Risen Hope

In just a couple of minutes, N.T. Wright answers a question pertaining to the Resurrection of Christ. Wright is always such a genial and clear thinker and speaker and it is nice to have some of his thoughts not just captured in the many books he has written, but also on video. Enjoy!

Christianity.com: Could the Shroud of Turin really be the actual burial garment of Jesus? – Gary Habermas from christianitydotcom2 on GodTube.

Kate’s Cup is a women’s ministry that meets east week at Northridge Community Church in the North Phoenix/Scottsdale area. that I first heard about in July of 2013. A couple of women who are part of this group contacted me and asked me to come and provide an introduction to apologetics to their group, of which I was more than happy to oblige.

So yesterday morning (Oct. 17, 2013) I faced a room full of 100+ women at this incredible ministry and I gave them an introduction to apologetics, what it is and how it can help them with their own lives and the lives of their family and friends.

Below is the audio from yesterday's talk.

I have said many times elsewhere that Greg Koukl of Stand To Reason (STR) is the clearest communicator of the Christian faith that I am aware of. I cannot think of anyone who is more precise and concise when it comes to either explaining the Christian faith or defending it.

One of the helpful things about his organization is that they produce short, succinct videos in response to questions that they receive. Today’s video is on the topic of prayer and I thought it appropriate to share.

If you are not a subscriber to STR and their materials, I would highly recommend becoming one. They are a wonderful apologetics organization and they have a wealth of information (much of it free) and resources (located in their online store for purchase) on their website to use and help you become better equipped at sharing and defending your faith.

In the synoptic gospel tradition Matthew, Mark, and Luke all share this story from Jesus’ ministry where the Sadducees challenge Jesus on the Torah and the resurrection (if you do not remember, the Sadducees denied there was such a thing as the resurrection).

Some Sadducees (who say that there is no resurrection) came to Jesus, and began questioning Him, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves behind a wife and leaves no child, his brother should marry the wife and raise up children to his brother. There were seven brothers; and the first took a wife, and died leaving no children. The second one married her, and died leaving behind no children; and the third likewise; and so all seven left no children. Last of all the woman died also. In the resurrection, when they rise again, which one’s wife will she be? For all seven had married her.”

Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures of the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I Am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; you are greatly mistaken.” (Mark 12:18-27)

Jesus addresses the Sadducees on at least three different levels here.

Marriage

Marriage and procreation are unnecessary functions of the resurrected in the life to come. The purpose of marriage and family is to continue the human race because we face death. God setup a system to keep us from dying out and going extinct. But in the life to come, there is no death and therefore no need to be married and have children. We live forever and do not need to procreate.

Life After Death

Jesus continues with his argument against the Sadducees by showing them their faulty thinking. Reaching back and using as an example a passage of the Torah that they would accept (the Sadducees only accepted the first five books of the Old Testament) Jesus talks about Yahweh revealing himself to Moses in the burning bush. He says that Yahweh is the God of the living not the dead, yet Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived centuries before Moses and had been dead and buried long ago. The point here is that though their bodies had died, they were in fact still alive, but not only that, this pointed to the general resurrection that would happen in the future. Because they were still alive in a disembodied state, at some point they would be rejoined to their resurrected bodies.

Exodus and the Kingdom of God

Moses led the people out of bondage and slavery via the Exodus from Egypt. The Jews living at the time of Jesus were also under bondage to the Roman empire. They expected the Messiah to provide some sort of nationalistic/political exodus for them. Jesus, viewing all people being held in bondage to sin, saw the act he was about to undergo (death, burial and resurrection) as a spiritual exodus leading the people out of a bondage of sin and death and into the Kingdom of God.

Chapter 5: The Flag of the World

In this chapter, Chesterton makes his first encounter with Christianity as he sifts through and attempts to understand the world. At this point in his investigative journey he begins to see a half-buried parallel of his views to those of Christianity; he is beginning to see evidence that the path he is walking on is well-tread.

Up to this point he has been talking and making distinctions about the optimist and the pessimist. Then he writes this gem of a paragraph:

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.

Chesterton has spent a little time discussing how loyalty comes before admiration; how one belongs to something before asking if it is a nice thing to belong to; how we can feel at once both at home and homeless in the same place.

This seems to echo that wise philosopher Paul of Tarsus who wrote these seemingly paradoxical statements:

“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” ~ Romans 12:2a (NASB)

“For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I may win more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, so that I might win Jews; to those who are under the Law, as under the Law though not being myself under the Law, so that I might win those who are under the Law; to those who are without law, as without law, though not being without the law of God but under the law of Christ, so that I might win those who are without law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak; I have become all things to all men, so that I may by all means save some.” ~ 1 Corinthians 9:19-22 (NASB)

Previous posts from The Gospel Coalition (GC) and Mere Orthodoxy (MO) in this series:

1. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Introduction (GC)
2. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapter 1 (MO)
3. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapters 2 & 3 (GC)
4. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapters 4 & 5 (MO)

Previous posts from Risen Hope in this series:

1. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 1
2. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 2
3. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 3
4. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 4a

Admittedly, I’m behind in last weeks reading, but I did manage to make two passes through “The Ethics of Elfland” (this means I will post up the remainder of this post on Monday). For the longest time, since my first encounter with Orthodoxy many years back, this has been one of my all-time favorite chapters of any book I have read. I’m sure my love of it is more simplistic and shallow than others. As with swimming, if my feet can’t touch the bottom while my head is out of the water, I get uneasy quickly.

Chapter 4: The Ethics of Elfland

Let’s begin, I love the juxtaposition of fairy land against our everyday world. Fairy land seems to be an echo from earlier chapters in that it continues to reverberate reason and wonder, while the everyday world has little to do with wonder. There is reason in the necessary things of elfland and wonder in everything else. But in the everyday world, we have taken the reasonableness of the necessary things and attempted to apply them unnaturally to everything else. We have taken the one single idea and reapplied it to everything we see and know (like the madman). Elfland makes a visible distinction between the two realms and yet they co-exist harmoniously; Everyday land lauds the one to the demise of the other.

Chesterton draws a distinction between necessity and possibility and I think his distinction between the two ideas is a good one to maintain. Everyday land seeks to remove the possible so that all is necessary and determined. Elfland sees them co-existing together.

Further, Chesterton paints a wonderful image of how repetition speaks to vitality and life and contrasts this with variance and how that depicts a wearing down and dying. He reminds us of how we have grown old due to sin while the Father is younger than us. Chesterton hits on a rather paradoxical idea. Sin sets decay in motion and with it brings death. Time existed before sin, but decay was not part of time. The wearing down and wearing out does not occur for the sinless and pure – God is eternally young though God existed from eternity. We age and grow old and die. Though, being finite, we are infinitely younger than an infinite God, we are also far older than He precisely because of sin.

I would love to hear your thoughts. If you have been reading Orthodoxy – bravo! If you haven’t started, then I would encourage you to do so and join in on the conversation – it is a good one.

Previous posts from The Gospel Coalition (GC) and Mere Orthodoxy (MO) in this series:

1. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Introduction (GC)
2. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapter 1 (MO)
3. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapters 2 & 3 (GC)
4. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Chapters 4 & 5 (MO)

Previous posts from Risen Hope in this series:

1. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 1
2. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 2
3. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton – Part 3

The last comment I want to make about the Swoon Theory, for now, is it fails to account for all the historical evidence for the resurrection. Due to that, it requires other theories to cover the data that it fails to address thus making it ad hoc in its approach.

For instance, since the Swoon Theory claims that Jesus did not rise from the dead, it fails to explain how the resurrection became the central teaching of the Apostles and the early church.[1] If Jesus’ followers knew that he had not died and, by extension, had not risen from the dead, then they must be charged with forming a conspiracy to spread this story. But the Conspiracy Theory is full of all sorts of issues as well and it cannot account for all the data either.

Additionally, to make up the idea that Jesus had resurrected ahead of the general resurrection would have been beyond the followers comprehension given their cultural background.[2] But this is what we would be asked to accept if the Swoon Theory were true.

There is also the critique of the skeptic Strauss that if Jesus had appeared alive to the followers instead of risen, they would not have turned around to worship him, but would have sought out medical attention to try and save him. Also, as mentioned yesterday, a badly wounded and most likely crippled Jesus is not going to inspire conversion in either Paul the church persecutor or James, the skeptical half-brother of Jesus.

Overall, the Swoon Theory is on very unstable ground as a viable theory. It leaves too much data unexplained and fails to deliver as a naturalistic explanation.

Previous posts:

1. Swoon Theory – Part 1
2. Swoon Theory – Part 2

1. See 1 Corinthians 15:1-4
2. N.T. Wright has a lot to say about this in his massive book The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003).

I’m taking the following information from my the notes I was provided during my graduate level course on the Defense of the Resurrection taught by Dr. Gary Habermas at Biola University. What follows is taken from those notes as being evidence against the Swoon Theory:

1. The archaeological discovery of a crucifixion victim (Yohanon) indicates the accuracy of the basic outline of crucifixion. The majority medical view is that crucifixion induces death by asphyxiation.
2. The use of a chest wound to insure death seems to be confirmed by extra-biblical sources, especially Quintillian. The majority medical view on the chest wound, involving a flow of blood and water, indicates that the Roman spear pierced Jesus’ heart.
3. In Strauss’ famous critique, he basically held that the Swoon Theory is self-contradictory. The Jesus who died by crucifixion would be in absolutely no shape to convince anyone that he had been raised from the dead. He would obviously be alive, but not raised.
4. How would this hypothesis convince Paul?
5. How would this hypothesis convince James, Jesus’ brother?
6. There are about a half-dozen indications that the man buried in the Shroud of Turin is dead, including post-mortem blood flow and rigor mortis.[1]
7. Of the approximately 18 extra-biblical sources for Jesus, about a dozen mention Jesus’ death, including some details of his crucifixion.
8. Curiously, Mark tells us that Pilate questioned Jesus’ early death, but was satisfied after he called the centurion and asked for details (Mark 15:44-45).
9. Bart Ehrman lists at least 11 independent historical sources for Jesus’ crucifixion (163-164, 291), including further textual support drawn from several historical criteria (156-158).[2]

Previous post:

1. Swoon Theory – Part 1

1. The Shroud of Turin dates from the appropriate time of when Jesus would have been buried. While it bears many similarities to what we find in scripture about Jesus’ death, the best we could claim is that it is probably his burial shroud, but having 100% conclusive evidence that it is his seems difficult.
2. Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (NY: Harper Collins, 2012).

We briefly touched on this particular skeptical theory here. But that is not all. Even skeptical and atheistic scholars agree that Jesus actually died on the cross and did not swoon.

The Swoon Theory says that Jesus did not die on the cross. Instead, he passed out from his wounds and the trauma. After lying in the coolness of the tomb for a period of time he revived, took off his burial clothes, rolled the stone away by himself, got past the posted guard, walked approximately 1 mile (perhaps more) to where the disciples were staying and presented himself (a bloody, wounded mess) as their risen Lord.

Here is a short video of Dr. Gary Habermas (world’s leading expert on the Resurrection) and Dr. Antony Flew (one of the world’s leading atheist philosophers at the time) discussing this point.

In the next two posts, I’ll provide more detailed information on why the Swoon Theory fails as an explanation for the disciples belief that Jesus rose from the dead.