Sunday's On It's Way

'The Resurrection' (detail) by El Greco 1596-1600, Museo del Prado, Madrid

 

Written for ATB by my dear friend Kenny Pierce

On Easter, Christians celebrate what C. S. Lewis called, The Grand Miracle, the one single event in human history that changes the meaning of the entire human story in general and our own personal story as well. A lifetime isn't enough to exhaust the contemplation of Easter. All you can do each year is contemplate what Easter will have to teach you this time around.

I think it a particularly great challenge to attempt to explain to people who aren't Christians, what it is that Christians see in Easter particularly since the Christian response to Easter is so highly individual, given the richness of the Myth That Really Happened. So I thought that I would take a shot at explaining to an imaginary audience composed of interested and intelligent, but unbelieving, imaginary friends one of the odd ways in which I think Easter looks different when you're seeing it from the other side, as it were. This is very far from the most important thing to understand about Easter. But it's interesting, I think, in its own quirky way, and it's almost certainly something that hasn't occurred to you if you are not yourself a Christian.

God is, of course, the Author of the human story, the Dramatist who created this world that famously is all a stage. Most monotheists would agree with that, at least in some sense. Now, Easter tells us what kind of story God is writing it is a mystery novel and a thriller and a romance all rolled into one, but most especially it's the kind of novel where you can't tell what's going to happen next. It turns out that the infinite God is not unlike M. Night Shyamalan the moment when the Resurrection happened is exactly like the moment the audience realizes that Malcolm is himself dead, only more so. The second time through The Sixth Sense the entire story is different from the first time you watched it, because you know the great central secret: Malcolm is dead. And for Christians, the second time through the story, as it were whether it is the story of one's own life and apparently pointless sufferings, or the New Testament story of the disciples cluelessly tagging along behind Jesus without ever figuring out what he was talking about, or even the second time through the Old Testament the second time through, the entire story is transformed, because you know the great central secret: Jesus is alive.

I have a wonderful Jewish friend, a person, by the way, considerably more intelligent and nicer than myself, and one who understands Christianity incomparably more deeply and sympathetically than I understand Judaism. One of my friend's objections to Christianity is precisely that the Resurrection, if it means what Christians and indeed Jesus himself claim it means, radically transforms the apparent meaning of the Tanach and upends all sorts of rabbinic apple-carts, even though the rabbis strove diligently and sincerely to understand the story God was telling. My friend cannot accept that God would be so deceitful and so unfair as to set the Jewish people up to believe one thing and then spring such an astonishing and
unforeseeable surprise upon them. But to a Christian, the Resurrection is the mother of all great plot twists, sprung with a dramatic skill that, as one would expect, utterly transcends the abilities of M. Night Shyamalan or Neil Jordan. Of the millions of people who saw The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game, there are bound to have been a few who figured out the secret before the director's great moment of triumph. But the Resurrection is the one unsurpassingly masterful plot twist that nobody figured out in advance. And Christians rejoice in that moment of unforeseen, unimagined, astonished enlightenment in very much the way moviegoers delighted in the shock of revelation in The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game. Indeed, we suspect that God shaped us to delight in plot twists precisely because He Himself delights in them. The pleasure Shyamalan and Jordan take in knowing that their skill made it possible for viewers to see one movie the first time through and a radically different movie the second time ˆ at the same time recognizing that in fact it has been the same movie, honest to its principles and playing fair with the viewer, all along ˆ is an echo of the pleasure God takes in His greatest of all surprise endings.

But of course, there is the difference that in both The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game, the surprise, while artistically deeply satisfying, is also tragic and poignant. The Resurrection, by contrast, is not only the greatest of all surprise endings ˆ it is also the happiest of all unexpectedly happy endings. What looked on Friday like the most unspeakable of tragedies turns out on Sunday to have been the setup for the most delightful of all romantic comedies. It rather strains the bounds of credulity to think, for example, that Mark Darcy would really choose Bridget Jones, but that patent mismatch fades to nothing beside God the Son‚s choice of us as His Bride ˆ and yet while the former is fiction, the latter is triumphant fact.

Once Easter settles into your heart for good, hope can never be lost. No matter how bleak things may seem, the God who sprung the Resurrection on an unsuspecting world (and, to be candid, a not terribly grateful one, all in all) well, who knows what surprises He has in store for us? Easter assures the Christian of two quite remarkable things about the Eternal, Omnipotent, Omniscient God of the universe: (1) He loves surprises, and (2) He loves us.

Or, as the Christian songwriter/performer Carman Licciardello put it:

On Friday night, they crucified the Lord on Calvary,
But He said, „Don't dread; in three days
I'm gonna live again, you'll see.
When troubles try to bury you and make it hard to pray
It may seem like Friday night
But Sunday's on its way.

Comments

[Ghost Dansing]

What a great picture! What an excellent selection for Easter Alexandra!

El Greco ("The Greek", 1541 – April 7, 1614) was a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. He usually signed his paintings in Greek letters with his full name, Doménicos Theotokópoulos (Greek: Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος), underscoring his Greek descent.

Wikipedia 

[nofate]

Kenny, about 6 months or so ago, I wrote a comment to you in which I said that I "didn't have enough time" to reply to something that was being discussed. You came back and said you didn't have enough time either, and proceeded to lay out a fairly long and involved comment relevant to the subject at hand. I blew that off as the typical "hey, it's rough for me too" type of response we all get from people around us all the time. Then, some time later, one of the commenters pointed out that you have something like eight kids you are raising. Then, a couple of days ago, in the epic "What Matters More" thread, I checked out your site and the picture you posted. Whoa! I could not have been more wrong. You really don't have the time. How do you do it? And I thought getting two raised and into college was a challenge. My hat's off to you. What a great looking family.

"And for Christians, the second time through the story, as it were whether it is the story of one's own life and apparently pointless sufferings, or the New Testament story of the disciples cluelessly tagging along behind Jesus without ever figuring out what he was talking about"

Or, as Toby Keith put it:
I'd have some friends that were poor
I'd run around with the wrong crowd, man I'd never be bored
Then I'd heal me a blind man, get myself crucified
By politicians and preachers, who got somethin' to hide.

Ooh and I'd lay my life down for you (woooooh)
And I'd show you who's the boss (woooooh)
I'd forgive you and adore you
While I was hangin' on your cross
If I Was Jesus.

If I Was Jesus, I'd come back from the dead
And I'd walk on some water, just to mess with your head
I'd know your dark little secrets, I'd look you right in the face
And I'd tell you I love you, with Amazing Grace.

[mac Brachman]

Kenny, a beautiful and thought-provoking post. Thanks for being Alexandra's guest and have a peaceful and joyful Easter weekend with your family. Shalom, Mac Brachman

[gringoman]

Kenny,

I can claim no special knowledge as to whether the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Son of God, was anticipated by that of Dionysus, Son of Zeus. Such questions are best left to the faithful or else to exceptional scholars. However, I found during my travels in the now up-and-coming exotic giant, India, a charmingly relaxed attitude about these matters---matters which have driven monotheists to intolerance, fury and disemboweling. For example, even in polytheist homes, deeply religious (or "pagan" as the monotheists dub them), homes dedicated to the gods of Hinduism, including goddesses and the blue-skinned Krishna, you may find pictures of Jesus. No sweat. Hey, they see Jesus as pretty cool too. Curiously I think, the sensibility must have been similar to what we now know as Greco-Roman, at least regarding religion.

So in that spirit, let me applaud you as an extraordinary paterfamilias of the Christian persuasion, even if you don't care to dance with Dionysus or listen to Krishna's flute.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It is possible that Dionysian mythology would later find its way into Christianity. There are many parallels between Dionysus and Jesus; both were said to have been born from a virgin mother, a mortal woman, but fathered by the king of heaven, to have returned from the dead, to have transformed water into wine, and to have been liberator of mankind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus#Parallels_with_Christianity

[Kenny]

Nofate, Mac, thank you very much for the compliments. As far as how I find time...well, chronic insomnia helps, 'cause I have to find something to pass the wee hours when I can't sleep. And of course one also learns not to sweat housework... Actually, my opinion is that if you have eight children, and there are any chores that aren't getting done, then somebody hasn't done a good job of raisin' 'em to do their fair share of work; so I've been leaning on 'em pretty hard about that the last few months.

Gringo, I'm with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien on the question of anticipatory myths. That's sort of the implication behind my phrase "the Myth That Really Happened." At any rate, thank you for the salute. But there's no need to admire me all that much -- I get way more out of my kids than I put in.

By the way, I apologize for the many missing punctuation marks and odd control characters -- I typed that thing up in Microsoft word, cut-and-pasted it into Hotmail, and sent it off to Alexandra -- and I can see both from the post and from the reply that Hotmail either perverted or threw out completely, practically every punctuation mark in the whole thing. Lesson learned: next time it gets typed in Notepad, not Microsoft Word. Sorry about that.

[Kenny]

A further point along the lines raised by Gringo: I almost wrote a post about how radically different was the attitude of the first Christians toward Easter, than the modern attitude. The modern attitude is that what is important about the story is its "meaning," in the sense that any other myth has meaning. But the attitude of the original Christians was that what was important about the story was that it really happened. You can't get away from it, throughout the whole New Testament -- the repeated insistence that "We are witnesses," that, "the one who wrote this saw it with his own eyes," that, "If Christ was not raised from the dead, than we are more to be pitied than all men," and the carefully memorized list of all the different people Jesus appeared to after his death. Whatever else the early Christians were, they were empiricists, far more than is soi-disant "empiricist" Heather MacDonald, to whom it has apparently not occurred that the moral standard of "fairness" by which she condemns God and declares His non-existence, cannot possibly be empirically derived.

So whenever you see somebody talking about how some myth (the myth of Dionysius, or the myth of Osiris, or the myth of Demeter, or the myths of Zoroastrianism) "made its way" into Christianity, you know instantly that you have somebody who is simply not willing to pay any attention to the actual evidence. The original disciples, who had lived with Jesus for three years and who knew perfectly well that he had been well and truly and tortuously dead, suddenly all at once declared with absolute confidence -- unbrokenly maintained by all of them in the face of torture and death -- that they had seen Jesus alive, in power, munching on fish and bread, offering to let them touch him. They may have been mistaken (though that is very hard to imagine). They may have been victims of mass hallucination (though, since that would be the only case in all of human history, mass hallucination -- especially joined in by separate completely convincing "hallucinations" by James and most astonishingly Saul -- would seem to be just as much a miracle as would resurrection). It is remotely conceivable that they were lying (though it would be at once the most ludicrous and the most obstinately and successfully maintained conspiracy in human history -- a history in which nobody ever got much out of it but torture, hardship, ostracization, poverty, and an early death, and yet that absolutely nobody ever broke and betrayed...even though the conspiracy involved a bunch of Jews claiming that God had become man, when of all races on earth the Jews were the only ones who considered that to be utterly impossible). But there is one thing that they were most certainly not doing. They were not telling a myth.

A person who tries to explain the doctrine of the Resurrection by talking of how some myth or other "influenced" the Church into imagining or pretending that Jesus had risen...well, it is only midly hyperbolic to say that he is rather less inclined to deal honestly with evidence than is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist Democrat who believes Bush destroyed the Twin Towers. One has to resist the temptation to say that he is as unreasonable as is any Egyptian Muslim "scholar" who cites in his doctoral thesis, as authoritative historical evidence, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As soon as somebody starts talking about how resurrection myths "influenced" early Christianity into making up the story that Jesus rose from the dead, you know you are dealing with somebody who either is flagrantly without intellectual integrity, or else is talking about a subject about which he knows next to nothing. It is possible to entertain other explanations for the disciples' sudden conviction that the most important thing in the world was to insist on telling everybody that they had seen Jesus alive and more than healthy a few days after he had died on a cross. But those plain-spoken, working-class, Galilean Jews sure as hell didn't get the idea from Zoroastrian or Dionysian myth.

I mean, I'm not slamming you, Gringo (you said yourself that this is not something to which you've devoted much thought). But there really is not, outside of possibly Women's Studies and African-American Studies, any branch of "scholarship" more patently self-deceiving than the Religion Studies departments of modern universities.

At any rate, I decided not to write that post because lots of people have already written that one; it's more or less standard apologetics. So I figured I'd take a shot at explaining how the Gospels are like The Sixth Sense, because while the connection between the two seems obvious to me, and while I do think Christians take the same kind of pleasure in the eucatastrophe of the Passion that moviegoers and readers of detective novels take in being skillfully set up and surprised, it's something that oddly I haven't seen many people talking about. Not very important, but I thought it was interesting...and if you can't write about interesting but unimportant quirky little subjects on a blog, then where in heaven's name are you supposed to write about them?

[Liquid]

Kenny, I knew I was gonna like it, just like the anticipation of a piece of chocolate cake after a family meal, but I gotta tell you that while I was reading it, I was paying close attention and almost repeating it in my mind, s I took in every word, so that I could later explain the way you told the story perhaps to a child, because you're such a good story teller and the six sense thingy was perfect! It's funny Kenny because, as I was reading along, I could hear your voice in my head, it sounded kinda like Andy Griffith sitting on the porch telling us all a big tale, while Aunt Bea sat rocking in her chair, as the rest of us sat on the steps. I gotta tell you that I did end up crying though, because no matter how many different ways the story is told, I always feel the burning in my heart because I get so filled up with how much sacrifice and love was given to us!

Thanks Kenny! God Bless ya!

Love to you all on this 'Happiest of Good News stories' time of year!

[Ghost Dansing]

But there really is not, outside of possibly Women's Studies and African-American Studies, any branch of "scholarship" more patently self-deceiving than the Religion Studies departments of modern universities.

This was a really strange comment Kenny.... but your guest article was very nicely done and quite allegorical as well with the Jesus resurrection providing insight into the mind of God, His love for His creation and surprise.

I've often wondered what the mind of the omniscient, eternal and infinite author of the Universe time and existence as we live it would be like.

Imagine a non-temporal Being experiencing the Alpha and Omega off all things in a kind of all-knowing  simultaneity of consciousness creation.

However, your piece really got me thinking about how perhaps existence itself is God's Book of Life, and to think that He has stopped writing is at least presumptuous, and at worst tacitly assuming His death, perhaps ironically in the midst of claiming fundamental fidelity to His Word.

Thanks for a wonderful Easter post.... and you do have a beautiful family.... a lucky man indeed.

Happy Easter 

[Kenny]

Liquid,

I'm very glad God blessed you with it. To be honest, I wasn't sure it would make sense to anybody besides me. So it's nice to know the analogy worked.

Ghost,

Thank you, I do have a delightful family...indeed, because you know me rather than any of the rest of my family, you're rather getting the short end of the stick, I think; especially now that Natasha, who has been an unmitigated delight, has joined us. (You really should read my wife's book. Which you can buy on Amazon, by the way. It All Started When the Toilet Fell Over, Dessie Pierce. We now return to our regular programming.)

I understand why that one comment seemed strange...my apologies, I had wandered off down a train of thought that I myself am familiar with but that would certainly be very difficult to follow for anybody else. I was channeling Pinky, I suppose. Just set that comment aside and don't worry about it.

And a very happy Easter to you, as well, my good friend.

[Jeremayakovka]

What a lovely online Easter message, a cause for pause. Thanks, Kenny! Happy Easter to Alexandra and all ATB readers!

[Ghost Dansing]

Kenny, check out one of my previous posts where I prove through wikipedia research how the Illuminati and the Elders of Zion are responsible for everything, including toilet overflows (Reference to Dessie's Book Title). Perhaps it will be of helpful insight.

Happy Easter to you again Kenny, and Happy Easter to all my Friends at ATB. :)
 

[Kenny]

[laughing] My dear Ghost, considering that you are by far the most prolific commenter at ATB, and that your average post length is longer than just about anybody else's, I think "one of my previous posts" is hardly sufficiently specific. You'll have to pop a link in there for me.

Oh, and since it is now actually Easter morning, I greet you all with the traditional Easter substitute for, "Mornin', how are ya?":

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

[For the uninitiated, the Easter version of, "Fine, how 'bout yourself?" is, "The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!" But obviously you don't have to come back with that one if you don't actually think the Lord is indeed risen...]

[Kenny]

Of course there's the Catholic version:

GREETING: Alleluia! We can finally eat meat again!

RESPONSE: We already ate a pound of breakfast sausage apiece before coming to church this morning! Alleluia!

(One of my Catholic friends, a graduate of Notre Dame and fanatic supporter of the Irish, once told me that Notre Dame undergraduates had a traditional, albeit unsanctioned, prayer to Mary, which the more devout among you may wish to postpone reading until after Easter -- just giving you fair warning...

"O Blessed Mother Mary, you conceived without sin; grant that we may sin without conception."

I apologize if the sacrilege meter went into the red on that one. And on the principle of in-for-a-penny, in-for-a-pound, there's always this picture of three guys who are so going to hell...

Um, anyway, happy Easter. At least it's obvious that I'm in a good mood, I suppose. Fortunately, not being Muslim, I'm free to believe that God has a robust sense of humor and likes non-malicious pseudo-blasphemous silliness. That's not meant as a slam on Muslims, by the way; I respect the fact that they consider reverence for God and prophets such as Jesus to be far too critical to allow for jokes and silliness involving sacred personages. That's just one of the ways in which our two religions are quite different.)

[Gang of One]

Such an awesome event and an even more awesome promise: the resurrection of not only the Master, but of all who choose to know the Creator.

I take the liberty of consuming some bandwidth [if GD can do it, although she is far more intelligent and erudite than I could ever chance to be, maybe you all won't mind] and post for your edification some text from a somewhat controversial source.

# line 33: 1. HERALDS OF THE RESURRECTION
# line 35: The apostles did not want Jesus to leave them; therefore had they slighted all his statements about dying, along with his promises to rise again. They were not expecting the resurrection as it came, and they refused to believe until they were confronted with the compulsion of unimpeachable evidence and the absolute proof of their own experiences.
# line 41: From the tomb David and Joseph went immediately to the home of Elijah Mark, where they held a conference with the ten apostles in the upper chamber. Only John Zebedee was disposed to believe, even faintly, that Jesus had risen from the dead. Peter had believed at first but, when he failed to find the Master, fell into grave doubting. They were all disposed to believe that the Jews had removed the body. David would not argue with them, but when he left, he said: "You are the apostles, and you ought to understand these things. I will not contend with you; nevertheless, I now go back to the home of Nicodemus, where I have appointed with the messengers to assemble this morning, and when they have gathered together, I will send them forth on their last mission, as heralds of the Master's resurrection. I heard the Master say that, after he should die, he would rise on the third day, and I believe him." And thus speaking to the dejected and forlorn ambassadors of the kingdom, this self-appointed chief of communication and intelligence took leave of the apostles. On his way from the upper chamber he dropped the bag of Judas, containing all the apostolic funds, in the lap of Matthew Levi.
# line 56: From the time of the morontia resurrection until the hour of his spirit ascension on high, Jesus made nineteen separate appearances in visible form to his believers on earth. He did not appear to his enemies nor to those who could not make spiritual use of his manifestation in visible form. His first appearance was to the five women at the tomb; his second, to Mary Magdalene, also at the tomb.
# line 64: James rushed into the house, even while they looked for him at Bethphage, exclaiming: "I have just seen Jesus and talked with him, visited with him. He is not dead; he has risen! He vanished before me, saying, `Farewell until I greet you all together.'" He had scarcely finished speaking when Jude returned, and he retold the experience of meeting Jesus in the garden for the benefit of Jude. And they all began to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. James now announced that he would not return to Galilee, and David exclaimed: "He is seen not only by excited women; even stronghearted men have begun to see him. I expect to see him myself."
# line 77: As a result of sending out the messengers during the midforenoon and from the unconscious leakage of intimations concerning this appearance of Jesus at Joseph's house, word began to come to the rulers of the Jews during the early evening that it was being reported about the city that Jesus had risen, and that many persons were claiming to have seen him. The Sanhedrists were thoroughly aroused by these rumors. After a hasty consultation with Annas, Caiaphas called a meeting of the Sanhedrin to convene at eight o'clock that evening. It was at this meeting that action was taken to throw out of the synagogues any person who made mention of Jesus' resurrection. It was even suggested that any one claiming to have seen him should be put to death; this proposal, however, did not come to a vote since the meeting broke up in confusion bordering on actual panic. They had dared to think they were through with Jesus. They were about to discover that their real trouble with the man of Nazareth had just begun.
# line 81: About half past four o'clock, at the home of one Flavius, the Master made his sixth morontia appearance to some forty Greek believers there assembled. While they were engaged in discussing the reports of the Master's resurrection, he manifested himself in their midst, notwithstanding that the doors were securely fastened, and speaking to them, said: "Peace be upon you. While the Son of Man appeared on earth among the Jews, he came to minister to all men.
# line 86: Rumors of Jesus' resurrection and reports concerning the many appearances to his followers are spreading rapidly, and the whole city is being wrought up to a high pitch of excitement. Already the Master has appeared to his family, to the women, and to the Greeks, and presently he manifests himself in the midst of the apostles. The Sanhedrin is soon to begin the consideration of these new problems which have been so suddenly thrust upon the Jewish rulers. Jesus thinks much about his apostles but desires that they be left alone for a few more hours of solemn reflection and thoughtful consideration before he visits them.

[Gang of One]

... And when the women reported this to the men, two of his apostles ran to the tomb and likewise found it empty"--and here Jacob interrupted his brother to say, "but they did not see Jesus."

As they walked along, Jesus said to them: "How slow you are to comprehend the truth! When you tell me that it is about the teachings and work of this man that you have your discussions, then may I enlighten you since I am more than familiar with these teachings. Do you not remember that this Jesus always taught that his kingdom was not of this world, and that all men, being the sons of God, should find liberty and freedom in the spiritual joy of the fellowship of the brotherhood of loving service in this new kingdom of the truth of the heavenly Father's love? Do you not recall how this Son of Man proclaimed the salvation of God for all men, ministering to the sick and afflicted and setting free those who were bound by fear and enslaved by evil? Do you not know that this man of Nazareth told his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, be delivered up to his enemies, who would put him to death, and that he would arise on the third day? Have you not been told all this? And have you never read in the Scriptures concerning this day of salvation for Jew and gentile, where it says that in him shall all the families of the earth be blessed; that he will hear the cry of the needy and save the souls of the poor who seek him; that all nations shall call him blessed? That such a Deliverer shall be as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. That he will feed the flock like a true shepherd, gathering the lambs in his arms and tenderly carrying them in his bosom. That he will open the eyes of the spiritually blind and bring the prisoners of despair out into full liberty and light; that all who sit in darkness shall see the great light of eternal salvation. That he will bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives of sin, and open up the prison to those who are enslaved by fear and bound by evil. That he will comfort those who mourn and bestow upon them the joy of salvation in the place of sorrow and heaviness. That he shall be the desire of all nations and the everlasting joy of those who seek righteousness. That this Son of truth and righteousness shall rise upon the world with healing light and saving power; even that he will save his people from their sins; that he will really seek and save those who are lost. That he will not destroy the weak but minister salvation to all who hunger and thirst for righteousness. That those who believe in him shall have eternal life. That he will pour out his spirit upon all flesh, and that this Spirit of Truth shall be in each believer a well of water, springing up into everlasting life. Did you not understand how great was the gospel of the kingdom which this man delivered to you? Do you not perceive how great a salvation has come upon you?"

No other system of belief, no other concept of metaphysics, no other mystery cult or polytheistic religion promised salvation -- eternal life -- to any and all who would choose to believe in the fact of resurrection. Through the eons of human history, from evolved to revealed truth, this fact was proven by the carpenter from Nazareth.
And some have the chutzpah to ask "why do they hate us?" ...

[LilMissIndie]

Thank you for the lovely Easter message, Kenny. To you, Alexandra, and all here at ATB, a blessed Easter.

[darthcrUSAderworldtour2007]

Happy Easter and the snow that fell this morning reminded me of how cold it must have been in Jesus' tomb for three days, until the angels rolled back the stone. John 15:13 - Greater love has no one than this, than he lay down his life for his friends. He is risen!

[nofate]

Kenny: LOL!!!

Being somewhat educated (operative word, "somewhat"; mostly auto-didactical), after stints as a "hip" type '70's campus ultra-liberal atheist (of course), agnostic (couldn't get it out of my head), I finally realized that I am a true believer. But one of the hardest things to accept when doing bible study, is the fact that Jesus arose from the dead. This was, and still is, the hardest thing for me to get my mind around. My personal solution is to take my mind out of it, and just believe. Mrs. nofate and my children and my dog taught this wayward sinner that true love is not an intellectual concept that can be argued and then accepted or denied. It just is. I have faith that it is as real as any intellectual concept, even though it cannot be explained by the mind, only approached. That is how I finally accepted the resurrection: it just is, the disciples saw it and told the story, and paid the earthly price so that we could have it with us still.

[Kenny]

nofate,

The very, very short version of my faith journey -- which makes for an interminably long post, alas -- goes something like this:

1. As a child I took it for granted that everything my parents taught me was true.

2. When I was eight I realized that lots of people believed stuff not because they really had any good reason to, but just because they believed their parents...and that since there is no belief about God that is not a minority belief (that is, every religious belief is a belief that the majority of people in the world at most times have thought was wrong, even if they wouldn't come out and say so), "because my parents say so" has to be a shitty reason to believe something. Your odds have got to be less than 50%, because no matter which religious belief is actually true, there are more people whose parents have taught them the wrong belief than the right one. Which left me with absolutely no confidence that my parents were right...but also with no confidence that atheists' parents were right, either. So began my more or less lifelong obsession with figuring out how people talk themselves into believing things that aren't true, and when that can hurt you and when it does no harm, and what the difference is between good reasons to believe things and bad reasons to believe things.

3. For a long time I thought there was no decent way to pick any belief in religion...that it was just a sort of lottery. For example...

A. Take the Hindu belief that everything is an illusion -- how would you disprove that? No evidence can be valid. But that doesn't mean it's true. Christianity says that not only is creation not an illusion, but that you will spend all of eternity as an individual, either in unimaginable bliss or unimaginable torment. What if the Hindus are completely wrong? You can't prove they're wrong; but then they can't provide any even halfway decent evidence that they're right. That's a helluva gamble to take on no evidence other than that you were raised to believe it, or whatever.

B. But at least at first glance, it seems like all religions are in pretty much the same boat, and so is atheism. Take Christianity. You can't prove that it isn't true, because there aren't actually any decent arguments against it that don't beg the question or try to sweep critical evidence under the rug. But philosophical proofs of God's existence like the ontological proof, or Aquinas's five lines of proof, don't work out in the end either. And Pascal's gamble doesn't work, because if this life is all you have, then whether you bet on Christianity or against it, you're all in either way -- and "everything I could possibly gain out of existence" is pretty much an infinite gamble. (That is, the "infinity" of Pascal's gamble on God is a meaningless, nonexistent infinity unless you sneak in the assumption that the gamble is going to pay off.) So, again, how do figure out which gamble has the best odds?

C. Or you could try to go with some sort of Randian rational self-interest approach. But that doesn't work either. For there are at least two possibilities:

i. Christianity or Islam is true, either of which would mean that all of the consequences that really matter are the ones that happen after you die. But all the variations on Randian self-interest -- including the "it works for me" midset of the Results-oriented -- all start with the great, big, whoppin', utterly unprovable assumption that all the consequences that matter are the ones we see and experience before we die. How can you pursue rational self-interest (i.e., maximization of expected future satisfaction) if your margin of error is essentially infinity? Or, to take a different variation, how can you be comfortable saying, "I'm okay with this religion 'cause it seems to be working for me," when Jesus' whole reason for saying the Pharisees were in worse trouble than the prostitutes was that the Pharisees felt like religion was working for them and the prostitutes knew they were in trouble? How can anybody who faces up, even for a moment, to the human capacity for self-deception, feel confident that, "Hey, it feels like it's working, so I got nothing to worry about" is a sane attitude to take? -- I mean, that's essentially the same attiude that's taken by a man who insists on marrying the woman with whom he's besotted even though all his friends and family can see perfectly well that she's going to make him miserable. But on the other hand, what are the alternatives?

ii. Or Christianity isn't true, and the only reason it doesn't get disproved is because it's not falsifiable. Which makes you start looking for a belief system that is falsifiable but that holds up to scrutiny; which would lead you to put your trust in science...except that when scientists start talking about metaphysics they promptly sail off into statements of faith in materialism that are no more falsifiable than the belief that God loves us even though it doesn't look like it. A scientist always can, and a scientist who has been raised to sneer at religion always will, say of anything that science can't explain yet, "Oh, there's a scientific explanation; we just haven't found it yet. But we will." And he could be right. But he could also be wrong. It is a statement of faith, going far beyond the available evidence.

In particular, there's one belief that I don't see any reason whatsoever to think is true, other than societal prejudice. That is the belief that it doesn't matter what you believe about religion as long as it's sincere, because either God doesn't exist at all, or else any God who does exist would certainly not have the bad taste to fail to conform to the expectations of the American Left -- if God exists, He must be "fair" (meaning what the Left means by "fair," whatever that is), and it wouldn't be fair to punish people for a wrong belief if it was sincere; so there's no need to go to all that icky trouble to do homework and study logic and call into question your own preconceived notions. I can't imagine what it is that makes people look at the world we live in and think that if God exists, He is what an American liberal would call "fair." My God, at what time in all of human history has life ever been fair? The one thing we know about God for certain is that if He exists, He sure doesn't care about being "fair" in the modern American sense. But the whole relaxed attitude that says that Fact doesn't matter in religion, is based on the towering and utterly baseless idea that if God exists, He is what a modern liberal would call "fair." And if Christianity is actually true, then this placid state of mildly indolent serenity stands an excellent chance of having eternally and unimaginably and irretrievably catastrophic consequences.

I mean, think about it: in practically every aspect of human existence, even honest mistakes often have very nasty consequences. Life, generally speaking, doesn't give a damn about whether your false beliefs are sincerely held or not. It slams you just the same. If you drink rat poison, then no matter how sincerely you believe it is water, you die. If you sincerely believe that the guy you're marrying is a wonderful man, and then it turns out he's a bigamist, you get lots of pain even though it wasn't your fault at all. Life doesn't say, "Well, you sincerely thought he was a nice guy; so this isn't going to hurt you or psychologically scar your children, because you aren't allowed to get hurt by believing something that isn't true as long as you're sincere about it." In every other area of life, fact matters. What reason would we have to think that in this one area of life, you can believe something that is not in fact true, and yet have no fear that your error might have devastating consequences?

Well, all of that is a pretty heavy burden to carry around when you're ten or eleven or even twenty, especially when you don't tell your parents that you're struggling because you don't want them to worry. In the end, as you guys already know, I wound up back in Christianity, but it wasn't because of philosophical arguments or anything of that sort, really. Every philosophical argument I could construct to prove that God existed, I could tear back down the moment I switched to devil's advocate. So in the end, what it comes down to goes something like this:

1. The Buddha and Jesus cannot possibly both be right, though they certainly could both be wrong. But if Jesus rose from the dead, that's more than the Buddha did -- maybe not more than the Buddha claimed to have done, but more than anybody actually saw the Buddha do. I think you have to say the smart money would go on Jesus rather than the Buddha, as long as Jesus really did rise from the dead.

2. The rabbis whose schools of thought developed into modern Judaism, and Jesus, cannot possibly both be right about the meaning of the Old Testament and Jesus' role in salvation. But I know that, however bright Hillel or Maimonedes might have been, neither one of them rose from the dead. If Jesus rose from the dead, then I think you have to say the smart money is on Jesus to know what He's talking about more than the rabbis did.

3. The comparisons between Zoroaster and Jesus, or Mohammed and Jesus, or Confucius and Jesus, or Plato and Jesus, have this same disproportionality. If Jesus really rose from the dead, then only prejudice and one's own cultural assumptions could make you trust those guys more than Jesus.

4. And when you start getting to Joseph Smith, or L. Ron Hubbard...okay, I can't keep a straight face at that point.

So if there's really a God, and there was ever a man who really did have special knowledge of Him that couldn't be explained by skeptical materialistic explanations or attribution to Satanic deception, and Jesus really did rise from the dead, then Jesus has a better claim than anybody else does. But of course that assumes He rose from the dead; and lots of people say He didn't.

But here's what I found, in the end. The people who say He didn't...well, okay, but then in that case what did happen? I mean, there are some facts that we pretty well know, and something had to cause them. So if it wasn't a resurrection, then what's your explanation?

And the reason I'm a Christian, is that when you chase down the alternative explanations, they all fall apart. A conspiracy on the part of the disciples, stealing the body or whatever? But all they got out of it was suffering and death, and yet none of the conspirators ever broke down and confessed. A mistake; they went to the wrong tomb and when it was empty they assumed he had risen from the dead? But that would certainly be easy to disprove: you just head out to Joseph's tomb at about 3:00 when it's nice and bright and say, "Look, you morons, here's the body; get a map of the cemetery next time." Mass hallucination? Doesn't happen; that would be as much of a miracle as resurrection. He just fainted on the cross and then woke up in the tomb and staggered to the house where the disciples were hiding without stopping by a hospital first to get his trauma treated and when he finally stumbled into the and the disciples said, "Wow, he's risen from the dead in power; He must actually be God"? (That last one, by the way, is not something I've made up as a parody; it was a real live theory that was, absurd as it seems, taken seriously for a long time.)

For sheer brazenness you have to love Elaine Pagels, who theorizes in The Gnostic Gospels that the male disciples found it easier to keep power in the church by pretending that Jesus had risen physicall from the dead -- and then she proceeds to spend the rest of the book talking as though she has proved that that's what in fact happened, without spending even another sentence actually examining the evidence for it or addressing other possible hypotheses...and by the end of the book she is insisting that the Catholic Church should change all its policies ASAP to suit her feminist agenda -- on the basis of her "scholarly" conclusions. Which is, from the standpoint of scholarly rigor and open-mindedness, pretty much exactly on a scale with the explanation I've heard from some Muslims, i.e., that Jesus didn't really die -- Satan just worked a miracle to make it look like he did. Q. E. D. Refute that, if you can.

What finally convinced me that the only remotely decent explanation for how the evidence came to be what it is, was the Resurrection, is interestingly enough not really so much that the Christians proved the other guys were wrong. What's funny is that the Christians haven't had to do the proving -- every explanation that one non-Christian comes up with, some other non-Christian shoots down, because he has his own theory...which is promptly shot down in turn. In the end every time somebody claims to have found an "explanation" other than the Resurrection, the explanation winds up being no real explanation at all, because every such explanation runs up against something it can't explain -- and when that happens, each such explanation just skips that part and hopes nobody notices.

The more closely you dig into the evidence, and the harder you probe the various theories, the more firmly the Resurrection explanation holds up, and the more the others fall apart. In the end there are only, I have come to believe, two possibilities:

1. Jesus rose from the dead.

2. Something else utterly inexplicable happened and we have no idea what -- but we just know that whatever it was it wasn't the Resurrection.

But you see, I've never been able to reconcile myself to blind faith -- not blind faith in Christianity, not blind faith in scientific materialism, not blind faith that God must be politically correct because otherwise he wouldn't suit my personal tastes, not blind faith that the Buddha is trustworthy, not blind faith in Mohammed, not blind faith in my parents, not blind faith in the societal prejudices and preconceived notions with which my culture has saddled me. And when in the end all that's left is those last two choices -- well, it's the second one of the two that takes more blind faith. You have to believe that you know that Jesus can't possibly have risen from the dead -- and I have never heard anybody even begin to justify their claim to have such knowledge.

Anyhow, I don't mean to say that this is what Easter means to most modern-day Christians. I don't think it is, actually, because most modern-day Christians haven't gone through the same crisis of faith that I have. I mean, most of us have gone through some sort of crisis of faith, but most other people's crises don't look all that much like mine, because most people don't have the same deeply cynical and skeptical temperament that I have. But for me as an individual, Easter is pivotal at the most fundamental and personal level. It is the one place in human history where it most appears that there's actual empirical evidence to point to a solution to a problem that is otherwise, as far as I can tell, unsolvable except by arbitrary and dubious assumption -- and yet the one problem of all problems that one most desperately needs to solve more or less correctly. I'm a Christian because something that changed the world happened between Friday night and Sunday morning, and in my years of asking people to help me understand what happened, the only people whose explanation even comes close to holding water are those Christians who say that Jesus rose, in literal fact, from the dead.

Not that I expect anybody to convert to Christianity because of this long and largely incoherent comment; that's not what I'm trying to do. It took years of research for me to get to where I am on this subject, and my purpose is not to persuade anybody. It's just to try to explain why for me it's not just that the factuality of the Resurrection is important to me -- it's that the Resurrection is the most important of all facts. It was the critical piece of intellectual terra firma on which I could establish empirical confidence, and once you have just one firm piece of ground to stand on, then you can start to build. You could say that the Resurrection is my own personal cogito ergo sum, my point of...well, not certainty exactly, but at least a confidence that there was a clear direction to the weight of some actual evidence.

And that's not really important to anybody else, except for one thing: the role that the Resurrection plays for me, is the role it played for the first generation of Christians. You simply cannot begin to understand the New Testament if you do not recognize that the men who wrote the New Testament and built the nascent Church, would have regarded the modern liberals' attitude toward the Resurrection -- that the story's nice, so it doesn't matter whether it happened or not -- with horror and revulsion. Literally everything changed for them, not because it was an inspiring myth from which they could draw life lessons, but because they were absolutely and unshakably convinced that it happened.

And I'm going to stop rambling now. Thank y'all for indulging me. I'll quit talking and listen for a while instead, which is a far more profitable activity anyway.

[Ghost Dansing]

Christology is a field of study within Christian theology which is concerned with the nature of Jesus the Christ. In particular, how the divine and human are related in his person. Christology is generally less concerned with the details of Jesus' life than it is with how the human and divine co-exist in one person. Although this study of the inter-relationship of these two natures is the foundation of Christology, some essential sub-topics within the field of Christology include:

the Incarnation,
the resurrection,
and the salvific work of Jesus (known as soteriology.

[Ghost Dansing]

Religion is more a matter of faith than reason.... but it is important to have the right committee to decide what everybody is going to believe.

For example:

The Council of Nicaea defined that Jesus was fully divine and also human. What it did not do was make clear how one person could be both divine and human, and how the divine and human were related within that one person. This led to the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries of the christian era.

The most important event in these controversies was the Council of Chalcedon, held in 451 CE. The Council promulgated a Christological doctrine known as the hypostatic union. In short, this doctrine states that two natures, one human and one divine, are united in the one person of Christ. The Council further taught that each of these natures, the human and the divine, was distinct and complete. This view is sometimes called Dyophysite (meaning two natures) by those who rejected it.

The Chalcedonian Creed did not put an end to all Christological debate, but it did clarify the terms used and became a point of reference for all other Christologies.

[gringoman]

Hey Kenny,

I didn't take it as a slam, or a slam dunk. Anyway, I don't know that we're that far apart on the nature of belief. It's all about faith, in my view. Now you don't seem to like "blind" faith. And that's all right, for you. However, there are many without your need and ability to cogitate (as you probably have noticed). For them, "blind" might do just fine. In either case, concerning the events after the Crucifixion, it must be clear that there were only two possibilities (excluding off-beat muslim views etc.)

1. Jesus died and rose from the dead.
2. Jesus died and did not rise from the dead.

Now, nothing on this planet can be ultimately proven or disproven by human reason (according to gringoVision, admittedly an outpost of human reason.) It's only a conceit of "science" to think otherwise. Even high school students now know how appearances can deceive. Even that "solid" I-pod at your fingertips is in fact an incredible field of whirling electrons (even without the 1000 top tunes)The best you can do is to take the "science" and the "evidence" a little further and try to establish the next "fact" or outpost of "truth" and so on into a place where humans can't really go: infinity.

Ergo, by human reason, you can't "prove" that Jesus rose again or did not rise again. Everything that's not just legend or hearsay was written down, and usually re-written and always after the fact. There was no remote news broadcast to living rooms from reporters in the field, even if the Roman Public Affairs Office would have permitted it. Now, you yourself have a set of criteria which satisfy you as "proof." But I'm sure you will quickly agree that only a percentage, probably a rather small perccentage, of humanity agrees with your criteria. And what of it? For you, that's their problem, not yours. Correct? For you, the answer was gotten via human reason, your human reason. And yours is quite good. You're not a consultant for nothing. For me, what you got was gotten in the only way it can be gotten---by "faith," albeit in your case hardly what we call "blind" faith. For you, faith requires history, not mythology.

Or maybe this is just semantics? Faith. Proof. Maybe you're just a wee bit prejudiced against a word like "faith", as I am against a word like "proof?"?

Oh, and speaking of "proof." I just remembered a notorious ecclesiastical sidebar. It addresses the conventional belief that Jesus was Jewish. I suspect you may have heard the alternative view. That is, Jesus was in fact Irish (admittedly, an heretical view.) Unfortunately, one of the items of proof slips my historical memory right now, so I think I'll wait to see if it re-surfaces.

[Ghost Dansing]

1. Jesus died and rose from the dead.
2. Jesus died and did not rise from the dead.

Interesting post gringoman..... a couple other theories out there showing it is not even a simple "either-or" proposition for reason.

3. Jesus never phyically died.... by some machination was in fact pre-death then resuscitated.... dissappeared, lived in exile.... had kids
4. Jesus never actually existed.... was totally a product of aggregated mythology
5. Jesus existed however was mythologically deified post-mortem 

One might suggest that rather than conclusions based on perfect reason or perfect faith human beings are capable only of self-deceptions approaching perfection, that all faith and all reason are in fact idiosyncratic at the extreme pole, and at best a product of socially constructed reality.

The moral substratum of a belief derived from  faith, reasoning or a hybrid of both; specifically its "goodness" or "badness" may depend upon the purpose to which that belief is maintained or applied, as opposed to the inherent characteristics of the belief.  

[slowtrain]

Kenny,

For the most part, I think your comments are scholarly and thoughtful. However, every now and then, something bewildering jumps out of you that I find difficult to reconcile with scholarship and empiricism. Such as:

But there really is not, outside of possibly Women's Studies and African-American Studies, any branch of "scholarship" more patently self-deceiving than the Religion Studies departments of modern universities.

How so Kenny? Please qualify or substantiate that statement, which I happen to think is highly pre-suppositional.

[nofate]

This statement seems to have generated some debate from both sides of the aisle. At the risk of butting in and being totally wrong, both, I did not percieve it as being either "strange" or "pre-suppositional".
"But there really is not, outside of possibly Women's Studies and African-American Studies, any branch of "scholarship" more patently self-deceiving than the Religion Studies departments of modern universities...This was a really strange comment Kenny..."
"How so Kenny? Please qualify or substantiate that statement, which I happen to think is highly pre-suppositional."
I thought of the "modern" university and all that that implies: the PC police, muslim apologetics, multiculturalism, slavishness to government funding, and much more, that we are all familiar with. Black studies teaches that blacks cannot be racists because they are not the oppressors. Kwanza. Women's studies teaches that women can do anything men can, as long as the physical standards are lowered. In the military, men have to do 50 pushups (not sure of the actual number) to pass physical training, while women in the same program will only have to do 20. Everything has to be perfectly "fair" by some PC standard set by liberal administrators. Anyone who has been to church in the last 20 years knows that this stuff has infected "modern" religion, also. So maybe I'm strange and somewhat pre-suppositional, but I saw nothing unusual or controversial about that statement at all.

[Kenny]

Slowtrain,

Without giving a complete answer (because my kids are waiting at home), I think probably the reason you find it bewildering, is that it's coming out of some very specific experiences -- namely, that of having been trained in a discipline that is very similar to what the typical Religious Studies department pretends to be, but that is genuinely rigorous. In short, I was a classics major at Princeton. And not only was I a classics major, but I was a classics major whose special field of academic interest was the interaction between Hellenism and Judaism. Furthermore, I was struggling with the questions of agnosticism, empiricism in religion, etc., and I was reading a tremendous amount of religious scholarship that was more related to my attempts to think rationally about religion than to my academic studies. So I took numerous classes that were actually offered by the Department of Religion, and to cap it all off, my senior thesis was on the process of distortion/enrichment that affected the concept of "law" as it moved out of the Hebrew torah into the Greek nomos. Thus, for my senior thesis, one of my advisors was from the Department of Classics at Princeton, and the other was from the Department of Religion.

Since I'm trying to be brief, all I can say is that there was a massive difference between the two departments, and that difference boils down to this: in the Department of Classics, you were expected to be honest and rigorous in your scholarship. But even a cursory experience with the methods and -- to use the phrase extremely loosely -- "professional standards" of the Department of Religion (including the textbooks and studies that were published by other universities' Departments of Religion), was enough to make you feel that to apply the term "scholarship" to what the Department of Religion was doing, was to abuse and debase the term.

I once wrote a brief, for me, treatment of the numerous ways in which religious "scholarship" systematically abuses the standards that real academic disciplines live and work and peer-review by. It ran to about thirty single-space pages; so I won't reproduce it here. What I will offer here is three anecdotes (yes, I know, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I'm just trying to give you a feel for how disastrously bad the Princeton Department of Religion was when I was there), and then a simple way for anybody who wants to, to go verify (or disprove) my charge.

1. At one point in one of my discussion groups in a Christian ethics class (taught by an atheist who betrayed in every lecture that he did not actually understand how Christians thought, and whose every lecture was therefore largely useless), one of the graduate students from the DoR casually stated, as if it were a fact as firmly and unquestionably established as Al Gore thinks global warming is, that the gospel of John was composed in the last couple of decades of the second century. Now this was, indeed, the "consensus" of "scholars" (the latter term is usually defined to exclude conservative Christian scholars because they, being Christian, are by definition not objective) -- a hundred years or so ago. But in 1934 -- 1934, mind you -- C. H. Roberts published the famous Rylands P52 papyrus fragment, which was found in Egypt (and thus can hardly have been copied until a significant number of years after the date of the gospel's composition and final revision), and which is most reliably dated between 125 and 150 A.D. It is probably the single most famous manuscript fragment in all of New Testament textual criticism and papyrology; its existence had already been known for half a century by the time we were sitting in that class -- and this Princeton graduate student had never heard of it! He was parroting an orthodoxy that had been out of date for fifty years. It was as if I had run into a classics graduate student who had never been told that Arthur Evans's "reconstruction" of Knossos was really bad archeological practice that no self-respecting archeologist would commit today.

2. As a freshman coming out of the southeastern Oklahoma hills, which in my youth was not exactly overrun with atheists, Jews, Hindus or Muslims, I couldn't wait to familiarize myself with other religions besides Christianity, and therefore immediately signed up for the DoR's Religions of the World class -- taught, again, by an atheist, who therefore proceeded from the fundamental assumption that every one of the people whose ideas he purported to be able to represent accurately and fairly, was a fool. Fortunately for me, the first religion he taught was Christianity. I listened to the first few lectures and heard him present, as the standard and common beliefs of all Christians, things that not only I myself did not believe, but that no Christian I had ever met would agree with. I mean, you would think somebody just spouting stuff at random would occasionally (on the broken-clock principle) get something right by sheer blind luck, but this guy clearly had no genuine understanding whatsoever of the subject matter he claimed to be teaching. In short order I observed to myself, "Well, if he's this much of a jackass when it comes to Christianity, what are the odds he's going to get Hinduism and Islam and Judaism right?" -- and luckily for me, I still had time to drop the class.

But two years later, when I was a resident advisor, one of my freshmen signed up for the same class. So I warned him in advance, "Look, don't pay any attention to anything this guy tells you about Christianity because it's all complete bullshit." About two months later -- when it was too late for Gitendra to drop the class -- my door burst open and an absolutely enraged GT stomped in and proceeded to unburden himself about how grotesquely the professor was misrepresenting Hinduism. All I could do was sit there and try not to say, "I told you so."

I refuse to believe that there is any way whatsoever that a person so utterly without actual understanding of his subject matter could possibly be allowed to present a course in any self-respecting Department of Classics. But this moron not only was teaching in the Princeton DoR -- he actually had tenure.

3. When I went to Princeton I still had my doubts about Christianity, because I was under the impression that religious scholars had demonstrated that most of orthodox Christianity's beliefs about the origins of the religion, were completely wrong. So I couldn't wait to get my hands on this scholarship. And it was this scholarship that convinced me, more than anything else, that Christianity was true -- because you never read such completely tendentious, dishonest, pseudoscholarly shit in all your life; and in the end I figured, "Well, if that's the best the skeptics have to offer, then the Christians win in a landslide." Take, for example, Elaine Pagels (who also had tenure in the PDoR) -- if I had written The Gnostic Gospels instead of her, and I had turned it in as my senior thesis, I would have been absolutely crucified by my classics professors. I can't imagine that piece of complete crap surviving the peer review process in a Department of Classics -- but the DoR thought that in Elaine Pagels they had one of the brightest stars in the scholarly firmament. There is only one way that you could be impressed by The Gnostic Gospels -- namely, if you hadn't the foggiest idea of what actual historical research and scholarship looks like.

So, all of this is just the opinions of a guy who, well, sure, he graduated from Princeton cum laude, but that was twenty years ago, and he can't even read Hebrew or French or German any more, and for the last two decades he's been programming computers and trading futures and consulting...so why should you believe him? (That is to say, me.) And the answer is...you probably shouldn't. Don't take my word for it. Just do this:

1. Go to any university library, get a copy of David Hackett Fischer's Historian's Fallacies, and read it. This will give you a decent idea of what sorts of standards are followed by real historians.

2. Then go read J. B. Bury's History of Greece, so you can see what real historians do in real life when writing about antiquity.

3. Then go read Walter Burkert's Greek Religion (in the original German if you're good at it, but there's a perfectly good English translation as well). This will show you not only what it looks like when a real historian writes about antiquity -- it will show you what it looks like when a real historian writes specifically about religion in antiquity.

4. Now -- go read anything by Elaine Pagels or John Shelby Spong.

And after that, you won't need me to tell you that the kind of stuff that gets you tenure at the Princeton or Harvard Departments of Religion, stinks like a three-story outhouse.

[slowtrain]

nofate,

With all due respect, if all you know about African American Studies is Kwanza (a feast that less than 15% of African Americans celebrate), then I am afraid you don't know enough to comment on the subject, because it would be equal in effect to a situation where all you know about African Americans is the color of their skin or that they came from Africa. If that were to be the case, then you speak out of pre-supposition and ill informed perception. The same goes for your knowledge of "women studies".

Black studies teaches that blacks cannot be racists because they are not the oppressors.

Pick any University in the United States or anywhere in the world and show me any academic curriculum that supports your claim.

Anyone who has been to church in the last 20 years knows that this stuff has infected "modern" religion, also.

What kind of church do you attend anyway…Episcopal? I don’t see what you are insinuating in my church.

So maybe I'm strange and somewhat pre-suppositional, but I saw nothing unusual or controversial about that statement at all.

You may very well be and that would be a shame.

[Ghost Dansing]

Hmmmm it sounds like the Princeton Department of Religion really made you angry. Anger is a waste of energy young man.

Now, wasn't Albert Einstein at Princeton? Here he's meeting Ben Gurion

 

[slowtrain]

Kenny,

What do you trade -- pork or soybean? Is the game still a play of "fast and loose" …buying high and selling low and all that? :)

I don’t doubt your experience at Princeton and if I may add, it was not all a loss. After all, you learned how bad the program was and here we are one way or another, being informed from that experience.

Nevertheless, I did not see how you could make such a generalized statement about "modern universities" in your original comments, knowing that there are well over a hundred reputable Christian universities and colleges in the United States that are in no way "patently self-deceiving" in scholarship.

By the way, the same problems can be found with the sciences -- natural sciences, medical sciences, social sciences and so on. Nevertheless, there are still many good people out there, doing work, in spite of the culture at Princeton and Harvard.

In any case what has that got to do with African American and Women studies?

[Kenny]

Slowtrain,

I apologize for not expressing myself clearly; I was thinking of secular universities, not explicitly Christian ones. It didn't occur to me that I was being ambiguous. People such as Gordon Fee do fine, careful work (not that I don't disagree with Fee frequently, but he's a real scholar making a genuine attempt at intellectual integrity). And even at Princeton there was at least one professor in the Department of Religion who was quality; I took an outstanding course on Thomas Aquinas from him. Can't remember his name, though.

As far as the validity of the generalization goes: remember that I read a very great deal of religious scholarship back in my day, so that my opinion of religious scholarship in general (in, as I say, secular universities) is not by any means based solely on a one-university sample. The appalling stuff is endemic in secular religious scholarship as a whole. It's not just that I've read a couple of books that were insults to the intelligence; there is no question that the overall standards are abysmal. Are there quality departments to be found? No doubt, here and there. But it says a very great deal that Elaine Pagels's work was considered good enough in her field as a whole that Princeton thought landing her was a major coup. That says quite a bit about the standards in that field.

So I stick to my generalization -- with this caveat, that I decided fifteen years or so that the little I could learn from those imbeciles didn't justify the time it took to wade through and sift through all the moronic chaff. So I quit reading it fifteen years ago, and therefore if there has been a major revolution in standards in the past fifteen years, then my contempt is as far out of date as the revolution is old.

Ghost, as far as the religion studies department's making me mad: one of the major flaws in my character has always been that I do not suffer fools gladly, and in particular I am annoyed, far more than is charitable, by pompous persons who bask in the glow of self-admiration but in reality couldn't figure out how to get out a paper bag if you gave them a pickaxe and dynamite. John Shelby Spong annoys me inordinately, for example, but it's not because he's a heretic (though he unquestionably is) -- it's because the arguments he uses to try to defend his heresy are so stupid. I don't mind the heresy any more than I mind those elements of your own political philosophy that I think are misguided; but stupid arguments annoy me even when (in fact especially when) the stupid arguments are used to defend the truth.

And if you want to say, "Then you must not like yourself very much"...[chuckling drily] why, you're absolutely correct.

[Kenny]

Forgot to answer a couple of other questions: back when I was a CTA, before I got tired of never having a holiday (because the markets were open most days and the currency markets in particular were 24/7) and my partner died of leukemia and I decided to go into consulting and let other people deal with the stress of actual trading, I traded all kinds of stuff. Probably made the majority of my money in pre-Euro foreign currencies; the deutsche Mark was particularly good to me, for example. But my most consistent profits came from pork bellies, though the market was too thin for me to be able to trade much volume in it. And I did okay in corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar, coffee, crude oil and Eurodollars. Never did play the stock indexes much because there was just too much slippage on the down side, and though my partner had traded lumber for years, by the time I got into the game Bear Stearns had killed the goose, as it were, by squeezing the market on contract expiry so often that the futures had stopped converging to cash and people stopped using it as a hedge -- which of course dried up all the liquidity and killed the contract. But I got out back in the early '90's; so I only remember a couple or three actual trades at this point. Bought crude oil two days before Saddam invaded Kuwait, for example, so you can certainly accuse me of being a war profiteer -- I made a bunch of money really fast on that one. On the other hand, I had heavy short positions on in multiple foreign currencies one day when a rumor swept the currency pits that President Bush (the first one) had been assassinated. The dollar snapped down six or seven weeks' worth in about twenty minutes and ran all my stops, knocking me out with big losses and throwing me long foreign currencies across the board -- and fifteen minutes later the news hit the floor, "No, no, it's fine, totally a rumor," and the damn things skyrocketed right back up to where they had been half an hour earlier and killed me all over againg going back up. I lost three months' profit in forty minutes; so I remember that day for sure.

My best trade of all time came when I put my big clients long coffee on Friday right before the markets closed when the per-contract margin was about $1,000, and a huge freeze hit Brazil on Sunday and obliterated the entire coffee crop. On Monday morning the coffee futures market (which didn't have tight limits at the time) gapped up on the opening $12,000 per contract, and then kept going up from there...I made a 1200% return on my clients' money in three days. (But it was, I confess, pretty much by sheer dumb luck -- I had noticed that coffee was starting to climb and figured I didn't know what was going on but I'd take a shot a hitching a ride and seeing how far it went.)

As I say, though, that was a very long time ago. Now I write software and design business processes for big energy trading companies -- at the moment I'm the primary functional designer for a big project to build custom in-house power trading software at a client who trades power in all the major ISO's and control areas in North America. So I still get to hang out with traders (I like traders, after all), but I sleep easy at night and when I'm on vacation, because I'm not going to get a computer beeping at me at 2:00 a.m. to tell me my stops have just been run and I'm twenty grand poorer than I was when I went to bed. The money's not nearly as good but the peace of mind is more than worth it.

[Ghost Dansing]

Elaine Pagels (née Hiesey, born February 13, 1943), is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Pagels was born in California, graduated from Stanford University (B.A. 1964, M.A. 1965) and, after briefly studying dance at Martha Graham's studio, began studying for her Ph.D. at Harvard University as a student of Helmut Koester. She married theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels in 1969.

At Harvard, she was part of a team studying the Nag Hammadi library manuscripts. Upon finishing her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970, she joined the faculty at Barnard College, where she headed the department of religion from 1974. Her study of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts was the basis for The Gnostic Gospels (1979), a popular introduction to the Nag Hammadi library.

The bestselling book won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the twentieth century. In the book she argued that the Christian church was founded in a society espousing a number of contradictory viewpoints. Gnosticism as a movement was not very coherent and there were several areas of disagreement between different factions. Gnosticism attracted women in particular because of its egalitarian perspective which allowed their participation in sacred rites.

Wikipedia 

[Kenny]

[chuckling] The committees giving her those awards sure are notable for their mastery of historical method, aren't they? Why, they're almost as objective and driven by merit and unaffected by the degree to which the work in question tells them what they want to hear, as are the Academy Awards voters (An Inconvenient Truth) and the Grammy voters (Dixie Chicks).

Seriously, the reason I remember The Gnostic Gospels more than most of the "scholarship" I read, is precisely that my expectations were so high going in. I was very excited when I sat down and opened it up. It reminds me very much of my experience the first time I read Keynes's General Theory -- you're expecting a genius and what you get is a complete ass and a dishonest one to boot. You get to the end and you close it and you're thinking, "Um...surely there's a different Elaine Pagels? 'Cause this can't possibly be the person all these other people have been talking about..."

I say again, read Burkert first, and then read Pagels. Same principle as the feds use when training agents to detect counterfeit money: you make them handle a whole bunch of real money, and then when you pass 'em a fake it just feels all wrong. If you read Burkert and then Pagels...well, just try it, that's all I'm sayin.'

[Bruce]

I came across the blog and your piece quite by accident. I really enjoyed your piece on the resurrection. I never thought of it as a "surprise", which it was of course. What a great surprise indeed. I can't imagine all the suprises we who trust in Christ can look forward to.

[Ghost Dansing]

Jus member Kenny.... youull change wen luv cums ta town..... all men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them.

[Ghost Dansing]

I think you'll get a kick out of this one Kenny.... What did you learn in school today?

[Ghost Dansing]

David Hackett Fischer (b. December 2, 1935) is University Professor and Earl Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University. His major works have tackled everything from large macroeconomic and cultural trends (Albion's Seed, The Great Wave) to narrative histories of significant events (Paul Revere's Ride, Washington's Crossing) to explorations of historiography (Historians' Fallacies).

He is best known for his major study Albion's Seed, which argued that core aspects of American culture stem from several different British folkways and regional cultures, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington's Crossing, a narrative of George Washington's leadership of the Continental Army during the winter of 1776-1777 during the American Revolutionary War.

Review (Of "Historians' Fallacies") © 2001 Branislav L. Slantchev

I am not a historian and after reading this compact, but not necessarily brief, exposé by Mr. Fischer, I am sure I don't want to be one, for it appears there is no way to write any sort of historical work without falling into at least one of the myriad of fallacies enumerated in this book. The author's brilliant and insightful prose leaves almost no historian intact, even the famous ones (and perhaps mostly the famous ones) come under attack for getting ensnared into the traps of logical deficiency.

The book is very entertaining because of Mr. Fischer's sarcastic wit, but also because it reveals the author's immense erudition and it is always amusing when a learned person pokes fun at another.

The book is divided into three major parts on fallacies of inquiry, explanation, and argument. Each part consists of several chapters, each devoted to a particular group of the type. And finally, each chapter comprises subdivisions of specific fallacies, each explained and then illustrated with at least one example from some historian's published work.

One may not agree with everything that Mr. Fischer has to say (e.g. his thoughts on the use of theory in historical research), but one should nevertheless read and re-read this book.

Every time I write anything of extended length, I browse this little tome with some trepidation lest I find out I need a major revision of what I've written. However, it is always better to catch mistakes on your own, before you've made a fool of yourself in public.

This book is most highly recommended. May 15, 2001. BLS

[gringoman]

Is a picture of Heartbreak off-topic?

http://www.blackfive.net/main/2007/04/marine_staff_se.html

[Ghost Dansing]

Yankee Bayonet

I will be home then.... 

[Ghost Dansing]

(Dubya) and his advisers have made a lot of ridiculous charges about critics of the war in Iraq: they’re unpatriotic, they want the terrorists to win, they don’t support the troops, to cite just a few. But none of these seem quite as absurd as President Bush’s latest suggestion, that critics of the war whose children are at risk are too “emotional” to see things clearly.

The direct target was Matthew Dowd, one of the chief strategists of Mr. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, who has grown disillusioned with the president and the war, which he made clear in an interview with Jim Rutenberg published in The Times last Sunday. But by extension, Mr. Bush’s comments were insulting to the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and spouses have served or will serve in Iraq.

They are perfectly capable of forming judgments about the war, pro or con, on the merits. But when Mr. Bush was asked about Mr. Dowd during a Rose Garden news conference yesterday, he said, “This is an emotional issue for Matthew, as it is for a lot of other people in our country.”

Mr. Dowd’s case, Mr. Bush said, “as I understand it, is obviously intensified because his son is deployable.”.....

....Mr. Dowd said his experiences were a backdrop to his reconsideration of his support of the war and Mr. Bush. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is something deeply wrong with the White House’s dismissing his criticism as emotional, as if it has no reasoned connection to Mr. Bush’s policies.

This form of attack is especially galling from a president who from the start tried to paint this war as virtually sacrifice-free: the Iraqis would welcome America with open arms, the war would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues — and the all-volunteer military would concentrate the sacrifice on only a portion of the nation’s families.

Dubya

The lies of this Republican administration are melting into history. The shallow, callous self serving political philosophy of modern Republicanism has culminated in a Republican administration that has epitomized the ideological inbreeding at its base.

After four years of occupation, untold numbers killed by death squads and suicide bombers, and searing experiences like Abu Ghraib, few Iraqis still look on American soldiers as liberators. Instead, thousands marked this week’s anniversary by burning American flags and marching through the streets of Najaf chanting, “Death to America.”

Once again, tens of thousands of American troops are pouring into Baghdad. Yesterday the Pentagon announced that battle-weary Army units in Iraq would have to stay on for an additional three months past their scheduled return dates.

(Dubya)  is desperately gambling that by stretching the Army to the absolute limits of its deployable strength, he may be able to impose some relative calm in the capital. And he seems to imagine that should that gamble succeed, the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki will, without any serious pressure from Washington, take the steps toward sharing political power and economic resources it has tenaciously resisted since the day it took office a year ago.

Dubya

In headier times, bushies bragged about "W the Gambler", "W the Poker Player", a man's man.....a brush clearing cocky Texan..... "bring 'em on".... we're strong on defense 'cause we talk tough (and do stupid things).

This is the way the world ends for modern Republicanism, Not with a bang but a whimper....

[Ghost Dansing]

Walter Burkert (born Neuendettelsau, Bavaria, February 2, 1931), an scholar of Greek religion and cults, is an emeritus professor of classics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and also has taught in the United Kingdom and the United States. He has influenced generations of students of religion since the 1960s, combining in the modern way the findings of archaeology and epigraphy with the work of poets, historians, and philosophers. He has published books on the balance between lore and science in the followers of Pythagoras, and more extensively on ritual and archaic cult survival, on the ritual killing at the heart of religion, on mystery religions, and on the reception in the Hellenic world of Near Eastern and Persian culture, which sets Greek religion in its wider Aegean and Near Eastern context.

From the Wiki 

Given the evidence, some have suggested an intrinsic relationship between religion and violence. One line of scholarship, represented by Norman Cohn and J. Harold Ellens, holds that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam incorporate in their respective theologies the ancient Zoroastrian notion that history and the human soul are caught in an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, God and the Devil, which cannot be resolved without violence.

According to Ellens, the violent discourse of Christian doomsday prophets, no less than the destructive actions of suicide bombers in Palestine and extremist religio-nationalists in Israel, are shaped unconsciously by the metaphor of cosmic conflict that has become the principle narrative of Western culture. Other scholars who theorize the close relationship between religion and violence look to the primordial connection of religion to ritual killing. The link has been made by the classicist Walter Burkert and the religious historian Jonathan Z. Smith, but the best known proponent of this view is Rene Girard who posits sacrifice as the resolution to the cycles of violence that spring from mimetic rivalry - the contest to obtain the objects or status that another party possesses (see also Hamerton-Kelly). According to Girard, in such situations a scapegoat is singled out, which stands in for the ills suffered by society and becomes the object of collective murder. Girard’s thesis is capable of sustaining historical particulars. Recently, he explained the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as mimetic competition played out “on a planetary scale” (2001).

Link

[Michael van der Galiën]

Kenny,

Re. Universities and religion. I do not follow any classes about religion as such, but sometimes 'religion' is part of another class, for instance about American Society - what role does religion play, etc.

I recognize a lot in what you say about Princeton.

On a related note: I always thought that conservatives were exaggerating how 'liberal' scholars / universities are, but since I have switched from Law to American Studies my discontent with the culture has grown. The far majority are moderate socialists who detest capitalism, or so it seems, and don't held Christianity in a high regard either.

[Ghost Dansing]

Here are some events from the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion:

CSR 

I'd like to haunt this one..... Religion and the English Enlightenment

Here are some Religion resources on the Web hosted at Iowa State University:

Link 

[Ghost Dansing]

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement — the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right — suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure,” he wrote, “and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university’s law school. She’s the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.....

.....  Regent isn’t a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva are religious universities. It’s run by someone whose first reaction to 9/11 was to brand it God’s punishment for America’s sins.

Two days after the terrorist attacks, Mr. Robertson held a conversation with Jerry Falwell on Mr. Robertson’s TV show “The 700 Club.” Mr. Falwell laid blame for the attack at the feet of “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians,” not to mention the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way. “Well, I totally concur,” said Mr. Robertson.

NYT Article on CommonDreams 

The problem of course is the Catholic Church became to Liberal with heretics claiming to be Christians.... this is the net result. It is unfortunate that such misguided tolerance has been allowed over the Centuries.

Secularism may be one of the great developments in history, but the secularism that holds sway in much of the West — that is, in Western Europe — is flawed; it has a bug in its programming. The mistaken conviction that reason and faith are two distinct realms has weakened Europe and has brought it to the verge of catastrophic collapse. As he said in a speech in 2004: “There exist pathologies in religion that are extremely dangerous and that make it necessary to see the divine light of reason as a ‘controlling organ.’ . . . However . . . there are also pathologies of reason . . . there is a hubris of reason that is no less dangerous.” If you seek a way out of the vast post-9/11 quagmire (Baghdad bomb blasts, Iranian nukes, Danish cartoons, ever-more-bizarre airport security measures and the looming mayhem they are meant to stop), and for that matter if you believe in Europe and “the West” (the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, the whole heritage of 2,500 years of history), then now, Benedict in effect argues, the Catholic Church must be heeded. Because its tradition was filtered through the Enlightenment, the thinking goes, the church can provide a bridge between godless rationality and religious fundamentalism.

Link

 

[Ernesto Ribeiro]

slowtrain,

As far as I had concerned, in American culture, racism only still exists among 3 groups of people:

1) Liberals Their delight in afirmative action programs and though crimes legislation (aka "hate" crimes laws) is proof positive of their racism.

2) "Black Militant" America . It's interesting how successful blacks are put down and their achievements denegrated by other blacks. Just look at how Condoleeza Rice, Collin Powell, and Bill Cosby (just to name a few) have been treated. If a black person becomes successful, without using the race-baiting techniques of Al Sharpton and Je$$e Jack$on, they are "Uncle Toms" or "race traitors".

3) KKK . Interestingly enough, members of the KKK have a tendency to join the liberal wing of the Democratic party. Just look at Robert Byrd as an example.
Except for these three groups, racism is dead in America. But these groups, primarily the first two, feel some deranged need to keep racism alive.

[Ghost Dansing]

In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the focus of the Republican party on winning U.S. Presidential elections by securing the electoral votes of the U.S. Southern states. The phrase Southern strategy was coined by Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips. In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."

While Phillips was concerned with polarizing ethnic votings in general, and not just with winning the white South, this was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level, gradually trickling down to statewide offices, the Senate and House, as legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP.

The strategy suffered a brief apparent reversal following Watergate, with broad support for the racially progressive Southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter in 1976. But with Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign proclaiming support for "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964's Freedom Summer, the Southern Strategy was back to stay.

Although another Southern Democrat, Bill Clinton, would twice be elected President, winning a handful of Southern states, he did better outside the South, and would have won without carrying any Southern State....

....Lyndon Johnson knew that his endorsement of Civil Rights legislation would endanger his party in the South, but he did it anyway. The national Democratic party turned its back on segregation, and also abandoned segregationist voters in the South. In the election of 1968, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters that had heretofore been beyond the reach of the Republican Party....

....The southern strategy was used during the 1988 election, during the Willie Horton controversy.

It has been used as recently as the 2000 election. During this election, George W. Bush political strategist Karl Rove was alleged to have conducted a push poll, suggesting to conservative Republican South Carolina primary voters that primary opponent John McCain had fathered an "illegitimate black child."

Following the 2004 re-election of President George W. Bush, which saw a low number of African Americans voting for Bush and other Republicans, Ken Mehlman, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee and Bush's campaign manager, delivered several speeches at meetings with African American business, community, and religious leaders in which he apologized for his party's use of the Southern Strategy in the past. Said Mehlman, "By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

However, many prominent Republican and conservative commentators denounced Mehlman for his apology, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity among them.

In the 2006 race for Tennessee's Senate seat a controversial political advertisement paid for by the Republican National Committee featured a series of characters facetiously offering their support for black Democratic candidate Harold Ford, Jr. One character was a white woman who claimed to have met Ford at a Playboy party. At the end of the ad, she requested that Ford call her. Critics accused the RNC of race baiting by playing on negative views of mixed-race relations.

Link 

Ernesto,

Although I'm inclined to agree with you on numbers 1 and 2, I am dubious about #3 and think you overstate your central point.

There is certainly racism, even properly so defined, other than in the two groups you mentioned --