We contend that the Christian faith—the religion promulgated by Jesus and continued by his disciples and the early apostles—is satisfying intellectually, ethically, and emotionally. It is the God-sent integration of head, hand, and heart for ideologically fragmented humans.
We also hold that the ethical and emotional ataraxia found in Jesus receive their impetus from the intellectual element. That is to say, what makes the Christian faith true is not per se its high ethic or personal experience of the Spirit of God, but the fact that certain things happened in history once, uniquely, irreversibly, and finally. These events centered on the life of Jesus, and it is above all an intellectual understanding of them which grounds the ethical conduct and emotional experience of a person committed to him.
How so? To begin with there is just no sense in talking about deriving "good" ethics from a Jesus who claimed to be sent from God but wasn't, who predicted his return-from-the-dead but didn't, who said he would judge the world but couldn't. At least Havelock Ellis is consistent:
Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career … The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.
In the second place, the "Spirit of God" (the "other Comforter" like himself which Jesus promised) and the emotional experience of "Christ in the Heart" is nothing at all if that first Easter was simply the collective wish-fulfillment of the early believers. Such terms then merely denote the modern continuation of that hallucinatory psychosis.
C.S. Lewis was right:
Either this man was and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. History has left us no other options.
Thus the intellectual element has the nature of historical knowledge. And it is critically important to realize that the historical question of Jesus' identity and character is no different in principle from questions such as: What happened to Vietnamization in
In the case of Jesus, the historical evidence is of the highest quality. William Ramsey, Frederick Kenyon, and F. F. Bruce (The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?), among others, have demonstrated the New Testament to be unimpeachably accurate in its internal relations, relations to external history, and in its text, which, incidentally, has been better and more extensively preserved than that of any work of Greco-Roman antiquity.
The New Testament documents were written by Jesus' disciples and their close associates within a generation after the events of his life. Not only were these authors utterly committed to telling the truth (hadn't their Master said that Satan was the "Father of lies"? And why did Luke write to Theophilus so that he would know the "exact truth about the things he had been taught," or Peter confess that he and the apostles had not followed "cleverly devised tales" in relating the history of Jesus?); the very faith they professed was on trial with every word they wrote. Their historical writings circulated at a time when the uncommitted desperately wished to quench the spreading Christian flame; any falsification of or embellishment of the life of their Lord and Liberator would have been used against them by those who knew better. And finally, does it seem even slightly possible that these men and their converts would later suffer and die for a cause they knew to be historically grounded in the fanciful expectations of their youthful enthusiasm?
Hardly! There was an infinitely greater impetus behind the original Jesus movement; it transformed a dejected band of Galilean fishermen into social agitators and continued to galvanize their early followers into a radical counterculture which, 30 years later, was accused of upending the morals and metaphysics of the
This matter of the Resurrection has provoked a good deal of controversy. After all, in the wooden world-view of scientific technocracy, such an event a priori cannot occur and therefore must be "rationalized" or "demythologized." But these alternatives are painfully restricting unless one is prepared to lift the ban and read all the historical evidence. For even if we could somehow account for the appearances of Jesus after the resurrection on psychological grounds (including the one Paul mentions as involving 500 people at once), the empty tomb remains an enigma.
Who snatched the body? The Roman soldiery was bribed by the religious leaders to report that the disciples stole the body; yet the soldiers themselves were to have guarded the sealed tomb against all meddlers. If either the religious leaders or the soldiers had taken the body (hardly possible under the terms of the bribe), producing it would have been simple and direct evidence against the new faith—later thought to be highly desirable. But they didn't. And if the disciples had somehow managed to obtain the body, it is inconceivable that they should have suffered and died for a corpse. Such alternatives appear to be more miraculous than the New Testament's explanation that the resurrection was the ultimate vindication of the life of One who claimed to be God incarnate. (See J.N.D. Anderson, Christianity: The Witness of History.)
Yet with all this said, we must add something more: any true understanding of Jesus cannot be reduced to an objectivistic intellectual exercise. We know him only in part if we know him only historically, for he lives today and is with us as he promised. This is not a defective epistemology. It is suspect only in the eyes of those who believe there is one, scientific way of knowing and no other. We grant the one; after all it is historical objectivity which initially informs of Jesus. But there is in addition the way of commitment, prayer, and trust without which no one is truly his disciple.
This added understanding is not informative but relational. Like Wittgenstein's "Mystical," it cannot be spoken of, only "felt"—felt on the basis of the antecedent intellectual understanding that guarantees the validity of the emotional experience. We may explore the resurrection and the life it vindicated with every historical scrutiny, we may touch his wounds as Thomas did, but while the morticians of scientific and theological rationalism seek to account for the missing body, we fall on our knees crying, "My Lord and my God!"
Will you join us?
Jim Moore was on the editorial staff of The Post-American when this article appeared.
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