“The Garden of Impending Bloom”: Hope in the Face of Apocalyptic Doom

In my April 9 blog post, I wrote about embracing comfort and hope from George F. Händel’s Messiah, first performed publicly 280 years ago on April 13, 1742. This post is about the hope of theologian Catherine Keller as seen in her book Facing Apocalypse—and also about a much greater hope. 

Keller’s Book

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University, and Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances (Orbis Books, 2021) is the first of her several books I have read—and it was a delightful, and somewhat difficult, read. 

Catherine Keller (b. 1953)

While the content of Keller’s book is deeply theological/philosophical, the written style is more that of a contemporary novel than that of most academic works. 

Although the book is primarily a general exposition of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, Keller repeatedly alludes to the political and economic situation of the world in the last few years.

She concludes her book with “PostScroll” (pp. 195~205)—and ends that conclusion with the words she had recently seen on a hand-painted sign: “The Garden of Impending Bloom.”

Keller’s Hope

Keller’s earlier work, Apocalypse Now and Then (1996), was written with the fear of nuclear holocaust in the background. But she said, by the time that book was finished, “the nuclear threat had dissipated” (p. ix).

(But now in 2022 with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some have again begun to fear that same threat again—and the terrible prospect of MAD, mutual assured destruction.)

Keller correctly points out that the 2021 “nightmares” were, “for instance, a climate-forced collapse of civilization within not many years, escalating mass migration and starvation, white supremacism, degrees of fascism, elite escapes, population decimation, and possibly worse” (p. xiv).

She realizes that many who understand the plight of the present have sunk “into a savvy nihilism.” Such people “see hope as delusional, and surrender to the spiral of our species’ self-destruction” (p. 2).

It is against that background that she attractively articulates the auspicious content of the biblical Book of Revelation. And by her erudite exposition we glimpse her underlying hope. This is especially seen on pages 132~6 where she referred to Händel’s Messiah (as mentioned in my previous blog post).

A Greater Hope

While Keller does briefly mention “the prophetic dream of a collective resurrection” (p. 135), she sees seven possible scenarios ahead, ranging from “exhumanity” (“the extinction of our species”) to “the age of enlivenment,” the optimum human response to the present ecological crisis.

In harmony with her worldly hope, Keller closes her book with the dream of a garden of impending bloom. It is an appealing dream, but since it depends on humans doing the right things, I don’t share her optimism. Impending doom seems more realistic.

So, I have been drawn back to the writings of German scientist/theologian Karl Heim (1874~1958). The last section of his book The World: Its Creation and Consummation is “The Future of the World in the Light of the Gospel of the Resurrection,” and indeed, he presents a much greater hope than Keller.

Keller mentioned the “savvy nihilism” of the present, but savvy or not, Heim wrote about nihilism in the 1950s. He contended that we humans are faced with two possibilities: “The first is the radical hopelessness of nihilism, . . . The second possibility is the universal faith of Easter” (p. 149).

The stupendous meaning of Easter is not the resuscitation of the physical body of a crucified Jewish man. Rather, it is a divine act with cosmic dimensions. It is the beginning of what will eventually become “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1).

I certainly don’t know how, or when, that will take place, but it is the living hope to which I cling.

_____

** The second edition of Heim’s book Weltschöpfung und Weltende (1953) was published in 1958 and the English translation of the latter was published in 1962 with an additional subtitle The End of the Present Age and the Future of the World in the Light of the Resurrection. It was probably the next year (59 years ago!) when I first read, and was invigorated by, that book as a graduate student. (I wrote a bit about Heim in my April 15, 2021, blog post).

A Resurrection-Shaped Life

In this article I am sharing some reflections on Episcopal Bishop Jake Owensby’s book, A Resurrection-Shaped Life: Dying and Rising on Planet Earth (2018), and relating it to my cousin who was buried yesterday.

Characteristics of a Resurrection-Shaped Life

1) Those who live a resurrection-shaped life are hopeful. Owensby’s slim book is neither directly about Jesus’ resurrection nor the resurrection of Jesus-believers in the future. Rather, it is about one’s manner of living in the here and now.

Owensby asserts that “it’s in the depths of loss and sorrow that hope brings us to new life” (p. 51). Jesus had said to his disciples, “Blessed are those who mourn” (Matt. 5:4). Even though they did not understand this as they mourned Jesus’ crucifixion, they experienced that blessedness when Jesus was resurrected.

So, “the resurrection of Christ gives new meaning to our experience of grief” (p. 52). Those who live a resurrection-shaped life embrace, and are embraced by, the blessing of hope even in the midst of grief.

2) Those who live a resurrection-shaped life are joyful. Perhaps it is largely because of their hopeful attitude, a resurrection-shaped life is characterized by joy as well as by hope.

Owensby (b. 1957) doesn’t write much about joy in this book--except for his several references to Joy, which is his wife’s name. But joy definitely seems to be a by-product of a resurrection-shaped life.

The third chapter of Owensby’s book is “Recovering from Shame and Blame.” (I was pleasantly surprised to see this chapter just after posting my article about shame on April 5.) Those who live a resurrection-shaped life have learned to overcome shame. That is because, as Owensby writes,

Overcoming shame involves changing our minds about ourselves. And Jesus came in part to help us do precisely that. Jesus changes our minds about ourselves by changing our minds about God (p. 36).

3) Those who live a resurrection-shaped life are helpful. That is, they regularly engage in loving service.

To cite Owensby again,

Life centered on caring for ourselves turns to dust. A life devoted to the growth, nurture, and well-being of others stretches into eternity. A resurrection-shaped life is love in the flesh (p. 102).

And this gets us to my cousin Carolyn, who was my oldest first cousin on the Seat side of the family.  

The Resurrection-Shaped Life of Cousin Carolyn

Carolyn Houts passed away on April 12 and her funeral/burial was yesterday, on Good Friday. Carolyn, who celebrated her 77th birthday last month, died peacefully, sitting in a chair waiting for the delivery of her Meals on Wheels lunch.

After serving for nearly 34 years as a Southern Baptist missionary to Ghana, Carolyn retired in 2010 and had lived in Grant City, Missouri, since 2011. My blog article for 7/5/10 (see here) was about Cousin Carolyn, just as she was returning to the U.S., and I hope you will read it (again). 

Carolyn Houts (1942-2019)

As I said in the eulogy that I gave at her funeral yesterday, it seems quite clear to me that Carolyn lived a resurrection-shaped life. Hopefulness, joyfulness, and helpfulness were definitely characteristics of her life.

As we observe the celebration of Easter tomorrow—and I realize there will be a great variety in the way readers of this blog will celebrate Easter—my deepest prayer is that we all will not only know what a resurrection-shaped life means but will, in reality, be able to live such a life.

Happy Easter!

Interpreting the Resurrection of Jesus

Even though today is Good Friday, this article is about the Easter story and how Jesus’ resurrection can be affirmed by contemporary people.

A Novel Interpretation

The writing of this article was spurred by my reading of a novel: Martin Gardner’s The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973, 1994). After finishing it in 2012, I wrote this in my “books read” record: “One of the most challenging theological novels I ever read. A book of great profundity and erudition.”

Last month I finished reading Gardner’s book for the second time—and I was impressed and disturbed by it again.

If you haven’t read the novel, I don’t necessarily recommend it. Why? Because debunking the resurrection of Jesus is one of the main themes of the book.

At the beginning of the novel, Peter Fromm is a precocious, fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christian boy from Oklahoma who chooses to go to the University of Chicago Divinity School. There he is “slowly but surely” led by Homer Wilson, his mentor who is a part-time professor and a Unitarian minister, to question and then to reject many of his Christian beliefs, including the reality of Jesus’ resurrection.

On Easter Sunday, shortly before he is scheduled to receive his doctor’s degree, to marry, and to be ordained and assume a full-time church position, Peter preaches at his mentor’s church—and has a dramatic psychological breakdown.

Questionable Interpretations

In spite of being a minister and seminary professor, early in the book Wilson acknowledges, “I do not consider myself a Christian except in the widest, most humanistic sense. I do not, for example, believe in God.”

Homer Wilson spends considerable time discussing theological ideas with Peter, who gradually begins to discard belief in the reality of the resurrection—along with ideas about the transcendence of God. So Peter comes largely to adopt what Wilson calls “secular humanism.”

Wilson tells Peter that one who preaches to modern people has “to choose between being a truthful traitor or a loyal liar.” In order to serve in a paid church position, he believes, it is necessary to choose the latter: that seems clearly to have been Homer’s choice, and Peter also apparently comes to accept that position. The duplicity of that choice, however, leads to Peter’s breakdown.

Much of the problem in accepting the reality of the Easter story centers on the interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection as being the resuscitation of his physical body. Peter assumes that that is the view of resurrection found in the New Testament.

Of course, Peter also considers, and rejects, Jesus’ resurrection as simply the spirit or idea of Jesus being “resurrected” in the minds of his disciples.

Recommended Interpretation

My interpretation of, and belief in, the resurrection is based on firm belief in the reality of God and in transcendence. Thus, my affirmation of the reality of Easter is grounded in a worldview quite different from that of secular humanism.

If one believes, as Homer Wilson and then Peter Fromm did, that the physical world, which can be fully examined by science, is the totality of reality, then resurrection cannot be affirmed in any historical sense.

My views are in general agreement with those of the eminent New Testament scholar N.T. Wright as summarily presented in his book Surprised by Hope (2008), which I highly recommend.

For me, and for Wright, Jesus’ resurrection can be, and must be, understood as something other than literal resuscitation and certainly as something other than a metaphorical, completely non-historical story.

Firm belief in God and transcendence, however, makes affirmation of Jesus’ resurrection possible, understandable, and a matter of great joy and hope.

Happy Easter!

The Resurrection and Fake News

Last month Christianity Today published “The Resurrection: Good News vs Fake News (An Easter Sermon Idea).” That article is by Karl Vaters, the pastor of an Assembly of God church in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It would be interesting to know how many Easter sermons will use his central idea—as I am in this blog article.

FAKE NEWS IS NOT NEW

In the past few months we have heard much about “fake news.” But the fake news phenomenon has been around for a long time. In fact, Wikipedia’s article says, “Significant fake news stories can be traced back to Octavian's 1st-century campaign of misinformation against Mark Antony.

Vaters sees evidence of fake news long before that, though. He avers that fake news was “how the serpent tempted Eve. By taking what God really said and twisting it just enough to make her doubt reality.”

Propaganda is a common type of fake news that has been around for centuries, and it has been widely used in religious squabbles, in politics, and especially in times of war. As I quoted in my 7/25/16 blog article, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”

FAKE NEWS AND THE RESURRECTION

To quote Vaters again, “The first challenge to the gospel wasn’t an alternative idea, a better philosophy or the refutation of an argument.” No, “The first challenge to the truth of the gospel was the planting of fake news to compete with the real news.”

As Vaters points out, according to Matthew the Roman soldiers who had been guarding Jesus’ tomb were bribed to spread a fake news story. (If you need to review that story in Matthew 28:11-15, you can find it here.)

There are many today who do not believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. That is not surprising if (a) one does not believe in a transcendent God (who is also immanent) or (b) one does not believe that there is any reality beyond the material world, which can be fully analyzed by science.

Such people must find some way to dismiss the claims of all those who believe the good news about the Resurrection. So whether they use those words or not, they reject the reports about the reality of the Resurrection as just fake news.

THE GOOD NEWS OF THE RESURRECTION

There are, however, no reports that have been longer lasting or of greater significance than those of the Resurrection. It has been believed by hundreds of millions of people around the world for nearly two millennia now.

Even during the heyday of atheistic Marxism in the Soviet Union, strong belief in the Resurrection remained in the hearts of multitudes of primarily Eastern Orthodox Christian believers there. As was true before and since, on Easter morning someone would call out,

Христо́с воскре́се! (Christ is risen!)

And the people within earshot would respond,

Вои́стину воскре́се! (He is risen indeed!) 

One of my favorite musical compositions is "Russian Easter Overture." It was composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) in 1888, nearly three decades before the Bolshevik Revolution. It expresses well the power of the ongoing Russian Orthodox belief in the Resurrection.

I encourage all of you to listen tomorrow (or anytime) to this magnificent 15-minute piece as performed by the Mariinsky Orchestra, one of the leading symphony orchestras in Russia, on YouTube here or here as conducted by Dmitri Kitayenko (b. 1940 in Leningrad).

Listening to that moving music reinforces my belief that the Resurrection is real! It is the reports denying that pivotal point in history that is fake news.

Happy Easter!

Is Proclaiming Jesus’ Resurrection Political Incorrect?

A few weeks ago I posted a blog article about political correctness. For the most part I favor the effort to be politically correct, for in its best form political correctness shows empathic understanding of those who are often discriminated against or belittled.

There was some questioning of a more recent article, though, along this very line. There was no direct reference to my not being P.C., but it was implied that what I wrote about the origins of Christianity and of Islam was problematic.

From the beginning I knew that there would likely be some pushback, for what I wrote could be used as an excuse to criticize, discriminate against, or mistreat Muslims today. I tried to counter that possibility by writing what I did in the final paragraph.

Christians around the world have just celebrated Easter (except for those in the Orthodox tradition who will not celebrate Easter until May 1). If there was, in fact, something historical about the resurrection of Jesus, Easter is an event that decisively differentiates Christianity from other religions.

Many have understood Jesus’ resurrection much too literally, seeing it is some sort of miraculous resuscitation of his physical body. That is not the kind of resurrection I am writing about.

On the other hand, many liberal Christian interpretations emphasize that Jesus’ resurrection was mainly metaphorical or “psychological” rather than historical. That is, it is explained as the “resurrection” of the spirit of Jesus in the hearts and minds of his early followers.

John Shelby Spong, for example, contends that the Jesus’ resurrection took place in Galilee, where the disciples had fled after Jesus’ crucifixion, rather than in Jerusalem, where Jesus had been buried in Joseph’s tomb.

Liberals need some way to explain the resurrection so Christianity can be considered just one religion among many that are equally valid and valuable.

That is not the kind of resurrection I am writing about either.

Recently, I have written a review of a book about the life and thought of Lesslie Newbigin. In that process I looked again at some of his notable writings, especially The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989). Newbigin (1909-98), an Englishman, was one of the premier missionaries and missiologists of the 20^th century. (Several years ago I wrote a blog article in praise of Newbigin.)

Newbigin repeatedly used the words “public truth” in referring to the Christian message, and one of his smaller books is titled Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (1991). The idea of public truth, of course, stands in stark contrast to the relativistic idea of truth in post-modernism and often in liberal Christianity as well.

He wrestles with the problem of truth not just from the standpoint of religious faith but also epistemologically, making repeated references to the significance of Michael Polanyi’s emphasis on “personal knowledge.”

In Truth to Tell, Newbigin avers, “To believe that the crucified Jesus rose from the dead, left an empty tomb, and regrouped his scatted disciples for their world mission can only be the result of a very radical change of mind indeed.”

He goes on to assert that “the simple truth is that the resurrection cannot be accommodated in any way of understanding the world except one of which it is the starting point” (p. 10-11).

Belief in the Resurrection should never lead to arrogance, condescension, or triumphalism. That belief should, however, lead faithful Christians to have confidence in the uniqueness of Jesus and to proclaim, boldly and lovingly, the significance of that pivotal event—even though some might consider it politically incorrect.

“Easter Is a Shout of Victory!”

Many of you read my 3/20 blog article about Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was assassinated on March 24, 1980. While celebrating the anniversary Mass of a friend’s death, he was shot and killed in the chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital. That hospital served as a hospice for cancer patients in San Salvador and was also Romero’s place of residence.

Just the day before his assassination, which was the fifth Sunday in Lent, he preached his last Sunday sermon. Here is part of what he said on that occasion:

Easter is a shout of victory! No one can extinguish that life that Christ resurrected. Not even death and hatred against Him and against His Church will be able to overcome it. He is the victor! Just as He will flourish in an Easter of unending resurrection, so it is necessary also to accompany Him in Lent, in a Holy Week that is cross, sacrifice, martyrdom. . . .

Lent, then, is a call to celebrate our redemption in that difficult complex of cross and victory. . . . all who have Christian faith and hope know that behind this Calvary of El Salvador is our Easter, our resurrection, and that is the hope of the Christian people” (cited in Scott Wright, “Oscar Romero and the Communion of the Saints,” p. 127).

In an interview he gave earlier that month, Romero said, “My life has been threatened many times. I have to confess that as a Christian, I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.”

And then in the homily he gave a few minutes before being shot through the heart, Romero declared,

Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies.

Those words were based on Jesus’ teaching recorded in John 12:24.

Those of you who, like me, grew up in the rural Midwest know about winter wheat. It is sown in the fall, lies “dead” in the earth through the cold winter, comes to life with greet plants shooting up in the spring, and then produces a harvest in the summer.

That is the image of death and resurrection that Jesus referred to and that Romero believed and emphasized in his last sermon. And that is why he could proclaim, “Easter is a shout of victory!”

According to the teachings of Christianity, the Resurrection is something that Jesus Christ experienced, but resurrection will also be experienced by all of Jesus’ followers—such as Joe Wolven, my old friend who was the best man at June’s and my wedding.

Joe died of cancer on the March 21, just before his 76^th birthday on April 1. (June and I are so thankful that we were able to drive down to south Missouri on March 9 and to have a good visit with Joe and his wife Cathy at their home near Galena.)

For the Christian believer like Joe, death is the prelude of resurrection. Death is not an end, but the necessary prerequisite for new life. Thus, as Archbishop Romero declared, Easter is, truly, a shout of victory!

Happy Easter!

Reflecting on the Resurrection

Another Easter Sunday has come and gone, but the debate about the factuality of Jesus’ resurrection continues to be pondered and debated, affirmed and denied.

One way to evade the issue is to generalize the resurrection, much as the President did last Saturday in his weekly radio address.

“Christ’s triumph over death holds special meaning for Christians,” the President said. “But all of us,” he continued, “no matter how or whether we believe, can identify with elements of His story. The triumph of hope over despair. Of faith over doubt.”

There is value in this approach, and I have often talked about “the Resurrection principle,” including on this blog (here). But that doesn’t really solve the problem about the factuality or actuality of Jesus’ resurrection.

Christians, past and present, have made two serious mistakes in explaining the Resurrection. On the one hand, many conservative/fundamentalist Christians have tended to interpret the resurrection too literally. That is, they have asserted the physical resurrection of Jesus.

But the resurrection of Jesus is quite certainly something different than—and far more important than—the resuscitation of a corpse.

On the other hand, many progressive/liberal Christians have tended to interpret the resurrection in a completely non-historical manner. That is, they assert that the resurrection of Jesus was an inner psychological, existential, or spiritual experience of the early Christian believers that had nothing to do with the crucified body of Jesus.

This is a matter I dealt with in my book The Limits of Liberalism. Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, for example, contends that the resurrection of Jesus occurred in Galilee, rather than in Jerusalem. That is because there was nothing “objective” that happened in Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified and buried. The “resurrection” was only something subjective that happened in the hearts and minds of the apostles who had fled to Galilee.

Spong and other liberals talk about resurrection, to be sure, but it is a watered-down resurrection, one devoid of any factuality or any “taint” of the miraculous—except in the sense that the Apostles “miraculously” experienced the spiritual presence and ongoing influence of the crucified Christ in their hearts as they were imbued with new faith and courage to carry on the teachings of the Jesus movement (see The Limits, p. 137).

I find the ideas of the British scholar N. T. Wright in his new book How God Became King (March 2012) to be much more satisfactory. An excellent, and succinct, summary of that book can be found here.

Wright, whom I also mentioned in a post about the Resurrection last April (here), rejects what he calls the “reductionist project” of liberal scholars. And I think Wright is right. In order to affirm the liberal position, all that one has to do is accept the Enlightenment paradigm—and deny/reject the New Testament witness, the primary creeds of the Church, and the central affirmation of the Church from the beginning until the present (except for the liberal minority).

As someone wrote in an e-mail last week, there is “a whole lot of mystery involved” in the story of the Resurrection. I fully agree. Let’s not miss the power of that story by trying to explain the Resurrection as either a physical occurrence or as just an inner, psychological experience.

Is the Resurrection Passé?

Yesterday was Easter Sunday, and I hope you have been energized by the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the pivotal point of the Christian faith. Recently, though, I have begun to wonder if the Resurrection doesn’t seem passé to many Christians now.

In the previous posting I agreed with the Pope’s assertion that Christianity “stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead.” And I have just asserted that the Resurrection is “the pivotal point of the Christian faith.” But is the Resurrection something that contemporary Christians can, and do, affirm wholeheartedly, or is such an idea the result of wish-fulfillment?

(N.B. – What I mean, and what the Pope means, by the resurrection of Jesus is not the resuscitation of a corpse. Thus, there is a qualitative difference between the resurrection of Jesus and, say, the resuscitation of Lazarus.)

Is the whole idea of resurrection just a traditional Christian belief that present-day, scientifically-oriented people can’t really affirm in any literal sense? Were the Easter services yesterday primarily just a nod to that powerful tradition of the past? For contemporary people, is Easter meaningful only if the Gospel accounts are demythologized, psychologized, or secularized?

I myself have done the latter to some extent, in the past and as recently as last week: I called the column I write weekly for my hometown newspaper, “The Resurrection Principle.” That article was mainly non-religious: I wrote about seeing the resurrection principle at work in the world of nature during the spring and in the hearts of people who live by hope rather than despair.

The resurrection principle recognizes that life overcomes death, love overcomes hate and indifference, hope overcomes despair, and joy overcomes sorrow. There is, I believe, such a principle at work in the world. But can there be a resurrection principle at work in the world even if Jesus Christ was not resurrected? Or is the resurrection principle an indication of, and a pointer to, the Resurrection?

Regardless of what happened on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion, the effects of the resurrection principle in our lives today are of great importance. Still, if nothing factual or objective happened on that first Easter morning, are our affirmations of life, love, hope, and joy just fanciful fabrications?

One Thinking Friend made this comment on the previous posting: “What I find fascinating is Christianity’s insistence that what one believes in one’s head about metaphysical realities is all important.” But if we take the Gospel accounts at all seriously, what the first Christians affirmed about the Resurrection was not primarily a metaphysical belief. They reported the actual experience of encountering the resurrected Christ.

For Christians today, too, what is significant is not an intellectual belief but a personal experience of Jesus Christ. So the Resurrection is not passé and the resurrection principle is not just the result of wish-fulfillment. On this day after Easter, all of us can truly celebrate life, love, hope, and joy because of presence of the resurrected Christ.

The Pope on the Resurrection

Pope Benedict XVI is not my favorite Pope; that would have to be John XXIII. And next month I plan to write about Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical I evaluate highly. But I have just finished Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, his new book which was published March 10, and I was quite favorably impressed with it.

On this Wednesday before Easter, let me share some of the Pope’s statements about the Resurrection, which I found very close to my own theological position (and also close to the position of the noted New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, whom he does not cite).

Near the beginning of “Jesus’ Resurrection from the Dead,” the ninth chapter, the Pope asserts, “The Christian faith stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead” (p. 241). And on the following page: “Only if Jesus is risen has anything really new occurred that changes the world and the situation of mankind.”

The Pope cites New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann on page 246. I write more (and more critically) about him in my book The Limits of Liberalism (see especially pp. 194-5). In his book The Resurrection of Christ (2004) Lüdemann dismisses the “vain resort of accepting the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact” and then goes on to assert that “we can no longer be Christians even if we wanted to be, for Jesus did not rise from the dead” (p. 202).

In response to what he quoted Lüdemann as saying, Benedict writes, “Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data.” But, “The Resurrection accounts certainly speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented—a new dimension of reality that is revealed. . . . Does that contradict science?”

The Pope continues, “Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new? If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of reality altogether?” (pp. 246-7).

In the last section of the ninth chapter, Benedict says that the resurrection is “a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it” (p. 273). He also says that the Resurrection can be regarded “as something akin to a radical ‘evolutionary leap,’ in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence.

“Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal” (p. 274). So, the Resurrection “is not the same kind of historical event as the birth or crucifixion of Jesus. It is something new, a new type of event.

“Yet at the same time it must be understood that the Resurrection does not simply stand outside or above history” (p. 275).

This is essentially what I believe about the Resurrection, and what I have taught and preached for many years. So while not a big fan of Benedict XVI, I find myself in agreement him about the Resurrection. What about you?

The Resurrection Principle

On this morning after Easter Sunday, I hope you are energized by the celebration of new life at this auspicious time of the year and by the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the pivotal point of the Christian faith.  

Easter sunrise (added April 4, 2021)

My new book, The Limits of Liberalism: A Historical, Theological, and Personal Appraisal of Christian Liberalism, should be released next month. In it, one of my criticisms of liberalism is related to its understanding of the resurrection of Jesus. Here is an excerpt about that:

John Shelby Spong [a retired Episcopal bishop and widely-known contemporary liberal Christian] writes about the resurrection of Jesus as occurring in Galilee, rather than in Jerusalem. That is because there was nothing “objective” that happened in Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified and buried. The “resurrection” was only something subjective that happened in the hearts and minds of the apostles who had fled to Galilee. Spong and other liberals talk about resurrection, to be sure, but it is a watered-down resurrection, one devoid of any factuality or any “taint” of the miraculous—excecpt in the sense that the Apostles “miraculously” experienced the spiritual presence and ongoing influence of the crucified Christ in their hearts as they were imbued with new faith and courage to carry on the teachings of the Jesus movement.

On the other hand, I also reject the over-literalness of some fundamentalist views of the resurrection. There is a tendency on the theological right to emphasize the historicity of the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus so much that its significance for our daily lives today is largely lost.

More than once I have preached an Easter sermon titled “The Resurrection Principle,” emphasizing the practical difference the resurrection makes (or could or should make) in our lives today, if we live by the resurrection principle. That principle emphasizes that life overcomes death, love overcomes hate and indifference, hope overcomes despair, and joy overcomes sorrow. These affirmations are all grounded in a firm belief in the actuality of Jesus’ resurrection, and they make a huge difference in the living of our daily lives.

Regardless of what happened on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion, the effects of the resurrection principle in our lives today are of great importance. But if nothing factual or objective happened on that first Easter morning, aren't the effects of the resurrection principle little more than wish-fulfillment? Are our affirmations of life, love, hope, and joy based on an actual event, or are they only fanciful fabrications? I firmly believe they are rooted in a real occurrence and not merely in subjective experiences.

On this day after Easter, it is my prayer that on the basis of the good news about Jesus Christ all of us can affirm the resurrection principle and will, accordingly, truly rejoice and enthusiastically celebrate life, love, hope, and joy.