What’s Wrong with the World

Nor in His death; for the Passion is what it is only in light of the Resurrection. If we who did not know Him in the flesh worship at the foot of His cross, it is because we have worshipped first at His empty tomb.

Excellent and important point. That is why the disciples were completely demoralized after Jesus' death and before His resurrection. (One of the oddities about the novel _Ben Hur_ is that it does not mention Jesus' resurrection. The old movie version takes this one step farther and has the central healing miracle of the story take place at the time of the crucifixion, for no particular reason, rather than having it worked by Jesus personally, as in the novel.)

My apologies. Ben Hur, the novel, does affirm Jesus' resurrection in passing in one place, but not after the crucifixion. A time indication in the epilogue is given as "About ____ years after the crucifixion..."

Your quote from Paul's letter to the Corinthians cuts to the core of Christianity. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, everything about Christianity is not only pointless, but false. If Jesus did come forth from the tomb, it validates the claims of Christianity against those of all rival faiths, and destroys atheism as well.

Submitting the claim to historical analysis is decidedly inconclusive. Historians who are believers assert that the evidence favors the resurrection. Not surprisingly, those who are not claim the opposite. Those who read their analyses almost always have their views set beforehand, they generally read such material to either reinforce the beliefs they already hold, or as a means to dispute those who disagree with them.

I don't think Jesus was a lunatic or a liar. It's quite easy to envision a man who was quite convinced he had a prophetic mission and was called to preach the imminent "Kingdom of God." Whether he claimed to be God himself is quite another matter. I agree with your observation, "...what sane first-century Jew would think claiming personal divinity a good way to raise a following?" In the Judaism of Jesus' time, it would have been a way to gain no following, which is why I think such a view was a later development.

Many believers claim it is ridiculous to believe that such a fundamental aspect of their faith was not present from the very beginning and could have developed in a short period of time--The Gospel of John asserts the divinity of Jesus in a distinct manner. Again we are left with scholars who argue on both sides, with their own inclinations guiding their conclusions. For me, the only evidence that would count at all is an experience of the Risen Christ. For those who have it, it becomes indisputable. For those who don't, claims on any other basis are not compelling. I have never had an experience of the Resurrected Jesus, nor any other deity and I remain an atheist.

If the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are THE central interactions of God with humanity and the very basis for any hope of eternal life, I would have to rate it as a very poor effort. For all the claims about how belief in the resurrection has changed the course of history (and it has), there is the basic fact that only a minority of people in the world are Christians. This has always been the case and will be so for the foreseeable future. Now that doesn't mean Christianity is false, yet it does raise the question of why God obscures himself from so many.

Christians claim that God is not only the very source of all existence, but that he sustains it from moment to moment. Beyond that, he took on humanity himself in the person of Jesus Christ. This foundational reality should be more obvious to each of us than is our immediate awareness of our own individual existences. If there is a God who creates and knows each of us more intimately than we know ourselves, he understands precisely what each of might require to acknowledge him. It need not be proof in a scientific, quantifiable manner--it could simply be the undeniable presence of the living God in the person of Jesus Christ. Devout believers claim just such an experience--some of them even assert that I do as well, but choose to deny it, which makes me deserving of eternal punishment. So Happy Easter to the Elect, whom God selected before the foundations of the world. The rest of us, the vast majority of humanity, to whom God denies that experience, will have to keep wondering why we are the "vessels fit for wrath, ready to be destroyed."

Thomas C. makes a number of points I concur with. C. S. Lewis' formula of Jesus having to be either of three: a lunatic, a charlatan, or the person he said he was breaks down when you add a fourth -- the Jesus we know from the Gospels is a man whose life was reported with less than coherent factual accuracy.

The Gospels have no interest in objective reportage, John especially. In the synoptic Gospels we get a farrago of narrative, parables, sayings, doings, anecdotes, statements and claims of faith, the supernatural, and so on.

On the whole they can be taken as descriptive but not necessarily accurate. We have a record of Jesus' life prior to Resurrection, and then we have a collection of events mixed in that must be post-resurrection superimposed or interpolated into the narrative.

You have John's "I am the way, the truth, and the life. . ." There simply is no way Jesus said these things, but John's insight into the nature of Jesus the Risen Lord is entirely true so such words are put into Jesus' mouth.

Revelation is not an experience that makes everything clear. It makes a great deal muddy. Revelation tells you Jesus is God, but it doesn't tell you exactly what that means other than that death is not death.

We interpret new experiences through old filters, cultural biases, romantic notions, textual cues, pious conventions.

We have the first Revelation of the Risen Jesus to the obvious discovery that He is God! Death is not death.

Then we go to -- this must mean that his horrible death stands for something else than simple mortality -- it means a supreme sacrifice and atonement of our sins like it says in Isaiah.

Hey, it's all been prophesized! (Never mind how strained the verses must be, and how many must be ignored, it was all foretold.)

Then it goes to -- if Jesus is God, his mother must have been pure and untouched, a virgin; and look, Isaiah says something that looks like that, too.

Pretty soon we are piling one pious claim upon another and getting further and further away from the encounter with the God Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit.

The church becomes a debating society of men trying to out pious one another, out expert each other in the intelligence of their theology, and out rationalize each other in their spiritual pride; or out good deed each other in proof of their submission.

Men will read, write, and discuss a million books but never venture to the source of revelation in abject humility and brokenness. They will never let themselves be crucified as many times at takes to be stripped of illusion and selfhood/selfishness.

I often wonder as the Gospel Jesus wondered whether he would find any faith upon the Earth when he returns. Humans seem to possess such little ability to see how persistently we cling to falsehoods, to ideas and images about God, and the almost infinite ability we have of deceiving ourselves.

How many people are really capable of truly hating themselves and their life? I see a world of men who do everything possible everyday to feel good about themselves -- not despise the vast bulk of BS that makes up their person going about his business.

I see churches full of people whose only prayers are petitions or the comforting habit of ritual. I don't meet any (or very few) who've read The Cloud of Unknowing or The Imitation of Christ (let alone Meister Eckhart who ventures into iffy territory but has real value nonetheless).

And then there's the Gospel of John; strange, weird, discursive, dialectical John, but what insights! What truth and beauty! Genius.

Thomas and Mark,

I don't see how the theory that the disciples invented the "Jesus was divine" idea is any more plausible than the claim that Jesus Himself dishonestly invented the idea. They were as Jewish as He was -- Paul no less than the others -- and equally unlikely to make such a thing up in order to gain a following. Indeed, if it weren't for modern liberal theologians' desperate need to find some way to salvage Christianity in the face of their rejection of the miraculous, I don't think anyone would take seriously for a moment this novel suggestion that Jesus never claimed to be divine -- a suggestion no one made for nearly 2,000 years.

The "results" of modern biblical "scholarship" like that of Crossan don't show otherwise. The "methodology" doesn't pass the laugh test and is manifestly rigged to get the results the "scholar" wants, not to mention being fundamentally unsound in any event. (Imagine a 30th century scholar examining the two texts from Dawkins I cited a couple of posts ago. If his "methodology" is like that of modern biblical scholars, he'll confidently conclude that they could not possibly have been written by the same person given the differences in style, different attitudes , etc. No doubt he'd posit a "Dawkinsian school" that produced these texts, conclude that the differences reflect a rift among the adherents of this "Dawkins movement," etc.)

And re: John's Gospel, there more than anywhere else we have a Jesus -- and a John -- who cannot possibly be regarded as anything but crazy -- not "insightful," or "beautiful," but nutso --if what the Gospel tells us is not true. (I recall when I was an atheist thinking that Jesus sounded like the most amazing weirdo imaginable in that particular book -- which He would be, UNLESS what He says there is true. Imagine really meeting a guy who said all that stuff: Would you seriously think for a moment, "Well, I don't really believe he's divine, but what insights!")

So, the situation for the skeptic -- and certainly for the theological liberal -- is even worse than the "Jesus was a lunatic" theory implies. The skeptic or liberal has to claim that the disciples too were all lunatics -- all crazy enough to believe that making up a "Jesus was divine" story was going to get them a following among Jews. Please.

Thomas,

Submitting the claim to historical analysis is decidedly inconclusive. Historians who are believers assert that the evidence favors the resurrection. Not surprisingly, those who are not claim the opposite. Those who read their analyses almost always have their views set beforehand, they generally read such material to either reinforce the beliefs they already hold, or as a means to dispute those who disagree with them.

For me, the only evidence that would count at all is an experience of the Risen Christ.

I submit for your serious consideration that your refusal to count anything else as evidence is irrational—a kind of irrationality that you yourself would immediately dismiss in any factual matter not religious.

If the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are THE central interactions of God with humanity and the very basis for any hope of eternal life, I would have to rate it as a very poor effort. For all the claims about how belief in the resurrection has changed the course of history (and it has), there is the basic fact that only a minority of people in the world are Christians. This has always been the case and will be so for the foreseeable future. Now that doesn't mean Christianity is false, yet it does raise the question of why God obscures himself from so many.

You might want to consider the possibility that the unconditional salvation of every human being is not God’s top priority. If this is any serious part of your objection to Christianity—and I assume that it is, or you would not bother to mention it here—then you are at least in part getting hung up on bad theology.

Christians claim that God is not only the very source of all existence, but that he sustains it from moment to moment. Beyond that, he took on humanity himself in the person of Jesus Christ. This foundational reality should be more obvious to each of us than is our immediate awareness of our own individual existences. If there is a God who creates and knows each of us more intimately than we know ourselves, he understands precisely what each of might require to acknowledge him.

If the public evidence we have is inadequate, then only private experience could determine the rationality of belief on a case-by-case basis. If, on the other hand, the public evidence is adequate—and this has been the position of thoughtful Christians in all ages—then it is captious to complain that there is not some other kind of evidence that you would have preferred.

Mark,

The Gospels have no interest in objective reportage, John especially. In the synoptic Gospels we get a farrago of narrative, parables, sayings, doings, anecdotes, statements and claims of faith, the supernatural, and so on.

So is it your contention is that no objective reportage could possibly include narrative, sayings, doings, anecdotes, the supernatural, and so on? Why on earth would you think a thing like that?

I do realize that it is an article of faith of much modern New Testament criticism that John's Gospel is more invention than reportage. You seem to be of the same mind, at least so far as John 14:6 is concerned, since in your opinion "there simply is no way Jesus said these things." But this assertion does not seem to be the outcome of any cogent line of argument.

To paraphrase one of Lewis's comments from "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your mind; I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.

You have John's "I am the way, the truth, and the life. . ." There simply is no way Jesus said these things,

Why not?

And by “raised” he meant raised – reanimated, brought back from the dead – not eaten by wild dogs but remembered fondly, or whatever it is the John Dominic Crossans of the world want to put in place of what Christianity has always claimed. The Christian faith has, historically, laid everything on that line: Accept the Resurrection, and you must accept what Jesus Christ taught; reject it, and you must reject Him too as a fraud.

Which brings us to another important items mentioned in the New Testament. In the Apocalypse of St. John, Christ demands that we be either hot or cold, but never lukewarm in our faith. Either accept the faith in its entirety or reject it in its entirety, as there is no third way. The modernist, liberal theologians are indeed the lukewarm sorts one can imagine being spoke of in the New Testament. They refuse to embrace the whole of the faith, yet try to maintain a few superficial elements of it so as to still be able to present themselves as good Christian theologians. At least anti-Christians like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens make clear where they stand and can at least be respect for that (I imagine that it will be a bit easier for Hitchens and Dawkins on the Day of Judgment then it will be for assorted lukewarm liberal theologians). In other words, you can either embrace the folly of the Cross or the wisdom of the world, but not both.

Men will read, write, and discuss a million books but never venture to the source of revelation in abject humility and brokenness. They will never let themselves be crucified as many times at takes to be stripped of illusion and selfhood/selfishness.

Mark, have you read any of the Catholic mystics' works? Like St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle? This is clearly written by someone who has had an incredibly deep direct personal experience of Christ, and who DID let herself be crucified over and over in humility. And yet, her account of the interior life is full of references to truths understood not solely in terms of her experience of Christ, but ALSO in terms of the writings of the Gospels, the Fathers, the saints, the theologians (some of them, that is).

And then there's the Gospel of John; strange, weird, discursive, dialectical John, but what insights! What truth and beauty! Genius.

Genius, indeed. To take a direct personal experience of Christ, and to recount that experience with a double-edged sword for truth: at one ant the same time, to have every single word be a simple and accurate reporting of the actual events that his eyes and ears reported to his mind, AND to have every phrase be capable of metaphorical and figurative and spiritual meanings on top of the basic literal truths that any Jew who lived by his side would have attested to as accurate.

If that's not the kind of genius you mean, then he was a liar, a scoundrel, a mountebank of the first order, because the truths of all of the metaphorical, figurative, and spiritual meanings hold ONLY to the extent that the literal sense is true as well.

If we try to base anything on pure subjective experience with no objective basis we are left with a morass. How are we to know if we are in the purely subjective to know if we are encountering God, Zeus, the devil, our own psychological quirks or the pepperoni pizza we ate last night. Without a basis in hard objective truth we cannot know anything.

Tony,

I considered including St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, but their mysticism is so often put into the service of proof texting verses and the Church that I recommend others first.

Your description of John, I agree with except accurate reporting of actual events. We weren't there, and we don't know that John was there or eyewitness to everything he wrote. You don't really think Jesus was the careful, Socratic-like dialectician in the long monologues he gives, the careful parsing and theological excursions, do you?

How are we to know if we are or are not subjective in our encounters with God? Well, is God an objective or subjective truth? How was Moses to know, or John the Baptist, or Jesus or Paul and Peter? You know the same way you know that 1+1=2. The experience is real, but sometimes the fruit of it can be odd.

Jesus' own family thought he was crazy and came to collect him. But mostly, you judge the tree by it's fruit. The Apostles's didn't trust Paul right away, either.

But, essentially, faith predates the NT. There is nothing of faith, of discernment, and judgment that the Holy Spirit can't teach, nothing that prayer cannot resolve. Every Bible in the world could be destroyed tomorrow and faith in Jesus would continue without a hitch. And we'd write a new new testament to help seekers and to sustain the faithful.

We have faith not because we have a Bible and theology, but because we keep meeting the risen Lord.

Edward,

I'm not sure I said or agreed with the notion that the disciples invented "Jesus was divine."

Clearly, if you meet the Risen Jesus, you're not inventing anything (but you will eventually be interpreting something).

I wholeheartedly dispute the notion that Jesus said and thought he was God prior to his resurrection. If Jesus died knowing he was God incarnate, an avatar of The Son, then he never really was a man, and his death and resurrection proves nothing to mortal man.

It only proves that a God can pretend to be a man and then return to what he was before he played at being mortal.

For 2000 years no one claimed that Jesus did not consider himself divine, you say. Yes, and for 2000 years (or so) Christians believed there was an Adam and Eve who dwelt in the garden of Eden and did something bad to cause sin and death to enter the world and creation. That's a great story, but utterly inconsistent with natural history.

Humanity did nothing to God (or themselves) to cause us to be born as we are. This is the universe as God made it and meant for it to be.

As for narrative, I have written a number of parables about the Kingdom of Heaven, and a variety of sayings which I have put into Jesus' mouth, and I guarantee you, that if I slipped them into Luke or Mark, say, and had believers (who aren't well versed in frequent reading of the New Testament) and non-believers read them, they wouldn't know that Jesus never said the words or told the stories.

My stories ring true as from Jesus because they were also inspired. The Holy Spirit isn't some tap or well that runs dry when it comes to telling the truth about God. The Bible is an anthology, not a fixed canon except that some people decided enough was enough and the material could be ordered into a nice, complete sort of unity. Genesis to Revelation, the alpha to omega. A nice whole.

Tim,

You mistake me if you take me for a sceptic. I'm a lover of truth and of that which is essential to faith. Is a virgin birth essential to faith in Jesus? Is Peter the first pope essential to faith? Is the Nicean Creed an absolute requirement for faith? And so on.

Paul states that only the resurrection justifies faith; and then interprets the death on the cross to mean sacrificial atonement.

Exactly, how many claims are essential? The Assumption of Mary? The Immaculate Conception (of Mary, not Jesus as many mistake it)?

Is Jesus really "one in being with the Father, begotten, not made"? As if those words are coherent rather than lilting gibberish?

And why are we arguing about words rather than discussing my experience of Jesus and your experience of Jesus. My experience of the Father, Abba, and your experience of Abba; my experience of the Holy Spirit and your experience? My perspective on Scripture and you perception of it.

Why is it all coming down to either/or, right/wrong? If truth in science cannot be arrived at by consensus, why do we think faith has to be? The God of Abraham has not changed an iota, but our image, conception, thought about him has a great deal.

Why did our faith go from two precepts in Paul, to the many of The Creed (and more doctrine besides)?

There is a period of faith when it's best to accept everything for the sake of conversion, self-improvement, discipline, fellowship, and guidance. It's like a 12 step program in many respects. Best to go along and do all that letting go and letting God; then there comes a day when somethings that were perfectly acceptable no longer make a lot of sense, and you want to know the truth better than the church or group might know it.

Faith has many stages. What's appropriate for one stage, no longer serves in the next. One year you're doing the Rosary, years later you're doing contemplative prayer. After that you're doing something else. One year you're praying to saints and asking Anthony to help you find stuff; years later you're talking to Jesus and only Jesus, no substitutes accepted. And so it goes.

And why are we arguing about words rather than discussing my experience of Jesus and your experience of Jesus.

Well, in part because folks show up in comment threads announcing that Scripture is false, cannot possibly be true, etc. For those of us who believe that, on the contrary, Scripture is very much true and more than just a great story, we must sadly have recourse to words and arguing to at least articulate our view.

Also, Mark -- I've read some of your parables, and they are very good; but with all due respect I'm not prepared to recommend them for additions to the canon.

I think, at the very least, you gotta admit that you're asking us to embrace a pretty novel view of scripture and tradition here. What does your perspective tell us, for instance, about how we are to interpret John's other great work, Revelation? Just another great story? Why that book, contrary to the bewilderment it engenders in most Western moderns, would be such a special source of comfort to persecuted Christians, is a question that this view of scripture has trouble with.

In the end, if you can believe that God donned the flesh, was the perfect man, Jesus, who was crucified, dead and buried, and then rose again, you can certainly believe that His Spirit protected the human authors of Scripture from error.

Hi, all.

I'm back (for what its worth). Happy Easter to all.

Mark, you wrote:

You have John's "I am the way, the truth, and the life. . ." There simply is no way Jesus said these things, but John's insight into the nature of Jesus the Risen Lord is entirely true so such words are put into Jesus' mouth.

Two points:
1. The memories of people, pre-tv era, is simply much more astounding than most people think (they had prodigious memories). It is quite possible that St. John remembered these word, exactly. Given the circumstance under which they were uttered, I would think this very likely (the statement has high information content in Information Theory).

2. Thou shalt not bear false witness. If Jesus didn't say it, St. John would have been guilty of bearing false witness. This is not a paraphrase or an explanation. One simply cannot attribute words (especially words this significant) to someone without having some primary evidence that they actually said them without being guilty of bearing false WITNESS. If this had been John's gloss, he would have said so. Actually, St. John went out of his way to use traditional semitic formulae (such as at the end of his Gospel) to show that what he was writing, when relating history, was based on eye-witness (his) accounts.

It's going to take me a while to get my blog feet wet, again. Boy, can one get out of the habit of posting really easily :)

The Chicken

Welcome back, Chicken!

The Gospel reading from yesterday's Easter service at my church:

Now the first day of the week Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. 2 Then she ran and came to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him.” 3 Peter therefore went out, and the other disciple, and were going to the tomb. 4 So they both ran together, and the other disciple outran Peter and came to the tomb first. 5 And he, stooping down and looking in, saw the linen cloths lying there; yet he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb; and he saw the linen cloths lying there, 7 and the handkerchief that had been around His head, not lying with the linen cloths, but folded together in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who came to the tomb first, went in also; and he saw and believed. 9 For as yet they did not know the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead. 10 Then the disciples went away again to their own homes.

I suppose there is nothing I might say to convince a skeptic like Thomas C. that the Gospels are full of little clues that point to their Truth, but a passage like this is a good place to start. First, there is the confusion about where Jesus could be and the frank admission that even those closest to Christ thought somebody came and took the body. Those close to Jesus and His disciples were skeptics -- just like us! Then there is the telling details that all the Gospel writers provide us -- "the other disciple outran Peter and came to the tomb first". I wonder why? Is Peter still feeling guilt over his earlier betrayal of Christ? And yet it is Peter, the rock of the church, who goes in first (and in Luke's Gospel Peter is alone -- slightly conflicting accounts of what happened at the tomb is exactly what we'd expect from an oral culture that told these stories year after year until the Gospel writers were getting old enough that they thought it important enought to get the stories down on papyrus). In just one paragraph we have such rich detail conveying such a plausible historical story -- but folks like Thomas C. turn around and claim we can't trust the Gospels because of what comes next -- Christ Resurrected. Like Peter, I want to run every day to the tomb (and to the cross) as I am grateful for the good news the church preaches not just on Easter, but every Sunday and every time I open your mind and my heart when I pick up a Bible.

Thanks Ed for a couple of great Easter Triduum posts.

Ed Feser writes: "The Christian faith has, historically, laid everything on that line: Accept the Resurrection, and you must accept what Jesus Christ taught; reject it, and you must reject Him too as a fraud."

I am reminded of the most famous passage from the letters (or is it the journals?) of Flannery O'Connor:

"...toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most 'portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.'"

In each case, I admire - I am even moved - without being convinced. I think that there are all sorts of middle grounds available, here.

In each case, I admire - I am even moved - without being convinced. I think that there are all sorts of middle grounds available, here.

How about this, Steve: Someone could plausibly say "The idea of Jesus of Nazareth having been God incarnate is moving and profound, but I don't think he really was." But someone could not plausibly say "Jesus of Nazareth mistakenly believed he was God incarnate, but what a moving and profound man he was anyway!" In other words, a non-Christian could plausibly regard the concept of the Incarnation as moving and profound, but could not plausibly regard Jesus of Nazareth himself as anything but a lunatic (if he concedes that Jesus claimed to be divine).

BTW, I think the above pretty much sums up the attitude I had during at least part of my years as an atheist, though I don't know that I ever consciously formulated it quite that way then. So, I understand that there is some kind of middle ground here.

Hey Paul,

I haven't said that Scripture is false in the sense that the authors were a bunch of liars trying to fool everybody (but how would you then classify the Koran or Book of Mormon?).

Is Shakespeare false? Well, he makes a number of mistakes (a clock strikes in Julius Caesar, knights joust in Pericles, Prince of Tyre), and he alters historical facts. My ancestor Harry Hotspur was not at all as young as Prince Hal, etc.

John knows (it seems) better than anyone else just what a radical alteration of reality has come with Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and he tries to explain it discursively without creating all sorts of paradoxes.

Chicken, is it false witness were I to report a conversation I had with the resurrected Jesus which helped me understand his life on earth and then put it into a narrative of his life on earth which means to explain that life? John's insights all are post-resurrection and after years of thought and prayer.

Is the opening, "In the beginning was the Word" something that Jesus told John prior to his death or something that John "invented" later on?

For example, I once experienced the Trinity as a whole and understood it as a whole, yet later when I rushed home to write down how the Trinity could be One and Three at the same time, how the perfection of it existed and simply Was, I started to fill up pages with explanation. When I later looked at those pages, I read assertions and statements that at different points contradicted one another, failed to adequately describe what I aimed at, and was hopelessly amorphous.

It was rather like trying to describe a new chord of music no one's ever heard. Comparisons, examples, similes, analogies all fail. At best, only stories can do the job.

Was Jesus a liar because he used fictions to talk about the Kingdom of Heaven? Of course not, and so neither were any authors of Gospels liars for trying to convey the truth about Jesus through every literary means at their disposal.

To say I call Scripture and its authors a lie, is to say that Jesus lied about the Prodigal Son.

Also, try to recall what Paul wrote before there was any written Gospels (we know of). In response to his radical departure from tradition by suggesting Gentiles need not adopt Jewish dietary laws, he was greatly attacked. He responded by coming to a remarkable conclusion about God and reported: There is freedom in Christ.

Paul Cella, John is attributed to have written the Gospel and Revelation, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

I'm not sure that I have formulated a precise view of Scripture that excludes the comfort that the last book of our Bible gives, but I do know a bit about apocalyptic literature in general. There's a lot of it from Jews between 300 BC and 100 AD, including Jesus (apparently) who thought the End was near.

Apocalypse is the last refuge of the wholly impotent and outraged, people whose hopes for a better life, for justice, or meritorious reward are thoroughly frustrated. We see it today in zealous secularists who demand the end of the world through global warming, nuclear holocaust, destruction of the environment, runaway toxic substances, the next great Plague, and so on. They are not fighting the End so much as wishing it would come. They are threatening an End so that they at last can get their way with things and be happy at last.

If you study William Blake, you find all his major works culminate in Apocalypse and Transformation. The latter, a word we're all too familiar with today.

Shakespeare's later works like The Tempest, Pericles, A Winter's Tale reflect miraculous transformations, reconciliations, and reward for long suffering.

It is fitting that the Bible should thus end with apocalypse for a people who are powerless in this world where we are impotent to alter injustice, cruelty, neglect, death, catastrophe, oppression, misery, corruption, vanity, and Time. Time which destroys all that is good we managed to build or make.

Our only hope is in God, and even that is regularly tenuous.

Anyway, exactly how much freedom aren't we allowed in Christ (and I'm not talking about anything immoral)?

If I no longer believe as I once did that the Atonement means what Paul and Peter, et al, said it means, am I cast into the outer darkness?

Are our meanings, images, ideas of God immutable? What of apophatic mysticism then?

Chicken, is it false witness were I to report a conversation I had with the resurrected Jesus which helped me understand his life on earth and then put it into a narrative of his life on earth which means to explain that life? John's insights all are post-resurrection and after years of thought and prayer.

It would be wrong to report a paraphrase as a quote. John reported them as quotes, not interpreted paraphrases.

The Chicken

Time which destroys all that is good we managed to build or make.

Rats. Be careful of punctuation. The scientist in me read the above as:

Time, which destroys all that is good, we manage to make or build.

I was so tempted to ask you how we build or make time. What a discussion that would have been :-)

Obviously, you meant:

Time destroys all that is good [that] we manage to build or make.

Don't get me overly excited by the possibility of exciting discussions of arcane physics. I may have a touch of the stomach flu, you know :)

The Chicken

In other words, a non-Christian could plausibly regard the concept of the Incarnation as moving and profound, but could not plausibly regard Jesus of Nazareth himself as anything but a lunatic (if he concedes that Jesus claimed to be divine).

My (probably faulty) understanding is that the first three Gospels portray Jesus almost always saying he is the Son of Man when speaking to people prior to the Resurrection. While this is a divinely consecrated position in Jewish apocalyptic prophecy, it is not an incarnation of God. The Gospel of John was written for a cosmopolitan audience, and cosmopolitan audiences had lots of practice in accepting pantheons of gods, mortal sons of gods, etc.

I think a non-Christian can easily regard Jesus as an attempted reformer of Judaism and a great teacher (I mean, who doesn't love the wisdom found in the parables), but anything beyond that is highly questionable.

Ed, I think that puts it well. The only way to get away from regarding Jesus as a lunatic, if one doesn't believe that he was God, is to comfort oneself with ahistorical radical revisions of the Gospels that turn Jesus into some kind of interesting peripatetic preacher and kindly teacher. The thing is that this is totally unjustified. Or, to put it more crassly, it requires that one just make stuff up. "Hmm. I guess there really was a Jesus, but he probably didn't go around obsessively asking people who he was and saying 'I am' and stuff. I bet that _instead_ he just said whatever parts can be fitted into the kindly teacher picture. Like some of the beatitudes."

Chicken, please don't multiply yourself. I'll get all confused if there are two of you.

Step2, the Synoptics contain the claim to be able to forgive sins, which the Jews immediately recognized as a claim to divine prerogative. And there is no way in Hades that you can fit the claims for Christ's divinity in John into a "pantheon" believed in by a "cosmopolitan audience." The claim is very clear--that he was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that he was the Eternal Word incarnate, etc. All that stuff that has nothing to do with (pagan) pantheons of gods, mortal sons of gods, or anything remotely similar.

Chicken,

Grammar is important. My mistake. Eats shoots and leaves, indeed.

As for physics, are you prepared to debate the Electric Universe and plasma physics? I would love to see more people take a serious look at how Creation actually operates according to radically new observations.

I think a non-Christian can easily regard Jesus as an attempted reformer of Judaism and a great teacher

I'm not so sure about the great teacher, sans divinity, that is. I'm supposed to become a sexually chaste, poverty-stricken, cheek-turning wuss of an itinerant hobo just because he says so? I'm to keep his commandments and be willing to suffer persecution and death just because he's a wise man who can spin a good tale? I've known a few great teachers, not a one of whom required of his students a willingness to lay down their lives for his very name's sake. Likely it would be wicked of anyone to ask these things unless his authority to ask - to teach, to command - was of a very particular, unrepeatable, and heretofore unseen, kind.

Was Jesus a liar because he used fictions to talk about the Kingdom of Heaven? Of course not, and so neither were any authors of Gospels liars for trying to convey the truth about Jesus through every literary means at their disposal.

Permit me to remind us all of Tony's Uncertainty Principle that regulates this view of the Gospel: There is a strict inverse relationship between the degree of certitude with which we can hold a truth that the Gospel teaches, and the degree of definiteness with which we can state the teaching.

The Principle holds at the extreme: we can be absolutely, totally, 100% rock-solid certain with no POSSIBILITY of doubt about a truth which can be stated so: Jesus taught X.

Once you unhinge yourself from accepting that the Gospel writers were (in their own minds) simply recounting what they saw and heard with their own eyes and ears, you lose all possibility of actually ascertaining just what the truths they were getting at are supposed to be. It all becomes a subjective mirror for whatever truths you ALREADY hold in your mind, or think you hold, or WANT to hold because they are appealing. Without grounding the message of the Gospel in the historical facts that are real whether I believe them or not, the message cannot be pinned down to content that is valid for more than one person at a time.

Steve,

Besides my favorite writers on this subject who happen to be a Protestant philosopher couple (whose wife blogs for this website), one of my other favorite writers on the historical truths of the Bible is the Catholic author Mark Shea:

http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5786&Itemid=48

That link provides a nice summary of the themes we explore in this post.

Mark -- no one is for casting you into the outer darkness. Some of us are merely recommending that your view of Scripture not be adopted.

Chicken, please don't multiply yourself. I'll get all confused if there are two of you.

No I won't ...and I won't, either :)

The Chicken

I won't try to pick up from my last post, just a couple of observations:

Mark Butterworth, I find it difficult to follow your lines of thought, your comments are scattered and somewhat random. It would help if you organized them into standard paragraphs and focused on one theme at a time before jumping to another topic. You're obviously passionate about your views, but they come across in a disjointed manner.

William Luse, did you get lost on your way to Dawkins' "Oasis of Clear Thought"? Your post is the sort of drivel his mindless sycophants spend their time exchanging as they celebrate their imaginary triumphs over theism. Wait, with further thought, I realize it's sheer genius! I'm going to trademark the phrase "Jesus Was A Hobo Wuss" and market it over on infidels.org as a bumper sticker. I'll make a fortune and change lives for the better at the same time thanks to your remarkable insights.

Dr. Feser, I read The Last Superstition just a couple of weeks ago, I'm actually surprised I hadn't heard of it earlier since I've been following many of the exchanges between the "New Atheists" and their opponents for the past several years. It's great to see something substantive published rather than another Strobel volume entitled The Case for Buying Every Book I Write Recycling the Same Arguments. Your background especially intrigued me because we have traveled parallel paths--in opposite directions. I was raised a devout Catholic, entered the Ordo Praedicatorum in my youth, left long before ordination and became an atheist, though I have always remained fascinated by matters of faith. (I should have stayed and become a biblical scholar, I would fit right in!--Yeah, I know, not funny because it's so true).

I was curious about your background because there was a mention not only of your former atheism, but also Libertarianism, which brings to mind George Smith and I wonder if you were ever associated with him. I read Atheism: The Case Against God back in my seminary days, and apart from the inordinate amount of material he devoted against Fundamentalist views of the Bible, it is far superior to anything produced by Dawkins and company. A read a more recent effort of his--Why Atheism?, which I scarcely recall, other than some bizarre ruminations of "Is God an Atheist?" because he doesn't believe in a higher being than himself...

My own atheism is entirely unenthusiastic and I've never had the slightest inclination to join any atheist or humanist organizations because at least I can be honest about my stance--it offers, literally, nothingness, so why would I wish to "preach" that? The view that the world would become some kind of utopia if humanity rejects religion and embraces materialism is idiocy. If every human suddenly knew, with certainty, that there is no God, the world would become far more frightening and dangerous than any of us can imagine. The person of faith naturally asks, "Then how can you possibly remain an unbeliever?"--the answer to that is another story...

Hello Thomas,

I agree that Smith is much better than Dawkins and Co., though in my atheist days I did (and still do) consider him far less formidable than someone like J. L. Mackie, who was probably what I then regarded as the "gold standard" among atheists. (And indeed, I still think his book is among the best written from that POV.) Flew and Nielsen I also regarded with respect (though my opinion of Nielsen was probably lower, and is not at all high now), and of course Hume was a hero. Nietzsche was also a big hero when I was a younger atheist, but much less so as I got older and less naively "enthusiastic" (as you might put it). The Jesus Seminar types I always had contempt for. My main influence on the NT scholarship front was probably Hyam Maccoby, and I still think that if one is going to avoid the traditional understanding of Jesus, the Schweitzer-style "failed apocalyptic prophet" model is the way to go. That's a big "if," though, since (obviously) I now regard this model as totally implausible, and Maccoby's take on Paul ludicrous.

I was never a Randian, so Smith played no role in my former libertarianism either. Nozick and Hayek were my main influences.

BTW, Bill Luse is a devout Catholic, not a Dawkins sycophant. I think he was just trying to emphasize how unattractive Jesus would have looked to many people of the day, so that his teaching is unlikely to have been accepted by anyone except those who were convinced He was divine.

My sincere apologies, Bill Luse, I absolutely failed to pick up on your approach. I imagine nothing could be worse for a Catholic than being classed as a Dawkins toadie...

By the way, Dr. Feser, have you ever made an appearance over at Dawkins' site? I rarely go there, but that's where I first became aware of your book--someone started a thread about it and there were a couple of attempts by someone to engage them who sounded quite a bit like you...

Thomas C., being an unenthusiastic atheist is a good place to be, if you're an atheist at all. (Which, of course, I regard as a bad place to be, but I think you see my point.) Then you're motivated to see whether you might, after all, be wrong about atheism.

I'm supposed to become a sexually chaste, poverty-stricken, cheek-turning wuss of an itinerant hobo just because he says so? I'm to keep his commandments and be willing to suffer persecution and death just because he's a wise man who can spin a good tale?

When you get deep into the cargo-cult of the soul, it doesn't matter what you are giving up, it only matters who you believe. Pilgrimage, purification, and sacrifice are forever rituals of the yearning for transcendence.

By the way, Dr. Feser, have you ever made an appearance over at Dawkins' site? I rarely go there, but that's where I first became aware of your book--someone started a thread about it and there were a couple of attempts by someone to engage them who sounded quite a bit like you...

Nope. And I never post anonymously or under a pseudonym, here or anywhere else.

Ed writes: "Someone could plausibly say 'The idea of Jesus of Nazareth having been God incarnate is moving and profound, but I don't think he really was.' But someone could not plausibly say 'Jesus of Nazareth mistakenly believed he was God incarnate, but what a moving and profound man he was anyway!'"

Well, OK. The middle-ground I have in mind depends on conceiving of Jesus of Nazareth *not* as a historical figure whose acts are more or less accurately reported in the gospels, but as a sort of legendary folk hero, around whom stories accumulated - stories that went on to conquer the imagination of the ancient world, and then to form the nucleus of Western culture - which is by far the best thing that ever happened to anybody, ever.

Like, er, Paul Bunyan? Only lots better? As a story?

I knew that I shouldn't have posted that comment.

I was studying the late, Catholic scholar, Raymond Brown, years ago and read an interview where he was asked about his approach to the NT. One of the things he said was that, "God doesn't write books. People write books."

At that time, I was convinced that God had written books through various people, and that whatever was in error, mistaken, mixed, or confused in the what was written was the result of people being less than perfect filters for the Truth.

But Brown's statement resonated with me since I am a writer and have a ton of experience in all the various ways that writing comes about from the sense of it being automatic, visionary, emotional, projection, fantasy, ecstatic, ordinary, uninspired to inspired, planned, felicitous, serendiptitious, and so on.

One thing that disconcerts my fellow Christians, perhaps, is that religion depends on some orthodoxy in order to function and survive; whereas my idiosyncratic approach (at this point in my life) leaves to much up in the air, ad hoc, amorphous, and uncertain.

I agree. What I "preach" harms religion; and that's because I'm much more interested in faith which precedes religion and then supersedes it (from my POV).

One affect of prayer is the continual paring away of ideas about God. We tend to think of him as an infinite complexity when the reverse is true. He keeps getting simpler and simpler, the way life and energy is made up of the simplest stuff.

Thus, I've taken Paul's, there is freedom in Christ, to heart. What is the least that I need to know about Jesus to have faith? His resurrection and that God is a Trinity. These things have been made apparent to me through Revelation to me directly, but also in agency with the historical Church.

That's a good thing, but the Church (RC and Orth particularly), is also hidebound, somewhat frozen in time, and hostile to any deviation in theology or basic understanding. That's both good and bad.

But I see it as Buddha is said to have seen it: doctrine is a raft you use to cross the river, but once on the other side, you don't need to pick it up and carry it on your back.

In my experience, once you've met Jesus and committed your life to him wholeheartedly, and are able to bear nearly constant humiliation, it's pretty tough to go wrong (for long) with him, Abba, and the Spirit guiding you.

You can trust Jesus better than you can yourself or the Church (eventually).

One must have a great capacity for suffering and anguish, though. (See Kierkegaard; or Isaiah, man of constant sorrow, indeed, but you have some good days, too.)

And so I see a prolonged reliance on doctrine, orthodoxy, dogma as a means of avoiding pain and suffering because if you're devoted to prayer, you're guaranteed profound misery (sometimes offset by consolation).

You start with worship and end with prayer. Most of what we think, practice, and believe is provisional.

Anyway, that about sums it up for me, and the best I can do to explain my, uh, different approach to Scripture. Thanks to everyone for being forbearing.

I was studying the late, Catholic scholar, Raymond Brown,

Mark, you could have inserted "material heretical" in ahead of "Catholic", and not harmed the description much.

At that time, I was convinced that God had written books through various people, and that whatever was in error, mistaken, mixed, or confused in the what was written was the result of people being less than perfect filters for the Truth.

It is quite true that people are less than perfect filters for Truth. Nevertheless, God is an infinitely powerful agent in control of those people's capacities for truth. Therefore, if He wanted to, He was able to use their imperfections in a way that guaranteed that what they wrote was free from error. There is a big difference between saying that God's truth on a point is capable of 100 levels of meaning and the human author was so limited as to be able to express only the first 3, and saying that the human author got the first level flat wrong. Imperfect by lack of fullness is not outright error.

Thus, I've taken Paul's, there is freedom in Christ, to heart. What is the least that I need to know about Jesus to have faith? His resurrection and that God is a Trinity. These things have been made apparent to me through Revelation to me directly, but also in agency with the historical Church.

Perhaps you missed this point of Paul's teaching: there is freedom in Christ to the extent that you submit yourself to Christ. You can't call on that freedom while being enslaved to sin and embracing that sin - that isn't freedom. The freedom that is energizing to Paul and a stumbling block pagans is giving up one's own will to God.

But submitting yourself to Christ means accepting the whole of what he said, not just portions of it. If Christ said "He who hears you [apostles] hears Me," then ignoring what the apostles said would be a way of NOT submitting to Christ.

Which suggests, to me at least, that your view of what parts of the Gospel are historically accurate is an inherently topsy-turvy troubled approach: you are free to believe only parts of it are historically accurate if you are RIGHT that Christ never said "He who hears you hear Me." And your determination for whether Christ said that is not from independent evidence about what Christ actually said, but rather what fits or doesn't fit with your idea of the truths He was trying to convey. Thus your approach submits the accuracy of the Gospels to your personal experience and the doctrines you derive from that. And if the Gospel writers were imperfect, and so are you, then how is this an improvement?

doctrine is a raft you use to cross the river, but once on the other side, you don't need to pick it up and carry it on your back.

This would be truer if your arrival at "the other side" were something you could verify for certain separately from what truths you believe, i.e. your "doctrines". The fact that many, many great mystics in the Church thought that you never lose the need for the guiding hand of doctrine suggests to me that Buddha wasn't quite as insightful as all that.

Mark Butterworth,
You're so far gone that I think that practicing Satan-worship would actually be a step in the right direction.

You're so far gone...

Look who's talking. Irony is dead. Long live irony.

Yes, Step2, but Mark B. is "far gone" into nihilism and modernism. What am I "far gone" into?

I wonder if you think that the historicity of the resurrection means that our belief in it is dependent upon our historical investigations. Thus naturalism may have the upper hand. Our belief in the supernatural event of the resurrection will only be as strong as our natural investigations into history.

What am I "far gone" into?

An uncharitable, nihilistic sarcasm, for one thing. Encouraging a troubled fellow Christian with Satan worship ain't funny.

George R.,
A tragic inability to be joyful and forgiving.

While I have little sympathy for Mark B's anti-evidential views expressed in this thread, I'm with Bill Luse on this one. The Satan worship comment was way out of line, George.

Joshua B., I'm working hard on an article right now on historical investigation and miracles, and, yes, I think that our belief in the resurrection should definitely rest on historical evidence. This is not naturalism. This is the biblical view of miracles as signs from God that he is acting. Signs only work if you have good reason to believe that they have actually happened. It is, in fact, the opposite of naturalism. Naturalists _love_ all that "oh, no, we Christians don't think our miracles are subject to historical investigation; they're matters of faith" stuff. Keeps us Christians in the back of the bus. You wanna make a naturalist squirm or burst into flame? Tell him there's good historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Lydia: Thanks for the reply. I think I basically agree with you. But in my experience many Christians will not accept the conditional, "If I didn't have historical evidence, then I wouldn't believe in the resurrection." One reason given is that they claim to have a palpable experience of the risen Jesus. On this view, the historical evidence is indeed superfluous. So for example William Lane Craig apparently thinks that if he went back in time and saw Jesus stay dead, he would still assume something was wrong with him, given his spiritual experience.

Conversely someone like Gary Habermas apparently would abandon his belief in the resurrection, and much else besides, since his apologetical model takes proof of the resurrection as allowing for belief in everything else.

Thanks again for your response.

"By the way, Dr. Feser, have you ever made an appearance over at Dawkins' site? I rarely go there, but that's where I first became aware of your book--someone started a thread about it and there were a couple of attempts by someone to engage them who sounded quite a bit like you..."

Ha! That was me, and thanks for the compliment! (Honestly, I thought my thesis was pretty uncontroversial: read the book, not unfavorable Amazon reviews of it alone, before you criticize it.)

Alright, I apologize for the satan-worship remark.

Maybe if I'd had that sort of experience, I would have evidence from it. Private experiences _can_ be evidence for the person who has them, though translating that into evidence for other people is a far more delicate matter. I find it difficult to imagine any sort of private religious experience that I could have that would lead me to believe in a public, historical event such as the resurrection for which there was _no_ historical evidence or even historical _counter_evidence. Perhaps that argues a poverty of imagination on my part, but there it is. I'm not saying that private religious experiences could never be evidence of any kind or any degree. But I would say that the whole point of God's making a public sign like a miracle is so that people are not crucially dependent on that sort of private religious experience.

Eric,

Nice try over there, but as you quickly found out, it's pointless to waste time on people who won't even read what they criticize, and that site is one of the worst. Most threads are rising crescendos of competing invectives and they think they are destroying Christianity by attacking Young-Earth Creationism and anti-evolutionists. One person admitted to only getting through three pages--he probably gave up when he saw Aristotle mentioned--"I learned everything I need to know about that guy from 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure'!"

Lydia, although I may be an unenthusiastic atheist, I am, at this point, a rather convinced one. However, I'm still searching so I'm open to being persuaded otherwise--well, in a limited way. If I re-converted, it would only be to Catholicism. (OK, if Moroni appeared in my bedroom with gold plates, I might have to consider other options.)

So when I post contrary views, I would hope everyone sees it as an opportunity for open exchanges, rather than an attempt to antagonize anyone. I did have more thoughts on Jesus' understanding of himself as divine, and your observations about the historicity of the resurrection, but no time right now...

Could I have a show of hands here on how many of us did a standard high school or college experiment and had the result NOT support the claimed "law" that the experiment was supposed to validate? I have had plenty of these, even though I always got straight A's in science and was an assistant lab technician in college.

Now, how many of us said, upon these failures, something like: well, there you go, the science guys got it wrong, Boyle's law doesn't describe a gas. Mostly, we said we did the experiment wrong. Which means that we had a higher level of confidence in the text book, the teachers, and the aura of science than we did in our own eyes and ears.

And yet, naturalists tell us that we should not place any confidence in the stories we hear from people we trust about miracles that happen to them, because these are unrepeatable and cannot be validated. Huh?

Lydia, I am no epistemologist, but it seems to me that we utilize both the voice of history and our own experience in a co-validating system. If history tells us that Christ rose from the dead (and that's exactly what the histories that are the 4 Gospels tell us), and if we ALSO experience some of the truths of the Gospel that are somewhat non-intuitive in a more direct way in personal experience, then we have stronger reason to believe in what the history says. Which is not to say that the personal experience would have been, alone, sufficient basis to believe.

If I recall St. Teresa's Interior Castle ideas, there are indeed many, many special interior spiritual experiences of good that can be mistaken - can be either from our own minds or from demons. Nevertheless, she also says that there are, in the higher reaches of spiritual manifestation of God's action, some things that cannot be counterfeited, they are unmistakably from God. (Since I have never had any, I can only go by what an expert says on the matter.) Still and all, you don't GET to those higher-order experiences without first submitting to God and learning to shed our personal sinful desires and evils, and becoming more like Christ. And, generally, these intermediate experiences require first believing in Christ and accepting the Gospels.