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. 

Emory Forum on Evolutionary Biology and Morality

This past week I attended a discussion about evolutionary biology and its relation to human nature and morality at Emory University (Georgia). The presenters were Frans de Waal, an agnostic/atheist who works at Emory, and Jeffrey Schloss, an Evangelical Christian biologist from Westmont College. In part the forum was a continuing response by faculty and students to the outspoken Creationist views of one of their own, Dr. Ben Carson. Carson is a Seventh Day Adventist. He is also an important neuroscientist with some impressive accomplishments. The issue began about a year ago with a commencement address. His views are encapsulated in the following quote:

Ultimately, if you accept the evolutionary theory, you dismiss ethics, you don’t have to abide by a set of moral codes, you determine your own conscience based on your own desires. You have no reason for things such as selfless love, when a father dives in to save his son from drowning. You can trash the Bible as irrelevant, just silly fables, since you believe that it does not conform to scientific thought.

The first part of this statement was demonstrated to be empirically false by de Waal, who gave a shorter version on his TED talk for his presentation that evening. I recommend watching it if you haven't seen it. You won't forget the videos of the monkeys.

Jeffrey Schloss followed up with a discussion of how the various perspectives of the explanatory power of evolution in regards to morality interrelate to his and to de Waal's views. Later, both men sat down with a moderator and talked about some of their differences. Anyhow, I got to ask a question of Schloss. It went something like, "In your chapter for Evolution, Games, and God you give three possibilities for evolutionary "directionality", especially in light of intentional sacrificial altruism. 1) evolutionary necessity 2) happy/ fortunate possibility 3) grace-mediated "impossibility" Which do you think is more correct?

Schloss is a great guy, and I got to meet him personally afterward. His response combined elements of 2 and 3, which I think is fair, but also seemed a bit on the "safe" side. This is especially clear when the grace he referred to was the "common grace" of the Wesleyan tradition. Common grace is a nice concept, and may even be theologically necessary, but it is hard to see what it adds to this discussion.

During the forum and afterward, I wondered if option 1, despite appearances, wasn't also open to theists as well. Simon Conway Morris (Cambridge paleontologist) has written and spoken extensively on the phenomenon of evolutionary convergence. In short, animals that are unrelated and separated in time and space develop strikingly similar adaptations. Morris suggests a "tilted plane" view of evolution could be an implication, providing a sort of teleology/teleonomy without vitalism. Of course, any suggestion of teleology, even at this level, runs into atheistic criticisms of importing religion into science. However, since this is an empirically verifiable phenomenon, it seems perfectly acceptable to wonder about its meaning or even uphold it as compatible (not as a proof) with a number of metaphysical viewpoints, including Christianity. Anyhow, my thoughts ran to Morris' work as a way in which the first option of Schloss' typology might be possible. Perhaps a push from the 'rear' through the constrained options and a "lure" (to use a Process term) from the 'front', pulling us toward God? Very speculative, I know, but I often hear the invitation to metaphysics when reading about and discussing science. The world, if you begin reflecting on it, is a deeply mysterious place. 

Clayton/Knapp and Christian Minimalism

During part of my life, I played tournament chess. In chess your Elo rating is determined by how often you win, lose, or draw against other players above, below, or roughly equal to you in strength. After you've established a permanent rating, there is a point where the graph of your progress does not fall below. For example, if you have consistently kept your rating in a range of 1600-1700 then it can be safely assumed that you won't fall below 1400 no matter how bad a single tournament might go for you. This is called your "floor".

Philip Clayton, professor at the Jerusalem of Process Studies, Claremont Theological, co-authored a book this past year with Steven Knapp entitled The Predicament of Belief. Clayton is a very interesting figure on the Process side of Christianity. He routinely breaks out of standard categories. For example, while most Process folks set up a symmetrical relationship between god and the world (pantheism), he posits an asymmetric one (panentheism). He apparently even believes in creatio ex nihilo as well. He is passionate, almost 'evangelical', about his ideas, but also very gracious to people who do not agree. Whatever you might think of his theology/philosophy, he models Christian humility and charity. If you are unfamiliar with him, check out podcast #24 on Homebrewed Christianity/TNT where he talks about the book.

Clayton and his co-author ask a simple question concerning how believable various parts of Christianity are today. In other words, what parts are rationally credible. He works with a tiered concept of rationality. At the lowest levels are bits of scientific information that have been reproduced time and again. These are intellectually secure. As you work your way up the mountain (see cover of latest book), it gets rationally more difficult to convince the hypothetical unbiased individual. Eventually, beyond even "rationally permissible" and "useful metaphor", the top of the mountain is obscured by clouds. So, whether or not you believe in a full trinitarian god, you should at least recognize that mind/consciousness is a part of the universe. Whether you believe the creeds, you can at least recognize that "infinite grace and compassion of the UR [ultimate reality]" were present in Jesus of Nazareth. Whether or not you believe in a physical resurrection, as Paul apparently did, you can at least believe in a trans-physical or perhaps a spirit-centered/ participatory understanding.

I've followed the reviews of the book with interest. The usual suspects and their expected positions appear, but I've also seen a bit of a push-back from some that would normally be sympathetic. Anyhow,Clayton is essentially saying that there is a "floor" of Christian belief and that we should seek to climb the mountain, if we are so inclined, as long as we realize that the air is thinner (rationally speaking) the higher we go. This, among other things, distinguishes him from theological liberalism and makes him an helpful voice in the ongoing theological conversation.