A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Dem bones

This is a bit tardy by blogospheric standards, but friend of this blog and regular commenter Joshie has a helpful analysis of the recent “Jesus tomb” brouhaha (Pt 1, Pt 2).

Thomas at Without Authority posted a while back on what the implications would be for the Christian faith if something like this turned out to be true.

My take is that something like this could, at least in principle, make a difference. The Resurrection, though it transcends what is possible according to our understanding of natural and historical processes, nevertheless occurred in human history. There’s debate about how early the empty tomb tradition is, and I’m not prepared to say categorically that the raising of Jesus’ physical remains is strictly necessary for the viability of the Christian faith, but it goes too far to say what one seminary professor said:

[T]he earliest followers of Jesus believed God had raised Jesus from the dead because they believed in Jesus. That is, they believed God had authorized his words and deeds, and that the change they had embraced in their lives was God’s will. After his death they continued to experience the spirit of Jesus alive in their midst. They experienced him in the hospitality of their meals, in which Jesus had first taught them to welcome the stranger (Luke 24:13-35). They experienced him in the voice of the homeless, the hungry, and the prisoner (Matt 25:31-46). And they experienced his spirit bringing them together to care for and love one another as the body of Christ (1 Cor 12-14). These experiences had nothing to do with Jesus’ body. They were experiences that transcended the mere physicality of human life—we call them spiritual experiences.

Leaving aside the somewhat gnostic overtones of this passage, it ignores the fact that the Resurrection was an event that transformed the disciples from a dispirited band whose leader had been shamefully executed as a blasphemer and enemy of the state into people who were willing to witness and even die for their faith in their Risen Lord. Saying that the disciples “believed God had raised Jesus from the dead because they believed in Jesus,” at least from the perspective of the New Testament, seems to me to almost get it precisely backwards. It was the Resurrection that provided the dramatic reversal and inagurated the mission of the church.

Like I said, I think Christianity could survive the discovery of Jesus’ bones because it is possible to make sense of a real Resurrection in a way that doesn’t strictly require the physical raising of Jesus’ body (though this very clearly is not what the church has traditionally taught). Not to mention that it’s hard to imagine a genuine and definitive discovery of Jesus’ remains.

However, if Christians are going to maintain their faith as an incarnational one, I think they have to allow for the possibility that it could be falsified by history. As one blogger mentioned (I can’t recall where) we can imagine the discovery of say, correspondence between Paul and Peter about the great hoax they perpetrated on gullible Christians, etc. and that this correspondence could be authenticated to a high degree of probability. Not that anything of this sort is likely to actually happen, but it’s conceivable, and if it did happen I think Christians would have to admit that their faith was “in vain.” The Christian faith has always been based on the belief that God did something new in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus: inagurated the new age, dealt decisively with evil, overcame sin and death, however we might phrase it.

Some (by no means all) liberal Christians, by contrast, have tried to insulate faith from what appeared to be the corrosive effects of modern science and history by reducing religion to ineffable spiritual experiences, “values,” and good works. But this ultimately gives you a god who makes no empirical difference in the way the world goes. It’s all well and good to talk about Jesus’ “spirit” (meaning, basically, their memory of him) inspiring Christians to acts of charity, but if, at the end of the day, Jesus isn’t a living person who reigns at the Father’s right hand, but simply an edifying memory or example, isn’t the whole thing basically a sham?

13 responses to “Dem bones”

  1. Steven Car

    Matthew 28:17 says that some of them ‘doubted’. Clearly this is spin designed to get around the fact that nobody had ever heard of 12 (or 11) people evangelising like that.

    Certainly Paul has no knowledge of these 11 witnessing.

    And why did they go back to fishing? Even the Bible makes no claim that seeing a resurrected Jesus led to witnessing and transformation, no more than it claims that seeing Moses return from the grave led to any change in the disciples.

    Why should it? According to the Gospels, the disicples had been given the power to raise the dead in Matthew 10, so why would a raising from the dead be a surprise to people who (allegedly) had been given that power already.

    We have to turn to somebody who really was there. Paul. And Paul’s letter to the Corinthians makes plain that people converted to Jesus-worship and still scoffed at the idea that God would choose to raise a corpse.

    Paul tells them that Jesus was a type, the second Adam, and that this Adam became a life-giving spirit, and that we would also share in that nature.

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  2. Joshie (Poo)

    “It was the Resurrection that provided the dramatic reversal and inagurated the mission of the church.”

    I agree with you here, but I would add another event that inaugurated the church, the coming of the Holy Spirit. This event is given in two different versions in Acts 2.1-4 and John 20.21-23
    respectively.

    As one of my seminary profs Dr. Gil Stafford often pointed out, the immediate result of the coming of the Spirit in both cases was not speaking in unintellegible tongues or personal holiness, but that the disciples were driven out to teach and preach the gospel. In John 20.21 Jesus states, “As the Father has sent me, I send you.” In Acts 2 the pentecost event is immediately followed by people nations from Arabia to Cappadocia, and from Parthia to Rome hearing the gospel, and Peter’s sermon afterwards.

    The Resurrection and the coming of the Spirit are linked, of course, but it’s both of them together that signify the change in the disciples’ mission, I think.

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  3. gaius sempronius gracchus

    Nobody would be left in the churches but the liberals. And then they would go home.

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  4. Lee

    J(P) – good point about the Spirit.

    Steven Car – I don’t see why Matthew 28:17 is “clearly spin;” seems to me it’s just the sort of thing one might doubt!

    Granted that the timeline given in the Gospels is less than clear, I think Joshie Poo’s point about the coming of the Spirit is a good piece of the puzzle. Maybe the disciples needed to be convinced that this was a message to be shared with the world rather than simply personal consolation for them.

    And I don’t quite get your point about Paul – doesn’t Paul go on to argue precisely against those who say that the dead aren’t raised?

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  5. Camassia

    Reminds me of Rowan Williams’ line: “If a corpse clearly marked ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.” Since he’s still the Archbishop of Canterbury (and God knows he has even more trouble to save himself from now), I guess he wasn’t convinced either.

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  6. Lee

    Camassia – your virtual presence has been missed!

    Oh, and that piece from RW is great – “while I believe Bishop Spong has, in these and other matters, done an indispensable task in focusing our attention on questions under-examined and poorly thought through, I believe that these theses represent a level of confusion and misinterpretation that I find astonishing.”

    I also like how he ties the risen body to the sacramental practice of the church.

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  7. Consumatopia

    Unless you are either unhappy or ashamed of how your life has changed because of Christ, why should you consider it a sham? Falsehoods can be divinely inspired just as much as truth–unless you literally believe the book of Genesis.

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  8. Lee

    I think the difference is that the book of Genesis, while not literally true in many respects, points to literal truths that are important. Confining ourselves just to the creation story, I think this includes truths like “God created the universe,” “God seeks a relationship with human beings,” “Human beings aren’t now what they are intended to be,” etc. Those are all beliefs which are either true or false and so I think that if they turned out to be false (leaving aside how we would know if they turned out to be false) then I think the Genesis story would lose much of its religious value.

    Likewise with the Resurrection of Jesus. Christians take this not simply to be an illustration of some timeless truth, but a real event that actually changes things. If the Resurrection turned out (again, bracketing how we would discover this) to be a fraud or made-up story of some kind, it would call into the question the belief that there really is a loving God who really seeks to redeem his creatures. It might be a reflection of a human aspiration of some sort and as such have some kind of value, but it would be a very different kind of value.

    I guess the bottom line is that religion, certainly Christianity, only makes sense if reality really does have the character it ascribes to it. Otherwise it’s not clear what the point is of attempting to conform one’s life to the picture of reality presented by that religion.

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  9. Consumatopia

    The Incarnation could still be literally real even if the Resurrection is just a metaphor for the timelessness of God’s gift of eternal life, and “Jesus was the Incarnation of God” seems extremely similar to the kinds of truths you are holding on to in Genesis. It could still be true even if the Virgin Birth was just a metaphor for the miraculous and undeserved nature of God’s gift. (Though, the DNA recovered from the tomb is just Mitochondrial DNA , so the Virgin Birth is still looking good…)

    I get that there are literal truths and statements that point to literal truths, but it seems to me that you can assign any truths that you worry about being falsified to the “pointing” category. I mean, you can still have a literal heaven, hell, Trinity, and angels that you won’t have to worry about falsifying until you reach the afterlife and run into either Yama or Saint Peter.

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  10. Joshie (Poo)

    “The Incarnation could still be literally real even if the Resurrection is just a metaphor for the timelessness of God’s gift of eternal life, and ‘Jesus was the Incarnation of God’ seems extremely similar to the kinds of truths you are holding on to in Genesis.”

    I don’t think this is true. In order for the incarnation to be redemtive, the God-man must be resurrected from the dead. It’s not enough that the Word was incarnated, the whole purpose of the Christ was to redeem humanity from the power and death and sin. If there is no “resurrection of the body” (as the Apostle’s Creed reads) then there is no resurrection of the body for any of us, and death still holds sway over humanity with no hope of redemption at all. God must die and a human must be raised for redemption to be complete.

    This is the central truth of Christianity. If this is falsified (and it is one of the most easily falsified of anything the scriptures say) then the whole thing collapses. There is a big difference between falsifying this truth and falsifying, say, Joshua’s conquest of Ai, the events of the book of Daniel, the timeline of Paul’s ministry in Acts, or even the triumphal entry or the Virgin birth.

    For example, it’s fine to debate the merits of socialist or laisse-faire economic systems, but if it were discovered that the principles of supply and demand were false, all economics would collapse. The resurrection is a foundational truth that if it were removed, the entrie ediface would collapse. Or if we want to get all post-modern, without the resurrection there is a gaping whole left in the web of truth that adversely impacts the entire web. Or something like that.

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  11. Consumatopia

    If you stop looking it at as a set of logical propositions and look at what Christians believe right now, I think the whole problem goes away. People don’t think Grandpa is in the ground waiting to ascend to heaven on the day when the dead arise from the ground, they think he’s in heaven right now. People don’t find it emotionally necessary to believe that their own body will arise from the ground at some point–in fact, they may not even be particularly pleased with their own body, and would much prefer a new body or form of existence. Since they don’t need their own body to arise, why should they need Christ’s to physically arise?

    Yeah, there’s a set of logical declarations derived theologically that will be disproven if the Resurrection is just metaphor. And yes, there is a strain of thought that interprets all the miracles of the Bible metaphorically that really doesn’t represent how most Christians view themselves or their faith.

    But a strict theological understanding of Christianity just isn’t what the vast majority of Christians have, either. There’s a “pop theology” Christianity in which the Resurrection is just a set of syllables they repeat without troubling themselves over unless someone with authority tells them they should be worried over it.

    And there’s no reason but their own historical weird hangups why the authorities would have to do that. The reinterpretation required to accommodate that would be less radical than reinterpretations required to accept Copernicus and Darwin. It’ll bother theologians, but it wouldn’t bother most Christians.

    The resurrection is a foundational truth that if it were removed, the entrie ediface would collapse.

    Actually, that’s a statement that’s not merely falsifiable, but false. And maybe that’s the real problem here–Christianity could deal just fine without a literal physically rising from the dead, but for too long theologians have been squawking that it would collapse without that belief. But, surely, certainly, the only reason it would collapse is because theologians keep saying it would collapse. Without the resurrection of the body, some of the text would change, but Christians would act and feel exactly the same. Just imagine some ghostly Jesus spirit walking around and preaching before the Ascension. Reinterpreting it as metaphor, nothing would have to change. At least, it wouldn’t have to change unless theologians started screaming about the collapse of faith, but the cause wouldn’t be falsification of doctrine, the cause would be crazy theologians.

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  12. Lee

    I’m with Joshie here – I think one of the points of the Resurrection is that all of human nature is redeemed, not just our mind or spirit or whatever. One of the church fathers – I forget which – said that Jesus must be fully human because “what is not assumed is not healed.” We might also say “what is not raised is not redeemed.”

    That said, it’s pretty clear that the tradition has understood the Resurrection to be not simply the raising of a corpse, as though Jesus were simply raised back to the same kind of life he had before he died (like Lazarus). Rather Jesus’ body was transformed in some way such that he was no longer subject to the limitations of the physical world, but he didn’t thereby become less than a physical being.

    And the traditional understanding has further been that we will be raised – usually this has been explicated to mean that our “souls” exist in some sort of interim state and that they’ll be “clothed” with bodies fitted for the new creation. Though lately some theologians have been willing to take a harder materialist view that we simply cease to exist between our individual deaths and the general resurrection, and that God will somehow re-create us. I have some philosophical objections to that view, but I’m not so confident in them that I’m willing to reject it as outright incoherent.

    Personally, I have a hard time seeing why a Resurrection of the body should be necessary. It would seem to me that a soul communing with God (assuming we have souls!) would by itself be more than enough bliss for anyone. But presumably God created the physical universe for a reason, and maybe part of it is so that matter (in some form or another) could become infused with and transparent to Spirit. As C.S. Lewis observed, “God likes matter; he invented it.”

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  13. Consumatopia

    That was well put. I concede I see the appeal of a literal resurrection doctrine now.

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