More Philosophical Concerns about the Resurrection

I have been thinking for a couple years about writing a book arguing that the Resurrection of Jesus actually occurred. You say there are too many books on that subject already? Including from acclaimed specialists in the New Testament like N. T. Wright? Don't worry, if I write such a book, it will break new (maybe alien) ground -- you'll understand when you see the title.

Such is the danger of anti-Christian arguments: they make me write more books. Because whenever I follow the arc of such arguments, they tend to boomerang around and hit the critics on the butt. Along their flight path, they open up new fields of evidence for the Gospel that Christians had generally overlooked.

Of course, our critics also help us weed out bad arguments for the faith -- God bless them! So many of my books begin as rebuttals of people like Richard Dawkins, John Crossan, Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, Richard Carrier, and Reza Aslan. But following the flight of the boomerang, they ultimately wind up in distant lands -- Upper Egypt, Polynesia, 19th Century India, Narnia, exoplanets -- where they turn up new evidence for the Christian faith. That is especially true of How Jesus Passes the Outsider Test: The Inside Story, and my new book, How Jesus has Liberated Women, both of which were superficially inspired by attacks on the Gospel by John Loftus, but end up offering sweeping historical arguments for the truth and value of the Good News that, in effect, tell the story of the human race in two new ways.

Last month, I responded to arguments against the Resurrection of Christ from a young philosopher named Eric Van Evans. Yesterday morning he offered more reasons for rejecting this central Christian doctrine as an historical fact.

Again, such challenges are a chance to brainstorm, and look at life, along with life from the dead, from fresh perspectives. So let's cautiously dip our toes in, and see how the swimming might be. I'll quote Van Evans' comments, then offer ten preliminary considerations:

"The primary reason (for rejecting Christianity) is that I don’t find the resurrection particularly plausible. How could I possibly ground my entire identity in a historical claim made thousands of years ago? Does God truly expect humanity to believe that he entered history as a human being, was executed, rose bodily from the dead, ascended into heaven, and will one day return? God must understand how extraordinary, opaque, and even absurd such a claim appears to us. (1) If God exists, surely he knows how difficult this is to believe. Why doesn’t he perform a resurrection now? Maybe God should enter history, say, every 2,000 years or so to let us know that he’s here. In fact, some Christian apologists argue that God has some sort of special obligation to become incarcerate. Well, why not do it again? (2)

(1) Doesn't God see how hard ("extraordinary, opaque, absurd") it is to believe in the Resurrection? 

The problem with this objection is that billions of people HAVE believed in the Resurrection, and not found it absurd.  Evans uses the phrase "to us," as if he were speaking for people in general, or modern people in general, who find Easter ridiculous.  But he is not.  He is speaking for himself, in a peculiar way, because he grants that God exists, and that miracles may happen, yet rejects one that is particularly well-established.  (So well established, that it is marked on the calendar as a Holy Day.)  

So the answer to this argument is simple.  If billions of people have believed that God raised Jesus from the dead, and Eric says he believes in God and is open to miracles, why does he find it so hard?  If something IS done, then it must be possible to do it.  If it is done billions of times, then it can't be that hard.  But perhaps he explains his own difficulties below.    

(2) Why doesn't God do resurrections more than once, to press home his point? 

I find this objection question-begging and (to be frank) aesthetically vulgar.  

Question-begging, because there are in fact records of other people coming back from the dead -- even in the New Testament, and yes, in modern times as well.  Read Craig Keener on the latter.    

Vulgar, because as Jesus himself said, "They have Moses and the prophets.  If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, why would they listen even if someone came back from the dead?"

Now we have Jesus come back from the dead.  If some still refuse to listen, or recognize the extraordinary evidence for that event, the demand for more, yet more miracles -- greater than Easter itself -- does seem vulgar, like a child throwing his quiche on the floor and demanding scrambled eggs with ketchup instead.     

For Evans is ruining the story arc.  It is vulgar to ask for a story to simply repeat.  The universe began in a moment of Creation, a counter-entropic explosion of space itself, then participles that congealed into atoms, and into stars and planets over billions of years. The Resurrection was a similar and parallel counter-entropic event on our planet.  By it, all Nature is brought up.  It is the hinge of history, even in the crude sense that we date history around the pivot of Jesus' life.  

Others may be healed, and it seems sometimes are.  Others may even be raised again to life.  But asking for a second Resurrection is like asking the stars to be made anew.  What we have in the gospels already is vastly more than those for whom "Moses and prophets" were the sum total of the Scriptures: we can see how the Old Testament, and in How Jesus Passes the Outsider Test I argue even Chinese, Indian, Greek and Norse cultures, were fulfilled.

The Resurrection is to human history what Creation is to cosmic history.  Asking for it twice, shows poor taste.  It is like insisting that because the scene where Gollum falls into the Cracks of Doom was so cool, he crawl back up, snatch the ring again, and plunge into the magma a few times extra, as a kind of curtain call  

Eric insists:   

"If salvation, truth, or a relationship with God hinges on believing an extraordinary historical claim from 2,000 years ago, then God seems to be asking humanity to carry an unreasonable burden. One standard Christian answer is that the incarnation is a “once-for-all event,” that is, decisive, complete, and final. But that answer assumes what it’s meant to prove. It presupposes that God’s self-disclosure must take the form of a single rupture, rather than an ongoing, recurring presence. (3) From the outside, that looks totally arbitrary. (4) If God has an obligation to reveal himself, then repeating the act would seem to strengthen the case, not weaken it. (5) (3) In part such a criticism seems a false dichotomy or straw man. Christianity describes both a "once for all" event, and an "ongoing, recurrence presence." What else can one say? Read the Book of Acts, and see the "ongoing, recurring" work of God happening before your eyes. Or read a modern missionary account like Peace Child or Lords of the Earth, or my new How Jesus has Liberated Women.

Analogously, what is marriage? A one-time event? Or a recurring commitment? Yes, and yes. The romance would seep out without both: without an initial public disclosure of love, and then an ongoing working out of that love in practical, real-world, often difficult, conditions.

What Eric is really getting at here is his objection to exclusive religion. He doesn't want one religion to be wholly true, and other religions to be mere errors. I object to exclusivism too, because I think both it and Eric's own pluralism are alike unbiblical and simplistic.

The Resurrection is the fulfillment of many hints and promises throughout the Old Testament. But it is also the fulfillment of hints and promises in Chinese culture, as I show in True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture, and Nordic tradition, as I show in How Jesus Passes the Outsider Test. (C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were keenly aware of this latter.)

The Resurrection, I would further argue, is the fulfillment of Nature itself, as it manifests itself in Spring. And it points forward to some greater Spring.

That is artistic. That is a beautiful outline of history. But truth must also recognize and account for areas of darkness -- the crucifixion before Easter. To simply say all is light, is to falsify reality and again, to ruin the plot, which needs the darkness and then the dawn.

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." So Christianity has a standard. It is well that this is so, or the gurus of the world - many of whom are the wolves and false prophets that Jesus warned against -- would break down boundaries and consume our souls.

This is, frankly, one reason I also disagree with Eric's repeated affirmations of Karl Marx and socialism. I think he was a ravenous wolf. And any model of religion that fails to take the darkness fully into account, is both inartistic, and crude. The Gulag cannot be swept under the rug: the blood of millions cries out. Neither, of course, can "Christian" sins.

(4) Again, Eric takes his opinion as objective, ignoring the fact that billions have found "Jesus is Lord" anything but arbitrary.

(5) Why should we agree with those unquoted "apologists" who say God had an "obligation" to reveal himself? The traditional Christian doctrine is that revelation is an act of Grace.

God does reveal Himself, through Christ, and through those who follow Him, explicitly or implicitly. The act is repeated in that sense. Read Lords of the Earth, for instance, and see how Stan Dale dies in a flight of arrows by a stream in New Guinea, as Jesus died on the cross. Many have followed Christ to the cross. But there is nothing irrational about setting up an ultimate standard for human life, or in seeing Jesus as its fulfillment, rather than putting every hero or saint on the same level.

The greatest saints recognize their limits. Thus Confucius, whom Mencius described as a "phoenix among chickens," the greatest of the sages, himself said he did not even hope to meet a true sage. Socrates, too, recognized that his greatest wisdom lay in his ability to admit the limits of his knowledge. This is their glory, not their weakness.

Here, my essay on the Prior Probability of the Resurrection might be helpful. I have studied world religions for decades, feel great respect for thinkers like Lao Zi and Confucius, but find no one comparable to Jesus of Nazareth. As the great Chinese man of letters Lin Yutang put it, after a lifetime of searching, and reviewing Chinese philosophy, "Blow out the candles, the sun is risen!" But in a sense Lin's metaphor is misleading, because in his eyes, the life of Jesus deepened the value and meaning of these other great sages, as he does with Isaiah and David.

This is the fundamental error of both exclusivism and pluralism: they assume that the Messianic character of Christ is a Zero-Sum Game: that Jesus being Lord, that negates the prophets and sages. No, he comes to fulfill, not abolish. (But as the Good Shepherd, he does set wolves out of the pasture.)

"Another response is that repeated incarnations would undermine faith. In other words, belief must involve risk, trust, or distance to be genuine. But this raises an uncomfortable implication for me: Does God really value epistemic insecurity? (6) Why should ambiguity be preferable to clarity? If God is perfectly loving, why design a world where salvation depends on navigating ancient testimony, translation disputes, and historical uncertainty?" (7)

(6) I don't think "epistemic insecurity" is a proper definition of "Christian faith." Tim McGrew and I defined it, rather, as something like "Holding firmly to, and acting on, what you have good reason to believe is true, in the face of difficulty."

What does God value? Certainly, if he created this world, ambiguity and uncertainty must be a useful part of life -- and any relationship. What good is your love for your wife if it is never tested? Trials not only prove, but strengthen, bonds. Trees that grow by the ocean develop tough roots, because the wind blows stiffly on their boughs.

So yes, if Christianity is true, faith must be tested. But that fits with everything else we know about the world. And it is consistent with the view that our object of faith is objectively reasonable. One marries hopefully in part because one has found a partner worthy of one's trust. Faith means trusting a worthy partner even when under stress, not marrying a fool or a cheat.

(7) What salvation depends on is a separate question. I do not claim to see into the afterlife. Nor am I the judge of souls.

Translation disputes need not concern us. I read the New Testament in Greek, and have read it in Chinese, English, and some in Japanese, and a few verses in Russian and French. The translators of the main English versions of the NT seem quite competent. The main sense of the NT is not confused by translation, IMO.

You may believe the testimony of the apostles or deny it. I have argued, in several books, that you should believe it, because it is strongly evidenced on dozens of levels.

"Now, even if I did find the resurrection plausible, I still don’t think I would be a 'Christian' in the conventional sense. (8) Why does one have to *be* anything at all? Belief in God does not require allegiance to a particular religious identity, nor does it require anchoring one’s moral and spiritual life to a single tradition. (9) What ultimately matters is how you live. Strive for virtue. Pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. In my view, you move infinitely closer to God through such pursuits than through merely affirming the correct doctrines or identifying with the correct tradition." (10)

(8) I'm not much for convention myself.

(9) Because Jesus is Lord.

I expected we'd come more explicitly to the question of World Religions before we got to the end of Eric's remarks. It's a question that he cares a lot about. It's also the central topic of four of my books, including my doctoral dissertation.

I love the Chinese tradition, and often take fire for that these days, when America and China are at odds.

But in a sense, I would argue that all modern traditions are in fact "anchored" to the life of Jesus. Neither modern society, nor our consciousness of what is right, can be explained apart from the teachings and example of Jesus. You can't escape his impact, even in rebellion. Marx was a Christian heretic, and so are the New Atheists.

And as Bob Dylan put: "It might be the devil, or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody."

Setting oneself as the judge of Right and Wrong is both historically naive, because we are all contingent beings, and psychologically damaging, because it makes us little gods, knowing good and evil for ourselves. Lordship does not suit us. It damages us, and makes us demons in practice. That is, in fact, what happened to Marx.

(10) This is a bit of a false dichotomy, and also ignores the fact that our conceptions of what is "good" or "true" cannot be anchored in ourselves. Because that deifies our souls, which ensnares them more profoundly.

C. S. Lewis and I would agree that the Stoics were the most noble of ancient Greeks and Romans.

If we could return to theistic Stoicism, that would indeed be a giant leap forward for mankind.

But can we? How did Stoicism actually play out in the ancient world? I would argue that it found its fulfillment when it met St. Paul in the market of Athens, and then heard his message about the Resurrection of one whom God had chosen to bring sense to the human story, on Mars Hill. Before that, even the greatest ancient moralists were a people walking in darkness. Now they had seen a great light, and that made all the difference -- historically and psychologically.