Thinking Christian

We’re in the season of expectancy, preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ. There was a season of expectancy before his actual birth 2,000 years ago–expectancy both on earth, where prophecies of a coming Messiah were passionately studied and only partly understood, and also in heaven, where the eternal God was preparing to break in to time and space and human life. It has been said that Jesus was the only person who chose to be born.

Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth “from the ground up,” through the eyes and ears of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the Magi. John (John 1:1-14) gives us the view from the sky, as it were:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John [the Baptist]. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. 8He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh on that first Christmas. We use words to express meaning and to connect with one another. From the beginning there was meaning and there was relationship among the three Persons of the Godhead. From the creation of man, God’s intent has been that we would live with full understanding of meaning, and in close relationship with him, with one another, and with all of his creation. No one needs to be convinced that we have not lived out that ideal. The Word became flesh to restore us to it. Merry Christmas indeed!

He was and he is both life and light. By coming to live as a human among humans, he opened to us the door to true life in true light. John says his own people did not receive him, and tragically some still will not see his bright light. But those who do receive him are born into new life through him. It’s a life of grace and truth: truth to guide us, to show us what is real and what is right, and grace so that we can recover from our failures in living by what is real and right.

The message of Christmas is not just about a stable and a star, not just a mother and a child. It’s about the glory of God shining on earth, through one who became flesh to show us his great glory.

This is what heaven was looking forward to during that first advent season. Merry Christmas indeed!

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I continue my survey of historical evidences for Jesus’ resurrection with an outline of evidences for the empty tomb. This is part of a continuing set of cumulative evidences, not intended to be complete in itself but to be read as part of the series on Evidences for the Resurrection. I am using William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith as my source again.

Craig lists six “lines of evidence” supporting the historicity of the empty tomb:

1. The historical reliability of the story of Jesus’ burial
2. Multiple, early, independent attestation of the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb
3. The use of the phrase “the first day of the week” in a way that reflects ancient tradition
4. The simplicity of the way Mark presents the story: it lacks legendary or theological development
5. The account of the tomb’s being discovered by women
6. The earliest Jewish polemic, which suggests the empty tomb

I can’t (and shouldn’t!) re-write all of Craig’s support for each of these. I will just summarize a few significant points, beginning with this overall observation: the manner in which Craig and other current apologists approach these issues is historical, not faith-driven. There are historical reasons to consider each of these lines of evidence to be valid.

Concerning the multiple, early independent attestation of the stories of the burial of Christ, and of the empty tomb being discovered, we have already discussed the most contentious issue: the independence of the sources. In Craig there is much more by way of demonstration of the probable independence of the accounts, specifically on this issue. Whether one views the various Gospel accounts as having come from oral tradition, from other prior sources, or from the authors’ own experiences and recollections, the woven pattern of varying details indicates they did not draw all of their information from a single source, and they did not collude with each other to craft a single narrative of deceit.

The point regarding the “first day of the week” requires knowledge of the original languages. Craig points out that it is awkward Greek, but if the Greek is back-translated into Aramaic, the language used in Jerusalem at the time, the resulting phrase is perfectly natural and reflective of Jewish tradition (the term “Sabbath” is used). This suggests that the phrase was first used in Aramaic, which implies that it was used early.

Mark’s simple account of the resurrection is not what one would expect of a fable developing long after the events.

The discovery of the tomb by women is quite remarkable. The social status of women in both Judaic and Greco-Roman culture at the time was lower than most of us could even conceive (more here, mp3 file). They had the social status of children at every age. They were not allowed to give testimony in court; they had no credibility as witnesses. If the early church had been trying to create a believable story at some later date, it is highly unlikely they would have made women the discoverers of the empty tomb, or the first witnesses of the risen Jesus. The most credible explanation for their being recorded as the first witnesses is that it was true.

The Jews who wanted to deny the resurrection spread a tale that the disciples stole the body (Matthew 28:11-15, especially the latter part of verse 15). How did they try to put an end to claims of the resurrection? It would have been simple to say, “These followers of Jesus are nut-cases.” If Jesus’ body were still in the tomb their rebuttals would have been easier still! Obviously there was a reason they did not use that answer: anyone could have checked and seen whether it was true or not.

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We’re on a continuing path here. The fact of Jesus’ empty tomb does not prove the fact of his resurrection, but it contributes to a historical case that I will keep adding to as I continue this series.

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Jesus asked in Matthew 16:13-20, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” (“Son of Man” was one of the ways he referred to himself.) Then he asked his followers who they thought he was.

I have a similar question for any reader here who is not a follower of Jesus Christ. It’s not quite the same question, though; it’s not “who do you think Jesus was?” I expect many of you would say that he was a legend or something of that sort, and that we have no reliable information on who he was. My question instead is this: given the account we have of Jesus’ life in the New Testament, who is he presented to be in that context and what was his central message?

Jesus followed up his first question that day by asking his followers who they thought he was. I will ask followers of Christ a similar follow-up question in a day or two, and I’m requesting that you hold off on answering this until then. First we’ll allow others to express their views.

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“There are many misconceptions about Christianity in today’s world, but the greatest is this: that there’s something ordinary about following Jesus Christ.”

That’s the opening of my latest Daily Press guest column. The link there will disappear in a few days, but you can continue to access a PDF version of the article here.

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Book Review

I should have anticipated it from the title, but N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is presented me with an unexpected personal challenge. Wright is an historian of the New Testament era, and in this book heset out to accomplish two historical purposes. The first was what one might call an attempt at time travel: to help us understand the way first century Israelites would have experienced Jesus among them, and how they would have understood his message. The second purpose was to establish reasons to believe the New Testament accounts—especially of the Resurrection—can be trusted historically.

His apologetic for the Resurrection was a new one to me, creative and (I think) compelling, and I would recommend the book on that basis alone. The first part of the book had a deeper, not entirely comfortable impact on me, though. That is where I will dwell for this review.

Even Christ followers can go off track, Wright says, by misunderstanding the context of Jesus’ times:

We have to make a journey as difficult for us in the in the contemporary Western world as that taken by the Wise Men as they went to Bethlehem. We have to think our way back into someone else’s world, specifically the world of the Old Testament as it was perceived and lived by first-century Jews. That is the world Jesus addressed, the world whose concerns he made his own. Until we know how Jesus’ contemporaries were thinking, it will not just be difficult to understand what he meant by the “Kingdom of God”; it will be totally impossible.

Is he saying Christianity has Jesus all mixed up? No and yes. Wright takes Scripture to be historical; he regards it as trustworthy. The message of Christ in it is true. But most of us probably do not understand quite what he meant by his central message: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Like the tables in the Temple, he turned upside-down Jewish expectations regarding the Kingdom. In fact, “repent” in this context (which in the Greek is metanoia, change of mind) did not mean, “stop sinning,” though that would certainly be one effect of what it meant. At a deeper level it meant to change one’s entire way of thinking about the Kingdom of God in the world.

Much of Jesus’ ministry was to overturn the Temple system itself, preparing to establish a new way of relating with God. This was more radical than most of us realize. The Temple was the heart of Israel’s national life, not just its religion. It was the center of power for some Jewish leaders—the ones who would ultimately have him killed.

This is what Wright wants us to see, and to see it through the eyes of a first-century Jew. For me, his time-travel purpose succeeded. He enabled me for a while, to a deeper extent than ever before, to see Jesus as many of his contemporaries must have seen him: the son of a carpenter, youngish, probably not at all outstanding in his physical appearance, walking the countryside with a small group of followers, teaching wisdom, demonstrating truth and love—and leading a revolution that would change not just one nation at its heart, but the whole future history of the world.

But wait. They wouldn’t have seen him as leading a revolution that would change the nation and the world. Not clearly, and certainly not until much later. He would have appeared to them as what I’ve already described: a youngish carpenter’s son, who had taken up the role of a wandering rabbi. We know of him as the leader of an historic revolution. To them, how likely would that have seemed? I’ll come back to that question in a moment.

To be sure, Jesus stood out among rabbis. He performed miracles, including healings, exorcisms, feeding large crowds with little food to start with, and raising the dead. He taught unique wisdom of a life of truth and love, and he taught it from his own authority (Matthew 7:28-29). More remarkably yet, he lived by his own teaching, consistently setting the highest example of how to live a life.

Still, how likely would it seem, to someone watching him teach in the synagogue or debating in the marketplace, that this one youngish (apparent) carpenter’s son, without benefit of microphone, megaphone, or public relations officer, with no head-start by way of family money or reputation, lacking the right degrees from the right schools, and gathering such a strange assortment of followers, would be the one to overturn the whole way God interacted with humans and humans with God?

Wright actually had me thinking for a while, “you know, this is just so implausible.” It wasn’t because he said anything to indicate it might not be true (quite the contrary). It was because I was seeing Jesus, I think, the way many people would have seen him at the time: the youngish carpenter’s son turned into a wandering rabbi with a strange set of followers. He was in those ways a very ordinary man. Israelites at the time thought that when God sent someone to change the world, it would be someone a lot less ordinary-looking, doing something a lot more spectacular. I caught myself thinking, “Yes, that’s how God would have/should have done it. Not this way.”

And then it hit me: it had to be this way.

It had to be this way because of what Jesus came to do, especially in his earthly ministry before the cross. Jesus’ purpose was not to make a spectacle of himself. He even asked people to keep some rather spectacular things quiet for the time being (Mark 8:27-30; Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 3:7-12; Mark 5:21-43). His purpose was to show how to live a life God’s way. More specifically he came to show you and me, and ordinary people everywhere, how we can live life God’s way. As much as possible, he had to do it as an ordinary person, so that we ordinary people could see his example and follow, in our ordinary lives.

Of course he had other purposes besides this: to display the Kingdom of God through his miracles, and ultimately to make it possible through his death and resurrection for us to be reconciled to God and enter the Kingdom with him. His life in those ways was not at all ordinary, and not what we are called to do.

Much of his ministry, though, was about praying and teaching, loving others, affirming the outcast, comforting the hurting, and confronting purveyors of falsehood and hypocrisy. These are things we can do as he did. These are ordinary kinds of things, for ordinary people in God’s Kingdom to do.

To do them as lovingly and consistently as he did—now, that’s far from ordinary. If you haven’t ever done it read the book of Mark or Luke (start at Mark 1 or Luke 1 online if you don’t have a printed version handy). See how extraordinarily he lived out the ordinary things of life.

Pick up a copy of Wright’s book as a companion to your reading, too. Perhaps you’ll see as I did that when God sent someone to change the world, it had to be this way.

The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is by N.T. Wright. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1999. 204 pages including endnotes and index. Amazon price US$12.24.

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God is good, and his goodness is shown more clearly in Jesus Christ than in any other way. This is a strong beauty in Jesus Christ.

“Beauty” is not a word we generally apply to men, but this post (redated and reposted here) was originally an introduction to a series I did some time ago on the beauty of the entire Christian faith, and the Christian way of thinking. Mathematicians speak of and see beauty in their demonstrations. Scientists consider beauty (elegance, simplicity, fit, etc.) to be a sign of a theory’s truth, an indicator of accuracy. There is beauty in Christianity.When I first put my faith in Jesus Christ, I had seen and was persuaded by strong evidences that the Bible’s historical record could be trusted. Those evidences are as strong as ever, but they are not absolute proof. I’ve read at length about various philosophical arguments for God, and some of them are very convincing to me. Still, there is no complete proof that God exists or that Jesus Christ is his Son.

There is enough there, though, that I am perfectly willing to stake all that I am on what I believe. Recently I’ve come to realize there’s a unifying theme to all that seems convincing to me in Christianity, and that is its beauty.

It’s a truism that no one in history matches Jesus Christ and his influence. More remarkable is the fact that nowhere in myth or fiction is anything like the life of Christ. There are characters who resemble one piece of him or another: spiritual teachers, miracle workers, gadflies to the established order, and so on. But no other person has even been imagined in whom it all fits together so beautifully. Has another character ever been conceived who combines such genuine, human, almost earthy reality with such transcendent spirituality? Jesus walked, ate, worked, prayed, got tired, got hungry, just as we do. Bill Cosby said in a comedy routine years ago, “I started out as a child.” Cosby’s line was comical because we don’t usually point out something so ordinary. But Jesus didn’t have to do that–he didn’t have to do the ordinary–yet, as God come to dwell with us, he started out (on earth) as a child. He grew up just as needy and dependent as any of us. He celebrated at celebrations; he wept at a funeral. He learned by practice what it means to be obedient. He learned by practice what it means to be challenged, to be opposed, to suffer.

So there was a distinct humanness to him, which never disappears from his picture on the pages of the New Testament. There was also, unmistakably, the divine. He claimed to be one with the Father (the Greek there means sharing the essence and not just the thoughts or the purposes); he forgave sin as only God can; he claimed to have been around before Abraham, and he used the unique, unutterable name of God for himself when he said it. Somehow he did all this without it ringing megalomaniacal.

He healed, he freed people from demons, he raised the dead, he walked on water, he fed the multitudes. Think of others who have been portrayed in myth or fiction as having powers like that. Do they display the same groundedness, the same reality of humanity that he did? He brought the human and divine together in a way that no storyteller has matched; possibly because it’s a life beyond human imagining. It could never have been thought up if it had not been observed.

He loved; he taught love, grace, compassion, and forgiveness, even toward one’s enemies. He taught it by consistent example and not just by words. He was gentle with those who needed gentleness. He stood terribly strong against the smug religionists, the hypocrites, those who used religion to put heavy burdens on others and to exalt themselves. The power he used, though, more often than not, was the power of their own words against themselves. It was the power of a mirror reflecting truly on them. He was unremitting in his insistence on truth, truth lived out in love.

There is a literary analogue to the trial and death of Christ in the execution of Socrates, who died willingly for the sake of the truth. I love the Socrates story too. Both stood against injustice with a stance of powerful humility: they each proved their case by their deaths. Yet the death of Christ is different even from that of Socrates; for Socrates met his end quite peacefully, surrounded by sympathetic friends. Jesus Christ forgave his literal torturers, while hanging from what has often been described as humanity’s cruelest-ever instrument of execution.

Thus even before we come to the most significant, and most contested, claim about the life of Christ, we see something unique, beautiful, unmatched. It’s been claimed that early believers made this up, under pressure of persecution. I’m highly skeptical they could have done it. I’m even more highly skeptical that a group of Jews would have entertained a moment’s thought of a divine-human person like this. Under the historical circumstances in which they lived, to think that they would have invented and clung tenaciously to a tale of bodily resurrection–that crowning act of an unparalleled life, which in Jewish thought was never anticipated for anyone before the end of all the ages–takes more faith to believe than that the resurrection actually happened.

This is (some of) the beauty of the life of Christ. We his followers have not always reflected it well, but nevertheless his picture stands in glory in the pages of the Bible, and has inspired many to seek, even if not to fully realize, a life like it. This beauty is not proof; no worldview has such a thing in any final, incontestable terms. Nevertheless, there’s something mightily compelling here, so that among the choices of worldviews, this one stands out as one we can believe is right: partly because of its beauty.

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Dallas Willard writes in The Divine Conspiracy (p. 335),

“God,” Paul said, “makes clear the greatness of his love for us through the fact that Christ died for us while we were still rebelling against him” (Rom. 5:8).

The exclusiveness of the Christian revelation of God lies here. No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated him. That is who God is. But that is not just a “right answer” to a theological question. It is God looking at me from the cross with compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time.

God’s deep, gracious love is proved in the price he paid in love on our behalf. Christ died for us. He died in love, to bring us to God, to break down the sin barrier between us and God.

One could go into explaining how the cross of Christ accomplished that: how sin separated us from God, earning us death, and how Christ paid that price for us. Let’s not dwell there this time, though. For now, let’s consider this fact in its simplicity: the price that God imposed, God paid. The price was death (Romans 3:23). God made the payment through the death of God the Son, Jesus Christ. He was the one the Father called his beloved, who often proclaimed his own eternal unity with the Father (John 10:30, John 17). He died by crucifixion, among the most torturous methods of execution ever practiced by a government on earth.

As Willard recalls the love of God that led God to do this for us, he throws in that terrible cultural hand grenade, the word exclusiveness. He had, to, though. It’s really quite inescapable. If the Christian message is at all true, then it is exclusively true. It cannot be one of several options. It is either exclusively true or it is thoroughly wrong.

Though this may be difficult, in an age when pluralism and inclusivism are considered among the chief virtues, I think anyone might be able to see this necessity. It is impossible to include Christianity—the kind of Christianity that centers on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ—in a list of ways to know God. Even if one doubts Jesus ever said what he did about being the only way to God (as in John 14:6, for example), it should be clear that he cannot be one of many items on a spiritual menu.

Let us consider what it would mean if he were. Suppose Eckhart Tolle and Oprah and the Bahá’ís and all the other inclusivists are right. Suppose Christianity is one of many paths to God, to enlightenment, fulfillment, Nirvana, or whatever the real goal is.

Then the universe offers us many ways to reach our best destiny. Whatever reality is at its core, there’s something about it that gives humans a real place, a real direction, a real destiny. Somehow in some personal or impersonal (and therefore metaphoric) way, the universe has us in mind, and it offers us all kinds of ways to flourish for now and for beyond. We just have to pick one of those ways off the universe’s spiritual menu. Let’s see, will I have the t-bone or the tofu?

Reality isn’t too picky. It’s nice to us, in a way. It wants us to be free to choose. You can follow any number of paths, many of which really are rather nice ideas. Experiencing the Now (per Tolle) is a nice idea. New Age spirituality of all kinds fits well into the “nice” category. The Secret says everything will go well if you’ll just think more positively. Those are a couple of attractive options. Let’s just make sure we include Jesus. The cross of Christ is another nice thing on the spiritual menu. Wasn’t that sweet of God the Father to offer his own Son’s torture and death as one of our options?

No!

When Jesus faced the cross it was in agony, with sweat dripping as blood. This was even before he was arrested—he knew what was coming! Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

His friends and followers deserted him–as he knew they would do. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He was cruelly tortured and mocked. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He hung on that infamously cruel cross, dying in excruciating pain while they laughed at him. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He was stabbed in the side, so that water and blood flowed out. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

His body was wrapped up, entombed in the dark. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

There is nothing nice about the cross. It is unthinkable that this was an item on some spiritual menu, one choice among many, something we could feel free to pass over in favor of positive thinking (or any other supposed path to God). 

Christ’s resurrection makes manifest the glory of both his death and his life. It redeems the loss of his death. It makes its greatness even greater. But it does not make it nice. And it hardly supports anyone’s view that Christ is just one of many enlightened ones!

C.S. Lewis said in another context,

But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Neither did he leave open the possibility that he might be just one of many spiritual options. He did not intend to.

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