What the Resurrection Proves

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

What the resurrection proves is more important than proving the resurrection.

R. A. Torrey (1856-1928), at the height of his fame as world-travelling evangelist, published a book called The Bible and its Christ. Of the book’s ten chapters, the first four provided reasons for believing the Bible to be God’s word, the next four were about the resurrection of Christ, and the final two were about “Infideliity: Its Causes, Consequences, and Cure.”

Of the four chapters on the resurrection, the first three argue that it is reasonable to believe that Christ rose from the dead, and that an impartial handling of the evidence will drive an honest inquirer to admit that, historically speaking, there are better reasons for affirming the resurrection than denying it. Torrey advances numerous lines of argument about the nature of historical judgements, the state of the documents, and so on, and he peppers the presentation with his characteristic declamations:

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is in many respects the most important fact in history. It is the Gibraltar of Christian evidences, the Waterloo of infidelity. If it can be proven to be a historic certainty that Jesus rose from the dead, then Christianity rests upon an impregnable foundation.

All of this has become standard apologetic fare, partly due to the labors of Torrey and the other founders of the fundamentalist coalition. Some of Torrey’s arguments don’t exactly hold up, or don’t prove as much as he hopes, but a great deal of his argument is solid. The current conversation on this subject is much more sophisticated, and anybody who wants to cull the evidence would be better served to check out something by apologist Gary Habermas or, rather definitively and with golly-gee acumen, N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. (If you haven’t read Wright before, prepare to read most of it barefoot… because he’ll knock your socks off in the opening chapters).

But what particularly drew my interest in Torrey’s book was that fourth chapter (Chapter VIII) on the resurrection: “What the resurrection of Jesus from the dead proves.”

Torrey opens the chapter with a recap of the previous arguments, and then asks,

But suppose He did rise from the dead, what of it? What does His resurrection prove? It proves everything that most needs to be proved. It proves everything that is essential in Christianity.

There follow six points:

1. The resurrection of Christ from the dead proves that there is a God, and that the God of the Bible is the true God.

2. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead proves that Jesus is a teacher sent from God, who received His messae from God, that He was absolutely inerrant, that He spoke the very words of God.

3. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead proves that He is the Son of God.

4. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead proves that there is a judgment day coming.

5. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead proves that every believer in Christ is justified from all things.

6. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead proves that all who are united to Christ by a living faith shall live again.

The apologetic project of “proving the resurrection” is important, especially to demonstrate that the Christian faith is not a leap into the irrational or a retreat to personal commitment. But on its own, it’s a fairly tiresome business. Unless, that is, you keep the theological context in view: Christ as the revelation of God the Father, as the one judge whose claim on all humanity has been vindicated in a mighty act of divine self-demonstration, as the one whose sacrifice is salvation, and whose rising from the dead catches humanity up in its momentum.

Torrey (and the solid evangelical tradition he spoke from) knew that the two projects had to be held together, and that the apologetic project must serve the theological. Both proofs have their place, but what the resurrection proves is more important than proving the resurrection.

Men of Easter: John

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

John was the man that stayed and hanging around with Jesus changed his life.

Many men wanted to follow Jesus until the Teacher said some hard things. Jesus demanded people think, but most men just wanted Him to provide bread and edutainment.

John saw people look for easy answers and miss Jesus.

A few men were intrigued with Jesus, but balked at giving up their stuff. Jesus saw one such man, but Bible readers never learn this young man’s name, because he passed on making it into the New Testament in order to keep his local wealth and fame. Judas made money by following Jesus, but lost his soul.

John saw friends love money and fame and miss History and Love Incarnate.

Three men were part of Jesus’ inner circle, but when things did not go well, all but one man ran away. These two had given up everything for Jesus, but could not give up their fears or their disappointments. Sacred blood was shed and they were in hiding with nothing to tell of Good Friday, but their failures.

John saw Peter and James run and miss the Cross.

Only one man followed Jesus all the way to the Cross: John.

What did John gain? He stood at the foot of the Cross and Jesus gave him a job. The woman who first said “yes” to the Word of God was placed in his care. John was the friend that Jesus could trust with His mother, because John stayed.

Jesus had been followed by many men, by a few, by three, and now only by one man. The women were there, but only John was faithful amongst the men.

This is not strange to any Christian alive today. The hard times in a Church will often see a few women and one man standing ready to do their final duty. Too many men have chosen simple mindedness, money, practicality, or their fears to stay.

Staying the course sounds easy, but only John succeeded.

Why?

John was a “son of thunder” in his early days. He was brave and only a brave man can succeed. He would become known as “the theologian. Only a man who wanted real answers could look at the Cross standing next to the mother of God. Fundamentally, John became the apostle of Love, because John was a true friend to Jesus. Where others saw a miracle worker or a sage, John saw a man worth his highest devotion.

John loved his friend and so loved God.

Courage.

Wisdom.

Love.

God grant me those manly gifts.

On Easter Simon Was Glad to be Wrong

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Simon knew talent. Simon was brave. Simon loved his nation.

Simon did not say much, but Simon followed Jesus.

This Easter Simon the Zealot has been on my mind. He was a follower of Jesus easy to forget, because we only know his name and political point of view. Simon wanted freedom for his people crushed by Roman tyranny.

When he saw Jesus, Simon heard a call and followed. With the other disciples, he seems to have lived in the constant expectation that at any moment Jesus would restore the kingdom to Israel. Jesus kept disappointing them with cryptic statements.

Palm Sunday must have thrilled Simon, because at last Jesus rode into Jerusalem as king. The crowd rejoiced and then Jesus cleaned out the Temple from the crooks that had set up shop in that holy place. We know Peter, the leader of the gang, had a sword and I cannot help suspecting that Simon had the other.

Simon was zealous for his people and for God.

Jesus must have been hard to understand. He claimed the Kingdom of Heaven was now, but then refused to do practical things to make it happen. It was “within” and Simon wanted it “without.” Jesus spoke of a better age to come, but seemed to do nothing to make it happen.

Simon was zealous to change the outer state of his people, but Jesus was playing a deeper political game. Jesus wanted new men and only from these men would the King form a new nation.

Simon wanted Jesus to kill Romans, but Jesus wanted to transform them. Simon wanted Jesus to bring justice, but Jesus was going to make men just. If Jesus had been just another rabbi, his goals would have been fine, but impractical, but Jesus was God as well as man. It is hard to blame Simon for his mistake. Usually someone like Jesus would have been one of these folk too good to help real people, too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.

Jesus was minded to bring heaven and earth into union. Simon the Zealot was following the one King in history that did not need to claim His crown. His very being was greater than any Kingdom.

God doesn’t do political games, because He is and every other role depends on Him.

Simon must have thought that Passover would mark the start of the inner reality becoming an outer one. He was right and his zeal would prove useful, but he was wrong about the Kingdom. Jesus was not satisfied with freedom for Israel, He wanted freedom for the whole earth. He was not just knocking down the Roman Empire, but every Empire that would not submit to His rule.

Jesus was after Hell and not just hellish rulers. His zeal for conquering death and Satan made Simon look cowardly and weak. Simon wanted to defeat Emperor Tiberius, but Jesus was after Death, Hell, and the Devil. When the test came, Simon ran like everyone else. Zeal cools fast in defeat.

Jesus was braver, his zeal hotter, and He plunged all the way to Hell to rescue his people.

Sometime on Easter morning, Simon must have understood. Tradition suggests he preached the gospel from Egypt to Persia and gave his life for Jesus. His zeal had finally found the Kingdom worthy of death, because martyrdom brought eternal life.

May I like Simon be a subject to King Jesus this Easter.

Ayn Rand—The Ugly Self-Esteem Movement

By Clay Jones
ClayJones.net

As we have already seen, Ayn Rand was really big on self-esteem.

One of her “inner-circle” disciples, Nathaniel Branden, is often called “the father of the self-esteem movement.” As I mentioned yesterday, Rand and Branden (he was 14 years her junior) felt good enough about themselves to have a sexual affair with both their spouses’ knowledge. After all, as Atlas Shrugged makes perfectly clear, smart and successful people deserve each other. To object would be to admit you aren’t the kind of person Rand admired. Famously, however, sexual hijinks also ended Rand and Branden’s social and professional relationship when Brandon—apparently feeling too good about himself—had an affair with another woman without telling Ayn (their sexual relationship had already ended—Branden had blamed it on some unresolved psychological issues). To say Ayn was livid is an understatement akin to saying toddlers shouldn’t kiss rabid Dobermans.

Did you feel the love? Umm… pleasure seeking?

But, I can hear you thinking, “in spite of their sexual peccadillos the self-esteem movement is still a good thing, right?”

Wrong.

But let me back up a minute. Here are some of the principles upon which Brandon’s philosophy of self-esteem is based:¹

• “I have a right to exist.” But if you are a murderer do you have the right to live?
• “I am of high value to myself.” Okay, but that’s like saying, “I can’t live without me.”
• “I have a right to honor my needs and wants….” Apparently, even if what I “want” is adulterous.
• “I am lovable.” But what if you’re just a selfish, gravy-sucking pig? Just saying that doesn’t make it true.
• “I am admirable.” Maybe not! Does anyone admire Charlie Manson?
• “I deserve to be treated… with respect by everyone.” Does Charlie Manson deserve this?
• “I am worthy of happiness.” Regardless of whether I treat others responsibly?
• “My happiness and self-realization are noble purposes.” It is true that everyone wants to be “happy” but on what basis is that want noble?

Now granted few people are like Pol Pot or Charlie Manson but the point is that simply being human, particularly from Rand’s or Branden’s atheistic worldview, doesn’t confer your right to exist, the right to honor your wants, or that you are lovable, admirable, or respected, etc.

No wonder that studies in the last ten years have revealed that the self-esteem movement is creating societally lazy, sometimes thuggish, ne’er-do-wells who, nonetheless, believe they are really wonderful.

One major study concluded that high self-esteem does not lead to better school performance and that “narcissists are charming at first but tend to alienate others eventually. Self-esteem has not been shown to predict the quality or duration of relationships….” Also, “High self-esteem does not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in early sex.” The study concludes by pointing out that “Praising all the children just for being themselves… simply devalues praise and confuses the young people as to what the legitimate standards are.”² After all, saying “I am valuable simply because I am human” isn’t saying anymore than “I’m one in seven billion.”³

Thankfully, there is a God who created humankind in His image and so there are absolute standards upon which we can base our worth. And if we do well on this earth we can look forward to His one day telling us “well done.”

2 Corinthians 10:17-18: “‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’ For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends.”

Amen.

Ayn Rand—The Bad

By Clay Jones
ClayJones.net

Yesterday I said there was some good in Ayn Rand’s work. Today we look at the bad. This blog post is longer and more sobering given the issues involved.

• Rand was an atheist and as such she failed to take in the whole of reality (taking in the whole of reality is a tenant of Objectivism). That certainly confused her thinking but atheism will be the topic of future blogs so there’s no point in my discussing it specifically regarding Rand.
• Like the communists, Rand rejected the Bible’s teaching of “original sin” and declared that “men are born tabula rasa” or blank slates.¹ That was a crucial mistake.² Rand is rejecting the evidence. What follows is at least evidence to falsify a tabula rasa view which the Bible’s teaching on “original sin” would confirm.

First, in just the last 100 years humans have tortured and murdered each other at staggering rates. Conservatively, the USSR from 1917 to 1989 killed 20 to 26 million people³; Germany about 13 million (not including war dead), China between 26 to 30 million,⁴ and the United States has suctioned, scalded and scraped to death over 50 million unborn children.⁵ It is difficult to choose among all the historical examples of the depth of human depravity, but this one will suffice as evidence for how a tabula rasa view of human persons is disconnected from reality. In 1937 Japanese raped, tortured or murdered 300,000 in Nanking China. Iris Chang wrote about this (warning: graphic violence follows):

The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000–80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of “bestial machinery.”⁶

Second, in response to the Holocaust, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a study where he found that with little provocation 65% of men and women would torture people with electric shocks⁷; In a similar study David Mantell found even higher numbers.⁸

Third, even victims of mass atrocities like Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel and gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concluded that it is the average member of a society that commits such horrors.

Fourth, every genocide scholar I’ve read similarly concludes that it is the average, ordinary member of a population who commits atrocities. I could provide many examples but the words of historian George M. Kren and psychologist Leon Rappoport must suffice:

What remains is a central, deadening sense of despair over the human species. Where can one find an affirmative meaning in life if human beings can do such things? Along with this despair there may also come a desperate new feeling of vulnerability attached to the fact that one is human. If one keeps at the Holocaust long enough, then sooner or later the ultimate truth begins to reveal itself: one knows, finally, that one might either do it, or be done to. If it could happen on such a massive scale elsewhere, then it can happen anywhere; it is all with in the range of human possibility, and like it or not, Auschwitz expands the universe of consciousness no less than landings on the moon.⁹

Those who don’t see something desperately wrong with the human species haven’t looked hard enough—no animal is so intentionally, exquisitely cruel.¹⁰ Apparently we were all born Auschwitz enabled.

• Rand contorted selfishness into an ultimate good and even entitled a book The Virtue of Selfishness. “The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one’s own rational self-interest and one’s own hierarchy of values: the time, the money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one’s own happiness.”¹¹ Thus you should only take the chance to save a drowning stranger “when the danger to your own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it: only a lack of self-esteem” could “permit” it.¹² But, by her logic, if there is any danger to your own life, why risk it?
• Rand’s rejection of God and her ignorance of human sinfulness ultimately led her to believe that man should be worshipped. “If anyone should ask me what it is that I have said to the glory of Man, I will answer only by paraphrasing Howard Roark: I will hold up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say, ‘The explanation rests.’”¹³ “The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it…. those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.¹⁴
• It is no surprise that Rand would consider Jesus’ crucifixion a horrible waste: the “ideal” dying for the “non-ideal.” And, indeed, why should Jesus die for people who are, of themselves, glorious? As Rand put it in her interview with Playboy: “according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice.”¹⁵ Here Rand is right. Her problem was that she really didn’t think people vicious and so she didn’t see the reasonableness of sacrifice. If she had, and if she had known her own viciousness—the viciousness that led her to convince her husband and her lover’s wife that her affair with self-esteem guru Nathanial Branden should be tolerated—she might have welcomed the “man of perfect virtue” dying for her.

Romans 1:22-23: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man….”

Amen.

Ayn Rand: The Good

By Clay Jones
ClayJones.net

There is much in Ayn Rand’s works that many find refreshing and it is no surprise that she’s the darling of many Libertarians and Republicans.

• Rand recognized what should be “duh!” to everyone: contradictory statements cannot be true at the same time and in the same way! As she put it: “A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.”¹ Yes! Would anybody mind if I ate that last slice?
• Rand demanded that we can know reality, and that too is refreshing in this age of postmodern poppycock. “‘We know that we know nothing,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—‘There are no absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge….”²
• Since we can know reality, it followed that we must use our minds to the fullest. “Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.”³ Of course, this leads logically to a constant theme in her books that people need to stop making excuses for their failures and get to work!⁴
• She argued that lazy thinkers often resent other people’s achievements and so many of them like the idea that we can’t know reality because that excuses their failures. In discussing the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, Rand wrote that, prior to landing, newscaster “Harry Reasoner summed it up by saying simply, quietly, a little sadly, that if the moon is found to be made of green cheese, it will be a blow to science; but if it isn’t, it will be a blow to ‘those of us whose life is not so well organized.’ And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational and that there is no loophole, no escape from reason and reality.”⁵ Thus “the obliteration of reason obliterates the concept of reality, which obliterates the concept of achievement, which obliterates the concept of the distinction between the earned and the unearned.”⁶
• Contrary to communism and most socialist philosophies, Rand recognized that humans are selfish and will not work hard (or even work at all) unless they believe their efforts will be rewarded. Although Christians completely disagree with Rand on the nature of selfishness (she thinks it’s a good thing), she’s right that it is the natural human condition that if people aren’t incentivized they will not excel. Communism’s failure to recognize human selfishness is the number one reason for its collapse. It’s no wonder then that while the West German was making the Mercedes, BMW, and Porsche, the East German working for the “collective good” was making trashbin Trabants, “the car that gave communism a bad name.”⁷

So logic works and we can know reality and we should stop making excuses and we should work hard for our labor will be rewarded.

What’s not to like!?

We’ll begin to look at that tomorrow.

1 Thessalonians 5:21: “But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.”

Amen.

Distant Recall

By Ken Myers
Touchstone Magazine, March/April 2011

In his 1983 Templeton address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began by recounting a memory from his childhood. “I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why this has happened.’”

As a telegraphic summary of the source of Russian ills under communism, it would be hard to improve on those four initial words. Since Solzhenitsyn spoke them, they have served many Christian pundits in the West as a description of the disorders within liberal democratic regimes. But while this slogan boasts a certain scrappy punchiness, it doesn’t offer us much help in figuring out how the memory lapse in question was provoked.

The modern forgetting of God has many intertwined causes, some of them the result of well-intentioned efforts to sustain God’s “relevance” for people living in a culture that eclipses God’s identity. It is a forgetting induced by systemic forces, and so it will not be reversed through piecemeal efforts such as keeping God’s name on our coins or his laws memorialized in public places.

Remembering God is not like remembering your brother’s birthday or remembering where you left your car keys. Remembering God is not sustaining awareness of an isolatable fact. The God we must remember is the source of rationality in which memory and personality have meaning. He is the origin of all being and order, all truth and coherence. The God we must remember gave all of Creation its shape, then entered Creation in the form of a man, and thereby reaffirmed his love of man and his love of all he has made. Trying to remember God as anything less is to ensure our forgetting.

Misunderstanding Creation

If we are really concerned to remember God, we need to attend to the various dismemberings that have made it easy to forget him. Since God has chosen to use Creation to reveal himself, and then to reveal himself most fully in human form, it is not surprising that the modern forgetting of God is intimately tied with confusion about the nature of the human, the nature of Creation, and the nature of human perception of Creation.

The English theologian Colin Gunton (1941–2003) left us with a number of books exploring these themes and how they relate to our understanding of God. Much of his work revolved around the doctrine of Creation and the doctrine of the Trinity, and his most insightful work interweaves those two concerns. It was through -Gunton’s work that I first encountered the observation that most Christian reflection on Creation might as well be Unitarian, and that this has contributed to our careless acceptance of many modern cultural innovations. We misunderstand Creation and we misunderstand God (and thus risk forgetting him) if we fail to acknowledge that it is in Christ that all things hold together.

One of Gunton’s earliest books is a slim volume called Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay Towards a Trinitarian Theology. The book explores themes developed more fully in Gunton’s later writing, but I know of few volumes that summarize so well the destructive “cast of mind” introduced by the Enlightenment. As Gunton demonstrates, the confidence in allegedly unaided reason championed by the Enlightenment is intertwined with a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge (particularly an unprecedented emphasis on precision and certainty), the nature of perception, the relationship between knowledge and belief, and the place of man in Creation.

As he traces the dominant threads in the development of modern ideas about human knowing, he introduces various critics of that main stream. There are some tantalizing excursions about the place of the imagination in the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, about the true meaning of human freedom as discussed by Iris Murdoch, and (most importantly) about the necessarily personal nature of human knowledge as explored by Michael Polanyi.

Throughout the book, Gunton keeps coming back to theology. Consider this Christological comment, part of his defense of the reliability of knowledge gained through the senses:

A world that owes its origin to a God who makes it with direct reference to one who was to become incarnate—part of that world—is a world that is a proper place for human beings to use their senses, minds and imaginations, and to expect that they will not be wholly deceived in doing so.

Alienation & Idolatry

There are numerous “alienations” in modern culture; among those addressed here are the dismembering of knowledge from belief, the stark separation of reason from the senses (of the mind from matter), and the alleged conflict between freedom and obedience. But the alienation that Gunton is most concerned with in this book is the alienation from Creation that modern thought and culture have encouraged. By making ourselves into the makers of all meaning, we cut ourselves off from “things as they really are,” and so, as he notes early in the book, “Despite the massive advances in knowledge, understanding and the protection of human life from threats to its physical well-being, we are no more at home on the earth, perhaps less so, than other-worldly mediaeval man.”

The modern forgetting of God is not a careless slipping from consciousness of an important fact. It is a product of various idolatries that have coalesced into conventional mindsets and cultural institutions, many practiced by well-meaning Christians. In Enlightenment and Alienation (as in his other books) Colin Gunton does more than identify those false gods and how they secured the fealty of their followers: he confidently and hopefully offers encouragement for a way forward for those who wish to honor in their engagement with Creation the three-in-one true God.