Here’s my most recent contribution to the National Post’s religion blog: I’m defending the recent European Court’s direction to the nation of Italy (!) to remove crucifixes from public schools.

(This may be the first time I’ve disagreed with a whole country, but I suppose it was inevitable.)

A friend recently wrote to me (and I’ve disguised the situation a bit to preserve his privacy):

“My wife and I have been approached by The Kids Help Line to help raise funds.  The Kids Help Line is a national organization to help kids with various problems from simple friendship and parent tensions to issues of abuse, suicide, bullying, teen pregnancy, contraception, sexual orientation and dating.

“Their job is to provide information and help these kids through their problems.  They have a website where there are chat lines and you are able to see how the counselors handle situations.  For the most part I am impressed with their care and attentive listening.  On most inquiries they ask the teen good questions in an effort to get them thinking about the issue from other perspectives.  On pregnancy they offer all the options and while they define abortion as ‘an interrupted pregnancy,’ they do say that there are people who believe abortion is wrong and that there are spiritual, emotional and psychological consequences that need to be thought out.  For a child questioning his or her orientation they refer them to the gay and lesbian society, which upsets me, but I also can’t think of who else they ought to recommend instead.

“So our dilemma: There is an overall good going on, especially regarding abuse and suicide, and there are also issues where their handling would be inadequate from a Christian prospective.

“So can I make out  the trees from the woods and make a wise decision?  I can argue that working with this organization opens opportunities for us to work alongside people who we would never otherwise meet,  people who want to do to good for others.  We may offset stereotypes of judgmental Christians by accepting them into our home and that we will be helping children in many difficult and some very serious situations.

“But I can argue instead that I am partnering with an organization that would be neutral, or worse, on ethical issues such as abortion, sexual orientation and promiscuity, and by helping fund them I appear to be endorsing their stands on these matters.  As a church leader I am leaving myself open to being criticized by Christians who would believe we have ’sold out.’ So what do you think?”

It seems to me that, as we recall first principles, we as human beings are primarily to make shalom as best we can within the realities of a given situation. We as Christians are to make disciples as best we can within the realities of a given situation. And, overall, we are to make the best of it within the realities of a given situation (so the title of last year’s book!).

In this situation, it seems clear that you can make shalom and in several respects: you help a group that does generally, if not entirely, good work among the needy; you encourage people who might wonder about Christian solidarity with their non-Christian neighbours and with non-Christian organizations; you encourage this group and other such groups to seek out other partnerships with Christians; and more. You also make disciples in that you show both fellow Christians and seekers that Christians are willing to stand with non-Christians in matters of mutual concern; that Christians do not insist that everyone agree with them on every point before they are willing to work with them; and that Christians care about kids’ well-being whether or not they can be converted to Christianity.

As you say, it is not evident to whom a young person wrestling with sexual identity can be referred by a public organization besides those (pro-gay/lesbian) groups organized specifically for that purpose. Yes, families and religious groups should be mentioned as possible resources for Kids Help Line, but of course it’s probably pretty common that the particular families and religious organizations in those kids’ lives are the problem for a lot of these kids. So until we Christians (or multi-faith coalitions, or some other pro-heterosexual groups–or neutral coalitions, which would be even harder to form and fund, I expect) develop organizations that parallel our prolife crisis pregnancy centres, we can’t complain about what KHL does in this regard.

In sum, if we wait to support The Perfect Kids Help Line, we will not support any. And that seems a shame to me.

I deliberately did not support the United Way Campaign at my former university (Manitoba) because of their funding of (prochoice) Planned Parenthood, and I told those who were soliciting contributions that Kari and I gave (substantially) to World Vision, Amnesty International, and our church. There were other organizations doing work that United Way organizations do; we found them; and we gave to them directly. But in your case, I don’t see an obvious alternative to KHL and it seems a fine thing to support, even as I share exactly your reservations about some of what they do.

—That’s what I wrote to my friend. What do you think?

We take a brief break from our usual seriousness to ask this timely, topical question: What’s the best Hallowe’en costume you’ve ever worn?

Define “best” any way you want (most witty; most hideous; most likely to get you a kiss by the evening’s end; most spiritual). And, if you simply must, you can describe someone else’s instead. But special kudos if it’s your own you describe.

Mine?

We went to a theme costume party to which we were to come as a famous hero or heroine. I was deep in my Ph.D. program in those days (always risky to ask such people to any party) and so, in a complete break from my normal pattern (see above re being in deep in my Ph.D. program), I put on blue body paint, found some ersatz Oriental stuff to wear (take that, Edward Said!), and completely baffled everyone at the party.

“Am I blue?” I would sing the old jazz standard, and that helped no one guess my identity.

“I’m Krishna!” I finally announced, and sulked the rest of the evening. But it was a cool costume, I (alone) thought.

And you?

A reader asks: “Professor Stackhouse, Do you have any comments on The Apostate’s post about William Lane Craig?

I reply:

I stopped reading The Apostate’s first post after he made such a hash of “refuting” the cosmological argument. I’m not saying he doesn’t raise good points later on: I just don’t have time to read everything, and the opening is so bad it doesn’t give me good grounds to keep reading. Here’s what I mean.

His first argument is to cite mumbo-jumbo about cosmological theories that are, to put it kindly, in very early days and (to his credit) the Apostate doesn’t claim they have a lot of empirical verification because they don’t. (I figure if even I know that, and I’m no scientist but have a lively amateur interest in such things, then everybody talking about such matters should know it, too!).

That’s the best of his three arguments. The second one shows that he doesn’t understand the cosmological argument. (I just heard a University of Toronto professor emeritus of philosophy make the same embarrassing mistake at a debate in the University of Ottawa.) Just look up “cosmological argument” on that noted philosophical reference tool, Wikipedia, to see what The Apostate fails to see, namely, this basic, basic qualification: everything that is finite and contingent ultimately must stem from something that is neither finite nor contingent. “Super-intelligent aliens,” the Apostate’s alternative hypothesis, are finite and contingent. Ergo, they don’t help his case.

This point perhaps deserves underlining, because it’s common for Christians to encounter critics–even educated critics–saying something they think is quite clever: “You say everything has to have a cause. Well, who caused God?” They then congratulate themselves on scoring some important point here, but really they just show that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

The argument is indeed fairly simple, but not stupid! “Everything we know about is both finite and contingent. An infinite regress of finite and contingent beings is impossible. So there must be something that is infinite and necessary”–which is a good beginning toward a definition of God. (Thomas Aquinas said it better, of course.)

The third “refutation” says that the act of creation requires both space and time, but space and time are properties of the universe–the thing to be created–so creation before there is space and time is impossible.

This kind of thing also shows up a lot, and just stumps me as to why people think it’s a good argument. First, some of these people want to avoid the idea of divine creation by positing multiple universes–but suddenly space and time is limited to this and only this universe. Second, why is space and time dogmatically confined to this universe? Why can’t there be Someone who exists on his own, in his own space and time, who creates this universe (and perhaps others before, or alongside) when and where he pleases? Not only is this not an incoherent idea: It seems pretty obvious.

(Perhaps the ghost of Plato haunts us still, since both Augustine and Leibniz–each Platonic in his own way–actually argue something similar. They posit a timeless God, since they, too, have trouble imagining a time-space situation in which God exists before this universe is created. But if God simply is temporal and spatial in and of himself, as many of us Christian theologians and philosophers think makes the most sense of the Bible and of philosophy, then the problem vanishes.)

I like Bill Craig personally and I think he does a lot of good. I don’t agree with, or even personally like, all of his approach, which sometimes strikes me as flinging a bunch of arguments at one’s opponent and one’s audience too quickly for anyone to really be persuaded of any or all of them. But these arguments deserve intelligent treatment, and they don’t get them from the Apostate or his ilk.

In a new article in Canada’s national newsmagazine, Maclean’s, Ken McQueen tries to walk the journalistic tightrope between appreciation and credulity as he interviews New Age guru Eckhart Tolle.

Your servant is quoted in the article along with friend Prof. James Beverley, as evangelical critics. (Funny: I’m almost always described in mainstream Canadian media as teaching at “evangelical Regent College” while I never see a qualifying adjective attached to, say, the Vancouver School of Theology or the like.) Jim and I are quoted accurately about Tolle:

“He gives a certain segment of the population exactly what they want: a sort of supreme religion that purports to draw from all sorts of lesser, that is, established, religions,” says John Stackhouse, a professor of theology and culture at Vancouver’s evangelical Regent College. “In fact [he] so chops, strains and rearranges the bits that it borrows that it ends up as a nicely vague spirituality that one can tailor to one’s own preferences.” James Beverley, a professor of Christian thought and ethics at the evangelical Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, has read Tolle’s books “in gory detail,” and finds Tolle denies “the core” of Christianity by claiming there is no ultimate distinction between humans and God and Jesus. “From a Christian perspective, Tolle misquotes the Bible to assert his strange mix of Hinduism, Buddhism and New Age pop,” he says. “He misrepresents the teaching of Jesus about the self and ignores the clear claims of Jesus as Saviour, Lord and Son of God.”

It is telling how Tolle replies to this criticism in the next paragraph of McQueen’s piece:

“Yes, there is a certain interpretation of the Bible that people have where every word is literally true and anybody who doesn’t share that particular interpretation actually becomes an opponent,” he says. He calls it a throwback to the bloody Crusades of medieval times. “Five per cent of his beliefs are different so he’s evil, you must burn him,” Tolle says with a chuckle. “It’s completely insane and so we still have remnants of that, unfortunately.”

Wow. That’s quite a characterization of Professor Beverley and me, isn’t? Just work your way through the half-dozen ways he describes us and see if a single charge sticks. How could someone purporting to have mastered and transcended the world’s religions caricature such opponents in this obviously false and nasty way?

I’ve seen it with Karen Armstrong, with the Dalai Lama, and now with Tolle: All smiles, all “everything is beautiful,” all genial generality until someone raises a pointed objection. Then the smiles turn into grimaces, the soothing tones go harsh, and the wild countercharges fly.

Of course I agree with them in their distaste for religious extremism and for evils (such as sexism, racism, nationalism, and more) that wrap themselves in religious legitimacy. Of course I agree with them that we need more dialogue with people other than ourselves and to appreciate the genuine good that is in traditions other than our own. And of course I agree with them that much in my own tradition, Christianity, has been spitefully intolerant of any deviation from a narrow norm and sometimes violent in its repression of the merely different.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about serious, substantial criticism of Tolle (or Armstrong or the Dalai Lama) rendered by people who might be credited with knowing what they/we are talking about. This isn’t about “five per cent” differences and we are not calling for their deaths (good grief!) or even their repression. We’re simply taking them seriously as people who purport to have investigated the world’s religions (quite a claim) and found them wanting, who routinely subject those religions to withering criticism, and who then champion their own views as superior to all these alternatives. Well, Jim and I say, we don’t see it the same way and we think your views deserve a robust critique.

I’m still waiting, that is, for one of these “peace and light” types, who claim to have transcended all the horrible dogmatism and crazy feuding of the world’s established religions, to stay nicely and sweetly high above the fray when their dogmas are challenged.

Two data: That’s all I need.

The two facts are (a) an empty tomb, and (b) enthusiastic disciples. Let’s see what might follow.

After his death by crucifixion Jesus was buried in a tomb owned by a secret follower, Joseph of Arimathea.  Jesus’ tomb was a cave sealed with a rolling rock of some sort.  The four Gospels record many other such details of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection.  For the present purpose, however, almost all of these details can be set aside as we focus on just one: the empty tomb.

Each of the four Gospels records that the tomb was empty (save for the graveclothes left behind).  Now, perhaps the Gospels are mistaken or dishonest about this.  But why, then, when rumors of Jesus’ resurrection began to circulate in ancient Jerusalem, did neither the Jewish nor the Roman authorities (neither group being friends of Jesus or his followers, as all accounts from that time indicate) simply go to the tomb and produce the body? For that matter, why didn’t any skeptic simply find out where Jesus had been buried and investigate? Given the premium that preachers like Peter were placing upon the resurrection of Jesus (as we have seen in a previous post), surely production of his corpse would have sufficed to smother Christianity in its cradle.

It seems more likely that the Gospel accounts are correct in their assertion that the tomb was empty.

Now, perhaps Jesus’ body was not in the tomb because he had revived and escaped.  This explanation (which goes back to the eighteenth century at least) faces considerable obstacles. First, why would the Roman executioners, skilled in their terrible craft, be mistaken about Jesus’ condition and allow him to be buried alive? Second, given the tortures of the standard pre-crucifixion flogging of Jesus, and of the crucifixion itself, how likely is it that Jesus would be healthier after a number of hours in the tomb than he was before? How much more likely that, even if he had been buried alive, he would have died from exposure or loss of blood? Third, the graveclothes in which Jesus was wrapped, if they were typical of the time (and why would they not be?), would have been made of linen fiber—extraordinarily difficult to break—in which Jesus’ body would have been wrapped tightly from neck to foot, with a separate cloth for the head. Even an escape artist might find such an arrangement challenging.  A victim of crucifixion freeing himself from such encumbrances is, may we say, an unlikely scenario.

Still, is it not possible that a barely-alive Jesus could have been elaborated into a later myth of resurrection? Well, the myth would have had precious little time to form. Few scholars doubt that Jesus was crucified sometime around A.D. 30, and most agree that Paul wrote to the Corinthians (in the New Testament book called “I Corinthians”) about the resurrection less than thirty years later. Myths that shape whole communities usually take a lot longer than that to form–generation after generation–as anthropologists and historians recognize.

The idea of myth-making runs into further trouble as it provokes the prior question as to whether these disciples were likely candidates for an enterprise of this sort. It could be, of course, that the disciples engaged in a different sort of plot entirely.  Perhaps they themselves purloined the dead body of Jesus precisely in order to foment the idea of resurrection and to forestall the devastating blow against their nascent movement of the corpse’s discovery.  A third alternative is that the disciples hallucinated and came to believe their master was alive when in fact he was dead.  Whichever of the three options one selects, one must deal with the second main datum to be explained: the extraordinary attitude of the disciples after Jesus’ reported resurrection.

The Gospels portray the disciples almost all as either cowardly or despondent during Jesus’ arrest, trial, and execution. Given the widespread Jewish belief of the time that Messiah would return in divine power to destroy precisely the Gentile oppressors who were now crushing Jesus, it is entirely understandable that the disciples were thrown into a confusion of terror and despair. The Gospels tell us only what we would expect to hear about such followers at such a time.

What needs to be explained, then, is the subsequent confidence of such followers in such a terrifically unlikely story: that the leader of their little band had in fact been raised to new life by God and had empowered them to bring the good news of his victory over evil to the entire world. Zeal was one thing, perhaps commendable in a land with little hope of freedom. But ancient Jews, according to what cultural records we have, were not more credulous about the possibility of resurrection than are most of us are today. Resurrection was the hope of some, yes, but as a reality to be enjoyed only in the awaited Messianic kingdom and as a general resurrection of all God’s people at the end of days.  One lone resurrection as the divine vindication of a crucified Messiah seemed an utter contradiction in terms, and organized Judaism soon moved to stamp out any such idea.  The Christians, however, persisted, and many lost careers, families, and even their lives for their faithfulness to this one message: God raised Jesus from the dead, and God eventually will raise you, too, if you believe.

Let’s be blunt: perhaps the disciples were liars and made the whole thing up.  They would have to persisted in a large and sustained conspiracy, lasting decades.  Philosopher Thomas Morris reflects at length upon this possibility:

This is from the beginning an exceedingly odd sort of agreement—a number of different people get together, concoct a story, and agree to lie about it, each promising not to break and tell the truth.  It is crucial to their agreement that they’re all liars, but how in the world can you trust liars to keep their end of an agreement?  Any supposition that the apostles of Christ met after his death and entered into this sort of agreement is especially hard to swallow.  Here a number of ordinary men [and women, we should add] from walks of life in which the truth mattered, who had just spent an extended period of time with a charismatic leader whom most non-Christians recognize as one of the greatest moral teachers in history, are supposed to have met together after the death of their leader and, to further his work, agreed to tell outrageous lies about him?  This is just too bizarre. (See Morris’s book, Making Sense of It All.)

Furthermore, since it is likely that at least some of the ancient traditions about their deaths are true, then some of the apostles died for what they must have known was untrue.  How likely is that?  At some point, surely at least one of them would have blown the whistle to save himself.

Even if all of the traditions about their martyrdoms are untrue, however, what motive would the earliest Christians have for teaching such a thing? They did not attempt to seize political power by exploiting this story. There was no commercial angle to be played. They risked suffering the same terrible fate as Jesus’ at the hands of the same powers. They gained only a few thousand converts for the first several decades. Why would they lie?

Perhaps they did not lie, therefore, but instead were deluded.  Again, however, how likely is this possibility?  As Morris cautions, “a mistake can only be so big.” How did the whole group become convinced of the success of a cause and a person who had apparently been an utter failure? Did they simply make up the reports of appearances of Jesus (such as those cited by Paul in the letter quoted above), or did they actually have such experiences as figments of wishful thinking? Did they all possess such powerful imaginations—imaginations, let us remain blunt, that in this case crossed over into sustained psychosis—that they believed that they had seen Jesus, talked with Jesus, and been commissioned by Jesus before his ascent to heaven? Furthermore, did they do so with apparently no dispute about these matters among the central core of followers, even as the historical records show that the early church disagreed about very many other, much less critical, matters?

It is at least logically possible that the whole thing was a massive exercise in group fabrication of an intentional or unintentional sort. Airtight proof is never obtainable in matters of history. Each serious inquirer into this historical question, however, must fairmindedly assess the various explanatory options and select the one that fits the data best. Christians are among those who believe that God really did raise Jesus from the dead, and that this event is the once-for-all historical guarantee of the authenticity of Jesus’ life work.

And at least one more historical matter requires explanation. Why have millions of people, across dozens of cultural lines, including highly-trained scholars and professionals around the world, come to believe the same truths as those first-century Jews—including this truth of the resurrection of Jesus? Can they all be simply credulous?  All taking refuge in wish-fulfilment?  All setting aside their critical faculties for one wild, desperate hope? Of course, one must fairly ask the same question about any other religion or philosophy, but note this interesting fact: no other religion makes this sort of historical claim. No other religion puts it all on the line: Did this event happen or not?

That’s the sort of hard-headed empirical argument–historically empirical, to be sure, not laboratory-observable empirical–that Richard Dawkins and Company should appreciate, no?

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This discussion is adapted from my book, Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil (Oxford University Press and InterVarsity Press).

One might well object to the foregoing thus: “The New Testament is our only record of these events, and it’s hopelessly biased and therefore unreliable. So we can’t know what really happened.”

Let’s begin by acknowledging the obvious: the New Testament is, indeed, biased. It is strongly biased, in fact: written entirely by devotees of Jesus, each of whom writes according to the tenets of orthodox Christianity (or his writing wouldn’t have been accepted by the early church into the canon–the approved group of scriptures).

But so what? Most (all?) historical writing is biased. Who devotes himself or herself to a careful historical accounting of a subject in which one has no interest and about which one has no strong opinion? Pick among the famous historians of the ages: Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Eusebius, Bede, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Beard, von Ranke: they’re all conspicuously biased. Pick your favourite historian today: same deal.

The serious historiographical question is never that of bias. People who don’t know much about history-writing fret about bias, but no historian and no experienced reader of history does. The question instead is whether bias interferes with veracity.

Often it doesn’t, of course. Those who care most about an event are usually (not always) the best reporters of it. Again, who else cares to get the details straight, or to report on it at all (as most Roman and Jewish historians of the time understandably do not report on the life and death of Jesus)? The question is always whether the historian evidently is trying to portray what actually happened (rather than evidently writing flattery or deceit) and whether we have any other grounds to trust his or her word: any sort of corroboration, for example, or other writings of his or hers that we can verify in some way, or the testimony of reliable others to the veracity of the account in question, and so on.

So let’s turn to the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—whom ancient church tradition understands to be the Gospel authors—were not professional historians. According to the early traditions, they came from four different trades: Matthew was a tax collector, Luke was a physician, John was a fisherman—we don’t know what Mark’s trade was. Each was an amateur simply doing his best to serve the first Christians with reliable accounts of the work of Jesus. Leaving aside the question of supernatural inspiration and even whether church tradition is correct about the authorship of what are, in fact, anonymous documents, the four Gospel writers worked the same way all historians work: they collected accounts, both oral and written; reflected on whatever personal experience they might have had with their subject; and set to work writing brief portraits of their Lord for their intended audiences.

But did they write reliable history? To answer this honestly, I need to risk making enemies among my professional friends by asserting that there is no field of contemporary literary or historical study that is as rich, but also as confused, as New Testament scholarship. It seems that one can find a well-credentialed scholar proclaiming virtually any thesis imaginable about this or that part of the New Testament.

There are a variety of reasons for this cacophony of dissenting voices. For one thing, there is no text in western civilization that matters as much as the New Testament: not the Magna Charta, not the Declaration of Independence, not “E = mc2.”  For better or worse, no text has affected our civilization like this collection of small first-century books.  Furthermore, when scholars study the New Testament, ultimate things are at stake. The text itself claims to describe the most fundamental realities: God, the world, humanity, sin, salvation, heaven, hell, morality—who can study it and remain indifferent to its implications?

So while one can recognize the eruditon of many New Testament scholars past and present, it is likely (and, I think, evident) that in at least some cases their expertise has been put at the service of highly personal religious agendas.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in fact, pioneering scholars like Simon and Reimarus and Wellhausen and Baur pursued their studies with openly unorthodox, even anti-orthodox, concerns that skewed their work—even as each of them made important contributions to the understanding of the Bible.  There is no reason to suppose that more recent scholars are so different from their distinguished predecessors.

The current scholarly voices that proclaim the gospels to be suspect as historical sources therefore must be listened to with caution—particularly since many reputable scholars think the gospels are in fact quite reliable.  One must neither accept unquestioningly whatever happens to be the trend of the moment in New Testament scholarship, nor dispense with the whole field entirely.  A critical arm’s-length stance serves one well in any area of human inquiry, and especially in one so contested as this is.

I myself, as a professional historian, have concluded that the gospels are at least basically reliable in their portrayals of Jesus.  They vary from each other in details, even important ones, but their individual and composite portraits of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth seem at least as reliable as any other historical sources we have about the ancient world.

Why do I think so? For one thing, there are, after all, four accounts: not one or two, as is often the case in classical sources. And these accounts agree with each other far more than they seem to disagree.

It seems preposterous, we should pause to observe, to attribute this agreement to some sort of collusion among the four writers.  Quite apart from the silliness of a charge of massive deceit levelled against devotees of a religious master whom everyone agrees taught honesty as a supreme virtue (it would be a different thing, for instance, to suspect collusion among Nazi biographers of Hitler), the very differences among the four gospels to which critics often point indicate that a conspiracy of agreement is highly unlikely.  In other words, it would be a poor conspiracy that so obviously failed to iron out the many differences among the gospels.  Instead, the more sensible explanation for four different, but mutually-reinforcing, accounts is that they are describing the same reality from four different points of view.

Furthermore, they agree with each other far more than they do with the other “gospels” written in the first, second, and later centuries—those attributed to the apostles Thomas and Peter, for example, or the early missionary Barnabas.  The early churches quickly latched onto the four gospels that became part of the New Testament—in church after church across the Empire, as archaeology has shown—while repudiating others as fanciful, even heretical. This widespread agreement on the status of the four gospels over against their “competitors,” an agreement noted by scholars of various stripes, is a phenomenon not to be lightly received—especially in the light of recent excitement over so-called Gnostic and other “gospels.”

The early churches ought to be treated as the best judges of which gospels got the story right. At least a few eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life were still alive at the time of the writing and circulation of the gospels, and these eyewitnesses easily and authoritatively could have refuted, and did refute, any phony accounts.  Even without the validation of eyewitnesses, it remains that the gospels were written within the lifetimes of the first generation after Jesus (that is, between A.D. 50 and 100, with the death of Jesus dated at about 30). Thus the four gospels of the New Testament were accepted as valid by the generation that had been taught the “Jesus traditions” by the apostles themselves. The vast majority of the early churches—and we have records right back to the late first century—broadly and independently agreed that these four were authentic.

So while scholars argue over whether Luke has a particular historical reference correct or whether John is putting words into the mouth of Jesus that he never said, we might sensibly consider one thing that New Testament scholars rarely dispute. The early Christians themselves adopted these four as their basic community remembrances of the life of their Lord.  The early churches prized these four accounts because, in their view, they told the truth about Jesus.

Many elements of Jesus’ career upon which all four gospel writers agree are also remarked upon in the still-earlier letters of the apostle Paul, which were written in the 50s and 60s, within thirty or forty years of Jesus’ death.  And these letters—at least the major ones such as Romans and I and II Corinthians—were also widely received early on by most churches as teaching the truth about Jesus. So we in fact have five sources, all of them written within a century of the events they purport to describe, that disagree on details but massively agree on many essential parts of the story of Jesus’ life.  These five sources together constitute an astonishingly rich and reliable resource base for study, especially when compared with any other records from the classical period of Greco-Roman history.  If we simply apply to the New Testament documents the same tests that professional historians normally apply to other ancient accounts, it is clear that we have at least as much reason to trust the gospels as sources of historical data about Jesus as we do to trust any other writer, writing about any other subject, in the ancient Mediterranean world.

(A fine online resource on this matter is an article by Gary Habermas available here.)

Having said all this (!), we still can generously grant to a skeptic all sorts of minor difficulties in the gospel accounts as we move to make the next point in our discussion, namely, that there are historical data that point to the truth of the Christian claim of Jesus’ resurrection. In other words, even if one takes a minimalist approach to the historicity of the gospel accounts, even if one grants for the sake of argument that the gospels contain a large number of relatively minor inaccuracies—or even major mistakes or fabrications!—one runs up against data that are attested in all four gospels and held up as crucial, not incidental, events in the narratives.

Now, grant me just two facts—two data that, let it be clear, are not in themselves miraculous.  Grant me these, and see what else might reasonably follow…

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This discussion is adapted from my book, Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil (Oxford University Press and InterVarsity Press).

Fun as it would be to argue over various perennial questions in the long, long debate over the intellectual credibility of Christianity, we’re all busy people. So let’s proceed to the core question of this religion that, after all, takes its name from an actual claim about Jesus of Nazareth, namely, that he was (and is) the Christos or “Messiah” (Anointed One) of God: the Lord and Saviour of the world.

How would a reasonable person begin to make up her mind about such a stupendous claim?

Helpfully, the earliest Christian preaching stands ready to assist.

The apostle Peter, in what the New Testament depicts as the first public address of the Christian church, stood up in the midst of a Jewish festival in Jerusalem, scant weeks after the execution of Jesus in that city, and boldly cried out,

“You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know—this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:22-24 NRSV).

Peter links Jesus with the ancient hero King David, claiming that David himself prophesied the resurrection of the Messiah (or “Christ”).  Peter bangs his point home:

“This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord [God] said to my Lord [Messiah], “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”‘  Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”  (2:32-36 NRSV)

Peter says (and he should know) that the earliest Christian argument/evidence/warrant/ground for belief that Jesus is God incarnate is his resurrection. This Jesus, this crucified rabble-rouser, this threat to the Jewish leaders and annoyance to the Roman rulers, God has vindicated by raising from the dead in fulfillment of prophetic Scripture. The early Christians thus believed Jesus to be both Lord (a title ascribed only to God by Jews) and Messiah (the Saviour of Israel and thus of the world).

So the early church points us in the right direction: What do you make of Jesus?

More pointedly still, what do you make of (the claim of) his resurrection?

It seems rather an odd focus for a serious, public discussion of the truth of Christianity, perhaps. Why aren’t we arguing about what we can observe in nature, or about what first principles of logic would tell us, or about comparative religions? Why are we arguing about history, and about an event long, long ago? Wouldn’t a good Dawkinsian ask for something more scientific?

Well, he shouldn’t, because Christianity isn’t about “timeless metaphysical and moral truths” or “scientific conclusions” that are encoded in the various world religions,  philosophies, or natural sciences. Some people might say that’s what Christianity is about, but they’re wrong. The Bible is very clear about this point, so you can claim otherwise only to audiences that don’t know the Bible very well or who do but have devised sophisticated ways of filtering out most of what it says.

The Bible, and therefore the Christian religion, is not about eternal verities, but about particular things that happened, things that God did and said, that have affected human history once for all. And the most important thing God has ever done is to become Jesus so we could see him and hear him more clearly and so that he could do for us what we cannot do for ourselves–namely, save us from evil, our own and others’. And what is the historical proof of this historical claim that particular things happened? A claim about a particular thing that happened–so amazing and yet so clearly significant that it justifies believing in all the rest: God raised Jesus from the dead.

We cannot intelligently retreat from the force of this claim. Let’s start with one possible escape route:

“It doesn’t matter whether Jesus rose from the dead or not. Lots of weird, currently inexplicable things happen in the world. They don’t justify starting a new religion, much less proclaiming the centre of that religion to be the one and only God of the universe.” This strange event, however, is not “inexplicable.” It is deeply and broadly explained in the early Christian preaching and tied in with numerous teachings of the Jewish Scriptures. It is not a freak, but instead an event that perfectly coheres with a complex web of Christian explanation of the way the world is, the way God is, the way we are, and the way God is working among and in us for our good.

Yes, these explanations emerge “after the fact.” But they are explanations that have been accepted as true by a lot of people, including some pretty smart people, and some pretty smart skeptical people, over the centuries. (And by “a lot” I mean billions, and by “pretty smart” I mean Ph.D.’s in every relevant discipline.) So if the resurrection happened and it does not mean what Christians think it means, it surely is odd that so many people were, and are, persuaded not only that it happened but that it meant what Christianity says it meant. What, then, is a better explanation for this very large phenomenon of Christian belief in this event and its significance?

But maybe it didn’t happen at all. The New Testament is our only source of historical detail about this so-called event. Its authors are, in the nature of the case, hopelessly biased and therefore untrustworthy. So maybe the best thing to do is withhold judgment or, better still, not believe in it at all until much better sources can be found.

I’ll talk about that “escape route” in my next post.

A couple of posts ago, I replied to Richard Dawkins’s charge that theologians don’t do anything useful. I replied in a couple of respects to that charge, but under friendly pressure from some of you it emerges more clearly that there are at least two more kinds of things to be said and argued.

First, is there something there that theologians describe? I argued the other way: If there is a God, and theologians know something about that God, then their/our work is useful. But of course many people wonder about the premise: Is there indeed a God and is that God the God of the (Christian) theologians?

Second, if theology somehow disappeared tonight, has it contributed something useful anyhow? This is a bit of an odd question Dawkins poses. I could reply in a qualifiedly positive way, and I do in the next paragraph, but I would say instead that the work of Christian theologians is fundamentally an all-or-nothing proposition: Either what we theologians say is true, and therefore useful, or it isn’t, and therefore isn’t.

Theology in fact has been used to motivate people to do good things (like abolish slavery or campaign for women’s rights) or to prompt enjoyable mystical feelings or to patch up various social divisions. I suppose those are the sort of thing Dawkins seeks as he wonders what good has been accomplished by theologians beyond the work of theology itself. But Christian theologians would say that the main thing we do is try to acquaint people with God and with the main information we can have about God. If we’re wrong, then yes, it’s good that people have used our wrong ideas to press for positive political change or stimulate happy spiritual feelings or heal ethnic or other social divisions. But it’s also also rather pathetic, since they depend upon a mistake, and once no one believes in the truth of that theology anymore, those good effects will unravel with their justification gone.

So let’s turn to the matter of fact: What are the grounds–and by “grounds” here I’m going to mean “publicly accessible and decidable grounds”–for Christian belief (and therefore for the work of theologians)?

There are lots of grounds on which Christians do in fact believe in the truth of Christian teaching. Christians believe they see evidence of answered prayer. Christians believe that they have spiritual experiences that are best accounted for by labeling them as genuine encounters with God. Christians believe that Christian teaching prompts them to live more virtuously than they otherwise would–or did. And so on.

In this series, however, I’m going to respond to Dawkins-types in a mode of public science, namely, history. I hope you’ll stay tuned.

I’m just back from several days on the University of Ottawa campus in our nation’s capital. I had a blast working with David Robinson (a recent alumnus of Regent College) and his team, who work out of St. Alban’s Anglican Church to serve students and professors at U of O.

David is an unusually capable person: superb academic record, extraordinary organizational ability, articulate speaker, and fine networker. But what I liked the most about working with him in producing several events on campus is that he is trying to reach the people most campus groups don’t: the thoughtful, and perhaps even threatening, inquirer, the smart student or professor who has been asking hard questions of Christianity perhaps for years and hasn’t found even a safe place in which to ask them, let alone a place to encounter satisfying answers to them.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate much of what most campus groups do, whether Inter-Varsity, Navigators, Campus for Christ, University Christian Ministries, and the various denominational or ethnic ministries as well. And I’ve been privileged to speak to such groups from time to time throughout North America.

But in my experience, most of these groups aim at a broad middle and a lowest common denominator of student interest. They normally offer basic Bible study, informal prayer and worship meetings, and maybe the occasional visiting apologist to stir things up in a campus debate (David and I stopped by to take in one of those at U of O earlier this week). What few campus groups seem to be trying to do, however, is to meet the university on its own terms: discussion of issues that matter in a way that meets the university’s own ideal standards of engagement, standards of both courteous respect and intellectual rigour.

(I set out what I’d like to see in campus ministry more extensively here.)

It’s harder to reach these people on campus, not least because many of them have had previous experiences with religious types and have been disappointed and offended by the defensive, even anti-intellectual, attitude they encountered. So they’re not likely now to show up at a “Free Pizza Night!” to “Hear local pastor Rev. Bill Jones speak on loving God better!” Rather than having their hard questions welcomed in the spirit of the university, they have been marginalized as troublesome party-poopers, spoiling a nice session of grooving on Jesus. Or perhaps they indeed have been engaged by Christians, but then their questions have exposed the Christians’ intellectual shallowness, their inability to articulate good grounds for their beliefs that make sense beyond the circle of already-convinced faith.

Not every campus group needs to aim its work at those asking searching questions. It takes unusually well trained leaders and a non-defensive, intellectually serious Christian fellowship to reach such people. But someone ought to be aiming to befriend and serve these people, and I’m glad David and the house are doing so. If you’re doing the same, let us know—and blessings on you, too!