Author Archives: Elizaphanian

About Elizaphanian

Rector of West Mersea

Dem bones

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This is a train of thought prompted by reading (and commenting on) this post at Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream, the question being what difference would it make to Christian faith if Jesus’ bones were discovered in a tomb somewhere, that is, in what way is the continuity of body between dead-in-the-tomb Jesus and eating-breakfast-with-disciples Jesus essential to Christian faith?

There are two angles I want to mention, but before continuing let me say that I believe the resurrection was a physically perceived event. I was about to put ‘physically manifested’ but that begs questions about scientific objectivity etc, and I don’t really want to play that game. I want to say that the disciples experienced Jesus with them physically, and I’m content to leave open the question of whether that physicality was something that could, in principle, have been validated with scientific instrumentation. Luke’s account: “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

So: two angles. The first is about the evidence for the empty tomb. Over the last eighteen months or so I’ve been introduced to Margaret Barker’s work, and much Christian language and symbolism is now more meaningful to me. One of them is the empty tomb, in particular, the way in which the two angels at each end of the bed correspond to the cherubim on the mercy seat – in other words, the empty tomb is now the place of atonement (note: not the cross); here is the restoration of the world. I find that a wonderful image.

However, I haven’t reached a settled view on the historical evidence question. Paul doesn’t mention it; on the other hand, if the story was invented out of whole cloth the early community wouldn’t have had the empty tomb discovered by women (their evidence was considered to be less worthy than that from a man). I think it possible that the story was invented; I think it possible that Jesus was buried in an unmarked grave along with the people crucified alongside him; but as time goes on I tend more towards something like the empty tomb.

Really what I want to say on this point is that whatever the view of the story on historico-critical grounds, what matters is the weight put onto the story – which brings me to the second angle – resurrection is not resuscitation. This is something on which Paul is good in 1 Corinthians 15 – the body dies and is raised a different sort of body. Still physical, but different. My worry about the empty tomb is less the historical question than the tendency it provokes to seeing the resurrection as simply a ‘coming back to life’ of Jesus: the body stopped working, and then it started working again. That’s not the resurrection. The resurrection is a much more radical break in continuity than that, it is the first fruits of a new creation.

I think that continuity between the bodies is important (that is why the resurrected body bears the marks of crucifixion – that’s tremendously important) but I don’t believe that continuity has to be expressed through an uninterrupted sequence from dead-body-in-tomb to risen-body-with-disciples. I’m happy for there to be a radical break there – indeed, I believe there was a radical break there.

You could say: the empty tomb as an historical account isn’t weight-bearing for me. Jesus being touched after his death is weight-bearing, and the empty tomb as a theological statement, these are weight-bearing.Which is really why I’m open to the possibility that we might one day discover a tomb with Jesus’ bones in it. That is, I don’t expect it, but should it happen, it wouldn’t make a great deal of difference to my faith and, in particular, it wouldn’t lead me to believe that the resurrection didn’t take place.

UPDATE: in other words, the resurrection is not like this!

Reasonable Atheism (16): a response to the Chimp

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I’m going to pick out some elements from the Chimp’s recent comment. My remarks in italics.

Yes, very sophisticated. Proclemations made with no support. Science is the absolute antithesis of faith. In adopting the scientific method, nothing is believed to be true without evidence.

This isn’t true. For implicit in the method, even as you describe it, is the construct of ‘evidence’, which contains assumptions about what is allowed to count as evidence. This notion is embedded in a whole patchwork quilt of assumptions from empiricism. Once these assumptions are brought out into the open the scientific endeavour starts to look much less pristine.

Faith is the exact opposite. The suggestion that science is in some way a faith position is ingnorant and misleading. It seems to me that anything half-hearted that states nothing concrete is ‘sophisticated’.

No, I think what is sophisticated is being able to step aside from the culturally acceptable rhetoric about science, and recognising science as a cultural construct itself. That’s why Ian and I can have productive conversations.

We ‘humourless’ Atheists are ‘humourless’ because we refuse to leave any wiggle room for religious fantasy.

Rather, I would say the humourlessness comes from not recognising a) the non-fantastical elements of religion, and b) the fantastical elements of science.

As for the end of faith, I have yet to witness a scientist strapping explosives to himself and blowing up civilans in honor of a theory or torturing someone to death because they would not subscribe to their view of gravity.

This is silly.I’m quite sure that if we were able to work out some sort of utilitarian calculation on which set of beliefs had had the most malign consequences – religious exploration and teachings, or scientific exploration and teachings – then science would end up with by far the most bloody hands. In other words, I’ll trade you one Torquemada for your chemical warfare.

Science represents civilization, cooperation and the free expression of ideas.

You missed out motherhood and apple pie 🙂 Those values existed before the rise of science and are maintained apart from the maintenance of science. What I would want to ask you is: can you give a scientifically acceptable explanation of those values?

Not all ideas are defacto accepted as equal. Some ideas are bad ones, they are discarded in favour of good ones.

How is this different from a religion?

There is no ‘holy’ text that cannot be contradicted.

Perhaps not a text, but certainly a network of culturally embedded assumptions. As Kuhn points out, what makes scientific practices change isn’t some semi-mystical notion of ‘reason conquering ignorance’ but simply a generational change when those established scientists who don’t ‘get’ a new theory die out and are replaced. Reason has very little to do with it (aesthetics is much more important).

Religion runs into this problem constantly. This leads to ‘sophisticated’ theology. That being bullshit dressed as being sensible. When the ancient books, full of hate and intolerence conflict with modern ethics, excuse making, obfuscation and meaning twisting begin in earnest. If the bible were a scientific document, it would have been discarded long ago.

Thank God it isn’t – because I completely agree that as a scientific text it’s worse than useless. But that is the mistake that fundamentalists make, and in saying it you show that you share a fundamentalist attitude. Besides which, where do you think ‘modern ethics’ came from, if not from Christian roots? Or do you think it sprang out new born from John Locke’s head, like Athena from Zeus?

Harris’ point is that if many people believe the end is coming, and a worryingly large number seem to think so, imagine what they would do with a nuclear arsenal. Many fundamentalists of all stripes actually look forward to the cataclismic ending of the world, day of judgement and all that.

I agree with him on that, and have been teaching and preaching to that effect for a while now.

His point simply is that the world can no longer afford ‘faith’. Our technological development coupled with much freer access to information will empower believers to literally destroy the world over their fantasies. ‘Sphisticated’ theism is complicit in that it suggests these types of beliefs are reasonable and justified.

On the contrary, the only hope of humanity is good theology outcompeting the bad. All that humourless atheism achieves is the disarming of the last best hope we’ve got. If you don’t understand what religion is, how it functions and why it appeals – if both good theology and bad theology is equally nonsensical – then the only future is a violent one, and my point above about the scientists having the bloodiest hands will be vindicated a billion-fold.

Reasonable Atheism (15): Western atheism as a Protestant sub-culture (1)

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This theme will have a few parts to it. Here I just want to sketch out the logical/historical link between Protestantism and the abandonment of Christianity.

The essential claim of Christianity is the incarnation – that Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine. One of the consequences of that claim is that the material world, the flesh, can be a vessel for the sacred, that it can communicate the transcendent, that it can be a means of grace.

This is the foundation for a sacramental theology, ie that through the water used in baptism, through the bread and wine of communion, God actively engages with the faithful and works to their healing – here the signs and symbols employed mediate God’s grace.

Consequently the historically orthodox churches have all emphasised the centrality of sacramental worship – baptism as the rite of entry into the church, communion as the central act of worship renewing and sustaining the church. This pattern is common across the vast majority of Christianity in time and space: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran etc. However, it is a pattern that broke down after the Reformation in some Protestant churches, and which became culturally influential.

In England, for example, the downplaying of the altar, and the raising up of the pulpit to a position of great prominence, can be tracked architecturally. Whereas the historic faith had been sacramentally centred, the post-Reformation church reduced the sacraments to simple signs – and beyond that, they were signs that were optional for faith. The essence of Christianity became “faith”, as in being “justified by faith” – and this became reduced to a matter of right belief. If you believe that Jesus Christ is your personal saviour then you have a saving faith.

So, in a great many Protestant churches today, what is most central to Christian worship is right teaching. You have to have the right attitude to the Bible, and the teachers of the Bible have to teach the right thing. Those are the essential elements for ensuring salvation.

However, note what has been lost in this transition. Where the sacraments have become optional or redundant, and teaching takes its place, you no longer need Jesus to have been God incarnate. He just needs to have been a good teacher. Where salvation is a matter of right belief, then Jesus’ prime purpose is to teach that right belief (despite the fact that Jesus never uses the phrase “justified by faith”).

So in the countries dominated by Western Protestantism, where the sacraments were downplayed or ignored, the idea that Jesus was simply a good teacher was implicitly first taught within the churches themselves. Of course, a major corollary of this trajectory of Protestantism was that church itself eventually becomes redundant. For if salvation flows from right belief, and right belief is a matter of rightly understanding the Bible and what it teaches – then that is something that can be obtained by private reading, private study of the Bible. Which becomes: “you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian”, a refrain still commonly heard on English streets when talking to the vicar.

At this point – when the church is redundant, when Jesus is simply a good teacher – the mental effort required to move to rejecting Jesus as a principal teacher is not very far.

This brings us on to questions of God, which I’ll cover in another post.

Put that in your bong and toke it

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Recent arrivals to this blog may not be familiar with this site, which is truly one of my favourites – and another example of sophisticated atheism at work, along with a a warped and wonderful sense of humour….

The project that the writer has embarked on is an important one. I hope his book gets published soon. His next book, that is.

Nobody sane doubts the existence of Jesus

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Good article here:

Outside this triangle of sceptics, accommodators and apologists there is another group of men and women who number in the thousands, whose works fill the academic libraries and journals of the world and yet whose views are rarely considered in popular discussion of this topic. I am talking about professional biblical historians: not professors of theology in religious institutions but university historians specialising in the language, literature and culture of the biblical period. Be they Christian, Jewish or agnostic, such scholars shun both overreaching scepticism and theological dogma. They approach the Gospels not as zealous fabrications or divine scripture but as texts comparable with any other from the period. All texts have blind spots and points to prove. If historians waited until they found a source with no angle, they would have nothing left to work with (ancient or modern). The goal is not to discover an agenda-less source but to analyse every source in light of its discernible commitment. This is how scholars read every ancient text, including the New Testament. They do not privilege the Gospels, but nor do they come to them with prejudice. Christians may be unsettled by this objective historical analysis of their sacred texts but there is no comfort here for the dogmatic sceptic either. For while mainstream scholars disagree on many things about the life of Jesus, there is a very strong consensus that the basic narrative of the Gospels is historically sound.

Take the question of Jesus’ existence. Dawkins may have his reservations; so might Onfray and Hitchens. But no one who is actually doing ancient history does. I contacted three eminent ancient history professors this week and asked if they knew of any professional historian who argued that Jesus never lived. They did not. Professor Graeme Clarke of the Australian National University was happy to go on the record as saying: “Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ – the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.” Dawkins inadvertently proves the point. In The God Delusion his sole example of a serious historical case against the existence of Jesus is that of “Professor G.A. Wells of the University of London”. Dawkins does not mention that George Wells is a professor of German language, not history.

That Jesus lived cannot be disputed…

Now the resurrection… that’s a different question – and the subject of my Easter morning sermon!