tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53658491296923594392024-03-13T21:05:12.403-07:00Grace and Miracles"The two foundations; one inward, the other outward; grace, miracles; both supernatural."
Blaise PascalAnette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.comBlogger109125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-58839483457923452642012-02-04T14:24:00.022-08:002014-11-02T15:47:29.991-08:00Grace, Miracles, and the Power of Prayer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oslo Cathedral, taken after the Christmas Eve Midnight Service, 2011.</td></tr>
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Back when Rick and I were dating in college we had a discussion about miracles. He said that he had a problem with miracles because he couldn't see why God would break His own laws. Why would an omnipotent, omniscient God create a universe with predictable natural laws, only to later violate them? My counter-argument was, in a nutshell: "Why can't an omniscient, omnipotent God do whatever He jolly-well pleases?"<br />
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But I just couldn't get Rick to see things my way. He continued to be stuck on the idea that even though God <i>could </i>break His own laws, He shouldn't <i>want </i>to or <i>have </i>to in order to accomplish His purposes.<br />
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After a while, we just dropped the subject, and it never came up again until seven years ago, when our oldest daughter, Chelsea, was thirteen. She asked me: "Mom, why would God break His own laws?"<br />
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It must be genetic!<br />
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But this time I didn't give such a simplistic response. Eleven years earlier, our second-born, Ingrid, had been diagnosed with a seizure disorder and cerebral palsy, so over the years I had often reflected on what the Bible says about miracles. And right around the time when Chelsea asked that question, I had experienced a paradigm shift in my understanding of the subject. Rick's (and Chelsea's) point is not just a valid one--it has far-reaching theological implications.<br />
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Saint Augustine said, “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature." But today we know more about nature than Saint Augstine did, and quantum physics indicates that we don't live in a clockwork universe with fixed laws. Physicist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davies">Paul Davies</a> says in an <a href="http://being.publicradio.org/programs/einsteinsgod/transcript.shtml">interview on the radio show, "On Being</a>":</div>
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If God does anything, God has to be at work in the world. And now, if we go back to the sort of universe that Newton had and the one that Einstein supported, the notion of a deterministic universe, a clockwork universe, then this becomes a real problem, because if God is to change anything, then God has to overrule God's own laws, and that doesn't look a very edifying prospect theologically or scientifically. It's horrible on both accounts. </blockquote>
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But when one gets to an indeterministic universe, if you allow quantum physics, then there is some sort of lassitude in the operation of these laws. There are interstices having to do with quantum certainty into which, if you want, you could insert the hand of God. So, for example, if we think of a typical quantum process as being like the roll of a die — you know, "God does not play dice," Einstein said — well, it seems that, you know, God does play dice. Then the question is, you know, if God could load the quantum dice, this is one way of influencing what happens in the world, working through these quantum uncertainties. </blockquote>
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In other words, miracles may not violate the laws of physics, since quantum physics tells us these laws are not deterministic. So given quantum physics, God could have parted the sea and done other miracles without breaking the laws of physics. Miracles would not be impossible--in any situation there would be a minuscule, non-zero probability of a miraculous outcome. And the hand of God could be at work in those probabilities, loading the dice according to His will.<br />
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But having said that, I want to move away from quantum physics to a discussion of the theological reasons for believing that God is consistent in His actions and purposes, even with respect to miracles.<br />
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">The Theological Implications of the Problem of Miracles</span></b><br />
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One objection I've often heard from skeptics is, "If an omnipotent, omniscient God exists, why doesn't He just do X?" where X is something very different from what we observe in nature and discover through science. In other words, why would an all-powerful deity bother with methods and processes, when He could simply swing His celestial wand and make things happen?<br />
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This is the opposite objection to the one expressed by Rick and Chelsea, and it's based on the same presupposition that I used to hold: That since an omnipotent, omniscient God can do whatever He pleases, random displays of power should be expected.<br />
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But the problem with this position is that God not just all-powerful, He is also all-good and all-wise, which means that He is rational, orderly, and consistent, not capricious. He could have raised up children for Abraham out of rocks (Matthew 3:9), but instead He did it through the process of birth and development, both physical and spiritual. His works--natural or supernatural--bear the same divine imprint.<br />
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Physicist and theologian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne">John Polkinghorne</a> says in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Physics-Theology-Unexpected-Kinship/dp/0300138407/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327362542&sr=8-1">Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship:</a></i><br />
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It does not make theological sense to suppose that God is a kind of show-off celestial conjurer, capriciously using divine power today to do something that God did not think of doing yesterday and won't be bothered to do tomorrow. There must be a deep underlying consistency in divine action, but that requirement does not condemn the deity never to do anything radically new or unexpected. In the Christian tradition, we use personal language about God, not because we think God is an old man with a beard sitting high above the bright blue sky, but because it is less misleading in using the finite resources of human language to call God 'Father' than it would be to employ the impersonal language of 'Force.' The divine consistency is not a rigidly unalterable regularity like that of the force of gravity, but it lies in the continuity of a perfectly appropriate relationship to prevailing circumstances. </blockquote>
Polkinghorne makes a number of very important points here, so I would like to spend some time unpacking them and using them as a framework for some of the insights I have acquired over the years.<br />
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First, he points out that it is less misleading to call God "Father" than to use the impersonal word "Force." To think of the God of the Bible as an impersonal force is a greater error than to be too anthropomorphic in our conception of God. God is not just a Person, but a <i>loving</i> Father who desires a relationship with us.<br />
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However, we can also err by failing to see that, although God is not an impersonal force, the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, <i>is</i> "power from on high" (Luke 24:49). God is not just like us, which means that prayer is not just like asking another person to please pass the salt, expecting either the request to be immediately granted or to be told, "No, I think you've had enough sodium." (Although, in my experience, the latter doesn't happen too often at dinner parties.)<br />
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Sometimes God does deny a request, knowing that to grant it would hurt us--or He has something better in store. Paul would learn humility and greater reliance on God's power as a result of the thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).<br />
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But when we pray for something according to the promises in God's Word, and the answer doesn't come, the Bible <i>nowhere </i>tells us to assume that the request has been denied. On the contrary, Jesus says to keep praying and not give up, telling the parable of the unrighteous judge (Luke 18:1-8).<br />
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This is a strange parable because it makes sense that nagging might wear <i>humans</i> down to the point where they will do something they were disinclined to do (children learn this at a very young age), but why would God say, essentially, "Just keep wearing Me out with your nagging, and I'll eventually do what I want to do anyway"? If our view of God is too anthropomorphic, this makes no sense. Unlike the unrighteous judge, God never becomes weary (Isaiah 40:28), and He is both willing and able to meet our every need (Philippians 4:19).<br />
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But if there is a "deep underlying consistency" in God's actions, as Polkinghorne says there must be, and God is the Creator of the universe, then we should not expect Him to act just like a human father. He is far more than that. We should expect to see close parallels between what nature reveals about His mind and what the Scriptures reveal about it. That is, just like there are physical laws, there ought to be spiritual laws.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>The Vine and the Branches</b></span><br />
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John 15:5-7 says: "I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you."<br />
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That last sentence is one of those embarrassing statements by Jesus that are rarely mentioned in polite Christian company. We have<i> </i>all experienced unanswered prayer, so we may think that the idea that <i>whatever we wish</i> will be done for us has to be a mistake. I remember hearing this verse as a child and putting it to the test. I prayed and wished very hard for a bag of candy to appear under my pillow, but alas, I had to conclude that Jesus must have been wrong because there was nothing under my pillow.<br />
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However, what people often fail to notice about this passage is that the promise has a <i>condition. </i>And that condition is that we must <i>abide </i>in Christ in the same way that a branch abides in the vine. In other words, we have to stay close enough to Christ so that His life-giving Spirit flows through us in the same way that sap flows from a vine to the branches.<br />
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How do we know if we are abiding in the way Jesus commands us to? The test is whether we bear good fruit (Matthew 7:16-20)? And what is good fruit, the kind produced by the Holy Spirit? "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22-23). <br />
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So John 15 describes a spiritual law that is exactly like a physical law. Just like a branch has to stay attached to the vine to bear fruit, we have to maintain this same close connection to Christ to bear good fruit. What happens if we don't? We will wither spiritually, just like a branch withers if it breaks off from the vine. But if God's Spirit works through us, we will bear much fruit and wield the power of God through our prayers.<br />
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This passage is so matter-of-fact that it's almost harsh, but the laws of nature are so matter-of-fact that <i>they're</i> almost harsh. If I start eating a slice of French silk pie every night I <i>will </i>gain weight and probably clog up my arteries. That is an extremely harsh reality because I happen to like French silk pie. But the upside is that by eating healthy food and exercising we can become healthier and feel better. So although the laws of nature make us responsible for certain unpleasant outcomes, they also give us power.<br />
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But without losing sight of the spiritual law Jesus describes in John 15, we also have to remember that God is not an impersonal force, like the laws of nature, but a loving Father. He is in charge of our spiritual growth. He is aware of our weaknesses and failings, and He doesn't give up on us unless it becomes clear that we'll never grow fruit no matter what He does (Luke 13:6-9). If we abide in Him a little and bear some fruit, He prunes us so we will be more fruitful (John 15:2).<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>Grace and Miracles</b></span><br />
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The reason why I named my blog "Grace and Miracles" is because I love the Blaise Pascal quote: "The two foundations; one inward, the other outward; grace, miracles; both supernatural." It's not because I'm particularly fond of the title, "Grace and Miracles." An atheist once told me that he would visit my blog even though the name reminded him of an Oprah segment. I guess I can kind of see that . . .<br />
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Anyway, Pascal is saying that the grace of God that changes our hearts is just as supernatural as the power that effects miracles in the world. "Grace" means the work of God in our hearts--how He forgives us, makes us spiritually alive, and changes us to become more like Him. Again, we can understand this by analogizing it to something in the natural realm. Electricity enlightens a room and also keeps our appliances running. The same power accomplishes different things. Likewise, the Holy Spirit enlightens our hearts, but it is also God's supernatural power in the world.<br />
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What does this mean in terms of the promise of Jesus that if we abide in Him we will bear much fruit <i>and </i>we will receive whatever we ask for? It means we will ask for the right things because we will <i>want </i>the right things. We won't ask for candy to appear under our pillows, because if we are manifesting the fruit of self-control we won't be so desperate for candy in the first place. And if God's love has transformed us, we will pray for other people because we will genuinely care. To the extent that God's Spirit lives within us, we will want what God wants and therefore pray according to His will.<br />
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It does not, however, mean that moral perfection is required of us before God will hear our prayers. If that were the case, none of us would have any hope! On the contrary, He invites us to come to Him, warts and all, and <i>He </i>is the one who strengthens us and gives a crown of beauty for ashes (Isaiah 61:3). When we abide in Him, He <i>gives</i> us His love for our hate and selfishness, His joy for our depression, His peace for our turmoil, and so on. Jesus came to call sinners, which means that we all qualify. And the more we experience the liberality of His gifts of grace, the more we come to believe that He will graciously give us everything we need.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>Is the Vine and the Branches Analogy Consistent With the Rest of the Scriptures?</b></span><br />
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As we have seen, John 15 reveals an underlying consistency between grace and the power of prayer--both depend on our relationship to Christ being like the relationship of a branch to a vine. The Holy Spirit is like the life-giving sap that flows through to the branches and makes a real difference in the physical world by producing fruit. But let's test John 15 to see if it really does shed some light on when and why miracles occur in the Scriptures. Is it consistent with the rest of the Bible?<br />
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We do see that much of the time when miracles occurred in the New Testament, believers were praying for a extended period of time, often as a large group. In other words, they were abiding in Christ in a particularly focused way. For example, Acts 1:14 says that the believers were with one mind "continually devoting themselves to prayer," and shortly afterwards the day of Pentecost came (Acts 2:1). Again, Acts 2:42 says that the believers "were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer," and Acts 2:43 continues by saying that many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. In Acts 10:9, Peter was praying when he had the vision about the unclean animals, and Acts 10:30 says that Cornelius was praying when a man appeared before him in shining garments.<br />
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In Acts 12:2, King Herod put James the brother of John to death--the first of the apostles to be martyred. And then Herod captured Peter as well and put him in prison, but "prayer for him was being made fervently by the church to God" (Acts 12:5). After Peter's miraculous rescue, the church was still gathered together praying for him (Acts 12:12).<br />
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That story is particularly significant because there is no mention of prayer when James was captured and killed. That doesn't mean they <i>didn't</i> pray, but the death of James may have sent shock waves through the church, because the passage about Peter specifically mentions twice that they prayed, and they prayed fervently into night.<br />
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John 15 makes sense of Luke 18:1-8, the parable of the widow and the unrighteous judge. Jesus says to cry out to Him day and night, and when we do, His power will be at work on our behalf, granting our request <i>speedily</i>.<br />
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We also see this principle typified in the Old Testament. In Exodus 17:8-13, the Amalekites attacked Israel, and Moses stood at the top of hill holding up the staff of the Lord. As long as he held it up, the Israelites were winning, but when he lowered it, the Amalekites started winning. After a while, Moses became tired and Aaron and Hur held up each of his hands until sunset, when the Israelites won. God's power was at work as long as Moses held up the staff of the Lord.<br />
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Again, in Joshua 6, the warriors of Israel were commanded to take the ark of the covenant and march around Jericho for seven days, once on each of the first six days, and seven times on the seventh day. After they did so, the wall of Jericho collapsed and the Israelites conquered the city. The ark of the covenant represents the throne of grace or the presence of God, and the number seven in the Bible represents completion or perfection. So they walked in the presence of the Lord for seven days, and the wall collapsed, just like we are called to persevere in prayer until the answer comes.<br />
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I could also discuss the story of Jacob wrestling with God all night, and Abraham "negotiating" with God about Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as other passages, but I think the above examples are sufficient to establish the consistency of the Bible's teachings about persevering prayer. The passages use different illustrations from nature or everyday life to communicate a spiritual concept. In other words, human language is insufficient, so we have to analogize to concepts that we <i>do </i>understand, each of which helps illuminate this principle.<br />
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I would like to make an important observation here before I move on. Sometimes a suffering person may feel like a failure after praying for a miracle that doesn't happen. But it's important to note that Peter did not deserve to be miraculously delivered any more than James did. Peter was <i>asleep</i> when the angel rescued him, so he wasn't even praying. The <i>church </i>was praying for him. And even Moses grew tired and needed someone to hold up his hands.<br />
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When we really study what the Bible says about prayer and when miracles occur in the book of Acts, we can see why they would be extremely rare today. We wield the power of God through our prayers, and the prayers of one Christian may be like one candle, lighting up one small part of the darkness. But if an entire congregation holds up candles, the blaze can conquer the darkness.<br />
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How often do we, as a church, devote ourselves to prayer the way the early church did? Not nearly often enough, but I have seen God work in powerful ways when we do.<br />
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This is not to discount the power of individual prayer. James 5:16 says that the fervent, effectual prayer of a righteous person can accomplish much. However, if we are praying for a miracle, we should expect to have to put forth much effort, learn from past mistakes, and not give up. The Bible compares the life of faith to running a race (1 Corinthians 9:24-27, Hebrews 12:1), so why should we expect it to be easy?<br />
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">When God Does Something Radically New or Unexpected</span></b><br />
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There are times when miracles occur in the New Testament and there is no specific mention of prayer. For example, Jesus performed many miracles, and much of the time He just spoke healing to people. Jesus is, of course, different because He is the Son of God, but He also spent forty days fasting and praying before He began His ministry. He remained in a state of unbroken communion with the Father, so He Himself lived what He taught in John 15.<br />
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But, according to the four canonical Gospels, nobody prayed or had faith when Jesus appeared to them after the resurrection. Does that invalidate the principle of the vine and the branches? No. As Polkinghorne says, "There must be a deep underlying consistency in divine action, but <i>that requirement does not condemn the deity never to do anything radically new or unexpected . . . </i>The divine consistency is not a rigidly unalterable regularity like that of the force of gravity, but <i>it lies in the continuity of a perfectly appropriate relationship to prevailing circumstances.</i>" (Italics added.)<br />
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The resurrection is a unique event because it is the bedrock of Christianity (1 Corinthians 15:14-17), intended as proof to all people (Acts 17:31), and the only biblical miracle that can be critically evaluated based on the textual details. In other words, secular historians can analyze the text using the same historical criteria applied to all ancient writings and determine whether certain non-supernatural facts are likely true. For example, a sizable majority of scholars who have written on the subject believe that women did in fact find the tomb empty. Non-theistic historian Michael Grant says, "[I]f we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty." Almost all scholars hold that the apostles at least believed that Jesus had appeared to them postmortem. And by taking these and other salient facts together an honest inquirer can make an inference as to whether the resurrection probably occurred. I discuss the resurrection in greater detail in <a href="http://graceandmiracles.blogspot.com/search/label/Resurrection%20Evidence">this series of posts</a>.<br />
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The question of whether the disciples and Paul believed that they would see Jesus postmortem is significant because if they did, it may be reasonable to infer that it was some kind of mass <a href="http://graceandmiracles.blogspot.com/2011/01/skeptical-response-to-resurrection.html">hallucination</a> brought on by the power of suggestion. And if the text had said that only those with faith could see Jesus, then we may have had an Emperor's New Clothes situation. But in the canonical narratives nobody expected Jesus to appear to them (least of all Paul), and they still boldly proclaimed the resurrection afterwards in the same hostile environment where Jesus had been crucified, and where members of their community continued to be persecuted and killed (Acts 7:58-60, Acts 8:1-3, Acts 9:1-2, Acts 12:1-4). The severe persecution by the Jewish and Roman leaders did not stop the church from growing in Jerusalem and spreading throughout the Roman Empire.<br />
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And in spite of the initial unbelief of the disciples of Jesus when faced with His resurrection, He did in fact predict it in Matthew 16:21, Matthew 17:22-23, Matthew 20:18-19, Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:34, Luke 9:22, Luke 18:31-33, and Luke 24:7. So it should not have been unexpected.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>The Divine Imprint on Biblical Miracles</b></span><br />
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Jesus expresses the underlying consistency in divine action when He says, "Do not believe me unless I do what my Father does" (John 10:37). Only if something is consistent with God's purposes and actions should we believe that it is from God. And the canonical miracles do bear this divine imprint in two ways: First, Jesus did on a small scale and in a focused way what God does or will do in nature on a large scale, and second, the miracles contain symbolism of God's redemptive purpose.<br />
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In <i>Miracles</i>, C. S. Lewis says about the miracles of Jesus: "Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of nature." He classifies them in the following two ways: "The first system yields the classes (1) Miracles of Fertility (2) Miracles of Healing (3) Miracles of Destruction (4) Miracles of Dominion over the Inorganic (5) Miracles of Reversal (6) Miracles of Perfecting or Glorification. The second system, which cuts across the first, yields two classes only: they are (1) Miracles of the Old Creation, and (2) Miracles of the New Creation."<br />
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The Miracles of Fertility are turning water into wine, making much bread out of a little bread and many fish out of a few fish, and the virgin birth. He points out that, "Every year, as part of the Natural order, God makes wine. He does so by creating a vegetable organism that can turn water, soil, and sunlight into a juice which will, under proper conditions, become wine." But at the wedding in Cana, He short-circuited the process. Likewise, He regularly makes a little corn into much corn in nature and multiplies fish.<br />
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As for the virgin birth, Lewis points out that "no woman ever conceived a child, no mare a foal, without Him." But once in history, when He created the Man who was to be Himself, He removed the human father from the chain of causation.<br />
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In his discussion on the Miracles of Healing, Lewis says that there is a sense in which no doctor ever heals--the body heals itself, and the doctor may simply stimulate this process or remove what hinders it. But once in Palestine, the "Power that always was behind all healings puts on a face and hands."<br />
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Christ's one Miracle of Destruction was to cause the fig tree to wither and die, just like God allows the cycle of life and death in nature everywhere.<br />
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With the Miracles of Dominion over the Inorganic, Lewis crosses over from the Miracles of the Old Creation to the Miracles of the New Creation. When Jesus calms the storm, He does what God does in the Old Creation, but when He walks on water He does something "that is the foretaste of a Nature that is still in the future. The New Creation is just breaking in."<br />
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The Miracles of Reversal are when the dead are raised, a process that is unknown in the Old Creation--"it involves playing backwards a film that we have always seen played forwards."<br />
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And he concludes this discussion by saying, "And the Miracles of Perfecting or of Glory, the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, are even more emphatically of the New Creation. These are the true spring, or even the summer, of the world's new year. The Captain, the forerunner, is already in May or June, though His followers on earth are still living in the frosts and east winds of Old Nature--for 'spring comes slowly up this way.'"<br />
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As for the symbolism, it used to bother me when pastors focused on the deeper message embedded in the miracles, as if Jesus did not literally perform miracles. However, this is not an either/or proposition. Something can be literally true and <i>also </i>symbolic. For example, I literally went to Norway for Christmas and attended the Christmas Eve midnight service at the Oslo Cathedral. Then, right around the stroke of midnight I snapped the picture of the ceiling, which says, "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" or "Glory to God in the Highest"--what the angels sang to the shepherds after announcing the birth of Christ (Luke 2:14). The picture is also symbolic of the topic of my blog post, how God's power works through us and brings glory back to God, in the same way that the power emerging through the ceiling lights up the bulbs in the chandelier, which in turn reveal the ceiling. (Granted, the analogy breaks down in that the ceiling does not empower the light bulbs.) But none of this occurred to me at the time. I was just trying to take a visually pleasing picture.<br />
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And the Bible contains many different literary styles, but deep symbolism of God's redemptive purpose seems to appear in just about all the stories, parables, and miracles--in the Old Testament and the New--as if God stamped them with His signet ring. The blind see, the lame leap, the dead live, and the unclean are cleansed. Darkness falls upon the earth when Jesus is dying, because the sun is obscured, but when He gives up His spirit the veil of the temple tears in two, allowing sinners into God's holy sanctuary. Saints emerge from their tombs (Matthew 27:52), foreshadowing the day when those who dwell in the dust will awaken (Isaiah 26:19) and when the sea will give up its dead (Revelation 20:13).<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>Why Don't We See Miracles Today?</b></span><br />
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Many people ask that question, but I think it assumes too much. If a "miracle" is defined as a great outcome following prayer, including healings that doctors can't explain, then miracles most certainly happen today. I have personally experienced highly improbable outcomes after prayer over the years and have seen them in the lives of other Christians. But if a miracle is something contrary to the laws of nature, then we are back to square one and the question of why God would break His own laws. According to <i>New York Times </i>science writer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15risk.html">Dennis Overbye</a>, "Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons." Quantum physics tells us that we live in a <i>very strange </i>universe, so we can never say that a particular event cannot happen in the natural order.<br />
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What is a miracle? At what point does a doctor go from saying, "I can't explain this," to "This is a miracle"? Ever? Does it all just come down to the improbability of an outcome?<br />
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If prayer makes a difference something supernatural is happening even if the outcome could have occurred without prayer. I just took some time off from blogging to focus on prayer because of a medical crisis involving my son, where we found out, after a series of tests, that he had had a severe reaction to a medication. Not only did he recover from everything without any medicine (except a week of Benadryl), but the insurance covered all the tens of thousands of dollars for the hospitalization, and I saw more answers to prayer in that month or two than I have in a long time, including the great news about the remission of Rick's agent <a href="http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/leehough">Lee Hough's</a> aggressive cancer and <a href="http://graceandmiracles.blogspot.com/2011/11/ricks-legal-thriller-hit-1-in-kindle.html">Rick's novel</a> being featured by Amazon and hitting the number one spot that day for Kindle sales.<br />
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Coincidence? Maybe. But in the words of William Temple, "When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't, they don't."<br />
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I met novelist <a href="http://brandilyncollins.com/healing.html">Brandilyn Collins</a> for the first time back in 2009. At the time, she was experiencing the reinfection of her Lyme Disease she describes on her website. I knew about the instant healing of her first and most severe bout of Lyme Disease after fellow Christians set up a 24-hour prayer vigil on her behalf, and I remember thinking how that resembled the prayer vigil by the church for the Apostle Peter. If the Bible is true in what it says about prayer, an effort like that would be most likely to bring about a miraculous outcome.<br />
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However, although I prayed for her (and she was kind enough to pray for my daughter Ingrid, who was having seizures at the time), it concerned me that she was unlikely to get that kind of an organized, continuous prayer vigil again. It is rare for Christians to do something like that. There are so many people to pray for, and frankly, we don't take prayer anywhere near as seriously as we should.<br />
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But God still had Brandilyn's well-being in mind, and working within the framework of His spiritual laws, He answered our comparatively sporadic, weak prayers by providing a medical remedy that healed her over the course of six months.<br />
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When Jesus says that it shall be done to us according to our faith, He is stating the spiritual law of John 15 in a different way. Faith simply means being open to the power of God, so the more of God's power we can bring to our situation, either by our own prayers or the prayers of other believers, the more likely we will see a miraculous outcome.<br />
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Martin Luther said, "Prayer is that mightiest of all weapons that created natures can wield." And no wonder, since prayer is the means by which we lay hold of the power of God! If we really believed that, would we see more outcomes like Brandilyn's? Could our greatest gift to our children be our prayers? What would happen if we, like Augustine's mother Monica, brought our children before the throne of grace day and night? We know that her fast-living, rebellious son became one of the most influential theologians and philosophers in history.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>Final Thoughts</b></span><br />
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The unifying theme of this behemoth blog post is the consistency of divine action, so I would like to conclude by identifying one more way in which God's supernatural work mirrors His work in nature: Just as we grow and develop physically, we grow and develop spiritually. This means that faith can be a very long, slow process even when we have experienced God's work in our lives many times and are intellectually convinced. We have to see the same cause and effect again and again, and allow our faith to be tested from many different angles, so we don't secretly fear that reality would shatter it.<br />
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Abraham was the man of great faith, but at one point he doubted enough to "help" God fulfill His promises by impregnating Hagar. Moses lived in Midian forty years, engaged in the lonely business of tending sheep, before God appeared to him in the burning bush (Acts 7:30). And even then, he doubted. The Christians who prayed for the Apostle Peter did not believe that he was still alive when he arrived at the door. They told the servant girl Rhoda that she was out of her mind when she announced it (Acts 12:12-16), even after they had prayed fervently for Peter for hours and had witnessed other miracles.<br />
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So if we struggle with doubt, we are in excellent company. But God is the author and perfecter of our faith, the one who calls us out of death into life, who plots our course, who teaches us to walk by faith, who picks us up and puts us back on our feet when we fall--and who knows exactly how long to let us lie there before He does.<br />
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God is mindful that we are but dust, but there's nothing prosaic about that dust--science tells us that we are made of stardust! And God's Word resoundingly echoes with our intended destiny: "Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever" (Daniel 12:3).Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-25641559498988375142011-11-13T13:15:00.001-08:002012-05-26T06:43:19.689-07:00Thoughts on ApologeticsGeorge MacDonald:<br />
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I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing and myself be, after all, a castaway---no king but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with Him to the death, but an arguer about the truth. </blockquote>
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C. S. Lewis, in the poem, "The Apologist's Evening Prayer":<br />
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Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead</blockquote>
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of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.</blockquote>
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From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,</blockquote>
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O Thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.</blockquote>
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Anette Acker, in the <a href="http://graceandmiracles.blogspot.com/2009/09/venite-ad-me-omnes.html">blog comments</a>, prior to ever writing anything on apologetics (quoting C. S. Lewis):<br />
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"What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words."</blockquote>
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I'm sure that Lewis, as an apologist, saw the futility of words. People will always find the words to defend what they want to believe. Only a personal encounter with God (even if it's not dramatic) brings true faith.</blockquote>
Do I agree with that? Well, I certainly agree with George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis, but I'm not sure about that Anette Acker person. (People who use words like "always" are always wrong.)<br />
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Apologetics has been very helpful to me in terms of answering the question of whether Christian theism is intellectually defensible, even as I seek out and honestly confront the best counter-arguments. The answer is an unequivocal Yes--more so than I expected when I first started engaging in discussions with atheists.<br />
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But I think it has limited value in terms of changing minds in dramatic ways, and this is why: First, we are all governed by will and emotion as well as intellect, and a person's worldview is often a major part of his or her identity. I remember when Norway voted on EC membership back when I was a child. Everybody had bumper stickers that said, "JA" or "NEI." I may not have understood any of the issues, but I <i>knew</i> that all right-thinking people said "JA," and a "NEI" bumper sticker was conclusive proof of feeblemindedness, a character flaw, or both.<br />
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Although most adults are a little more sophisticated than that, we are still prone to thinking in terms of in-crowds and out-crowds and banding together against the opposition. So completely changing our minds and, consequently, our identities, is difficult.<br />
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Second, those who have never experienced the presence of God in their lives and for whom God feels non-existent will require a much higher burden of proof than someone who has lived the Christian life, studied the Bible in-depth, seen answers to prayer, and experienced spiritual growth. The same evidence may be sufficient for one person and not for another.<br />
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On his blog, Atheist Central,<i> </i>Ray Comfort once wrote a couple of posts about a Canadian Christian talk show host who was experiencing a crisis of faith. The main reason for his crisis was that he had never experienced God's presence in his life, so for him God may as well be non-existent. How much would it help him if I said, "Just look at this evidence and these arguments. Can't you see that Christianity is true?" No, he probably <i>wouldn't </i>be able to see it because his own immediate experience would speak to him more powerfully than anything I could say. As hard as it is to change a worldview, it may be easier than maintaining a radical disconnect between experience and belief, at least for some people. He would need prayer more than argument.<br />
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Judging from their writings, C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald did not experience this disconnect. However, the above quotes capture their sense that apologetics, or thoughts of God, are a poor substitute for God Himself, and how our thoughts can crowd out the stillness that God inhabits. If I'm always arguing about God, unable to rein in my thoughts, how can I draw near to Him?<br />
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I'm going to take an indefinite break from blogging about apologetics. The central reason is that it has become impossible to keep the comments from getting out of control, and it's burning me out. (The post on my daughter's study abroad has 199 comments on numerous subjects, and about half of them are mine.) I have always felt that apologetics blogs can be counter-productive if arguments are made and not defended or questions remain unanswered. Although the truth of Christianity does not depend on the ability of any given Christian to defend it, people still often conclude that there <i>is </i>no answer if they don't see one. Maybe it<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> is</span> </i>my fault that my discussions spiral out control, but I have not discovered any way to avoid it without leaving unanswered objections, questions, and arguments. And that's something I feel irresponsible doing. If there is a solution I have not found it. <br />
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I do feel privileged to have had these discussions with you all and have learned a lot. They have been an invaluable gift to me and I appreciate your friendship. But everything tells me that I'm at a point of transition.<br />
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So although I will do a post on the power of prayer, as I've said I would, I will not be engaging in debate in the comments.<br />
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</blockquote>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com148tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-52887113550312826152011-11-11T16:37:00.000-08:002011-11-12T16:28:42.569-08:00Rick's Legal Thriller Hit #1 in the Kindle Store Today!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAmkPJpZBgNyZAzsf5mWFL3oq0jT90gGoP1_oVHfo1Rk-P_SCiudp7XiQFm6kJ83yR8CG4XFwrEU2UYwvnVIub3YHs_CefF8kb1nVIFVBAXcxOuPlZtzgHcshxGFuiWO0CjVZMHtII9bo/s1600/Amazon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAmkPJpZBgNyZAzsf5mWFL3oq0jT90gGoP1_oVHfo1Rk-P_SCiudp7XiQFm6kJ83yR8CG4XFwrEU2UYwvnVIub3YHs_CefF8kb1nVIFVBAXcxOuPlZtzgHcshxGFuiWO0CjVZMHtII9bo/s640/Amazon.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
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Just out of the blue, Amazon decided to feature <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/When-the-Devil-Whistles-ebook/dp/B0043VEGNO/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1321144003&sr=8-1">When the Devil Whistles</a> </i>as their Daily Deal today (Friday) for $1.99, and it shot up to #1, right above John Grisham!<br />
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It has been #1 much of the day, but I figured I would immortalize it by taking a screenshot.<br />
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The book description is:<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #989898; font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 22px;"><img alt="" class="alignleft" height="200" src="http://www.rickacker.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/DevilWhistles-JPEG1-194x300.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; float: left; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 15px; margin-top: 6px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="DevilWhistles (JPEG)" width="130" /></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Allie Whitman is a professional whistleblower with a knack for sniffing out fraud in government contracts. Conner Norman is a gifted litigator and together they form Devil to Pay, Inc., a shell corporation that files lawsuits based on Allie s investigations. They soon find themselves fighting potentially fatal battles in and out of the courtroom, going great lengths to protect secrets that could ruin them both.</blockquote><br />
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And the author description:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><a href="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/01/7e/570ac0a398a0c66c7e034210.L._V192212144_SX200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Image of Rick Acker" border="0" height="200" id="artistCentralGallery_image0" src="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/01/7e/570ac0a398a0c66c7e034210.L._V192212144_SX200_.jpg" width="133" /></a>Rick Acker is a Deputy Attorney General in the California Department of Justice. He <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"></span>prosecutes corporate fraud lawsuits like those described in <i>When the Devil Whistles</i>. He has led confidential investigations into a number of large and sensitive cases that made headlines in and out of California. Rick holds law degrees from the University of Oslo and the University of Notre Dame, where he graduated with honors. In addition to his novels, he is a contributing author on two legal treatises published by the American Bar Association. Rick lives with his wife in the San Francisco area. Visit him on the Web at: www.rickacker.com. </blockquote>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-17821177079388061152011-10-19T05:48:00.000-07:002011-10-19T09:13:35.652-07:00The Eternal Weight of GloryOn May 20, 2007, my husband's brother died of cancer, leaving a wife and a two-year-old daughter. He was thirty-eight.<br />
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His pain became excruciating toward the end of his life, and one day, after getting off the phone with my mother-in-law, I remember praying, <i>How can anything be worth this? How can You let a good man with a young family die in ever-growing pain?</i><br />
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<i></i>Two weeks before he died, with very little remaining strength, he spent several hours at his computer, writing. He had degrees from Brown, Princeton, and the University of Chicago Law School. He had worked for a large, prestigious law firm and had left it to follow his dream to do environmental protection for a non-profit organization. He had lived in France and Kenya and had climbed mountains around the world. But his "Final Jottings"—right before the cancer attacked his brain—were : "Do not fail to seize the love of God, which is available to you in the all-embracing sacrifice of Christ."<br />
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I have for a while talked about writing a post on the problem of evil, but theodicy is a daunting subject because the Bible is never<i> </i>philosophical about suffering and evil. The shortest, and, in my opinion, the most powerful verse in the Bible is John 11:35, which follows the death of Lazarus: "Jesus wept." Jesus knew that He would raise Lazarus from the dead and increase the faith of those present, but He was "deeply moved in spirit and was troubled" when He saw their grief (John 11:33).<br />
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The Book of Job is all about the problem of evil, and yet Job, with his raw and authentic complaint to God, is applauded by God, while his friends, with their judgmental platitudes, are sharply rebuked (Job 42:7). God rejects their simplistic theodicy and answers Job by asking if he really is in a position to judge God. Does he have the wisdom of God?<br />
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The problem of evil is complex because, on the one hand, God has permitted evil and suffering, but on the other hand, we are called to overcome evil and alleviate suffering wherever we see it. Acts 10:38 says that Jesus "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him." So the devil is responsible for oppression and suffering, and God's will is healing and well-being. But God created Satan and all the fallen angels, and He <i>could</i> put an end to all suffering and evil right now.<br />
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Why doesn't He?<br />
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In order to do justice to the problem of evil, we have to put it in its proper context. Although it is a <i>practical</i> problem for anyone, <i>philosophically</i> it is a Christian problem, since Christianity, more than any religion, speaks of a God of love. But the Apostle Paul, who was called to his ministry with the words, "I will show him how much he must suffer for My name's sake" (Acts 9:16), says in 2 Corinthians 4:17-18: "For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."<br />
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Paul says that suffering is <i>producing </i>for us an eternal weight of glory. And since God is preparing us for the eternal Paradise that will someday replace this temporary order, it is no wonder that if we belong to Christ we will become familiar with the dizzying spin on the potter's wheel.<br />
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Only a particular kind of universe can produce certain moral qualities in us. If we never encountered danger, how could we practice courage? If we never experienced opposition, how could we learn fortitude? If nobody ever wronged us, we would not learn forgiveness. If poverty did not exist, we would have no opportunity to practice charity or learn contentment. Failure and suffering can teach us humility and empathy. If we were self-sufficient and never wanted for anything, we would not seek God.<br />
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The new Paradise will, unlike the innocent Eden, consist of redeemed sinners who will have known the deepest lows of human existence and its greatest heights, like a symphony of high and low notes, dramatic fortissimos and tender pianissimos. That is how God uses evil for His own good purposes, and Romans 8:18 says: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us." This life, for better or for worse, is like a mist that appears for a short while and then disappears (James 4:14). But our share in the kingdom of God will last forever.<br />
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To be sure, hardship can bring bitterness and hopelessness, but that is a choice we make. We can also choose to overcome evil with good and let the fire of affliction purify us. As Augustine says:<br />
<blockquote>For, in the same fire, gold gleams and straw smokes; under the same flail the stalk is crushed and the grain threshed; the lees are not mistaken for oil because they have issued from the same press. So, too, the tide of trouble will test, purify, and improve the good, but beat, crush, and wash away the wicked. So it is that, under the weight of the same affliction, the wicked deny and blaspheme God, and the good pray to Him and praise Him. The difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer. The same shaking that makes fetid water stink makes perfume issue a more pleasant odor.</blockquote>It is to the one who <i>overcomes </i>that God will "grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God" (Revelation 2:7). And in order to overcome, there has to be something to overcome. Romans 12:21 says, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." We are not to take what life throws at us sitting down. We are called to fight! And we overcome the world by our faith (1 John 5:4), which is the power of God within us.<br />
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My brother-in-law passed into eternity on a high note. He overcame the ravages of cancer that threaten to dehumanize and became increasingly conscious of the love of God through it all. His Final Jottings may, from an eternal vantage point, have been his greatest accomplishment of all.<br />
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But in no way am I downplaying his tragic and untimely death. Death is an enemy that will someday be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26), because evil and suffering are <i>not </i>God's will.<br />
<blockquote>And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away (Revelation 21:2-4).</blockquote>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-53210624117980713152011-10-02T06:07:00.000-07:002011-10-02T07:13:42.401-07:00Why I Haven't Been BloggingI apologize for dropping from the face of the blogosphere a couple of weeks ago, but our thirteen-year-old son was hospitalized with what turns out to have been a very severe reaction to a medication, and I'm just now becoming capable of letting my mind do anything but pray. I think he is going to be fine, although he has unfortunately inherited his mother's sensitivity to medications--I'm allergic to three antibiotics.<br />
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Now we just have to figure out what to do about all the missed schoolwork . . .Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-30776046627803500272011-09-04T07:40:00.000-07:002011-09-05T06:20:41.920-07:00Divine Inspiration<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2545/3922919961_aafb48d2e8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" id="il_fi" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2545/3922919961_aafb48d2e8.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Darkknight56 asked me what it means for the Bible to be inspired by God, and I said that I would do a post on the subject. So let’s start by looking at the story of Peter warming himself by the fire in the courtyard of the high priest and denying Jesus three times before the rooster crowed. In Matthew 26 and Mark 14, the high priest and other members of the Sanhedrin questioned Jesus in the courtyard and condemned Him to death before Peter denied Jesus and before the rooster crowed. However, in Luke 22, Jesus was only held in custody in the courtyard, and the denial of Peter and the rooster’s crowing happened <i>before</i> the Sanhedrin took Jesus to the council chamber to be questioned. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In other words, Mark and Matthew have the meeting where Jesus references Daniel 7:13 take place before dawn in the courtyard and Luke records it as taking place in the council chamber during the day. Unless Jesus was questioned and pronounced guilty twice—once before and once after Peter denied Him—it looks like the details don’t quite line up. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Oh, no! What do we do? We take a chill pill because the sky is <i>not</i> falling. What does the Bible say about divine inspiration? 2 Timothy 3:16 says: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.” The Greek word <i>theopneustos</i> is only used in 2 Timothy 3:16 and it literally means, “God-breathed.” </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So it says that all of Scripture is God-breathed, but it also tells us the <i>purpose</i> of the Scriptures—to train us in righteousness and equip us for every good work, or, as 2 Timothy 3:15 says, to give us “wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">If this is the purpose of divine inspiration, then unless we insist on holding the Bible to a standard that it doesn’t set for itself, the minor discrepancies I mentioned before don’t matter. We can be saved through faith and equipped for God’s work without knowing exactly when and where Jesus was questioned by the Sanhedrin. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>Historical Accuracy</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But of course the facts <i>do</i> matter because Christianity is a religion based on the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, our faith is in vain. This fact is the lynchpin of Christianity.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So the New Testament narratives have to be <a href="http://graceandmiracles.blogspot.com/2011/02/historicity-of-new-testament.html">historically reliable</a>, and according to the late Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White, they are. Sherwin-White did a detailed analysis of the trial of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels and the Book of Acts. He says, “As soon as Christ enters the Roman orbit at Jerusalem, the confirmation begins. For Acts, the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming.”</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And he <i>does</i> address the question of when and where the trial before the Sanhedrin took place by saying: “The detail of the time-table may seem trivial, but it is like the button that hangs the murderer. Mark and Matthew have the time-table right, where Luke is less probable.” In other words, Mark and Matthew (and John) are correct that it took place at night and they took Jesus to Pilate in the morning. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Why does he say that the details are like the button that hangs the murderer? For two reasons: First, Sherwin-White says that we have enough information about Roman officials’ daily round to know that they started their workday very early and ended it by noon at the latest. Some officials started before dawn and completed their work by ten or eleven. This means that on Luke’s scheme, the Jews would have arrived at the Praetorium to see Pontius Pilate too late, while he was engaging in his organized leisure activities. Sherwin-White concludes, “The Jews, because of the festival, were in a hurry. Hence there was every reason to hold the unusual night session if they were to catch the Procurator at the right moment.”</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Second, he says: “The quite unessential detail of the fire, which is common to both Mark and Luke, in the story of Peter’s denial, supports the Marcan version. Why light a fire—an act of some extravagance—if everyone was sleeping through the night?” If Jesus had just been held in custody in the courtyard of the high priest, as Luke reported, no fire would have been lit.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So through his knowledge of Roman history, Sherwin-White is able to confirm the historicity of these important events that have in the past been rejected by scholars like German theologian and church historian, Hans Lietzmann. (According to Sherwin-White, Lietzmann “pours a great deal of scorn” on the idea of the trial taking place at night and concludes that no trial ever took place before the Sanhedrin.) </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Sherwin-White likewise confirms the historicity of minor details like the soldiers dividing amongst themselves Jesus' clothing (Luke 23:34), by saying: "Given the relevant prophecy from the Old Testament [Psalm 22:18], there is every reason to assume that this is one of the evolved myths dear to the form-critics. But, as has been familiar since Mommsen, legal texts confirm that it was the accepted right of the executioner's squad to share out the minor possessions of their victim."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In other words, in spite of minor discrepancies like the one between Luke and the other Gospels regarding the time-table, the New Testament appears to be remarkably accurate historically. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>How Can We Tell if God Inspired the Scriptures?</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Of course the evidence for historical accuracy tells us little about whether the Bible is God-breathed. It merely says something about the human authors, much like the accuracy of a secular document does. Nor does the minor discrepancy in Luke tell us that the New Testament is <i>not </i>God-breathed, since it does not undermine the purpose of divine inspiration stated in 2 Timothy 3:16. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">To address the question of whether the Bible is divinely inspired, we have to see if it contains evidence that it is the product of one Mind, communicating the message of salvation. If so, then this evidence would be supportive of the claim and purpose of 2 Timothy 3:15-16. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Let’s focus on the beginning of Genesis, one of the most contentious parts of the Bible and, if my observations are an accurate gauge, the cause of most defections from Christianity. But I'm not going to get into the question of the age of the earth or other scientific aspects of creation. Instead, I am going to talk about some of the typology of Genesis and see how well it fits the theology of salvation. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">A "type" is something in the Old Testament foreshadowing or pre-figuring Christ or His salvation. Luke 24:27 refers to typology (Moses) and prophecy (the prophets), when it says, "Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures." Although what Jesus actually said is not recorded there, Jesus often explicitly referenced the Old Testament types during His ministry. However, other types are left for us to discover on our own.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Paul says in Romans 5:14 that Adam is a type of Him who was to come. So if Adam is a type of Christ, then Eve is a type of the church, which is the bride of Christ (Ephesians 5:25, Revelation 21:9). In Genesis 3:6, where Eve is tempted to eat the fruit, she noticed that the tree was "good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise." In other words, her temptation falls into all three categories mentioned in 1 John 2:16, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life." But she fell.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Jesus was also tempted by Satan in ways that fit into these three categories (Luke 4:3-12): Turn a stone into bread (lust of the flesh), worship Satan and He would receive the splendor and authority of all the kingdoms of the world (the lust of the eyes), and jump from the highest point of the temple and legions of angels would catch Him (the boastful pride of life). He resisted the temptations and fulfilled all righteousness on behalf of the church. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">After Adam and Eve fell, they sewed together fig leaves to cover themselves. This corresponds to Matthew 21:19, where Jesus curses a fig tree that has no fruit but only leaves, as well as the parable in Luke 13:6-9 of the fig tree in the vineyard that didn't bear any fruit. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In Genesis 3:21, God takes away the fig leaves and covers Adam and Eve with garments of an animal's skin. Likewise, God covers us with the righteousness of the sacrificial Lamb, Christ. John 15 says that if we abide in Christ, we will bear good fruit—in other words, we will have the righteousness of God.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Genesis 3:8 says that Adam and Eve hid from the presence of the Lord God after they sinned. Isaiah 59:2 says that our sins separate us from God. However, God sought them (Genesis 3:9), and when they responded, He gave them the garments of skin. Luke 15:4-9 says that God seeks the lost. However, it is up to us to respond if we are to receive His salvation (Revelation 3:20).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">They were driven out of the Garden of Eden and not permitted to eat from the tree of life. But Paradise was restored through Christ, who says in Revelation 2:7: "To him who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God." </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">A lot more could be said—like how Adam was put into a deep sleep and Eve was "taken out of man," just like the church was born out of Christ after He died on the cross (Jesus often referred to death as "sleep"), and how God finished His work of creation on the sixth day and Jesus said on the sixth day, "It is finished!" However, my purpose in all this is simply to illuminate the theological cohesiveness of the Bible, as if one Mind is communicating His message through all the various human authors, spanning many centuries and two religions. And even in the very first pages of the Old Testament, the central message is about salvation. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-28221439692942689442011-08-01T17:26:00.000-07:002011-08-30T12:00:36.015-07:00Planes, Trains and Automobiles—and Sending Daughters Abroad<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img height="320" id="il_fi" src="http://kristinscarfone.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/planes-trains-and-automobiles.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="225" /></span>I've probably watched the movie <i>Planes, Trains and Automobiles </i>at least five or six times, and it's just as laugh-out-loud funny each time. It is about a man (Steve Martin) who tries to get home to his family for Thanksgiving, and everything that can go wrong goes wrong on his trip, including the fact that he always ends up with an annoying shower ring salesman as a companion (John Candy). But I don't think it's just the comedic genius of John Candy and Steve Martin that appeals to me. I watch that movie to truly appreciate the fact that <i>I </i>am not out there experiencing a trip of nightmarish proportions. I'm experiencing it vicariously, yes, but with the power to instantly end the experience via the click of a remote control and go to sleep in my own bed--a power I woefully lack when I'm actually out there braving airports and delayed flights. So that movie is more than just mindless entertainment to me--it's a complex psychological experience.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I've been having the opposite psychological experience since I woke up this morning, after finding out that my daughter Chelsea has been stuck at the Reykjavik airport on her way to Norway--about sixteen hours now. She will hopefully arrive in Oslo by 2:30 a.m., barring further delays. After much time talking with relatives on the phone, communicating with Chelsea through email, and researching hotels on the Internet, she has a hotel room by the airport and will be picked up by my dad when she checks out tomorrow at noon. Hurrah for the Internet for making long distance helicopter parenting possible! </div><div><br />
</div><div>Not that Chelsea needs helicopter parenting. She pretty much planned this year abroad entirely by herself--figuring out how to get her college credits transferred, how to get a Norwegian social security number and passport (she has dual citizenship), learning the culture and language, and following the Norwegian news. She has lived and breathed Norway for the past year. </div><div><br />
</div><div>She has also carefully researched the Norwegian fashions. (In case anyone is wondering, Converse high tops are a <i>must have </i>if you are planning a trip in the near future--the more colors the better.) A couple of days before she left, after too many trips to the mall to buy and return shoes and stuff, I warned her against going to Norway with a Norwegianer-than-thou attitude, by telling her about my Italian friend back when I studied in Norway my junior year in college. His real name was Giorgio, but when he moved to Norway he exercised the exceedingly poor judgment of legally changing it to Jørgen. He wore traditional Norwegian sweaters all the time and spoke Nynorsk (the version of written Norwegian that combines dialects and which is used in more traditional parts of the country). He was far<i> </i>more Norwegian than those of us who were born there, and of course we thought that an Italian born-again Norwegian was too funny.<br />
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Chelsea explained that she was in no danger of becoming like Jørgen because although she had worked very hard to become as Norwegian as possible, she wouldn't <i>look </i>like she had tried too hard. She would look like she effortlessly blended, instead of screaming, "I am American!" </div><div><br />
</div><div>Maybe true. But even with all the right footwear, the best laid plans of mice and men and college girls can go awry. Several months ago when we made the reservations, Chelsea didn't need a meddling mother to tell her that a ten-hour layover in Reykjavik (which has now turned to sixteen) was too long and that she should go through London instead. She <i>loved </i>Iceland almost as much as she loves Norway (and yes, I think the past tense is probably correct, although I haven't asked her about it). </div><div><br />
</div><div>I just got on Flight Stats and found out that her flight out of Iceland has taken off. Yay! And it will arrive at 2:30 a.m. local time. Not so yay--especially since we left for the San Francisco Airport at 6:45 a.m. yesterday, and her trip will take a grand total of 37 hours. But at least it should be over soon.</div><div><br />
</div><div>So I think I'll take a deep breath (after I call and double-check Chelsea's hotel reservations in Oslo) and watch <i>Planes, Trains and Automobiles </i>again tonight.<br />
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UPDATE at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time: She is now in her hotel room and the lady at the desk was nice enough to offer to let her check out at 2 p.m. tomorrow, so she can sleep in. </div>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com211tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-24102290681996227822011-07-27T07:45:00.000-07:002011-10-10T21:31:12.097-07:00Why is Faith Necessary for Salvation?First, I want to apologize for taking so long since my last post. I commented on a couple of other blogs, and although I enjoyed the discussions, they went on for far too long. This is a habit of mine that I'm going to try to conquer, so I can take less time between blog posts.<br />
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However, I had planned to answer a couple of questions on <a href="http://thinkandwonderwonderandthink.blogspot.com/2011/05/got-belief.html#comments">Think and Wonder. Wonder and Think . . .</a> about two months ago, but since that post is now old, and my answer is kind of lengthy (very atypical for me, I know), I figured I would just do a blog post on it. Maybe others have the same questions.<br />
<blockquote><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Why is belief a necessary component of Christianity? Of salvation? </span></blockquote><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Why this mental affirmation of the death and resurrection of Christ for our salvation? </span></blockquote></blockquote>Hebrews 11:6 addresses the first question: "And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him."<br />
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In other words, in order to <i>come to God</i>, we have to believe that he exists and that seeking him is worth it. There is nothing esoteric about this concept. Unless we believe that a hospital exists and is likely to cure our disease, we will not go to the hospital either.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="clear: right; float: right; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></span>And it is by coming to God, through Christ, that we are saved. This theme of God calling us to come to him runs through the Old and the New Testaments:<br />
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"Does a maiden forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding ornaments? Yet my people have forgotten me, days without number" (Jeremiah 2:32).<br />
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"Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David" (Isaiah 55:1-3).<br />
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"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him" (John 7:37-38).<br />
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These verses talk about persistently coming to God, not just responding to an altar call. It is the lifestyle described in Micah 6:8: "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."<br />
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And why does God require us to come to him or walk with him? So he can heal our souls. Walking with him has great reward, which is why Jeremiah 2:32 asks rhetorically: "Does a maiden forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding ornaments?"<br />
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When Jesus laments unbelief, he says: "For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them" (Matthew 13:15). Unbelief shuts us off from the healing God wants to give.<br />
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However, Hebrews 11:6 implies that simply seeking God earnestly is indicative of sufficient faith. And this is illustrated in the story of Mark 9:19-25, where Jesus tells the father of the convulsing boy: "Everything is possible for him who believes." The father responds with, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" This man did not have very much faith, but he had enough to seek Jesus and to ask for help--even help to believe.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>What is Faith?</b></span><br />
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There are two facets of the Christian faith: First, there is the intellectual belief that it is true. This depends on objective evidence and reasoning. And second, faith means the ability to receive what God wants to give. Jesus frequently chided his disciples for their unbelief--in spite of having seen many miracles--referring to it as the hardness of their hearts. The disciples <i>had </i>evidence, and yet they often doubted (Mark 16:14).<br />
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">The Intellectual Aspect of Faith</span></b><br />
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Christmas movies often tout the virtues of faith, but faith in and of itself is entirely neutral. It is good to believe something true and bad to believe something false. And to know the difference, we have to think critically.<br />
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The Judeo-Christian tradition is highly intellectual. The Jews have always valued literacy, and the Book of Proverbs continually exhorts us to acquire wisdom and understanding. Proverbs 8 is a celebration of wisdom, saying, "For wisdom is better than jewels; and all desirable things cannot compare with her" (Proverbs 8:11), and characterizing wisdom as God's companion when he planned out and created the universe (Proverbs 8:22-31).<br />
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When the Book of Acts describes Paul's evangelistic efforts, they almost always involve him reasoning with people (Acts 17:2, Acts 17:17, Acts 18:4, Acts 18:19). He reasoned with the Jews from the Old Testament Scriptures, but when he addressed the Greeks in Athens, he met them where <i>they</i> were by referencing what was familiar to their culture (Acts 17:22-31).<br />
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Of all the groups that Paul addressed, only the Jews from Berea were called "noble" or "noble-minded," because they "they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true" (Acts 17:11). In other words, they were receptive to the message, but they didn't accept it uncritically--they checked the Scriptures to see if what Paul said about the Messiah was true.<br />
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The Bereans were not motivated by jealousy like the Thessalonians, nor did they scoff like some of the Athenians. They simply evaluated the claims of Paul rationally, and this earned them the description "noble-minded."<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>The Spiritual Aspect of Faith</b></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b></b></span>Although intellectual belief is important, by itself it cannot save us. James 2:19 says: "You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless." The faith that saves is the kind that changes our hearts so that our actions follow. This is a gift to us from God, by his Spirit.<br />
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Ezekiel 36:26-27 prophesies: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws." Saving faith enables us to receive what God wants to give, so that we may become everything God intends for us to be.<br />
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How do we get this kind of faith? Revelation 3:20 says: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me." All we have to do is surrender to God and permit him access to our hearts and our needs.<br />
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This is not something we do just once. If we want to grow spiritually we have to keep an open door policy with God, so that we come to know him and let him do the renovation that needs to be done in us. The more we let that happen, the more we make it possible for God to work through us, building his kingdom.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>Why Is Faith in the Resurrection Necessary for Our Salvation?</b></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b></b></span>Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins." And in Romans 6:10-11, he says: "For the death that [Jesus] died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus."<br />
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In <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Christian-Origins-Question-Vol/dp/0800626796/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311797642&sr=8-1">The Resurrection of the Son of God</a>,</i> N. T. Wright uses the analogy of a bank account to explain what this means (he is referring to the word translated "consider" or "reckon" in Romans 6:11).<br />
<blockquote>When Paul says 'reckon', he does not mean that the act of 'reckoning' something creates a new entity . . . the language of 'reckoning' is that of adding up a sum, a column of figures. When I add up the money in my bank account, that does not create the money; life is not, alas, that easy. It merely informs me of the amount that is already there. When I have completed the 'reckoning', I have not brought about a new state of affairs in the real world outside my mind; the only new state of affairs is that my mind is now aware of the way things actually are.</blockquote>When Jesus died for us and rose again, he set up an eternal "bank account" for us with everything we could possibly need or desire forever. By his stripes we are healed from the explosive temper that controls us, the demanding ego that makes us and those close to us miserable, and every affliction of body or soul.<br />
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And we have to know about that for the same reason that if we possess a bank account containing a large sum, it does us no good if we have no idea it exists--or if we know about it but rarely get around to making a trip to the bank.<br />
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As Paul says in Ephesians 1:18-20: "I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms."<br />
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Faith means having the eyes of our hearts enlightened, so that we can understand that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is available to us. And that power comes from the Holy Spirit, whom we are given as a pledge of our inheritance when we believe (Ephesians 1:13-14).Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-76239988473484467892011-06-15T19:41:00.000-07:002011-06-18T09:04:39.596-07:00My Faith Journey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0PDoTH84PZNK2gA9AujzbkF/SIG=12jq9k3q6/EXP=1308053884/**http%3a//farm4.static.flickr.com/3195/2720281163_ab33b2b15d_z.jpg" id="aimgMain" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; text-decoration: none;" target="_top"><img alt="View Image" height="400" id="imageMain" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3195/2720281163_ab33b2b15d_z.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 31px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 3px;" title="View Full Size Image" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A statue on Notre Dame campus<br />
with the inscription, <i>Venite Ad Me Omnes <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br />
("Come to Me All")</span></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
My friend, Mary, has asked me to contribute a chapter to her book about people who have emerged through a crisis of faith with a changed and stronger faith, and the following is the first draft. I would welcome any suggestions on how to make it better.<br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">At first I wasn't sure if what I experienced was a true crisis of faith in the way that others have experienced it, because I never felt abandoned by God for very long. When, at my lowest point, the thought, <i>Maybe God does not exist</i>, began to form in my mind, it was countered by the words of Job in Handel’s <i>Messiah</i> through the car stereo: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” God was closer to me than ever—hovering over the chaos.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">So in that sense my crisis was very different from those who eventually abandon their faith. But in other ways I suspect that it was similar: My crisis shook the very foundation of my faith, which had to be rebuilt brick by brick into something more solid. I came to a point where platitudes wouldn’t sustain me—I had to <i>know</i> that it was true. My faith could no longer be like a fragile object stored in a glass cabinet. It had to be taken out and tested at the risk of its destruction.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I faced the crossroad that permits no shrinking back into one’s comfort zone, which leads either to a stronger, deeper faith or its abandonment. Mary’s book is from the perspective of those who end up taking the former path, as described by George MacDonald in words that comforted me during that phase of my life:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">"A man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood . . . Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed."</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>My Faith Prior to the Crisis</b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b></b></span>My faith background is fairly eclectic. I was baptized into the Norwegian Lutheran State Church, of which one of my only memories is being stuck in the annual going-to-church-on-Christmas-Eve traffic for about an hour, when the entire community tried to cram into a relatively small traditional church. My other memory was of going to the same church on a school field trip in fourth grade and being shocked when a Pakistani boy in my class announced before the field trip that he didn't believe in our God. That was my first experience of anyone believing anything different from what the state church taught. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">After moving to the U.S. when I was eleven, our family started attending the Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church in Minneapolis, where I went through confirmation. Then I attended St. Olaf College, once again (you guessed it) a Norwegian Lutheran institution. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Things started to change at the age of nineteen, when I came to Christ in a Charismatic church while visiting my aunt in Florida for spring break (such a rebel, I know). My senior year, I met my husband Rick, who also had a Lutheran background, but to his father's dismay I corrupted Rick into leaving the Lutheran Church, and we attended an evangelical church after we married. Then we enrolled at Notre Dame Law School, a Roman Catholic institution, where we found an evangelical church in South Bend. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Already at this point, I had experienced the gentle stretching of my faith that I think helped me through my coming crisis. Rick was a more critically-thinking Christian than I was at the time, so he challenged my myopia. And I knew that there were genuine Christians outside of my narrow sphere of modern evangelicalism, like our Contracts Professor Edward Murphy, a deeply spiritual Catholic Christian who authored the book <i>Life to the Full, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">and who sadly succumbed to cancer a few years after we left Notre Dame</span>.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i></i>But I still had that sense that <i>I </i>was the center of all rightness and to the extent people said what was familiar to me, they were also right. And the further they were from that center, the more wrong they were. I never asked myself why I should be so right—I simply equated familiarity with truth. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>The Day that Changed Everything</b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383586164259436818" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuj6-kEN3tsZ9saRajsvo2Zi5cDV-7Gm5gli1H2eTD6Nqyut1u1t73VC_1xWQi50TfSX6F806z8Q40KZGanB0B2Che1qqKUqvvT75c5uxywltgijbvjGJSyIRAO52UFywtQQU9Wl-kuvw/s320/IMG.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; height: 320px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; width: 227px;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ingrid at four months</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;">Our first two children, Chelsea and Ingrid, were born during the three years I was in law school. It may not seem like the brightest idea to have babies in law school, but this was, after all, Notre Dame, where people often had children numbering in the double digits—and when in Rome . . . (Sorry—I didn’t even notice the pun until after I wrote it.) </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">But God prepared me for what lay ahead by showing me that I could do all things through Him who strengthens me, including juggling babies and my studies. I had a rough semester that started a month after Chelsea's birth, when I was in a sleep-deprived stupor every day. After that semester, I concluded that the only way I would make it through law school with decent grades was if I started every day with an hour of focused Bible reading and prayer. After that, my grades became better than before I had children, and when May 12, 1993 rolled around, I had just completed my best semester in all my years of schooling and was awaiting graduation.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 21px;"></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-XVFmjqa-GVtR5fuwchDVQRI4geLIgVdOkXIfciOR5irU1YeNyERnzHbB6mX-cd3YM8_KeKyk18NQKkx3i8AUuYi7te9gQMC_GCyczgJLVRSf8aZP3j1_5LIiJrJ8R9V7Js7Iw_JqYDM/s1600/IMG_0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-XVFmjqa-GVtR5fuwchDVQRI4geLIgVdOkXIfciOR5irU1YeNyERnzHbB6mX-cd3YM8_KeKyk18NQKkx3i8AUuYi7te9gQMC_GCyczgJLVRSf8aZP3j1_5LIiJrJ8R9V7Js7Iw_JqYDM/s320/IMG_0001.jpg" width="214" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ingrid was released from the<br />
hospital, but very sedated, for<br />
my graduation. <br />
(Rick graduated the year before.)</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;">That was the day when Ingrid, at five months old, had her first seizure. I was feeding her at the time, and my first thought was that she was choking on the milk because she stopped breathing and turned blue. But I had seen a seizure before while working with the mentally disabled, and in my haste to call for medical assistance I yanked the phone cord out of the wall and couldn't keep my hands from shaking as I tried to plug it back in. But my fears at the time did not come close to doing justice to the reality we faced. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Ingrid was in and out of hospitals in Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota over the next three months, while doctors tried in vain to stop the seizures that came every few minutes. At one point, she developed pneumonia because she was so heavily drugged that she could hardly swallow. She stopped crying and smiling, and her right hand became fisted and unusable from the seizures. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I spent most of those three months just praying—praying while sitting in the hospital, praying at night, reading the Bible and devouring books on prayer. I had experienced God's faithfulness many times before and knew the power of prayer, so I <i>would </i>have faith and I wouldn't stop praying until she was healed—even if it killed me. I would permit no doubt in my mind and no grief in my heart. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I remember one night toward the end of the three months while Ingrid was at a hospital in St. Paul, the premier hospital for epilepsy care in the Midwest, and we were staying with my parents in Minneapolis. I was up praying in the middle of the night, as usual. Rick found me and said, "Let's say a three-year-old is helping her father do something that only the father can do. It is <i>okay </i>for the three-year-old to take a break and get some sleep. You're the three-year-old in this scenario and God is the father, so why don't you come to bed?"</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I thought that was a quaint analogy, but what kind of mother would I be if I let my eight-month-old suffer while I slept? So I stayed awake and continued to pray. I was convinced that by the time we exhausted all natural remedies, God would intervene and heal Ingrid. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">After three weeks at the St. Paul hospital, the doctors had concluded that Ingrid was not a candidate for surgery, and the experimental drugs had not helped her. But she had apparently overstayed her visit, because they told us that she would be discharged, without anywhere else to go. "We think that Ingrid is doing much better, and is ready to go home. She only has about seven seizures per day now."</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">"But that's because you give her Ativan after three seizures, which knocks her out after about seven seizures for the rest of the day," I said.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">"No, we think she is doing better even without the Ativan."</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Let's test that then and wait to give her Ativan," I suggested. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">"Okay, but we still have to get the discharge papers ready. Most epilepsy patients stay for a maximum of two weeks, and Ingrid has been here for three now." So they knew as well as I did that Ingrid had not improved at all on the experimental medicine. But they were not willing to tell us that there was nothing else they could do. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">While we waited for the discharge papers, Ingrid had over twenty seizures, just as I had suspected. Then the Ativan stopped them by once again putting her into a deep sleep. I was exhausted and my conviction that Ingrid would be healed was gone and replaced with overwhelming dread and tension. I had not cried since my graduation week, when Ingrid was first hospitalized. But I cried the whole time we waited for the papers and during the entire drive back to my parents' house. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Rick recalls holding Ingrid and praying for her later that night. Her tiny body convulsed with one seizure after the other, every minute or two, and he thought to himself, <i>I'm holding my daughter as she dies.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i></i>The next day we started driving back to Illinois, where we were living at the time. Darkness hung like heavy curtains around me, and I started experiencing almost unbearable panic attacks. No longer was I only concerned about Ingrid, but I began to fear for myself as well for having driven myself so hard at a time when I <i>needed </i>to grieve and heal. I had made the leap of faith headlong into the abyss, and now I wondered if anyone was there to catch me, or if I had leapt to my doom. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Then the song came over the car speakers: "I know that my Redeemer liveth. And that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God."</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Job's bold pronouncement of faith in God and the resurrection kindled a small spark of faith within me. I didn't have great faith, in spite of my mental gymnastics and my frantic, all-consuming prayers, because when Ingrid wasn't miraculously healed in the way I had hoped, my immediate reaction was, <i>I knew it. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i></i>But I still had a little faith—enough to do the one thing that faith demands of us: come to Christ. "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;">So I clung to Him like never before, releasing everything into His hand—Ingrid, my precarious mental state, and my faltering faith. For the first time, I came without asking for anything except His presence. I surrendered everything at His altar. And I decided that instead of trying to control God, I would listen to Him and let Him lead me.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Over the next two weeks, I continued to struggle with panic attacks and waves of depression, and I felt very strongly that God commanded me to cut out all caffeine, alcohol, and refined sugar from my diet (which I later learned can make panic attacks worse). I started jogging, making a practice of thanking God for every blessing, releasing all my anxieties to Him, and resting in His presence moment by moment.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">God's light spilled into my life, more powerful than ever, filling me with a joy and peace that I had never before experienced. The darkness fled at His presence, and the panic attacks disappeared and never came back. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">During this two-week period, Ingrid continued to have seizures that we had to stop with Ativan, which would put her into a deep sleep for the rest of the day. But we knew that Ativan was not a permanent solution, because it stops working for seizures after a couple of weeks of daily use. So at the end of the two weeks, her seizures started coming every few minutes even when we gave her Ativan, and we had her admitted to the intensive care unit of the local hospital.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I thought the poor ICU doctor would have nervous breakdown, because he had inherited this problem from the specialists in St. Paul, and there was nothing he could do. He had long phone conversations with them, and finally he told us that the specialists had recommended that we try combining the experimental medicine (Felbatol) with Phenobarbital, rather than Tegretol. I don't think anyone thought this would help, since we had tried just about every combination of every anticonvulsant available. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">But the seizures stopped. For two weeks, Ingrid did not have a single seizure. Then she started having a few, several times a week, but we were out of crisis mode and were able to sign her up for rehabilitative therapy and early intervention programs. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">That was not the solution I had envisioned, and Ingrid's disabilities continued to be challenging, but the pressures I faced made me look to God, who had a lot to teach me. Some say that God's ways are inscrutable, but I say that He's eager to instruct, even though the human mind can only very slowly process the truths that He has revealed. We can't wait for answers to every <i>why </i>before we believe, because only when we live by faith, by looking to Christ, does the puzzle begin to take shape. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b>Where I am Today</b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;">Back when Ingrid was first admitted to the hospital in St. Paul, we met with a hospital social worker who wanted to see how we were holding up. I made a point of giving all the "right" answers and demonstrating what a great attitude I had. I thought for sure I had succeeded, because she smiled and nodded a lot, so obviously she was quite impressed. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">But in her report, she said that I was in denial and really needed a good support network. I was somewhat offended by this at the time, but she was 100% correct in what she said about me. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">That is one way in which I am different today. In the aftermath of the crisis, I learned how important it is to face <i>all</i> truth—about myself, the world around me, and the Bible. "Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part You will make me know wisdom" (Psalm 51:6). I have come to see that truth is the building block of genuine faith. Only when I resolve to build my foundation of faith with solid materials will it sustain me during a crisis. And this means testing everything to make sure it's true.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I have also become more faithful to the Bible, which some may claim is inconsistent with the desire for truth. But no such inconsistency exists. I have found that the more I seek the truth, the more I see that it lines up perfectly with the teachings of the Bible, and the stronger my faith becomes. In the beginning, it felt threatening to me to seek the truth because I<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> risked</span> </i>finding that what I believed was false. And much of what I believed <i>was </i>false because I had plenty of blind spots. But I have always found the <i>Bible</i> to be true. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Another question raised by my story is whether I still believe in modern day miracles, and the answer is an emphatic "yes." I believe they happen and that we should pray for them. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">But we don't experience the power of God by trying to twist His arm like I did when I prayed for Ingrid. After Ingrid was discharged from the St. Paul hospital, Rick and Chelsea were looking at cartoon pictures on the computer, and one of them was of a tiny man sitting on a huge hand and breaking into a major sweat trying to move an unyielding thumb. I can't tell you how much that picture spoke to me at the time! That is not what prayer is supposed to be like. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">God <i>wants </i>to give, and when we surrender to Him moment by moment, we receive His power. And it is this power that alone can do great works in this world that glorify God. Only God can glorify God, and "Christ in us" is our "hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). Yes, we are to wrestle in prayer, but we wrestle to stay persistent and focused. As Martin Luther said, "Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance, but laying hold of His willingness."</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Prayer is the simple act of abiding in Christ, like a branch on a vine, but such simplicity is the greatest challenge of the Christian life. And so my journey continues. </div>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-22004380666371448122011-05-26T16:25:00.000-07:002011-05-28T20:57:41.769-07:00The Opium of the People?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1px; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img height="320" id="il_fi" src="http://www.deviantart.com/download/181913229/religion_opium_of_the_people_by_dailyatheist-d30b159.png" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.648438) 2px 2px 8px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="236" /></span></div><br />
<br />
A few months ago, I had a conversation with Juanetta, a homeless woman who occasionally collects money for her shelter outside of our local Target store. She told me of her heartbreak when her son was sentenced to prison, but how God had helped her finally surrender the burden to Him. And she was full of joy, with a smile on her face and words of kindness to everyone who passed by. “God has something wonderful to give us and all we have to do is open up our hearts,” were her parting words to me, and as always when I talk with her, I didn't just <i>feel </i>enriched, I <i>was </i>enriched.<br />
<br />
But if Karl Marx had still been alive and leaving Target at the time of our conversation, he might have said that it proved his point:<br />
<blockquote>Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.</blockquote>Getting rid of the vale of tears is a noble goal and one that Juanetta and I share. We agree that it is <i>not </i>a good thing when children end up in prison, and that people should give generously to the poor. (She was after all collecting money for her shelter.) But did Marx really think that he could eradicate car accidents, terminal illnesses, poverty, broken marriages, and the rebellion of children by simply demanding that people give up those things? And since he could do precious little about the vale of tears, it seems rather backwards to demand that people give up its "halo."<br />
<br />
I don't for a moment concede that faith is an illusion, but Marx correctly observed that it helps people get through difficult times. In fact, I would say that there is a positive correlation between faith and poverty. How does the Bible explain this correlation? James 2:5 says: "Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?" He has set up <i>this world</i> to function according to the survival of the fittest, but He has set up the<i> kingdom of God</i> in such a way that only the humble can receive it. "God is opposed to the proud, but He gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6). And that means the poor and disadvantaged have a distinct advantage.<br />
<br />
Like Juanetta said, God has something wonderful to give us, but we have to open our hearts to receive it. And if our hearts are full of other things, we won't. Augustine agreed. "God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it."<br />
<br />
In her <i>Magnificat</i>, Mary, the humble young girl with great faith who was chosen by God to carry His Son, said: "[God] has done mighty deeds with His arm; He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, and He has exalted those who were humble. He has filled the hungry with good things; and sent away the rich empty-handed" (Luke 52-53). At the end of the Gospels, God exalts another Mary with the honor of being the apostle to the apostles—the first messenger of the resurrection of Jesus. Who was Mary Magdalene, the mystery woman who received the spotlight at such an important moment, but is hardly mentioned elsewhere? Luke 8:1-3 indicates that she may have been wealthy, but that Jesus had cast out of her seven demons. We are not given any details, but we can safely say that this means she had major issues and would have really needed Jesus.<br />
<br />
To the early Christians, the order of the postmortem appearances of Jesus was significant, with some non-canonical Gospels claiming the first appearance for whomever they admired most. For example, the Gospel of the Hebrews says that Jesus appeared first to James. The importance of the order is not lost on Paul, who doesn't mention Mary Magdalene in that patriarchal society, and goes through the list and concludes with, "and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God" (1 Corinthians 15:8-9).<br />
<br />
Saul of Tarsus was neither poor nor disadvantaged in any way. He was an upwardly mobile, self-righteous Pharisee, who believed that he was doing God's will by destroying the church. But God could still use him. Paul continues: "But by the <i>grace of God </i>I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the <i>grace of God </i>with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10, italics added).<br />
<br />
And those words highlight what it is that God wants to give us if only we open up our hearts: the grace of God—that is, the power of God through the Holy Spirit. It was the grace of God that changed Paul from a proud, hate-driven man to a humble, hardworking man who called himself the least of the apostles and penned some of the most well-known, eloquent, and powerful verses about the preeminence of love: 1 Corinthians 13. And it is the grace of God that gives Juanetta joy in spite of her circumstances.<br />
<br />
But even though Paul was God's chosen instrument for bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles, he continued to struggle with pride, and in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, he says that he was given a "thorn in the flesh" to keep him from exalting himself. When he asked God to take it away, God replied: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." In other words, as great as Paul was, the power of God was greater in him in his weakness and suffering. Then he was able to come to God with empty hands and an open heart and be filled with the power of Christ.Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-19838133745164805762011-05-23T19:02:00.000-07:002011-05-29T05:58:59.742-07:00Failed Rapture Notice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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<br />
A friend of my husband got this email, and I thought it was pretty funny. Did anyone else get it?<br />
<br />
<br />
ADDENDUM (5/28/11):<br />
<br />
Since the above was admittedly a poor excuse for a blogpost, I figured I would add the following comment on the subject of Harold Camping that I posted on <a href="http://sandwichesforsale.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-large-print-giveth-small-print.html">Thoughts from a Sandwich</a> this morning. (Parts of the main post are in red and my response is in black.)<br />
<blockquote><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Aren’t [Christians who believe Jesus could come again any time and urge you to "get right with God," yet criticize Camping by stabbing out Matthew 24:36 like a weapon] committing the same error, albeit with slightly less precision? They know it could happen today. Yet, ironically, by such knowledge, seem to have eliminated today as a possibility, pursuant to their own Bible verse.</span></blockquote></blockquote>Most Christians didn’t eliminate May 21, 2011 as a possibility. We just didn’t think it was any more likely than, say, May 25, 2011. It’s the difference between expressing confidence that <i>someone</i> is going to win the lottery and being so confident that <i>I</i> will win the lottery that I take out a loan and spend the money in anticipation.<br />
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And Harold Camping’s antics have about as much in common with the position of Christian orthodoxy as the behavior of the Heaven’s Gate UFO cultists had in common with the statements by Stephen Hawking that aliens probably exist somewhere. Whether or not Hawking is right, his statement is not worth laughing at because he has good reasons for saying that. This would be even truer if scientists actually discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life. The fact that most of the people who talk about aliens have been kooks wouldn’t then render scientists kooks.<br />
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I know that the idea of Jesus coming again as described in the Bible is bizarre, because something like that has never happened before. But quantum physics is bizarre and so is Big Bang cosmology. The question is whether we have good reasons for accepting those bizarre things as true.<br />
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And since Christians have good reasons for believing that God exists and that the Bible is God’s word, and the Bible is very clear that Jesus will come again, our belief is reasonable. However, Camping’s was not—he used completely random calculations to arrive at his date, going against Matthew 24:36, Mark 13:32, and Acts 1:7. What he did has little to do with Christianity—he will now simply take his place in history (once again) as one of a number of failed apocalyptic preachers, not all of whom were Christian.<br />
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Yes, he’s right that every day is a good day to get right with God, and in his case that would mean the humility of admitting he was completely wrong (rather than just changing the date) and taking some responsibility for the people he mislead.<br />
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<blockquote><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Has Jesus been waiting around for 2000 years for people to stop remembering he is coming back? </span></blockquote><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">I wonder if he regrets putting that clause in the contract….</span></blockquote></blockquote>Matthew 24:14 and Mark 13:10 say that the Gospel must first be preached to all nations. That probably has happened by now, but it was certainly not true in the first century when those words were written. So that is a fulfilled prophecy.<br />
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The description of the church in Revelation 7:9 has also been fulfilled: “After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and people and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands.”<br />
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There are Christians around the world of all nationalities, races, languages, and cultures, and the Bible is the most translated book in the world, continuing to be translated into new languages all the time.<br />
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In the Great Commission, Jesus said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). Surely He wouldn’t come again before that had been accomplished?Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-28532656076608821962011-05-13T09:56:00.001-07:002012-03-09T20:14:31.117-08:00Did God Pour Out His Wrath on Jesus?<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/z0sgIdm2Fao" width="425"></iframe></div><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I have often heard it said that God poured out His wrath on Jesus on the cross, and afterwards His wrath was appeased. This brings to mind an image of God feeling very angry and having to get it out of His system somehow. Christ was a willing scapegoat who took God's wrath upon Himself, and afterwards God felt much better. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The problem with the idea of God pouring out His wrath on Christ, aside from the fact that it makes no sense, is that the Bible says nothing of the kind. If you do a search on the way the words "the wrath of God" are used in the New Testament, they always refer to Judgment Day, when God will execute justice on the world. The words are never used in connection with the vicarious redemption of Christ. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">What, then, does the Bible say about the vicarious redemption of Christ? 2 Corinthians 5:21 says: "For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Isaiah 53:5-6 prophesies, "But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed." </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So God didn't pour out His wrath on Jesus, He laid on Him the sins of the world, so that He might pay the penalty for them through His death. Why? Hebrews 2:14 says, "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil." So Jesus did not die to appease God the Father, but to defeat the forces of evil. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Before Jesus became sin on our behalf, Satan had no power over Him because it is <i>sin </i>that gives Satan a foothold. This is why Satan could not harm Jesus when He fasted in the wilderness, but he could tempt Him. And if Jesus had succumbed to temptation, then Satan could have destroyed Him. However, in John 14:30-31, Jesus says, "I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father." The "ruler of this world"--this fallen world--is Satan, and he has a claim on sinners. Sin separates us from a holy God, so we don't experience His power and protection. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Although Satan had no claim on Christ, God allowed the sins of the world to be placed on Him, and <i>our </i>sins separated Jesus from the Father. This meant that the spiritual forces of evil could do whatever they wanted to Him--humiliate Him, cause Him psychic torment and excruciating physical pain, and kill Him, and that is what they did. Jesus was punished for the sins of the world, thus paying the penalty that we could not pay, reconciling us to God, and granting us freedom from the power of sin and death. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This is not God demanding a burnt offering, because they never pleased Him. Hosea 6:6 says: "For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Isaiah 1:11, 17 says: "'The multitude of your sacrifices--what are they to me?' says the LORD. 'I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats . . . Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.'" </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Micah 6:6-8 says: "With what shall I come before the LORD and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And Hebrews 10:4 says that "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." In other words, this ritual of burnt offerings accomplished nothing, even though the Law of Moses required it. But like the rest of the law, it was powerless to save, and was a mere shadow of what was to come: God sending His own Son to pay the penalty for our sins and bridge the chasm between God and sinners. This means that we may receive the Holy Spirit, who has set us "free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:2).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Clamflats was right when he said in a comment, "At least with the word 'appease,' we are following a ceremonial sacrifice script which is recognized cross-culturally." People sacrificed to appease their gods until Constantine, the first Christian emperor, ended the practice in the Roman Empire. Although sacrifice never pleased God and never took away sins, it was within this cultural framework that He worked His plan of salvation. But instead of demanding a sacrifice from us, God turned the "ceremonial sacrifice script" around and sacrificed Himself for us.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Charles Wesley's hymn, "And Can It Be?" aptly says, "Amazing love! How can it be, that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?" but the sacrifice of Christ was more than just a symbol of His love. Romans 8:3-4 says, "For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Wesley's hymn continues:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Long my imprisoned spirit lay,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">My chains fell off, my heart was free,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">My chains fell off, my heart was free,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Still the small inward voice I hear,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">That whispers all my sins forgiven;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Still the atoning blood is near,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">That quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I feel the life His wounds impart;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I feel the Savior in my heart.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I feel the life His wounds impart;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I feel the Savior in my heart.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">No condemnation now I dread;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Jesus, and all in Him, is mine;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Alive in Him, my living Head,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And clothed in righteousness divine,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Bold I approach th’eternal throne,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And claim the crown, through Christ my own.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Bold I approach th’eternal throne,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And claim the crown, through Christ my own.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The atonement of Jesus "quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven," by breaking down the barrier between God and humanity. His atoning blood has the power to set us free from the chains of sin, so that <i>we</i> will escape the wrath of God, or His righteous judgment of sin, when He ushers in "new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 3:13). Jesus gave Himself for us, giving us His righteousness in exchange for our sin, suffering that we may be healed, and dying and rising that we may live.</div>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-75004189726098142642011-05-05T19:18:00.000-07:002011-05-06T11:54:24.534-07:00Glory Rendering, Mother's Day, and Redemption<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrT3F5DNBKG2XIasu5a0vzJE3jdKZabncuATMVxaCXP7k8dfMSl0mzGihOzT1PG5o7hCOOxnyNgM5Y7cBU9uLgTbZG8FVuHtjoJilEMWD6Q_pVavch611nxSEjdhz8m2zQ3I6w4GeBTt8/s1600/IMG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrT3F5DNBKG2XIasu5a0vzJE3jdKZabncuATMVxaCXP7k8dfMSl0mzGihOzT1PG5o7hCOOxnyNgM5Y7cBU9uLgTbZG8FVuHtjoJilEMWD6Q_pVavch611nxSEjdhz8m2zQ3I6w4GeBTt8/s320/IMG.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Clamflats asked the following question, which I have edited slightly to make it more coherent out of context (but let me know if I changed the meaning, clamflats). And I wrote most of it before Dan answered the question, so hopefully you don't mind, Dan. </div><blockquote><i>The idea that the motive of the crucifixion is glory-rendering makes it seem that we humans are bit players in some divine grand opera. Why would God require glory and why would corporal punishment be necessary? At least with the word "appease," we are following a ceremonial sacrifice script which is recognized cross-culturally. </i></blockquote>A couple of hours ago I changed my Facebook profile picture to the above photo with my mother who passed away at sixty-two. My sister Elisabeth was the first to comment, saying: "What a GREAT photo Anette!!! She is missed every day, and was the best MOM ever! Thank you for posting this and Happy Mothers Day to another great mom!" I replied by agreeing with my sister about what she said about our mom, wishing Elisabeth a Happy Mother's Day, and returning the praise.<br />
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Now, you would presumably never ask, "Why is Mother's Day necessary? Do mothers raise children so they can be praised by them?" Of course parents don't raise and make sacrifices for their children in order to receive praise, but it still right to praise our parents for what they have done for us. And it makes parents very happy to receive heartfelt praise from their children.<br />
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But it is also right for children to honor and respect their parents just because they are they are their parents, just as it is right to honor and respect the President whether or not we voted for him.<br />
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So the answer to the question of why God would "require glory" is that it is <i>right</i> to give Him glory because of who He is and also because He deserves it. Jesus <i>deserves</i> glory because although He was equal to God, He emptied Himself and became a mere human, willing to take our sins upon Himself and die on a cross between two criminals on our behalf. "For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:9-11). God the Father deserves glory because He "so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16).<br />
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Although, as I will discuss later, the primary purpose of the crucifixion was not glory-rendering between the Father and the Son, God still deserves glory for doing that for us, in order to bring "many sons to glory" (Hebrews 2:9-10). And that is the other part of this glory-rendering business--that at the coming of Christ, God will glorify the church, the Bride of Christ. That is, if we belong to Christ and allow ourselves to be made like Him in this life, we will share in His glory. Christ made that possible through the cross.<br />
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So the Son glorifies the Father and the Father glorifies the Son, in the same way that I would praise my mother, sisters, mother-in-law, and other mothers on Mother's Day, instead of going around saying, "Boy, I am an <i>amazing </i>mother, and since today is Mother's Day, I'm going to tell you all about it." That would be wrong. Praise always flows from one person to another (or at least it should).<br />
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But since Jesus loves us so much and has chosen us to be His own, He puts us between Himself and the Father, so that the glory and love that flows between the Father and the Son is ours as well. Jesus says, "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you" (John 15:15). So although He is the exalted King who will come in glory with His angels, He invites us to be His friends.<br />
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But the love of Jesus was costly and sacrificial<i>, </i>and the cross preceded the throne. It led to a staggering promise, that if we are His children, we are "heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ," with the following sobering qualification, "if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him" (Romans 8:17).<br />
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Why should suffering have to precede the glory God has prepared eternally for His people? That is something I will discuss in future posts. But in the next post I will address the second part of clamflats' question: Did the sacrifice of Jesus appease the wrath of God?Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-45331514113218636052011-04-23T08:43:00.000-07:002011-04-23T13:41:58.298-07:00Why Doesn't God Do Something About Evil?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.all-about-the-virgin-mary.com/images/christ-on-the-cross.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Jesus on the Cross" border="0" height="392" src="http://www.all-about-the-virgin-mary.com/images/christ-on-the-cross.jpg" width="598" /></a></div><br />
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Many people who find the evidence for a Creator in natural theology compelling have a hard time believing that He could be good. He seems more like a disinterested deity who created and moved on without a backwards glance. As one atheist whose father was dying put it, "If this is the best God can do, he must've taken a half day on Friday."<br />
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When he said that, it occurred to me that on a Friday afternoon, God defeated sin, suffering, and death forever on the cross. He finished His work of re-creation and opened up a way that will culminate in a new heaven and a new earth where our humanity is perfected and death and suffering is a thing of the past.<br />
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But He also used a powerful symbol to communicate His love for us even when we don't understand why there is so much wrong with the world. God came in human form and took upon Himself our sin and our pain. He died the most shameful and excruciating of deaths, between two criminals. He was present with the lowest of the low, promising Paradise to the repentant sinner (Luke 23:39-43).<br />
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From the very beginning, God planned to take responsibility for allowing evil in His creation, by sending His Son to die for us. Contrary to what Christopher Hitchens has said, this is not human sacrifice, something the Bible strictly forbids. It is self-sacrifice by God Himself, the ultimate expression of love and humility.Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com70tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-48045884502973775662011-04-21T14:55:00.000-07:002011-04-22T20:53:45.310-07:00The Problem of Evil and Suffering<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
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</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I had a conversation with Lowell in the comments about a month ago where he asked me about a post<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"></span> that I wrote back in 2009: <i><a href="http://graceandmiracles.blogspot.com/2009/09/venite-ad-me-omnes.html">Venite Ad Me Omnes</a>. </i>It was about a crisis I went through eighteen years ago. I wrote it before I had any inkling that I would ever write apologetics, and reading it again through a skeptic's eyes, I wonder if it was irresponsibly written. I spelled out the gut-wrenching evil in great detail, but failed to talk in much detail about God's great goodness through it all. Just about everything I am today grew out of that experience. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">When someone asked me a few days ago why I ended up engaging in dialogue with atheists, I explained that it was because I happened to have a conversation with an agnostic who told me about <i>Atheist Central, </i>and after checking it out I decided to comment. But I realized afterwards that the <i>why </i>goes back much further than that. It started when my five-month-old, Ingrid, had her first seizure the day after I had completed my requirements for graduation from Notre Dame Law School. Before May 12, 1993, Ingrid was developing normally--smiling and babbling to everyone, including stuffed animals and the baby in the mirror. Three months, three hospitals, and countless seizures later, she neither smiled nor cried and her right hand was fisted and unusable. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">That's when <i>I </i>started asking the hard questions.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've only spent a year-and-a-half thinking about the resurrection evidence, the fine-tuning argument, the cosmological argument, and the argument from moral law, but I spent a decade-and-a-half thinking about the problem of evil--called "the rock of atheism" by German playwright Georg Büchner. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I did gain some insights into the relationship between suffering, spiritual growth, and prayer over the years, and I will do a series of posts on that. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But I want to stress that the Bible is never overly philosophical about suffering. John 11:35 simply says, "Jesus wept" when He saw people grieving over the death of Lazarus. Jesus wept even though He knew that Lazarus would not remain dead. Evil is still evil and suffering still hurts even though God has reasons for allowing it. We are not to downplay the suffering of others by offering "helpful" platitudes. Instead, we are to "mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So I don't want to trivialize evil and suffering by a discussion of theodicy. C. S. Lewis said in <i>The Problem of Pain </i>that pain is God's "megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But he later wrote the following in <i>A Grief Observed</i> after his wife died: </div><blockquote>Feeling, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.'s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned--I had warned myself--not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, "Blessed are they that mourn," and I accepted it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination.</blockquote>Pain is also a megaphone that drowns out reason, and it was not until we had settled into our new life with a severely disabled child that I was really able to reflect on the <i>whys. </i>But explanations are a pale substitute for what I did receive during those months in 1993: God's presence, joy, and peace like never before--the fulfillment of the promise of Jesus in Matthew 11:28: "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."<br />
<blockquote><div></div></blockquote>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-8668044825899202492011-03-13T19:37:00.000-07:002011-06-04T12:31:54.295-07:00Is Christianity Falsifiable?<div style="clear: right; float: right; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><div style="clear: right; float: right; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
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<div style="clear: right; float: right; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0px;"></div></div></div></div>During these discussions about the evidence for the resurrection, I have occasionally been asked what would prove to me that the resurrection did <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">not</span> happen. Or to put the question differently, is the resurrection falsifiable? If it is, then Christianity is falsifiable because Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:14 that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain. Only if the resurrection didn't happen is Christianity falsified.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"></span>Eliezer Yudkowsky, a skeptical blogger, addresses the question of whether religion is falsifiable in <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprovable/">Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable</a>:<br />
<blockquote>The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of <a href="http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/1kings/1kings18.htm">Elijah and the priests of Baal.</a> </blockquote><blockquote>The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it – quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah’s bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah – the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar… to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level. The fire comes down on Elijah’s altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout “The Lord is God!” – peer review.</blockquote><blockquote>And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats. This is stern, but necessary. You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself. If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.</blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The story of Elijah and the priests of Baal presents a good framework for our discussion of what would falsify the resurrection, and consequently, Christianity. (Although, needless to say, I reached a different conclusion from Yudkowsky about whether Christianity has been falsified. He relied on his interpretation of tangential issues in the Old Testament--not on the resurrection.) Of course if something directly contradicts the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, then the resurrection would be falsified. However, evidence that actually disproves a supernatural event is not easy to come by. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.mormonthink.com/img/js_bedroom2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Joseph Smith home - upstairs" border="0" height="150" src="http://www.mormonthink.com/img/js_bedroom2.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="200" /></a>For example, this <a href="http://www.mormonthink.com/moroniweb.htm">website</a> addresses the claim of Joseph Smith that the angel Moroni appeared to him at night when he was a teenager. The author gives a photo of the Smith residence and says that his five brothers would have slept in the same small room, three to a bed, but none of them woke up and noticed the magnificent visitation or even their brother having a conversation (and a powerful spiritual experience) all night. This seems to at least falsify the idea that the angel was present in the room, as opposed to just in Smith's mind. It is <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">consistent with </span>a hallucination. However, it is also consistent with the event in Matthew 2:13, where an angel appears to Joseph, the father of Jesus, in a dream. So the visitation to Smith has not been disproven, but it is consistent with either a normal dream or a hallucination. This means that absent more compelling evidence for Smith's claims, we would be wise to exercise healthy skepticism. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">How do we then approach the question of falsification of the resurrection? This is where Yudkowsky's ingenious interpretation of Elijah and the priests of Baal is helpful. Just like God, through Elijah, raised the burden of proof by pouring water onto the wood on the altar and into the trench, it appears that God has raised the burden of proof for the resurrection by leaving no plausible naturalistic explanation for the evidence. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Since the death of Jesus, skeptics have tried to explain away the resurrection--starting with the claim that the disciples stole the body. Since then, they have put forth the swoon theory, the twin theory, the wrong tomb theory, conspiracy theories, and the hallucination theory, among others. All have major flaws and most have been discarded. Some skeptics, like David Hume and Bart Ehrman, have attempted to stay above the fray and simply dismiss the evidence by saying, essentially, that the supernatural is always the least likely. But this approach has been refuted using Bayes' Theorem. To say that the supernatural is the least likely, regardless of the evidence, is mathematically fallacious, as non-theistic philosopher of physics John Earman demonstrates in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Hume's Abject Failure. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">In 1 Kings 18:20-29, the priests of Baal frantically called on the name of Baal all day long without response, and Elijah began to taunt them: "Shout louder! Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened." They shouted louder, leaping around the altar and slashing themselves with swords--to no avail.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">This brings to mind the efforts to explain away the resurrection, in the context of Psalm 2:1-4. "Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the LORD and against his Anointed One. 'Let us break their chains,' they say, 'and throw off their fetters.' The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them."</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">In 1 Kings 18:33-39, Elijah prepared his sacrifice, asking God to reveal to the people that He is the God of Israel and that Elijah was His servant. Fire from heaven fell down on the altar and consumed the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust, and the water in the trench. God accepted Elijah's sacrifice. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Likewise, God accepted the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins and proved it by raising Him from the dead. The resurrection confirmed all the teachings of Jesus as being from God, including His claim to deity, and through it, God fulfilled the repeated prophecy of His Son that He would be delivered into the hands of sinners to die and be raised on the third day (Matthew 16:21, Matthew 17:22-23, Matthew 20:18-19, Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:34, Luke 9:22, Luke 18:31-33, Luke 24:7). </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">As Paul said to the men of Athens: "God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead" (Acts 17:30-31).</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com219tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-89069064093269533242011-03-05T07:32:00.000-08:002011-06-04T12:31:11.403-07:00The Easter Faith of the Early Church<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a class="image" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caravaggio-Crucifixion_of_Peter.jpg" style="-webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: none; background-repeat: initial; clear: right; color: #0645ad; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="thumbimage" height="259" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Caravaggio-Crucifixion_of_Peter.jpg/200px-Caravaggio-Crucifixion_of_Peter.jpg" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-right-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-top-style: solid; border-width: initial; vertical-align: middle;" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Crucifixion of Peter</td></tr>
</tbody></table>As I said before, the resurrection of Jesus is supported by three pillars: the empty tomb, the postmortem<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: -webkit-sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;"> appearances of Jesus, and the Easter faith of the early Christians in the face of severe persecution. In order to undermine the historical support for the resurrection, a skeptic has to give viable naturalistic explanations for all three. </span></span><br />
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We have already discussed the evidence for the empty tomb and examined the possible explanations for why Paul and the other apostles claimed to have seen Jesus postmortem. What remains is a discussion of the Easter faith that sprung up in a climate of severe persecution and grew into the dominant world religion. <br />
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The late orthodox Jewish rabbi and theologian Pinchas Lapide came to the conclusion that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead, and said in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective,</span> that if the faith-shattering cry of Jesus on the cross, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" had been the end of the story, the movement would have died right there. The Jews believed in a faithful, just God who never abandoned the righteous.<br />
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He concluded: "If the defeated and depressed group of disciples overnight could change into a victorious movement of faith, based only on autosuggestion or self-deception--without a fundamental faith experience--then this would be a much greater miracle than the resurrection itself."<br />
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So the final question is this: What caused the Easter faith of the early followers of Jesus that grew into four million Christians by 300 AD? Did a group of simple men perpetrate the most masterful hoax ever, while preaching an ethic of love, faithfulness, and truth? And even if they <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">could</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">would</span> do it, what would have motivated them?<br />
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We know from Paul's letters that he used to be a zealous, successful Pharisee who persecuted the church, and he gave it up for imprisonment, persecution, and poverty. Writing from prison, he said, "But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ" <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">(Philippians 3:7-8). </span></span><br />
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What could possibly<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span>have motivated him? Note that I am not asking what <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">did</span> motivate him--we can never know exactly what combination of factors lead other people to do what they do. However, if Jesus did not appear to Paul as he claimed, there should be other <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">possible</span> explanations for his willingness to sacrifice everything for his hope in the resurrection. What are they?<br />
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Liberal theologian and church historian Ferdinand Christian Baur rejected the resurrection and the other supernatural aspects of the primitive church for most of his life. But shortly before he died he concluded that the conversion of Paul was an unsolvable psychological puzzle which was a miracle in and of itself, and according to Philip Schaff, this led Baur to "bow before the greater miracle of the resurrection of Christ, without which the former is an inexplicable enigma."<br />
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Why did Stephen, when he stood before the Sanhedrin, gaze into the heavens and boldly report, "Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:55-56), echoing the words that earned Jesus the death penalty? And when they rushed at him as an angry mob and stoned him to death, how could he have cried out, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them!" as he died?<br />
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Pliny the Younger describes the Christian martyrs in much the same way in his letter to Emperor Trajan in 112 AD--that true Christians would die before they cursed Christ or worshipped pagan gods, like Pliny ordered them to do. And their conduct was blameless. He wrote:<br />
<blockquote>In the meanwhile, the method I have observed towards those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed. For whatever the nature of their creed might be, I could at least feel no doubt that contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved chastisement.</blockquote>And,<br />
<blockquote>They affirmed, however, the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food -- but food of an ordinary and innocent kind. Even this practice, however, they had abandoned after the publication of my edict, by which, according to your orders, I had forbidden political associations. I judged it so much the more necessary to extract the real truth, with the assistance of torture, from two female slaves, who were styled deaconesses: but I could discover nothing more than depraved and excessive superstition. </blockquote>So eighty years after the death of Christ, His followers were still known for their loyalty to Him. They were still true to His word and fearless in the face of death because of their hope of eternal life.<br />
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The movement continued to grow after the stoning of James by the Sandedrin in 62 AD, and after the deaths of Paul and Peter during the severe persecution by Nero, who lit up his 64 AD garden party with torches of burning Christians and put them to death in other horrific ways for the amusement of the Romans. And it continued to grow through many subsequent waves of persecution when Christians were ordered to recant or be executed. As Tertullian observed, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."<br />
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Paul lays it on the line in 1 Corinthians 15:15 by saying that if Jesus had not been raised, then he and the others would have been "false witnesses of God because we testified against God that He raised Christ." He makes it very clear that the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">truth</span> of the resurrection is crucial, and if it didn't happen, the apostles would have been false witnesses against God. He leaves no room for any wishy-washy thinking about faith being such a beautiful thing that there is no need to worry about pesky things like facts. And the hope of the later martyrs was grounded in the historical fact of the resurrection that the apostles themselves were willing to die for.<br />
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If we take into account the whole panoply of human motivations, how does the Easter faith make any sense if this resurrection did not happen?<br />
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</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: -webkit-sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"></span>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com83tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-31436506751798124812011-02-14T16:17:00.000-08:002011-06-04T12:30:25.741-07:00The Historicity of the New Testament<a href="http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A2KJkK3ExFlNiCUAy_ajzbkF/SIG=128kj71i3/EXP=1297757508/**http%3a//kenraggio.com/Jesus-Before-Pontius-Pilate.jpg" id="aimgMain" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; text-decoration: none;" target="_top"><img alt="View Image" height="308" id="imageMain" src="http://kenraggio.com/Jesus-Before-Pontius-Pilate.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 3px;" title="View Full Size Image" width="400" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"></span>Over the past week or so, I've been part of a discussion on <a href="http://youcallthisculture.blogspot.com/">Vinny's blog</a> about the historicity of the New Testament narratives--or specifically, about a book called <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, </span>by the late A. N. Sherwin-White, an Oxford professor who specialized in ancient Rome at the time of the New Testament.<br />
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Vinny has taken issue with some Christian apologists because he feels that they are "abusing" the professor by misrepresenting his position. Well, I have been reading the book carefully, and I've seen no sign of abuse. And unless the author of Sherwin-White's 1993 obituary in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Times</span> was also an abusive apologist, the apologists in question characterize his general position accurately. The obituary talked about "his conviction of the essential historicity of the narratives in the New Testament."<br />
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Vinny is correct that the apologists were careless in their choice of words. One of them put a word in quotations that Sherwin-White never used, another one changed a word to mean the opposite, and a third used generally imprecise language. I am familiar with the first two apologists, and they are usually very careful about what they say, so I don't know what happened there. But they captured the general message of Sherwin-White, and if anything, they failed to utilize the strongest parts of the book.<br />
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Most of our discussion pertained to the last eight pages of the book, where Sherwin-White criticizes "form-criticism of the extremer sort" and talks about the rate of development of "didactic myths" in historical documents in general, and what this means for the New Testament writings. That is what the apologists and Vinny have focused on. Vinny has argued, based on those last eight pages, that Sherwin-White's statements "do not admit more than the possibility that a historical core within the gospel material can be found."<br />
<br />
We have discussed that at length, and I have argued that Vinny is taking Sherwin-White's words out of context, but at this point I would prefer to talk about the substantive parts of the book, which is a detailed analysis of the historicity of the trial of Jesus and the book of Acts from the perspective of someone who has immersed himself in the Roman Empire "until its understanding becomes second nature." He starts with the trial of Jesus, which took place in "the Roman orbit at Jerusalem," and then moves on to the book of Acts.<br />
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These are his conclusions: "For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming . . . any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken it for granted."<br />
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He says the following about the trial of Jesus: "The impression of a historical tradition is nowhere more strongly felt than in the various accounts of the trial of Christ, analysed in Roman terms in the second lecture. Consider the close interdependence of Mark and Matthew, supplementing each other even in particular phrases, yet each with his particular contribution, then Luke with his more coherent and explicit account of the charges and less clear version of the activity of the Sanhedrin, finally John, who despite many improbabilities and obscurities yet gives a convincingly contemporary version of the political pressure on Pilate in the age of Tiberius."<br />
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Sherwin-White discusses the trial of Jesus in great detail in lecture two, frequently addressing claims by earlier scholars that certain parts are unhistorical. For example, theologian and church historian Hans Lietzmann argues that Jesus was only charged with insurrection and not with the offense of blasphemy according to Jewish law. In other words, the trial before the Sanhedrin was a fabrication motivated by a desire to pin the blame on the Jews. Sherwin-White explains Lietzmann's logic as follows:<br />
<blockquote>He poses a dilemma: either the Sanhedrin sentenced Christ and carried out the sentence in the Jewish fashion, by stoning, or Pilate sentenced Christ and carried out the sentence in Roman fashion, by crucifixion. Since all the evidence agrees that the execution was in Roman fashion by Romans, then the trial and condemnation by the Sanhedrin is a fabrication. He then presents an alternative proof. The Sanhedrin had the power of capital punishment, and had no need of a fiat from the procurator to carry out its execution.</blockquote>However, Sherwin-White says that John 18:31 is correct that the Sanhedrin did not have the power of capital punishment. "When we find that the capital power was the most jealously guarded of all the attributes of government, not even entrusted to the principal assistants of the governors, and specifically withdrawn, in the instance of Cyrene, from the competence of local courts, it becomes very questionable indeed for the Sanhedrin." He spends about twelve pages developing this argument because of its centrality.<br />
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This is just one example of the kind of detailed analysis Sherwin-White does of the trial of Jesus and the book of Act. He then addresses the argument by Lietzmann that the trial before the Sanhedrin could not have taken place at night, by saying, "The Jews, because of the festival, were in a hurry. Hence there was every reason to hold the unusual night session if they were to catch the Procurator at the right moment."<br />
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And he says about the soldiers casting lots and dividing among themselves the clothing of Jesus: "Given the relevant prophecy from the Old Testament [Psalm 22:18], there is every reason to assume that this is one of the evolved myths dear to the form-critics. But, as has been familiar since Mommsen, legal texts confirm that it was the accepted right of the executioner's squad to share out the minor possessions of their victim."<br />
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He makes the following general statement about the synoptic Gospel accounts of the trial: "It is noteworthy that though Luke at first reading gives the most intelligible account of the trial as a whole, and Mark the least, yet by no means all the advantages lie with Luke. On certain technical points, such as the reference to the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">tribunal </span>and the formulation of the sentence, Mark and Matthew are superior. But Luke is remarkable in that his additional materials--the full formulation of the charges before Pilate, the reference to Herod, and the proposed acquittal with admonition--are all technically correct."<br />
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He goes on to spend even more time on the book of Acts, affirming the accuracy of the legal proceedings and other details. For example, he points out that the charge against Paul in Acts 24:5 ("stirring up a plague and disturbances for the Jews throughout the world") is "precisely the one to bring against a Jew during the Principate of Claudius or the early years of Nero. The accusers of Paul were putting themselves on the side of the government."<br />
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Going back to the last eight pages of the book, where Sherwin-White "discusses the whole topic of historicity [of secular and ecclesiastical documents] briefly and very generally," he says that "a hard core or basic layer of historical truth can be recovered even from the most deplorable of our tertiary sources." (However, in no way does he imply that the New Testament books are "deplorable" sources. He says about historical documents in general that "we are seldom in the happy position of dealing at only one remove from a contemporary source.") This subject of a hard historical core came up repeatedly during our discussion, and one participant asked whether Sherwin-White gave any indication of what he considered the historical core of the New Testament narratives. Would the empty tomb qualify?<br />
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Sherwin-White says nothing about the empty tomb, but he confirms the historicity of a great many details, and I have not come across any that he has deemed unhistorical. He confirms minor details like the casting of lots for the clothes of Jesus as well as the political pressure the Jewish leaders put on Pontius Pilate by saying that he would not be a friend of Caesar if he released Jesus. Of course he also affirms the historicity of the Jews not having capital power in the first century. He says that all the details about the trial in the four Gospels are accurate, even though they contain "mild discrepancies." He does not call them contradictions, even though he uses that word to describe the four accounts of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.<br />
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And although he says little about the parts of the Gospels that take place in Galilee, he explains the lack of external confirmation as follows: "That the degree of confirmation in Graeco-Roman terms is less for the Gospels than for Acts is due, as these lectures have tried to show, to the differences in their regional setting. As soon as Christ enters the Roman orbit at Jerusalem, the confirmation begins. For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming."<br />
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So I can with confidence say that the apologists did not overstate Sherwin-White's position. As I've said before, they failed to fully utilize this fascinating work by focusing exclusively on the concluding pages, and leaving skeptics to try to read into the qualifying statements something that is diametrically opposed to what Sherwin-White argues in detail in the more substantive parts of the book.Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com78tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-58244961406075720512011-01-26T07:55:00.000-08:002011-06-04T12:29:38.275-07:00"What's the Son of a Duck?"<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="353" style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #333333; font: normal normal normal 11px/normal arial; text-align: center; width: 360px;"><tbody>
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<div>According to Bart Ehrman, scholars have for a long time said that the Bible is filled with contradictions, and the central teachings of Christianity, like the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity, are not found in the synoptic Gospels. He said that Jesus was a human Messiah in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and then by the time John was written, He was viewed by the church as divine. Of course, what he means by "scholars" is "the scholars I agree with," but let's ignore that for now, because it wouldn't matter if all scholars really did make unanimous pronouncements about the Bible. What matters is what the Bible says, and Ehrman is just wrong about this. Jesus does not portray Himself as merely a human Messiah in the synoptic Gospels.<br />
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</div><div>Why was Jesus sentenced to death by the high priest and handed over to Pontius Pilate? Matthew 26:63-65 says: "And the high priest said to Him, 'I adjure You by the living God, that You tell us whether You are the Christ, the Son of God.' Jesus said to him, 'You have said it yourself; nevertheless I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.' Then the high priest tore his robes and said, 'He has blasphemed! What further need do we have of witnesses?'" This incident is repeated in Mark and Luke. </div><div><br />
</div><div>So Jesus was sentenced to death for blasphemy. If the high priest thought that He claimed to be a human Messiah, why would He have been guilty of blasphemy? </div><div><br />
</div><div>And lest there be any ambiguity, in Matthew 22:41-46 Jesus asked a group of Pharisees, "'What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?' They said to Him, 'The son of David.' He said to them, 'Then how does David in the Spirit call Him "Lord," saying, "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit at My right hand, until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet'"? If David then calls Him "Lord," how is He his son?' No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Him another question."</div><div><br />
</div><div>The clear implication is that He is equal to God, even though He was also a descendant of David. So He said that He was fully divine and fully human, just like Christians have always believed. Jesus was using the Socratic method with the Pharisees rather than announcing to them that He was the Son of God. If He had been more explicit, they would have had Him arrested for blasphemy before the time set by the Father, so He chose His words carefully. They couldn't arrest Him for just asking a question about the Scriptures, regardless of the implications. This sheds further light on Jesus' trial before the Sanhedrin because it tells us that although, as Ehrman said, the Jews expected a human Messiah, Jesus had earlier made the connection to Psalm 110:1, thereby subtly correcting them, but also probably stirring up the suspicions that would eventually lead to His arrest and death sentence. </div><div><br />
</div><div>In Matthew 11:27, Jesus says: "All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him." So the Son has a very unique relationship to the Father--so much so that He is the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">only</span> one who knows Him and has the power to reveal Him to us--and all authority has been handed to Him. How could He possibly be just a human Messiah?</div><div><br />
</div><div>And in Matthew 28:19, after His resurrection, Jesus says to His disciples: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit</span>, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (italics added). That is the Trinity. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Ehrman is right that the Gospel of John is much more explicit about the divinity of Jesus than the synoptics, but Jesus still makes it clear in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that He is the Son of God, and not a human Messiah. Ehrman is also right that it took the church a while to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity into a creed. But all of the elements are in the Bible, including the synoptic Gospels. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Ehrman's words have interesting implications for the dating of the synoptic Gospels. He says that Jesus was "portrayed as a human Messiah in the earliest parts of Christianity" (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), but He eventually came to be seen as divine in the Gospel of John.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> But </span>Paul makes it very clear that Jesus is the Son of God in the first letter to the Corinthians, which was written around 55 AD. 1 Corinthians 1:9 says that God called us "into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord." And in 1 Corinthians 2:14-16, Paul says that the person who has the Holy Spirit has the mind of Christ. Most scholars also think that the epistle to the Romans was written around 55 AD, and in it Paul says: "He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32). Romans is widely considered the most important theological work in the Bible. </div><div><br />
</div><div>So Paul characterizes Jesus as the Son of God and gives the elements of the doctrine of the Trinity fifteen years before liberal scholars like Ehrman think the first synoptic Gospel was written. How do "scholars" explain this? Could it be that it's their thinking, and not the Bible, that is filled with contradictions?</div><div><br />
</div></div>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-4579613313156225722011-01-19T13:23:00.000-08:002011-06-04T12:29:03.647-07:00The Skeptical Response to the Resurrection: The Appearances of Jesus<div style="text-align: right;"></div><a href="http://christian4moses.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/resurrection.jpg" style="clear: right; color: #2277dd; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1294" height="300" src="http://christian4moses.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/resurrection.jpg?w=180&h=300" style="border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-right-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-style: initial; border-top-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-top-style: solid; border-width: initial; border-width: initial; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding-bottom: 4px; padding-left: 4px; padding-right: 4px; padding-top: 4px;" title="resurrection" width="180" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"></span>As I said before, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">most</span> scholars accept the historicity of the empty tomb, but virtually <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">all</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: -webkit-sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">scholars believe </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 12px; line-height: 21px;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: -webkit-sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">that the apostles had experiences in which they saw Jesus postmortem. Atheist and New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann said, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."</span></span><br />
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Why are scholars--even skeptical ones--almost unanimous in the conclusion that the followers of Jesus at least thought they saw Him postmortem?<br />
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First, Paul says that Jesus appeared to him personally (1 Corinthians 15:8), and that prior to his conversion, he was a zealous, upwardly mobile Pharisee who persecuted the church (Philippians 3:5-6). After his conversion, Paul gave up prestige and worldly goods, was imprisoned several times, and was charged with treason for his faith. Paul's words about Jesus appearing to him are firsthand testimony, and combined with his actions following his conversion, they are highly credible.<br />
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Second, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, Paul cites what is widely believed by scholars to be a creedal formula of the Christian faith passed down to him by his predecessors--dated to within five years of the death of Jesus: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles."<br />
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Lüdemann says in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Resurrection of Jesus </span>that "the elements in the tradition [of 1 Corinthians 15:3-7] are to be dated to the first two years after the crucifixion of Jesus." Jewish scholar Geza Vermes says that the words of Paul are "a tradition he has inherited from his seniors in the faith concerning the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus." A. M. Hunter says, "The passage therefore preserves uniquely early and verifiable testimony. It meets every reasonable demand of historical reliability." Reginald Fuller concludes: "It is almost universally agreed today that Paul is here citing tradition."<br />
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This corresponds to the words of Paul in Galatians 1:18-19, where he talks about going up to Jerusalem three years after his conversion to become acquainted with Cephas (Peter), and where he also met "James, the Lord's brother," but none of the other apostles. And in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7, the only individuals he mentions by name are Peter and James, the two apostles he met when he went up to Jerusalem. Gary Habermas, who has done extensive research of the opinions of critical scholars, said: "The most popular view is that Paul received this material during his trip to Jerusalem just three years after his conversion, to visit Peter and James (Gal. 1:18-19), both of whose names appear in the appearance list (1 Cor. 15:5, 7). An important hint here is Paul's use of the verb <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">historesai</span> (1:18), a term that indicates the investigation of a topic."<br />
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So in this group that, according to 1 Corinthians 15:5-8, saw Jesus, we have Paul, the intellectual Pharisee who violently persecuted the church; Peter, the coward who denied Jesus three times when He was arrested and then went into hiding; James, the brother of Jesus who was skeptical of Jesus' claims during His lifetime (Mark 3:21, John 7:5); and the five hundred, most of whom were still alive at the time of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and available for questioning, since the Christians were called to be "witnesses" (Acts 1:8).<br />
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Modern scholars have almost unanimously dismissed the idea that these individuals lied about the appearances, because they would not have given up everything, including their lives, for a known lie. The Christian faith is based on the fact of the resurrection, and if the early Christians <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">knew</span> that Jesus had not really risen from the dead, their subsequent behavior would have been incomprehensible. If James did not at least think he saw Jesus, how did he go from being a skeptic who believed that his brother was insane (Mark 3:21, John 7:5) to the head of the early church (Acts 15:13) to being stoned to death by a sanhedrin of judges (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Antiquities of the Jews, </span>20:200)? Why was Paul willing to give up his prestige to suffer poverty, imprisonment, and persecution? And why did Peter overcome his cowardice to boldly proclaim the gospel if he was part of a conspiracy to deceive? Why sacrifice everything to be part of a small Jewish sect that was deemed heretical by other Jews and illegal by the Romans? And how could such a conspiracy survive the severe persecution of Christians by Nero beginning in 64 AD?<br />
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One might argue that it is not unusual for religious fanatics to be willing to die for what they believe. The 911 terrorists were brainwashed into thinking that they would get seventy-two virgins in Paradise for killing American infidels. (In other words, if they died killing debauched Americans, their reward would be an eternity of debauchery.) But the faith of the disciples of Jesus was based, not on expectation, but on experience. They claimed to have <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">seen </span>the resurrected Jesus.<br />
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The primary hypothesis put forth by skeptics to explain the appearances and the subsequent faith of the disciples is that they all hallucinated. They had some kind of experience that deeply affected them for the rest of their lives, but it was psychological. The proponents of this theory postulate that the disciples experienced grief-related hallucinations after the death of Jesus, and they spread via chain reaction to what Lüdemann labeled "mass ecstasy."<br />
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But there are several problems with the hallucination theory: First, hallucinations by their very nature are psychological phenomena, so most psychologists say that they are private experiences. Since they are perceptions independent of external stimuli, it is no more possible to share the exact same hallucination with another person than to share the exact same dream. Second, even if "collective hallucinations" are possible in some situations, as psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones say may have been the case with the Marian visions, the criteria present during those events were <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">not </span>present when the apostles saw Jesus postmortem.<br />
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Zusne and Jones say that "emotional arousal is a prerequisite of collective hallucinations," and "all participants in the hallucination must be informed beforehand, at least concerning the broad outlines of the phenomenon that will constitute the collective hallucination."<br />
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So with that in mind, I'm going to compare the event at Fátima to the resurrection appearances. First, the large crowd that saw the "miracle of the sun" came <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">expecting</span> to see something miraculous. They had been told that something would happen that day.<br />
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The disciples, on the other hand, did not expect to see Jesus resurrected. The Gospels indicate that everybody was initially skeptical. The disciples did not believe the women when they returned from the tomb (Luke 24:11) and Thomas did not believe the disciples (John 20:25). Was their skepticism a later invention? Under the criterion of embarrassment, there is no reason why the faithlessness of the disciples should be emphasized unless it was authentic.<br />
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And Paul certainly didn't expect to see Jesus on the road to Damascus. He was probably the last person he <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">wanted</span> to see. Acts 9:1-2 says, "Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem." Then he saw a light from heaven and heard a voice, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" His travel companions heard the voice but saw no one.<br />
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What kind of a hallucination turns a murderous persecutor into a peaceful missionary? And who hallucinates a light that is so bright that it leaves him blind?<br />
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The second criteria Zusne and Jones give is emotional arousal. Those who witnessed the "miracle of the sun" at Fátima came to see something supernatural, so they may have been in a state of religious fervor, but the disciples had just seen their friend and rabbi being publicly flogged and crucified as a criminal, thus dashing their hopes that He was the awaited Messiah. The normal reaction would be depression and fear for their own lives, and that is exactly how the Gospels tell us they did react.<br />
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Also, James and Paul were not exactly the credulous type. The Gospels make it clear that James did not believe during Jesus' lifetime, and 1 Corinthians 15:7 tells us that Jesus appeared to him. Paul must have known everything about the teachings of the Way, including the claims of the resurrection, but that did not stop him from persecuting its followers. He was also highly educated and trained in Greek philosophy, and in 1 Timothy 4:7 he warns his followers to have nothing to do with worldly myths and old wives tales. In no way does he seem like someone who was prone to flights of fancy.<br />
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So even if the event at Fátima was, as Zusne and Jones hypothesize, collective hallucination "mingled with some celestial event," they say nothing about the postmortem appearances of Jesus.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 4px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 4px; font-family: verdana; font-size: 10px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px;"> And with good reason, because the resurrection appearances do not meet the criteria they put forth. </span></span><br />
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But Lüdemann gives a different explanation. He says that the extreme grief of the disciples led them to hallucinate the appearances. The first point to note here is that Lüdemann is not a psychologist, and Zusne and Jones, who <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">are</span> psychologists, say nothing about grief leading to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">collective </span>hallucinations. This kind of hallucination may perhaps be experienced by a bereaved spouse, but it doesn't spread to the other family members, neighbors, and treating health care professionals.<br />
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Second, Paul felt no grief, nor is there any evidence of guilt prior to his conversion. He persecuted the Christians because he was zealous for his ancestral traditions (Galatians 1:14), and he was faultless in his legalistic righteousness (Philippians 3:6). He was well-educated and rational, and most likely he thought very highly of himself prior to his conversion. And yet he is our primary witness of the resurrection because he speaks of his own first-hand<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span>experiences.<br />
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The hallucination hypothesis has many problems, but even if it didn't, it wouldn't explain the empty tomb. Another naturalistic explanation is required to account for that, and as I have attempted to demonstrate in a prior post, none fit the evidence.<br />
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The question then remains: Why should we prefer one apparent violation of the laws of nature (the resurrection of a dead man) to others like mass hallucinations under impossible circumstances? That is a question of applying Bayes' Theorem to all the salient facts and weighing the probability of the resurrection against the naturalistic explanations. Several people have already done this and found that given the vanishingly small probability of the naturalistic explanations, the probability of the resurrection is high even if we assume that it has a very low prior probability apart from the specific evidence.<br />
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And the prior probability is not as low as some may think. As I pointed out in my post about Hume and Bayes' Theorem, it is not simply the probability of a violation of the laws of nature, but the probability of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">God </span>raising His Son from the dead in order to prove His deity and victory over death. And in order to do that, He has to exist, so we have to view the prior probability in the context of arguments in natural theology for the existence of God. That is, the stronger the fine-tuning argument, the cosmological argument, the argument from moral law, and other arguments for God's existence, the higher the prior probability that God exists and therefore the more likely that He raised Jesus from the dead. Conversely, the stronger the atheological arguments, like the problem of evil, the less likely that God exists and therefore the lower the prior probability that He raised Jesus from the dead.<br />
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</div><div>In the same way that the evidence in natural theology increases the prior probability of the resurrection, the resurrection is one more argument for the existence of God, specifically the God of the Bible. God <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">intended</span> it as proof to all (Acts 17:31). Thomas Arnold, former Professor of History at Oxford, concluded: "I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better, fuller evidence of every sort, to the understanding of a fair enquirer, than the great sign which God hath given us that Christ died, and rose again from the dead."</div>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com96tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-29566739767511593432010-12-21T16:16:00.000-08:002010-12-22T08:01:34.917-08:00When the Transcendent Fills the Ordinary<object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/SXh7JR9oKVE?fs=1&hl=en_US&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/SXh7JR9oKVE?fs=1&hl=en_US&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br />
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I will soon write my post on the resurrection appearances of Jesus, but first I wanted to post something more appropriate for the season. The above video has been watched almost 25 million times on YouTube. Water Russell Mead wrote the <a href="http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/12/05/faith-matters-the-kingdom-of-god-in-a-food-court/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; text-decoration: none;">following</span></a> in his blog post, "The Kingdom of God in a Food Court":<br />
<blockquote>To hear this music in that place, and to see this spontaneity breaking forth in the midst of life at its dullest, most routine is to see what the Gospel really is. Just as the Hallelujah Chorus erupts into the food court, changing everything, Jesus was born into the dreary history of a defeated people while his parents were fighting the seasonal crowds in Bethlehem like shoppers hunting for a table in the food court of an overcrowded mall.</blockquote><blockquote>When the miracle happens, the ordinary life of ordinary people is transformed. This solid and often dull world of work and worry suddenly moves onto a new plane: infinitely richer. We look up — not in duty or obligation or in moral resolve — but in sheer, surprising joy.</blockquote>The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the transcendent is a recurring theme in the Gospel. We have this heavenly treasure in jars of clay, says the Apostle Paul--just like the blessed Virgin Mary, a humble girl who was chosen to bear the Messiah. When the King of kings came to live among us, He was born in a stable among the animals, and the glory of the Lord lit up the night for a group of shepherds as a multitude of the heavenly host proclaimed the good news that a Savior had been born <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">for them </span>(Luke 2:11).<br />
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He was born for them--and for us--ordinary people who experience the prosaic drudgery of human existence, like shepherds working the night shift. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: "God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them." Like in a food court.<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-36499983660691945952010-11-30T17:12:00.000-08:002011-06-04T12:28:13.149-07:00Skeptical Response to the Resurrection: The Empty Tomb<a href="http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A2KJke3B_vNMODMAWHyjzbkF/SIG=1277u1kt3/EXP=1291145281/**http%3a//www.flickr.com/photos/korephotos/2844936791/" id="aimgMain" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; text-decoration: none;" target="_top"><img alt="View Image" height="167" id="imageMain" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3115/2844936791_c59511ff73.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; cursor: move; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 3px;" title="By KOREphotos on Flickr" width="250" /></a>The resurrection of Jesus is supported by three pillars: the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances, and the birth and growth of the church in the face of severe persecution. In order to undermine the historical support for the resurrection, a naturalistic theory has to explain all three in a way that is scientifically and psychologically viable and not excessively <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">ad hoc.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">A greater assortment of sledge hammers have been taken to the empty tomb than either of the other two pillars, but even so, most critical scholars accept its historicity. Jewish scholar Geza Vermez concludes: "But in the end, when every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that the opinions of the orthodox, the liberal sympathizer and the critical agnostic alike . . . are simply interpretations of the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb."</span></span><br />
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But some skeptics try to characterize the story of the empty tomb as legend, so I will start by addressing the historicity of the empty tomb.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Is the empty tomb a legend? </span>Skeptics argue that, unlike 1 Corinthians, the Gospels were written by anonymous authors at least thirty years after the death of Jesus, so enough time passed for legendary embellishment to develop. But there are three major reasons why the empty tomb is not a legend:<br />
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First, according to the late historian of ancient Rome and fellow at Oxford, A. N. Sherwin-White, "even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition." And with respect to historical reconstruction, he says that "we are seldom in the happy position of dealing at only one remove with a contemporary source." But the first Gospel was written while many of the original eyewitnesses were probably still alive. So that is not enough time for legend to have replaced the historical core of the stories of which the Gospels are composed.<br />
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Sherwin-White is one of a number of historians who have confirmed the historicity of the book of Acts "even in matters of detail." And he concludes that the reason why the "degree of confirmation in Graeco-Roman terms is less for the Gospels than for Acts is due, as these lectures have tried to show, to the differences in their regional setting. As soon as Christ enters the Roman orbit at Jerusalem, the confirmation begins. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming</span>" (italics added). So because of the regional setting of most of the Gospel stories, we cannot directly confirm their basic historicity in the way that we can the book of Acts. But since Acts is by all appearances "no less of a propaganda narrative than the Gospels, liable to similar distortions," there is no reason to think that the Gospels are less historical.<br />
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Second, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, Paul recites a creedal formula which most scholars, including skeptics like Gerd Lüdemann, date to within a couple of years of the death of Jesus, and in it he says, "and that [Jesus] was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:4). Paul's statement (and by extension, the statement of his predecessors shortly after the death of Jesus) that Jesus was raised on the third day implies that the tomb was empty because otherwise the creed could not have said that Jesus was raised on the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">third</span> day. If a body remained in the tomb <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">or </span>rotted in a common grave, the day of his resurrection would have been unknown.<br />
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The words "according to the Scriptures" do not help here because Hosea 6:2, the Old Testament reference, would be too subtle unless Paul knew of the empty grave on the third day. Hosea 6:2 says "He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him." Unless the early church knew that the tomb was found empty on the third day, it would be too much of a stretch to say that this verse is a Scriptural reference to the day of the resurrection.<br />
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This further undermines the theory that the empty tomb was a legend, since the early Christians would have preached it from the very beginning.<br />
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Third, critical scholars employ historical criteria to determine whether parts of the Bible are true, and two of them are the criterion of multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment. The criterion of multiple attestation is met because the story of women finding the tomb empty is told in each of the four Gospels. (And of course they were not originally part of a compilation labeled the "New Testament." They were the earliest and most reliable documents about Jesus.)<br />
<br />
The criterion of embarrassment is met because the male disciples fled in fear after Jesus was arrested, while women, who had virtually no status in first century Palestine, and were not considered reliable witnesses, stayed and went to pay their last respects to Jesus. They were the star witnesses to the empty tomb, something that the authors would be very unlikely to fabricate.<br />
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Someone suggested in a previous thread that Mark invented the empty tomb to fill in a gap in his story of what happened to Jesus, and that 16:8 was Mark's way of explaining why the story of the empty tomb had not been told earlier. ("They went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had gripped them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.") That is, the "unreliable" women who said nothing were a later invention. However, the context indicates that the women were only silent temporarily because they were terrorized by their experience. In Mark 16:7 the angel tells them to go tell Peter and the other disciples, and in Matthew, Luke, and John they do exactly that. Most likely Mark just left that part out and instead focused on the women's state of mind immediately after their encounter with the angel.<br />
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Numerous theories have been put forth over the years of natural explanations for the empty tomb, and I will briefly mention the major ones:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Did the disciples steal the body? </span>Matthew 28:11-15 says that a story of the disciples stealing the body of Jesus circulated among the Jews. Although we don't have independent corroboration that first century Jews made this arguments (but I'm aware of modern Jews who have been given that explanation growing up in Jewish schools), it is unlikely that Matthew invented this, since he brought it up for the purpose of refuting it. If another argument had been widespread among the Jews at the time, why did he not focus on that on instead?<br />
<br />
This argument concedes the empty tomb because if there was some way of denying that the tomb was empty in the first place, the detractors of Christianity would have taken that approach. They could have produced a body, argued that the body was one of many in a common grave, or claimed that the story of the empty tomb was invented later. But instead of denying the empty grave, they chose to explain it away.<br />
<br />
The stolen body hypothesis has been rejected by modern critics because the disciples would not have been willing to die for a known lie. Something changed the followers of Jesus from doubting cowards to courageous proclaimers of the Gospel who were willing to die for their faith.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Did Jesus not really die? </span>This was a popular hypothesis around the beginning of the nineteenth century, but like the stolen body theory, it has been almost completely abandoned by modern scholars. It states that Jesus did not fully die on the cross and recovered in the tomb. This hypothesis has major problems. First, since Jesus was at least severely wounded from the crucifixion, there is no way He could have removed the stone covering the entrance to the tomb, so the apparent death theory has to be in part conspiracy theory. Second, as the very liberal scholar David Strauss argued, how did a half-dead Jesus stumble into a meeting of His doubting and fearful disciples and encourage them with the news that He had conquered death and someday they would have a body just like His? Third, numerous studies show that medically there is no way He could have survived the crucifixion. Skeptical Jesus Seminar co-founder John Dominic Crossan has stated that the fact that Jesus died by crucifixion is as sure as any fact could ever be.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Did the women visit the wrong tomb? </span>This hypothesis, put forth in the early twentieth century, says that the women lost their way to the tomb and ended up at one that was unoccupied. A caretaker said to them, "You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He is not here," and the women were so unnerved that they ran off without hearing the rest of the explanation. When the disciples started talking about appearances of the risen Christ, the women embellished the story into the account found in Mark.<br />
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This hypothesis never took off in large part because it cherry picks certain parts of the Gospel account and dismisses others without giving good justification. And it doesn't explain why nobody, including the Jewish leaders, ever set the record straight.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Did Joseph of Arimathea remove the body from his tomb? </span>One hypothesis states that Joseph was not a follower of Jesus, but that Joseph placed Jesus in his rock-hewn tomb in observance of the Jewish laws that a body had to be buried within 24-hours and that burial was prohibited on the Sabbath. Since Jesus died shortly before the start of the Sabbath (from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday), there was no time to dig a grave. Joseph temporarily stored the body in his tomb, and then removed it after the Sabbath. The women later discovered the tomb empty.<br />
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There are several problems with this explanation: First, since Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin and a devout Jew, why did he not announce what he had done when the early Christians began proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead? He could have done much to nip the movement in the bud. Second, if Joseph had taken the body, there is no reason to think that the followers of Jesus would have concluded that He had risen. According to John 20:2, Mary Magdalene immediately assumed that someone had taken the body of Jesus. Third, Joseph must have removed the body after sundown on Saturday and before dawn on Sunday, which is when the Gospels tell us the women arrived. Why did he not wait until daylight before he removed the body? If he was not sympathetic to Jesus, it seems reasonable that he would remove the body, but it makes no sense that he did it after dark and that he failed to later announce what he had done.<br />
<br />
Every naturalistic explanation of the empty tomb has serious problems, and even if they can be overcome, another major hurdle remains: the appearances of Jesus as the risen Christ in such a convincing way that his followers--including those who started out as skeptics--were willing to sacrifice their lives for their faith. The subject of my next post will be the skeptical response to the appearances of Jesus.Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com66tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-34872939617063804392010-11-14T18:59:00.000-08:002011-06-04T12:27:38.517-07:00An Invincible Unbelief?<div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A2KJkIedKjdNPGgAj3SjzbkF/SIG=12b2takuo/EXP=1295547421/**http%3a//ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/portrait.jpg" id="aimgMain" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; text-decoration: none;" target="_top"><img alt="View Image" height="200" id="imageMain" src="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/portrait.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 3px;" title="View Full Size Image" width="165" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">A few months ago, I spilled a glass of water on my daughter's book. I quickly wiped it off and put it down to go clean the area where I spilled. But when my daughter came to look for it later because she <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">needed it for school, it was gone. We searched everywhere to no avail, so I just bought her a new book. It never reappeared, and at this point I would be surprised if it ever does. </span></span></span></span></div><br />
How could that book have completely disappeared? Did the water have magical properties? Do we have a gnome infestation? That thought has occurred to me a few times when socks go into the laundry chute and never, ever make it out. Maybe the book went the way of those socks, whose partners have taken up permanent residence at the bottom of the clean laundry basket in the hopes that they will someday return.<br />
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But enough about my laundry woes, the point here is that in spite of my speculation, I <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">know </span>that we don't have gnomes. I also know that the water did not make the book disappear. In fact, I know that even if the book never shows up there's a natural explanation for its disappearance. I have an invincible unbelief in gnomes and magic water and I believe that to be a rational position.<br />
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I used the words "invincible unbelief" because during a debate between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas on the resurrection of Jesus, they agreed on the relevant historical facts, but Flew said that he had an almost invincible unbelief in the resurrection because it was so wildly different from our experience of how the universe functions. Flew agreed with David Hume's argument against miracles in the article "Of Miracles," which states, in a nutshell, that no matter how improbable a naturalistic explanation, a miracle is even less probable. Hume defines a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature and argues that experience is proof against them.<br />
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There are several problems with Hume's argument. First, the definition he gives of a miracle is a poor one. A better definition is the one given by J. L. Mackie: "The laws of nature . . . describe the ways in which the world--including, of course, human beings--works when left to itself, when not interfered with. A miracle occurs when the world is not left to itself, when something distinct from the natural order as a whole intrudes into it." That definition is not theologically precise, but it works for the purposes of this discussion.<br />
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The example I gave about gnomes stealing my daugther's book or water causing it to disappear would be a violation of the laws of nature in that the universal laws would suddenly not apply. However, the resurrection would be a miracle according to Mackie's definition because <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">God </span>raised Jesus from the dead; this was not simply a violation of the laws of nature, but an intrusion from beyond nature.<br />
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This distinction is significant because it is reasonable to believe that the laws of nature are constant. If they were not, the universe would be incomprehensible to us and science would be impossible. We know from experience that the laws of nature are predictable. However, this does not mean that it is reasonable to have an invincible conviction that nothing exists <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">beyond </span>nature. That is a different question altogether. <br />
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Second, Hume's argument may be reasonably applied to the disappearing book, but it is not reasonable to apply it to the resurrection of Jesus, which, if true, would be an argument for a God who exists beyond nature. In other words, if God raised Jesus from the dead, then that is an argument for theism, like the fine-tuning argument, the cosmological argument, and the argument from moral law. The argument is not just that a violation of the laws of nature took place, but that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">God</span> intervened from beyond nature to raise Jesus from the dead, and He would have to exist to do so. And not only is it an argument for theism in general, but it is an argument for the Christian God.<br />
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In fact, I have frequently heard non-believers say that they would believe if they witnessed a miracle. Of course, if God had to perform a major miracle in the presence of every person who ever lived, then miracles would be the rule rather than the exception and therefore not evidence for His existence. Instead, He entered His creation in the flesh and did one major miracle that is supported by historical evidence: He rose from the dead. And His resurrection from the dead is the lynchpin of the Christian faith.<br />
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So Hume commits the fallacy of begging the question by rejecting the central claim of Christian theism without even considering the evidence. He dismisses the possibility that we could ever have evidence that a God who exists outside of nature revealed Himself to us within nature by doing something that is normally impossible.<br />
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Third, Hume's argument is essentially probabilistic, and it has been refuted by Bayes' Theorem. William Lane Craig explained this in his debate with Bart Ehrman, who used a variation of Hume's argument. Craig sets it up as follows:<br />
<br />
Calculating the Probability of the Resurrection:<br />
<br />
B = Background knowledge<br />
E = Specific evidence (empty tomb, postmortem appearances, etc.)<br />
R = Resurrection of Jesus<br />
Pr (R/B & E) = ?<br />
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As I said before, Hume ignores the specific evidence for the resurrection, and says that the probability of the resurrection is R/B, with B representing our background knowledge about the laws of nature and the likelihood of a violation. Of course the probability is very low, in part because of his definition of a miracle and in part because he does not take into consideration the evidence for the resurrection and the plausibility of naturalistic explanations. Agnostic philosopher of physics John Earman (not to be confused with Ehrman) did not mince words in calling Hume's argument fallacious in his book <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Hume's Abject Failure.</span><br />
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Since Hume's argument is about the probability of a miracle, Earman and Craig used Bayes' Theorem to refute it. Craig argued that the equation has to look like this:<br />
<br />
Pr (R/B) x Pr (E/B&R) <br />
Pr (R/B & E) = ____________________________________________<br />
Pr (R/B) x Pr (E/B&R) + Pr (not-R/B) x (E/B& not-R)<br />
<br />
The numerator is the probability of the resurrection given our background knowledge and the specific evidence for the resurrection. The denominator reproduces the numerator and adds the probability and explanatory power of all the naturalistic explanations. So the lower the probability of those explanations, the higher the probability of the resurrection. But if the naturalistic explanations [Pr (not-R/B) x (E/B& not-R)] are plausible and have explanatory power, then the probability of the resurrection goes down.<br />
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If that is not clear, Craig spends more time (and does a much better job) explaining it <a href="http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/DocServer/resurrection-debate-transcript.pdf?docID=621">here</a>.<br />
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The point here is not to give a probabilistic value to the resurrection but to demonstrate that Hume's argument is fallacious because he oversimplifies the probability of the resurrection. Instead of dismissing the resurrection as <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">always </span>the least probable, we also have to take into consideration the specific evidence for the resurrection and the probability of the naturalistic explanations, like numerous people--including skeptics--having the same hallucination in different situations and at different times, and being willing to give their lives for the truth of what they perceived.<br />
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But even if we ignore the evidence for the resurrection and just go back to the original equation Pr = R/B, then Hume's argument still fails because the arguments for theism in general make the inherent probability of the resurrection greater. If the existence of a God who created <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">ex nihilo</span> is the best<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"> </span>explanation for why the universe emerged out of nothing, and an Intelligent Designer is the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe, then the probability that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">God </span>raised Jesus from the dead increases. So the background knowledge is not just the probability of a violation of the laws of nature--it is the probability that God raised His Son from the dead, and the probability of that increases if the evidence in cosmology points to a Creator. Pr = R/B is affected by the probability of the existence of a Creator.<br />
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In the introduction to "Of Miracles," Hume says, "I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument . . . which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures."<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000020;">Although those of us in the throes of "superstitious delusions" are eternally grateful to Hume for his thoughtful gesture, the problem is that his argument is far too ambitious because it is only useful with respect to true superstition. For example, if I were tempted to plug in my gap of knowledge about the missing book with an explanation like gnomes, then his argument would be a "check" to that kind of a "superstitious delusion." But it tells us nothing about the probability that a God beyond nature would identify Himself to us within nature by superseding its laws, because for Him to be able to do that the laws of nature would have to be predictable in the first place. </span>Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com52tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-52960560426871009272010-11-05T15:16:00.000-07:002011-06-04T12:26:52.120-07:00Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus<div style="clear: left; float: left; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"></span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0S020o6g9RMT0sAtZajzbkF/SIG=12ej8du23/EXP=1289082042/**http%3a//www.dst-corp.com/james/PaintingsOfJesus/Jesus14.jpg" id="aimgMain" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; text-decoration: none;" target="_top"><img alt="View Image" height="320" id="imageMain" src="http://www.dst-corp.com/james/PaintingsOfJesus/Jesus14.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 3px;" title="View Full Size Image" width="226" /></a></div><br />
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In his autobiography <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Surprised by Joy, </span>C. S. Lewis wrote:<br />
<blockquote>Early in 1926 [when Lewis was still an atheist] the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. "Rum thing," he went on. "All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once."</blockquote>What does it mean to say that there is historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? It means that historians agree on facts about Jesus that strongly point to His resurrection from the dead. It does not, however, mean that the majority of scholars conclude that Jesus was raised from the dead. They would be at least nominally Christian if they believed that. (And in spite of his off-hand comment, Lewis' friend never since showed any interest in Christianity.)<br />
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Over the years, critical scholars have not so much disputed the facts as sought naturalistic explanations, like the swoon theory, the stolen body theory, and the mass hallucination theory. But as we will see in the next post, none of these theories are medically or psychologically plausible, nor do they explain all the facts. Only the bodily resurrection of Jesus explains all the known facts.<br />
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These key facts are:<br />
<br />
First, Jesus was buried in Jerusalem, in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Sanhedrin.<br />
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Second, the disciples lost hope when Jesus was arrested. <br />
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Third, the tomb was found empty by a group of Jesus's female followers on the morning of the third day after He was crucified.<br />
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Fourth, over a period of time a variety of people had experiences where Jesus appeared to them postmortem, including James, the skeptical brother of Jesus and Paul, the Pharisee who persecuted the church.<br />
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Fifth, the resurrection was the central message from the very beginning, and the disciples courageously preached it in Jerusalem, the city where Jesus was crucified, willing to forfeit even their lives.<br />
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Why do most historians agree on these facts?<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"> "honorable burial" by Joseph of Arimathea in Jerusalem. </span>Most historians agree that the Gospel accounts are correct about the honorable burial for the following reasons: First, the burial is independently attested in several early sources. Skeptical scholar Bart Ehrman acknowledges that "the earliest accounts we have are unanimous in saying that Jesus was in fact buried by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, and so it's relatively reliable that that's what happened."<br />
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Second, Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin, which means that he was a celebrity at the time. The authors of the Gospels could not have made this up and not been called on it because many people would have known, at the time when the Gospels were written, whether or not it was true. And the Jewish leaders certainly would have set everyone straight if this had been fabricated.<br />
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Third, it seems unlikely that the Christians would have made this up. The Jewish leaders are the villains in the Gospel accounts, and the early Christians blamed them for Jesus's death (Acts 7). So how likely is it that the Gospel authors would all agree to fabricate this ironic twist--that a good and honorable Jewish leader would bury Jesus in his own tomb?<br />
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The historicity of this fact is significant because it tells us that Jesus was buried in Jerusalem, in the very city where the message of the resurrection was initially proclaimed. So if any body remained in the tomb, the authorities could have produced it and the message would have been disproved immediately. But there is no evidence of any body having been produced. Gary Habermas says, "We certainly would expect to have heard from Celsus, the second-century critic of Christianity, if Jesus' corpse had been produced. When he wrote against Jesus' resurrection, it would have been to his advantage to include this damaging information, had it been available." But neither he nor any of the Christian apologists of the second or third centuries mentioned it.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The disciples' initial doubt and fear. </span>One of the criteria Bible historians use to determine whether an event in the life of Jesus really took place is the criterion of embarrassment. That is, if it is embarrassing and still included, it is most likely true because why would someone fabricate something to make a significant person in the early church look bad? Well, Peter's denial of Jesus makes him look <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">really</span> bad. First we have the initial bravado: "I'll never deny you, even if I have to die for you!" Then after Jesus was arrested, we have the cowardly denial to a <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">servant girl</span> who recognized him. And when they didn't accept his denials, the future St. Peter the great church leader started cursing and swearing: "I do not know the man!"<br />
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This story clearly qualifies under the criterion of embarrassment, and it tells us that the budding ministry started to collapse when their Leader died. As Peter demonstrates, the disciples were stricken with fear and began to doubt everything they had seen and experienced. And this incident is told in all four Gospels so it also qualifies under the criterion of multiple attestation.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The discovery of the empty tomb by female disciples. </span>Was the tomb really empty? This is probably the most controversial fact of the five, and even so, William Lane Craig says: "According to Jacob Kremer, a New Testament critic who has specialized in the study of the resurrection: 'By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements about the empty tomb.' In fact in a bibliographical survey of over 2,200 publications on the resurrection in English, French, and German since 1975, Habermas found that 75 percent of scholars accepted the historicity of the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb. The evidence is so compelling that even a number of Jewish scholars, such as Pinchas Lapide and Geza Vermes, have declared themselves convinced on the basis of the evidence that Jesus' tomb was found empty." And Bart Ehrman admits, "We also have solid traditions to indicate that women found this tomb empty three days later."<br />
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The main reason why most scholars accept the historicity of the empty tomb is because each Gospel account insists that women were the chief witnesses. It is not strictly true that they were not permitted to testify, but they were never called upon as witnesses in important matters. So if the story of the empty tomb was legendary, the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">male </span>disciples would have almost certainly have been the ones to discover it. There is simply no reason to fabricate such a detail.<br />
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Some critical scholars, like Gerd Lüdemann, believe that the account of the empty tomb is a legend, but the canonical passion story is too unembellished to read like a legend. Contrast the understated passion story of the Gospel of Mark to the dramatic non-canonical Gospel of Peter, where a gigantic Jesus emerges from the tomb before a vast crowd of witnesses, including the villainous Roman soldiers and Jewish leaders. Two enormous shining men carry Jesus off in glory as a talking cross follows them. A voice from heaven proclaims: "Thou hast preached to them that sleep, and from the cross there was heard the answer, Yea" (10:41-42). Now that's a legend for you!<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">A variety of people had experiences, at different times and in different ways, in which Jesus appeared to them postmortem. </span>Scholars are virtually unanimous in their acceptance of this fact. Gerd Lüdemann, an eminent atheistic scholar who has written a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Christ-Historical-Inquiry/dp/1591022452/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288921660&sr=8-1">book</a> seeking to prove that the resurrection <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">did not </span>take place, has said, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus's death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ." As I will discuss in the next post, Lüdemann contends that everybody who thought they saw him actually hallucinated. However, for now it is significant that just about all scholars accept this fact, including those who are strongly biased against Christianity.<br />
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Why would an opponent of Christianity say that this is historically certain? In the first letter to the Corinthians, written by Paul around 55AD, he says: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also" (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).<br />
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So at the time when Paul wrote this, there were hundreds of people still alive claiming to have seen the risen Christ and willing to testify as witnesses. Were they all friendly witnesses? No, James the brother of Jesus was a skeptic until He saw Jesus postmortem, and that is when he was converted and became one of the leaders of early church. And, according to Josephus, James and some companions were stoned to death by the Sanhedrin of judges in 62 BC (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Antiquities of the Jews</span> 20:200).<br />
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Paul himself was certainly no friendly witness. Until his conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul was a Pharisee who violently persecuted the church, having been commissioned by the Sanhedrin. "For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it; and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions" (Galatians 1:13-14).<br />
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So Paul was well-respected among the very people who sought to destroy the Christian movement, but he gave that all up after Jesus appeared to him. Instead of prestige and money, he chose ridicule, imprisonment, and poverty for the sake of the Gospel. Why did he do that? If he had really seen Jesus, he did it for the hope of his own resurrection and the resurrection of others. But if the incident on the road to Damascus never happened, what then could possibly have motivated him?<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">The resurrection of Christ was the central message of Christianity from the very beginning, and the disciples courageously preached it in Jerusalem, the city where Jesus was crucified. </span>In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Paul sets forth the creed that he received, "that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." This is an early creedal formula that most critical scholars believe Paul received in 35 AD, during his visit to see Peter and James in Jerusalem three years after his conversion (Galatians 1:18). So within five years of the resurrection, the beliefs of the early church had been formulated into a creed and passed on to Paul. German historian Hans von Campenhausen says of the dating of the creedal formula: "This account meets all the demands of historical reliability that could possibly be made of such a text." However, this does not mean that the creed was formulated as late as 35 AD; it simply means that it already existed at that time.<br />
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It is well established that the early church flourished in Jerusalem, the city where Jesus was crucified and buried. If the tomb had not been empty and the Sanhedrin had produced a body--any body--it would have significantly weakened the movement if not disproved the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead. But the early Christians boldly proclaimed the resurrection in Jerusalem, willingly facing torture and death for their conviction.<br />
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Those historical facts have stood immutable as a rock in spite of many attempts to explain them away. Did Jesus not really die? Did the disciples steal the body and conspire to deceive? Did everybody who thought they saw the resurrected Christ hallucinate? Were people in first century Palestine so superstitious and ignorant of science that they readily believed that someone could be raised bodily from the dead?<br />
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The last point was raised in the comments to the prior post, so I'll reply to that here. In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">The Resurrection of the Son of God, </span>N. T. Wright said that the idea of a bodily resurrection was considered impossible among the pagans. They might not have been very scientific (and they may have believed in ghosts), but they knew that dead people stayed dead. Wright says: "Not even in myth was it permitted. When Apollo tried to raise a child from the dead, Zeus punished them both with a thunderbolt." In 1 Corinthians 1:23, Paul says that the Gospel is foolishness to the Gentiles, and that is probably because they had no belief in the possibility of a bodily resurrection of the dead. In Acts 26:24, the Roman governor Festus accuses Paul of being out of his mind when he tells King Agrippa about the resurrection. The Jews, on the other hand, believed only in a resurrection at the end of time, and they had no concept of a dying and rising Messiah.<br />
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The skeptic who rejects the resurrection will have to propose an alternative explanation for the evidence, and I will elaborate on some of them in the next post. Lüdemann has argued that those who believed they saw Jesus really hallucinated, a problematic hypothesis given the nature of hallucinations. Bart Ehrman relies on David Hume's argument that the supernatural is inherently the least probable explanation, but that argument has been refuted using Bayes' Theorem. And Anthony Flew admitted, in a debate with Gary Habermas in 1993, that he had an almost invincible unbelief in the resurrection because it seemed to him so "wildly inconsistent with everything else that happens in the universe."<br />
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Flew is right that the resurrection is wildly inconsistent with everything we know; people have always known that dead people stay dead. But that is precisely why it would be logical for the Creator of this ordered universe to reveal Himself to us in that way, as a miracle within His original miracle--creation itself.Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com113tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5365849129692359439.post-40300097406442349472010-10-30T15:33:00.000-07:002011-06-04T12:26:10.621-07:00Did Jesus Really Exist?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0WTefeAjRFNRHwA9HGjzbkF/SIG=12l31l6rg/EXP=1293082368/**http%3a//namaha.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/jesus-christ-divine.jpg" id="aimgMain" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; outline-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; text-decoration: none;" target="_top"><img alt="View Image" height="188" id="imageMain" src="http://namaha.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/jesus-christ-divine.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 3px;" title="View Full Size Image" width="250" /></a></div>No serious contemporary historian questions the historicity of Jesus, and that includes skeptical<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; white-space: pre;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; white-space: normal;">scholars <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">like John Dominic Crossan, Gerd Lüdemann, and Bart Ehrman, so this may be a redundant post. But a few atheists--like Dan Barker and Christopher Hitchens--have publicly disputed His existence. So for the sake of completeness, I will briefly state some of the extra-biblical evidence for Jesus's existence.</span></span></span></span><br />
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First century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions Jesus twice in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Jewish Antiquities:</span><br />
<blockquote>At this time there was a wise man called Jesus. And his conduct was good and (he) was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.</blockquote>The original version had unfortunately been interpolated later to include questionable phrases like "if it would be lawful to call him a man," and "he was the Christ." However, the above translation is of the Arabic version, which was found without the interpolated parts. It has been translated by Schlomo Pines, professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.<br />
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The second mention of Jesus by Josephus is as follows:<br />
<blockquote>Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others. </blockquote>Jesus (Yeshu) also appears to be mentioned in the Jewish <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Talmud</span>, in Sanhedrin 43a:<br />
<blockquote>On the eve of the Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, "He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Any one who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf." But since nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.</blockquote>This tells us several things: First, this Yeshu was accused of practicing sorcery, which sounds like a derogatory characterization of the miraculous. It is also consistent with Luke 11:15, which says that some of the Jewish leaders accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.<br />
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Second, he "enticed Israel to apostasy." This indicates that he had a strong following among the Jews and that he taught something the Jewish leaders disapproved of and labeled "apostasy." <br />
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Third, he was hanged on the eve of the Passover, just like Jesus. The word "hanged" was also used for crucifixion, in the sense that someone was hanged on a cross.<br />
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Wikipedia adds the following: "In the Florence manuscript of the Talmud (1177 CE) an addition is made to Sanhedrin 43a saying that Yeshu was hanged on the eve of the Sabbath." So this Yeshu was hanged on the eve of the Sabbath <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">and </span>on the eve of the Passover, just like Jesus in the Bible. It is rare for the Passover and the Sabbath to fall on the same day; for example, in the twentieth century it only happened ten times.<br />
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Fourth, the herald that went out <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">before</span> the hanging said that Yeshu was to be stoned, which was the penalty for blasphemy. However, he was not stoned--he was hanged.<br />
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Although the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Talmud</span> does not mention Pontius Pilate, Cornelius Tacitus, one of Rome's greatest historians, does. He wrote in his <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Annals </span>about the great fire of Rome in 64 AD, which had been blamed on the emperor Nero, and explained:<br />
<blockquote>Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a deadly superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but also in the City [Rome], where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world meet and become popular.</blockquote>Some skeptics have claimed that this part of the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Annals</span> was a forgery added later by Christians. But most scholars have concluded that the passage was written by Tacitus, including the skeptical Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, who said, "Tacitus's report confirms what we know from other sources, that Jesus was executed by order of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, sometime during Tiberius's reign."<br />
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Pliny the Younger described more persecution of the early Christians in his lettters to Trajan around 110 AD:<br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;">In the meantime, the method I have observed towards those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed. For whatever the nature of their creed might be, I could at least feel no doubt that contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved punishment. </span></blockquote>Lucian, a second century Greek satirist, wrote:<br />
<blockquote>The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day--the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account . . . You see, these misguided creatures start with the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains the contempt of death and voluntary self-devotion which are so common among them; and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.</blockquote>Second century philosopher Celcus, an opponent of Christianity, wrote a book about the Christians in which he said that Jesus was a sorcerer. In other words, in his effort to discredit Christianity, he unwittingly affirmed that Jesus did perform extraordinary works, because rather than denying them, he explained them away.<br />
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These and numerous other sources indicate that Jesus really existed. There is simply no dispute about that among historians. In fact, atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann has written a book in which he explicitly tries to disprove Christianity by arguing that the resurrection never happened, but not only does he concede that Jesus existed, he also says that there is no question that Jesus actually died on the cross, and that his disciples "had experiences after Jesus's death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."<br />
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In the next post I will discuss the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And in the following post, I will discuss the response of skeptical scholars.Anette Ackerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360188067259687608noreply@blogger.com13