Evidence for Christian Theism
32
Conclusion
In Part IV it has been my concern to show that the New Testament is a generally reliable source of information about Jesus; that the life of Jesus was the kind of life to which God would plausibly affix his signature; and that we can know on the evidence of natural theology, a priori reasoning and history that God did, in fact, raise Jesus from the dead. In drawing my entire argument to a close, there are three final matters to consider: the importance of the historical context of the Resurrection; the theological significance of the Resurrection to the status of the Bible and the personal significance of the Resurrection to anyone who feels persuaded by the evidence that it occurred. After that I will offer some final thoughts on the role of doubt and faith in the religious life.
The Historical Context of the Resurrection.
Sometimes, as a last resort, the skeptic will suggest that even if God or something like a God does exist and Jesus really did rise from the dead there is no obvious reason why we should attach any importance to that fact. Perhaps, the skeptic suggests, it was just a freak event (a quantum anomaly, say) or perhaps God raised Jesus from the dead for some unknown reason with which we need not concern ourselves. Generally, the objection is: It is no entailment of the Resurrection of Jesus that we should believe Jesus to be God Incarnate and follow his teachings. I do not think that the logic of this objection will have widespread appeal; nevertheless, the point that needs to be made in response to it is of general importance and so I will make it now.
The Old Testament had two criteria by means of which to test a prophet. The first was that he must teach in the name of the God of Israel and not enjoin his followers to worship other gods. Jesus clearly fulfilled the first criterion: He taught in the name of the God of Israel and told Jews to worship the God of Israel. The second criterion was that if the prophet makes a prophecy his prophecy must come to pass. The prophecy could not be something that might reasonably be expected to occur anyway in the ordinary course of nature but a miracle in response to a prayer by the prophet would amply satisfy this criterion. Thus Elijah called upon God to ignite a water-soaked sacrifice—an event which, if it occurred, would be understood as an act of God. And so at the ignition of the sacrifice Elijah was recognized as a true prophet of Israel.
It is not important whether this story is true. It merely establishes that the Jews of Jesus' time understood what would constitute a divine signature on the work of a prophet. And since, according to Mark, Jesus prophesied his Resurrection on three separate occasions, so, in the historical context in which it occurred, the Resurrection of Jesus constituted a divine imprimatur on the life and teachings of Jesus.
Putting predictions on the lips of heroes was a habit of ancient authors which has led some modern critics to call Jesus' predictions into question. However, there are three further and important predictions which Jesus made and which were fulfilled by his Resurrection. The first was his prediction that he would make a sacrifice of his own life for the atonement of human sin. Clearly enough, crucifixion alone would not demonstrate the fulfilment of his prediction—to have effect an offer of atonement must be accepted by the party who has been wronged; that is, by God. But the Resurrection demonstrates that Jesus' offer of atonement on behalf of the world had been accepted by God and so that that prediction was fulfilled. A second prediction of Jesus' that was verified and partially fulfilled: That humans would be raised from the dead. Jesus' own Resurrection showed that one man, Jesus himself, was raised and thus Resurrection is possible and will happen to us. And finally: The Resurrection also vindicated Jesus' claim to divine authority by reversing and countermanding the Sanhedrin verdict of blasphemy and demonstrating that Jesus was divine and had supernatural powers and status.
A final point: The Nicene Creed claims that Jesus, “rose again on the third day according to the scriptures,” and, as noted in the previous Chapter, Jesus himself explained to his disciples that his suffering, death and “entering into glory” had been predicted by the prophets of the Old Testament. Many Old Testament passages do indeed seem to prefigure the details of the life and death of Jesus with uncanny exactitude—the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah and Psalm 22 being the most obvious examples. Thus Jesus also appears to have fulfilled the Old Testament by providing those things for which so many of the prophets longed: complete and final atonement for sin, the triumph of good over evil and a deep understanding of God. And, of course, Jesus went on to found a Church tasked with converting the whole world and promised to one day raise all people of good moral character to eternal life.
And it is in this religious and historical context that the deity of Jesus follows by logical entailment from his Resurrection. Consider: Because God is all powerful, all knowing and all present, Jesus could only rise from the dead if God caused him to rise or allowed him to rise while being present at and aware of his rising. And because God is all good, he would not deceive us by causing or allowing a false prophet to rise from the dead: For God to affix his divine signature to a lie would be to corroborate a lie and that is something God, being morally perfect, would not do. And so it follows that the Resurrection of Jesus is a divine vindication of his claim to be God and this means that his teachings also come from God and should be followed.
The Status of the Bible
A second closing consideration concerns the significance of the Resurrection of Jesus to the status of the Bible. In making the case for the Resurrection the New Testament was treated like any other collection of ancient documents: approached with caution and skepticism and tested against the criteria of historical authenticity. However, by preceding in this fashion, and evaluating the historical evidence against the background evidence of natural theology, we were able to establish that, very probably, God raised Jesus from the dead.
The reality of the Incarnation and Resurrection has a number of important consequences and one of them concerns the status of the Bible. It was noted in Chapter 21 that since the life of God Incarnate would be of limited duration, he would need to establish a worldwide Church to record, interpret and share his message and offer of atonement so that future generations could learn about and avail themselves of it. And I noted in Chapter 30 that Jesus indeed founded a Church which he tasked with taking his message to the world. Critically: Jesus also said that he would providentially guide that Church in spirit after his Incarnation. Thus Matthew closes with Jesus promising, “I am with you always until the end of the age.”
If Jesus were God it follows that God has providentially guided the Church in recording, interpreting and sharing the message of Jesus—an activity which includes the compilation and interpretation of the whole Bible discussed in Chapter 24 and 25. And this means that the Church is correct in imputing to the Bible its unique status as Holy Scripture. And so, with the careful qualifications made in those chapters, that is how we should regard it.
Practical Application
The second important consequence of the Resurrection is deeply personal.
In the introduction to Part IV, I noted N. T. Wright’s observation that the statement, Jesus rose from the dead is “self-involving.” In the revenant passage of The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright makes the obvious point that there are different degrees of this. Consider the strength of self-involvement that inheres in the statement The Number 10 bus just passed when I state it blandly while sitting by the living room window and the same statement screamed in dismay when I am running to the bus stop on my way to a vital appointment. Wright continues,
The point is that one cannot say, “Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead,” with the minimal involvement of the first of those statements. If it happened, it matters. The world is a different place. Saying, “Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead” is not only a self-involving statement; it is a self-committing statement. We cannot simply leave a flag stuck on a hill somewhere and sail back home to safety.
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Wright is surely right. If some proposition is rational and entails that certain actions in response to it are rational then it is irrational for one who affirms that proposition not to take those actions. I suggested in Chapter 28 that conversion to Christianity is the only rational response to the reality of the Incarnation—and surely this is logical. If God really exists a relationship with God is the greatest possible good available to the creature and if it is rational to believe that God revealed himself through Jesus then it is rational to seek that relationship with God through Jesus and the Church Jesus founded and irrational not to. And so if, as I have argued, it is indeed probable on the evidence of natural theology, a priori reasoning and history that God raised Jesus from the dead then following the teachings of Jesus, and so conversion to Christianity, is rationally obligatory.
Doubt and Faith
Even rationally obligatory propositions are open to doubt and the possibility and necessity of doubt have been a recurring feature of my whole argument: In Chapter 6 and 17 and throughout my discussion of religious pluralism I argued that divine hiddenness is a necessary feature of any world in which significant moral self-determination is possible and so a necessary feature of any world capable of producing virtuous creatures fit for a relationship with God. It is in keeping with this understanding of the relationship between divine hiddenness and moral self-determination that one of the main difficulties of living a religious life is persevering in our effort to meet the exacting moral standards of God in the face of fluctuating doubts about his existence. Swinburne finds some rational grounds for perseverance in the fact that it is good to live as though God exists whether he exists or not; good, that is, to try and become the sort of people that a morally perfect being would choose to sustain for all eternity if such a being existed—by being good and helping others to do the same and by loving each other and performing virtuous actions. In so far as the religious life helps us to do this, it is good to live a religious life even if there is no God.
However, no discussion of religious doubt is complete without touching on faith. How can we best define this word about which there is already so much misgiving and misunderstanding? [1] I foresee no possibility of settling the dispute but would like offer the three points that I have found most helpful.
In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis provides a very serviceable definition of faith. “Now that I am a Christian,” he writes, “I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.” For Lewis, faith is simply, “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.” And certainly a person is rational to continue affirming a proposition without apprehending the evidence that first led him to accept it. Perhaps many years ago Mr Green studied the historical evidence which, he believed, made it probable that Jesus rose from the dead. He therefore believes the proposition Jesus rose from the dead even though he has now forgotten the historical evidence. His evidence today is just that he did once, honestly and conscientiously, examine historical evidence and reach that conclusion. And this holds, I think, even if the evidence is remembered but, on a sudden impulse, it all seems rather improbable. At such times one dismisses the passing impulse and trusts, or has faith in, the inquiry already undertaken. This is the first helpful point.
The second is to note that there is virtually nothing about which doubt is impossible. This was a point discussed in Chapter 9. Science, for instance, depends on inductive reasoning: one makes a series of observations and infers a conclusion. Thus having observed many swans and found them all to be white, it seems valid to conclude, All swans are white. But no number of confirming observations, however large, can prove a universal generalisation. Only the conclusions of sound analytic arguments are logically necessary; the conclusions of synthetic arguments based on observation, however probable, are always in principle falsifiable.
So: In natural theology, as in every other philosophical and scientific enterprise, we are dealing with arguments whose premises must be weighed for their plausibility or probability. And this goes for arguments for atheism as well as theism. In each case, an argument for or against the existence of God will be a successful argument if and only if it has a valid logical structure and its premises are more plausible or probable than their negations: This, in turn, will make its conclusion more plausibly or probably true than false and we will be then rationally obligated to give it our assent.
We have looked at a total of 13 positive arguments in a cumulative case for Christian theism. I have shown that those arguments make it far more probable than not that Jesus was God Incarnate. To negate this conclusion it is not enough to merely raise doubts; one would have to show that each premise in each argument is more plausibly false than true. And so doubt of itself is of little philosophical significance.
At the close of his book Was Jesus God? Swinburne makes a similar point: He confronts his doubts and finds that, on balance, belief in God remains quite rational. “I am well aware,” he writes, “of objections other than the ones which I have discussed which can be made to almost every sentence which I have written. And I am aware of counter-objections which can be advanced in turn against every objection to my views.” He continues,
Doubt and Faith
Even rationally obligatory propositions are open to doubt and the possibility and necessity of doubt have been a recurring feature of my whole argument: In Chapter 6 and 17 and throughout my discussion of religious pluralism I argued that divine hiddenness is a necessary feature of any world in which significant moral self-determination is possible and so a necessary feature of any world capable of producing virtuous creatures fit for a relationship with God. It is in keeping with this understanding of the relationship between divine hiddenness and moral self-determination that one of the main difficulties of living a religious life is persevering in our effort to meet the exacting moral standards of God in the face of fluctuating doubts about his existence. Swinburne finds some rational grounds for perseverance in the fact that it is good to live as though God exists whether he exists or not; good, that is, to try and become the sort of people that a morally perfect being would choose to sustain for all eternity if such a being existed—by being good and helping others to do the same and by loving each other and performing virtuous actions. In so far as the religious life helps us to do this, it is good to live a religious life even if there is no God.
However, no discussion of religious doubt is complete without touching on faith. How can we best define this word about which there is already so much misgiving and misunderstanding? [1] I foresee no possibility of settling the dispute but would like offer the three points that I have found most helpful.
In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis provides a very serviceable definition of faith. “Now that I am a Christian,” he writes, “I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.” For Lewis, faith is simply, “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.” And certainly a person is rational to continue affirming a proposition without apprehending the evidence that first led him to accept it. Perhaps many years ago Mr Green studied the historical evidence which, he believed, made it probable that Jesus rose from the dead. He therefore believes the proposition Jesus rose from the dead even though he has now forgotten the historical evidence. His evidence today is just that he did once, honestly and conscientiously, examine historical evidence and reach that conclusion. And this holds, I think, even if the evidence is remembered but, on a sudden impulse, it all seems rather improbable. At such times one dismisses the passing impulse and trusts, or has faith in, the inquiry already undertaken. This is the first helpful point.
The second is to note that there is virtually nothing about which doubt is impossible. This was a point discussed in Chapter 9. Science, for instance, depends on inductive reasoning: one makes a series of observations and infers a conclusion. Thus having observed many swans and found them all to be white, it seems valid to conclude, All swans are white. But no number of confirming observations, however large, can prove a universal generalisation. Only the conclusions of sound analytic arguments are logically necessary; the conclusions of synthetic arguments based on observation, however probable, are always in principle falsifiable.
So: In natural theology, as in every other philosophical and scientific enterprise, we are dealing with arguments whose premises must be weighed for their plausibility or probability. And this goes for arguments for atheism as well as theism. In each case, an argument for or against the existence of God will be a successful argument if and only if it has a valid logical structure and its premises are more plausible or probable than their negations: This, in turn, will make its conclusion more plausibly or probably true than false and we will be then rationally obligated to give it our assent.
We have looked at a total of 13 positive arguments in a cumulative case for Christian theism. I have shown that those arguments make it far more probable than not that Jesus was God Incarnate. To negate this conclusion it is not enough to merely raise doubts; one would have to show that each premise in each argument is more plausibly false than true. And so doubt of itself is of little philosophical significance.
At the close of his book Was Jesus God? Swinburne makes a similar point: He confronts his doubts and finds that, on balance, belief in God remains quite rational. “I am well aware,” he writes, “of objections other than the ones which I have discussed which can be made to almost every sentence which I have written. And I am aware of counter-objections which can be advanced in turn against every objection to my views.” He continues,
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My third and final point concerning religious doubt and religious faith is the most important of all and with it I will close my argument.
The conclusion of the last 32 chapters is that there is a God: An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, necessary, eternal and perfectly good immaterial person. If you accept that conclusion then the arguments that led you to do so are thereafter almost irrelevant: Just as I cannot obtain personal knowledge of my wife by studying her circulation and blood pressure and metabolism, so I cannot obtain personal knowledge of God by studying the philosophy of religion. I obtain that knowledge by building a relationship with him.
The relevance of all this to faith and doubt is as follows: By seeking to know God on a personal level through prayer and worship we open ourselves to religious experiences which will have considerably more force and meaning than any philosophical argument for the existence of God and so further diminish our doubts. And by coming to know God on a personal level through those experiences we may also discover a new kind of faith to draw on: faith not in our own rational adjudication but faith in God as the person who has proven himself reliable and so on whom we may rely. Just as a child who has learnt to trust their father implicitly will trust that he has a good reason for taking them somewhere without telling them where he is taking them, so one who has come to trust God implicitly will trust that he has good reason for allowing them to suffer doubts and trust, too, that he will keep his promise to one day bring both the doubt and the suffering to a decisive end.
There is, however, more to having a relationship with God than our belief, prayer and religious experiences. If you accept that God exists it follows that you have certain obligations to him. For example: Because God is the holy source of your existence who sustains you from moment to moment you should show gratitude and obedience to him and this entails serving him by helping to further his divine purposes. God's divine purposes include willing the good of others and so serving him means giving to the poor, befriending the lonely, visiting the sick and so on. The burden is one that God does not force upon us. We can choose to take it up or choose not to bother. And even if we do take it up it there are obvious obstacles in our way; obstacles that are necessary, as Swinburne notes, “to ensure that our commitment is genuine.” But Swinburne adds that, “God has every reason in due course to remove those obstacles—to allow us to become the good people we seek to be, to give us the vision of himself—forever.”
Or, as Paul wrote in I Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
The conclusion of the last 32 chapters is that there is a God: An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, necessary, eternal and perfectly good immaterial person. If you accept that conclusion then the arguments that led you to do so are thereafter almost irrelevant: Just as I cannot obtain personal knowledge of my wife by studying her circulation and blood pressure and metabolism, so I cannot obtain personal knowledge of God by studying the philosophy of religion. I obtain that knowledge by building a relationship with him.
The relevance of all this to faith and doubt is as follows: By seeking to know God on a personal level through prayer and worship we open ourselves to religious experiences which will have considerably more force and meaning than any philosophical argument for the existence of God and so further diminish our doubts. And by coming to know God on a personal level through those experiences we may also discover a new kind of faith to draw on: faith not in our own rational adjudication but faith in God as the person who has proven himself reliable and so on whom we may rely. Just as a child who has learnt to trust their father implicitly will trust that he has a good reason for taking them somewhere without telling them where he is taking them, so one who has come to trust God implicitly will trust that he has good reason for allowing them to suffer doubts and trust, too, that he will keep his promise to one day bring both the doubt and the suffering to a decisive end.
There is, however, more to having a relationship with God than our belief, prayer and religious experiences. If you accept that God exists it follows that you have certain obligations to him. For example: Because God is the holy source of your existence who sustains you from moment to moment you should show gratitude and obedience to him and this entails serving him by helping to further his divine purposes. God's divine purposes include willing the good of others and so serving him means giving to the poor, befriending the lonely, visiting the sick and so on. The burden is one that God does not force upon us. We can choose to take it up or choose not to bother. And even if we do take it up it there are obvious obstacles in our way; obstacles that are necessary, as Swinburne notes, “to ensure that our commitment is genuine.” But Swinburne adds that, “God has every reason in due course to remove those obstacles—to allow us to become the good people we seek to be, to give us the vision of himself—forever.”
Or, as Paul wrote in I Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
[1] The New Atheists, for example, have repeatedly expressed great contempt for faith which they regard as irrational and dangerous and cite as one of the central reasons for their campaign against religion. They all define it, incorrectly, as, "believing something without evidence."