Did he really rise from the dead?

I love that video clip from “Yes Prime Minister”, because it is so English and so Anglican. Watch it if you have time, and then consider the awful reality of atheism and agnosticism in the heart of what is supposed to be the dynamic believing Community.

In fact, all my adult life I have had to contend with well-meaning liberal Christians who reduce the events at the heart of the Christian faith to a collection of culturally conditioned metaphors that nudge us along our “spiritual journey.” Bishop John Hazlewood often described many so-called Anglo-catholics of this stripe as “liberal protestants in chasubles.” These were clergy who though they had pretty well become agnostics, remained in office because they continued to love the “culture” and aesthetics of Christian worship, not to mention their stipends!

Now, of course, as far as the declining first world Anglican scene is concerned, they are pretty well in charge. Liberal catholics and liberal evangelicals.

And while there has been a recovery and renewal of the Gospel and the true Faith within the Roman Catholic Church, especially among young adults, it is still all too easy to find the same kind of priests, religious and lay theologians there who believe very little.

Nine years ago Fr Dwight Longenecker wrote this piece for his blog. I’m sure that that you will be able to think of clergy who are just like those described! 

The Resurrection and Theological Sleight of Hand

The main plague of modern Christianity is, well, modern Christianity. That is to say, modernism. Modernism may be defined as the conviction that the truths of Christianity were determined by the cultural circumstances of the first century, and that they are therefore no longer relevant of credible by modern people. The truths of Christianity must be ‘re-interpreted’ for modern, scientific, technologically adept people.

Now, if the modernist were honest about his scheme we wouldn’t mind so much. If he said (as some admirably honest modernists do) “The miracles stories are nothing more than symbolic” we would know where we stood. If he said, “The resurrection is a beautiful fairy tale” we would be clear. If he said, “The Virgin Birth is a make believe fantasy story” we’d understand. Then when he (or she) resigned from being a Christian minister we would accept their resignation with understanding (and not a little delight) and wish them well in their new career as a social worker.

But he doesn’t do this. Instead the modernist priest continues to use the traditional language and liturgy of Christianity. He sings with gusto, “Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty triumph o’er his foes....” He stands up on Easter day and says with a theatrical tone, “Christ is risen from the dead, Alleluia!” to which his faithful people reply, “He is risen indeed. Alleluia!” And everyone feels warm and comfortable.

Furthermore, the modernist minister feels no qualms about drawing his salary, putting in his expense claims and having the rectory redecorated. Indeed, he perceives himself as something of a pioneer. He boldly goes where others fear to tread. He has faced the difficult questions of Christianity and found a new way through. He sees himself as a true man of faith for “isn’t faith daring to ask the difficult questions and stepping out into the unknown--letting go all the quaint certainties to launch out into the deep?” Indeed, he even sees himself as a martyr for he has gone through persecution at the hands of the Pharisaical and self righteous orthodox Christians.

So Reverend Wooly continues to use all the conventional language of belief. He does so because he recognizes a certain ‘psychological depth’ in the ‘ancient mythical symbolism’. He believes it helps people. It inspires them. But take him on one side and quiz him a bit you discover that he doesn’t really believe in the resurrection at all. For him it is “a beautiful story about life and love eventually overcoming death” or “In some mysterious way the truth and goodness of Jesus continued to live long after his physical body passed away, and isn’t that what we all hope for ourselves and our loved ones?”

Of course this is total and utter nonsense. The resurrection means that the physical person who died rose up from the dead and wasn’t dead anymore. The tomb was empty. They saw him and they were scared. They ate with him and touched his new body. If this didn’t happen then it wasn’t resurrection at all. It was just a beautiful idea, but the beautiful idea couldn’t even be a beautiful idea if the resurrection didn’t happen. The beautiful idea would only be an imaginative story, in which case it wasn’t even a beautiful idea, it was just a fairy tale, and it wasn’t even a very nice fairy tale, because it promised something it could never deliver.

To say the resurrection is nothing more than “a beautiful idea” is as absurd as saying marriage is a beautiful idea. What if a man said he was married, but you never saw the woman, you never saw the engagement ring and you never saw the children which proved that he had made love to the woman? You’d say it wasn’t marriage at all, and it wasn’t even a beautiful idea. It was a lie. And what if humanity built a great civilization on this beautiful idea of marriage but none of the men were ever married to women, but still they talked in glowing terms of “the beautiful sacrament of marriage” You would consider the lot of them to be insane.

So modernism, with its theological sleight of hand is not only dishonest, it’s insane. Those who follow it live in a world cut off from reality. They live in an alternative reality of their own imagination.

The poisonous thing about this modernism, is that it is so difficult to pin down. It has to come from the Father of Lies since it is so insidiously deceptive. Whenever it appears it never speaks plainly and openly. Instead it resorts to half truths, poetical deceptions and charming myths. It is all smoke and mirrors.

Even worse, it has got into every Christian denomination. It’s easy to think this is the disease of the mainline liberal Protestant denominations. Sadly, it has gone deep in the Catholic Church and it affects everything we do. It affects the way we worship, the way we preach, the way we relate to the world, the way we do everything. It lies deeply hidden, and is the root cause of all our problems in the church. Furthermore, like Satan himself, the more a church attempts to root it out, the more subtle the deception goes and the more the lies become hidden under clever academic speak.

So the Catholic modernist hides his disbelief completely and never really says what he means at all, and if he is pushed to explain what he believes about the resurrection he’ll say with a sweet smile, “Of course Christ is risen, and what we mean by that remains a glorious mystery”, or even worse, he says nothing at all, keeps to the liturgical formulas and goes on through his ministry to undermine everything he says he stands for.

Well you can keep it. Give me the old time religion. I believe Jesus rose from the dead. I believe it was physical. If it wasn’t I’d pack it all in tomorrow.

Fr Longenecker on dating the New Testament

I keep an eye on Fr Dwight Longenecker’s blog “Standing on My Head” (which is HERE). Born in the USA, Longenecker is a former Evangelical who became a priest of the Church of England, and is now a Roman Catholic priest back in the USA. He’s no slouch intellectually; nor is he easy to pigeonhole in terms of what particular stream of the contemporary Catholic Church he belongs to. He’s just - well - mainstream. On 20th November last year, he posted a little article which expresses exactly my view of a whole branch of purported scholarship. Now, I must say that I have always been fascinated by theories of the origins of sub strata of Biblical texts and how they might have been edited by the writers who incorporated them into the literature that became canonical. 

But as a student I had come across C.S. Lewis’ devastating 1959 article “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”, now published in “Fern-seed and Elephants” (text HERE) at about the same time as I made my decision to write essays as if I believed the latest theories, in order to get through the subjects, while - to be honest - I was becoming more and more sceptical about the worth of such unbridled unbelief as actual scholarship. It is so uncool, even among some of the theologically orthodox, to question the assumptions of the biblical critics, that I’ve really left the area alone, even on this blog. But the short sharp blows dealt by Fr Longenecker in his blog post were so good that I couldn’t resist sharing it with you. 

     

Dating the New Testament

For the life of me I have never been able to figure out why scholars make such a big difficulty out of dating the New Testament.

On the face of it, the problem is not so difficult, but what we have to do is take things at face value with common sense. Once we get into academic theories about what might have happened it is all a bit like conspiracy theories–in which one scrap of ambiguous evidence may mean that and may mean this and may mean something else, then the theorists start building great castles in the air from scraps of evidence combined with huge chunks of speculation. Then other scholars speculate further on the speculation until the result is so far from the real events as to be laughable. Once you go down that route of possible other authors, possible later dates and possible editorial changes–for which there is no evidence anywhere–you end up in a labyrinth of confusion and chaos–and we know who the Lord of confusion and chaos is . . .

If we work with common sense and take things at face value it is actually very easy to discover the dating of the New Testament:

First you need a verifiable historical date. We could use 70AD the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, but we have an earlier reliable date:  65AD. We know this is the year St Peter and St Paul were killed in Rome during the persecution of the Emperor Nero. Therefore Paul’s epistles and the first epistle of Peter were all written before 65 AD.

The Acts of the Apostles was written by Luke–the same person who wrote the gospel of Luke. The Acts of the Apostles does not mention the death of Peter and Paul. If Peter and Paul had died by the time it had been completed we can be sure Luke would have mentioned their martyrdom. He would have mentioned their martyrdom for three reasons: he told the story of Stephen’s martyrdom and he related the death of the apostle James. Thirdly, the death of the martyrs was an important feature for the early Christians. They used it as a teaching point. John does just this in his mention of the death of Peter in his gospel.

Because the deaths of Peter and Paul are not mentioned in Acts of the Apostles we can be confident that it was written before 65AD.

The Acts of the Apostles makes it clear that the Gospel of Luke was written before the Acts of the Apostles. Luke says in his opening words, “In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.”Therefore the Gospel of Luke was written before 65 AD.

Scholars believe the Gospel of Luke was based on the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew. If the gospel of Luke depended on Mark and Matthew, then they were also written before 65 AD.

Jesus Christ was crucified 33AD. Therefore the main three gospels were written within just thirty or so years of the death of Christ. John’s gospel was written after 65 AD and before the death of John around 90 AD.

This leaves the question of authorship. Some scholars dispute the authorship of the books of the New Testament saying that apostles’ names were attached to them, but they were written by a secretary or another author altogether.  There is some possibility that a secretary wrote some of the material in the New Testament–especially if the stories were based on the preaching of the Apostles. This is probably the case, for example, with the epistles of Peter.

However, the idea that whole books were fabricated later and assigned to the Apostles is far fetched. While this happened with the obviously later Gnostic Gospels like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, there is little evidence that this type of pseudo graphical writing took place in the early development of the New Testament.

While some of the writing of St Paul evidences different vocabulary and style this is not significant enough to say that the books were not written by him. Style and vocabulary vary greatly within any writer’s work.

Why do scholars try so hard then to give a late date to the New Testament? Because they have another agenda. If Jesus really claimed to be God incarnate–as the gospels show–then it is difficult to avoid this conclusion about him. However, if these “mythological” elements can be shown to be later inventions, then they can be dismissed, and the only way to show that they were later inventions is to try to prove that the gospels were written at a later date. In other words, the radically liberal New Testament scholars are not only lousy scholars. They’re liars.