five logical possibilities regarding the resurrection of Jesus:

1. The Swoon theory--Jesus never actually died.
2. The Hallucination theory--the grief-stricken disciples imaginations got the best of them.
3. The Conspiracy theory--the disciples stole the body.
4. The Myth theory--the recorded testimony is not meant to be taken literally.
5. The Christian explanation--which you should accept because none of the others hold up.

Pieces of Kreeft's entire argument can be found scattered about the history of the church. In fact, that is part of the beauty of his achievement as a synthesizer. For example, Pascal wonders in the Pensees, "If Jesus did not rise, who made the disciples act as they did?" C.S. Lewis devotes some time to the appearances and the hallucination theory in Miracles Chapter 16. I will not recapitulate the entire argument offered by Kreeft, which even in condensed form runs over ten pages, but the rebuttal essentially goes like this:

1. The Romans were too good at crucifixion for resuscitation to be possible.
2. Many people claimed to see Jesus, so why didn't someone just produce the body and stop it?
3. The disciples died gruesome deaths. Surely someone would have let the cat out of the bag.
4. Either the  gospel accounts are historical or mythical.
5. Paul (like Updike above) believed it was the linchpin of Christianity (1 Cor. 15)

Probably the only statement above that seems likely to be true without qualification is the statement about Jesus' death being real. The other statements rest upon a couple of debatable presuppositions. Dominic Crossan, for instance, asks the haunting question that I believe enters the heart of statements 2 and 3.To paraphrase, what if those who cared didn't know, and those who knew didn't care? Sometimes the conservative apologist's picture of the period after the resurrection imagines the Roman and  Jewish leadership standing in the place of the modern skeptic, waiting for an opportunity to crush the fledgling sect by digging up a body and saying, "Aha!" Or, similarly, the disciples going door-to-door bothering everyone with Easter tracts. Judaism was splintered into a variety of sects. Who cared about one more, especially when their Messiah was dead? The other presupposition is that history and myth are logically incompatible forms of discourse. This is almost certainly a modern invention. Ancient texts routinely mix what we would call history with legendary and metaphorical elements. I can hear the conservative detractor say, "But the disciples claimed to be eye-witnesses" True enough; they did. Overall the gospel accounts, and the writings of Paul on the subject, sound like much like eye-witness accounts in comparison to other stories in the Bible. But it simply begs the question that, even if they were, they would write on the subject in the manner of the Enlightenment centuries later with its attempted, authentic, unbiased reporting of "the way it was". This itself further assumes that historiography of that kind is both achievable and desirable.

About the time that Kreeft was typing out his argument, conservative Christianity starting questioning the foundationalist presuppositions of its program through the incorporation of Kierkegaardian (Evans eventually went on to write several books on the Dane) and postmodern humility. The old evangelical apologists were fading away, but the questions still remained.

* Picture: Jacob de Wit shows truth keeping her eye on a historian (1754)

Prayer and Divine Action in the World

I've been fascinated by the discussion that has been taking place over the past decade about the mechanism(s) by which God interacts with the world. A recent featured piece in The Guardian got me thinking again.

Some people, I suppose, may think of prayer as a peculiar way of making things happen in the world. And it would indeed be a quite a fringe benefit to religious belief if it granted believers the ability to change the course of the universe simply by closing their eyes, squeezing their hands together, and submitting a request to the divine omnipotence that things be otherwise. Yes, it is easy to be sarcastic at the philosophical naivety of this view. But is this really what people do?

The great Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury throughout the 1960s, was once asked how to pray. "I just get down on my knees and hope for the best," he replied. In other words, there is not much that you have to do other than make time for it. For Ramsey, prayer was not the heaping up of pious chatter. It was not a peculiar way of getting things done in the world. Rather, it was about listening and waiting – being attentive to that which is beyond oneself, a form of concentration on that which is other.

The experts in prayer are therefore often strange misfits, otherworldly in so far that they eschew any practical calculation of utility. Prayer is like art, or rather prayer demands the sort of attention that art demands. It takes time. It requires silence.  From "Prayer is Not Pious" -- by Giles Frazer

I'm not sure if those who believe in an "interventionist" God would disagree. This is just one of several ways to pray; what is typically called petitionary. As the article points out, it is only this way of praying that is met with incredulity. Really, it isn't even petitionary prayer as such, but a subset that expects an answer in the non-human physical world. Something like praying for rain. Hume, of course, is cited as the beginning of skepticism about the miraculous, but in an age where claims proliferated and were used as a type of evidence or authentication for belief, his response was certainly needed. In our modern, scientific age, any kind of claim that god has acted in the world is a just as hard to sell . Gone are the days when miracles could be appealed to unproblematically.

A number of thinkers that have an interest in the religion and science dialogue have taken on the subject.  Part of the explanation has to do with viewing god as a causal agent analogously to the way we as human causal agents effect the transition from the mental to the physical. Certain kinds of divine action can be explained in this way, but the explanations stop short of what I will call a purely physical miracle such as the turning of water into wine. This is an important reason why Ian Barbour, Philip Clayton, and the late Arthur Peacocke, for example, all reject in one way or another various physical miracles in the Christian tradition such as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection.

Clayton speaks for the concensus in stating that information theory in biology is a useful way to understand what might be going on when god interacts with us. Any effects in the physical world would necessarily be indirectly mediated through human beings.

...understood within the context of emergence theory, it [the information model] allows for divine causal constraints on the aspirations of persons in a way that does not abrogate the functioning of natural law. No physical laws are broken if there is an exchange of information between a divine source and conscious human agents. The type of influence is at least formally analogous to the chemical effects produced when an agent shifts her attention from one object to another--an everyday occurence. By contrast, a direct divine intervention to change the chemistry of a cell would be a troubling miracle.

 Clayton, Philip. "Natural Law and Divine Action: The Search for an Expanded Theory of Causation" Zygon, vol. 39, no. 3, September 2004

By contrast, John Polkinghorne, former professor of mathematical physics and now a priest in the Anglican church, takes the view that conservative religious instincts are correct and that an open universe could allow for the kind of purely physical miracle. Polkinghorne builds on the work of Thomas Torrance, a Scottish theologian who was at the forefront of early science-religion dialogue, and he has been in conversation with the above thinkers. Like Torrance, he believes that the transition from the closed, mechanistic universe of Newton to the open, dynamic picture of the universe that science presents since Einstein has not been fully taken into account. Polkinghorne favors the view that radically "unnatural" events can occur on theological grounds because the biblical tradition sees them as "signs" pointing to the ultimate nature and purposes of God, but he also believes that these events can be consonant with known principles of science. The difficulty, however, has been in adequately explaining the method in which God interacts. Polkinghorne's mature views see the value of information theory, mathematically chaos, and kenosis (God condescending to act as a cause among causes) as thought experiments "to take us beyond simple fideistic assertion that God acts providentially, without assuming to claim that the mode of divine action is fully understood." ("Divine Action--Some Comments" Science and Christian Belief, Vol 24, No. 1, 2012)

Great questions, and ones that I won't attempt to answer. I look forward to more discussions in this area. The practical and theological (are they ever really separate?) implications are significant, but not overwhelmingly significant. The vast majority of people who pray on a regular basis derive much more from the practice than they may even be aware of.