Talking About the Resurrection, Part 2--The Basis for Our Hope
Having affirmed Nicholas Kristof that there is value in the teachings of Jesus even in the face of skepticism about the physical resurrection in Part 1, I would like to address Rev. Jones's position on the resurrection. I should note that Rev. Jones reported yesterday that she has been subject to online harassment as a result of her interview, which is (unfortunately) unsurprising, surely true, and totally unacceptable. I hope, and don't believe that I am, adding to this harassment with this post, but only to express why I think her answer doesn't really hang together or get to the heart of what is at stake with Christianity. And, in particular, I don't think it can really answer the most powerful and sophisticated critiques of Christianity.
But, first, let's start with what Rev. Jones said:
KRISTOF Happy Easter, Reverend Jones! To start, do you think of Easter as a literal flesh-and-blood resurrection? I have problems with that.
JONES When you look in the Gospels, the stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves. But that empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed. . . .
[KRISTOF] Isn’t a Christianity without a physical resurrection less powerful and awesome? When the message is about love, that’s less religion, more philosophy.
[JONES] For me, the message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death. That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there. For Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that. . . .
[KRISTOF] What happens when we die?
[JONES] I don’t know! There may be something, there may be nothing. My faith is not tied to some divine promise about the afterlife. People who behave well in this life only to achieve an afterlife, that’s a faith driven by a selfish motive: “I’m going to be good so God would reward me with a stick of candy called heaven?” For me, living a life of love is driven by the simple fact that love is true.
The underlined passages are my emphasis. Now, I agree with everything that she says in the underlined passages. But my belief in those statements is explicitly predicated on and flows out of my belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. The resurrection of Jesus is the proof that those statements are true, and but for the resurrection I don't think I would believe these things.
Clearly, Rev. Jones's support for those ideas is not predicated on the physical resurrection. And, insofar as one believes for whatever set of reasons that love is more powerful than death without reference to the resurrection of Jesus, then I guess belief in the physicality of the resurrection is unnecessary and irrelevant. But, for me this begs the question--why does she believe these things? What is the basis for her to believe that "love is true" and "the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed"?
In the interview, Rev. Jones talks about how the crucifixion of Jesus is a lynching and an act of political murder, with parallels to a host of modern situations. All true. But, absent the resurrection, in what sense did Jesus overcome those realities? Or provide any indication that those realities can be overcome? If He is dead, then the Roman military occupation and certain self-serving elements of the religious establishment of Jerusalem conspired to eliminate a potentially disruptive agitator. They won. And to the extent they didn't win, it was only because His followers asserted the claim that He had risen from the dead and that claim found purchase with some segment of the population and developed into a movement. Which, of course, Rev. Jones doesn't really believe.
So, is there any empirical evidence that love is more powerful than violence and political coercion (absent, perhaps, the Christian movement, which on this framing is predicated at least in part on a delusion)? Do we see evidence of this in our world? Love did not defeat the evil and horror of Nazi Germany--only a counter-acting application of brutality did that, and only then after millions had died in the Shoah and other millions we killed. 20th Century Communist regimes were not defeated by love, so much as they broke on the wheel of a more effective capitalist economic model (a model which is far, far from being morally blameless). Genocides in Rwanda and in Yugoslavia either burned out by consuming all of their fuel, or were forced to stop as a result of the application or threat of force by an interventionist international community, or both. It's a pretty messy and problematic definition of "love" that would attribute the the defeat of Nazism or the Rwandan genocide to the principle that love is more powerful than violence.
In the U.S. context, the standard example of a non-violent, non-coercive movement to address injustice is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. But, if the last three years have taught us anything, perhaps we (or, rather, some of us) declared victory a little too fast on that one. And even in the more narrow context our own lives, as wonderful and beautiful as love is, equally powerful and real is the pain when those we love are taken from us. We have our memories of those we love, but not their presence, and since Rev. Jones is agnostic about life after death, we can't even fall back on the comfort of being reunited with those we love in the time-to-come.
In the face of these realities, I take comfort in the promise that those realities do not define the horizon of God's possibilities. But that horizon is explicitly demarcated by the physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In preaching the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the first apostles were announcing the opening of a conceptual space beyond the empirical realities that they, and we, all can see and experience. Love is stronger than death because Jesus went to the place of death and came back to prove it. If that's not true, if Jesus didn't got there, then I see no reason to believe that love is stronger than death, or is capable of overcoming the violence and loss that we see around us.
You might say that Rev. Jones is an optimist about the human condition and that I am a pessimist. I suppose that is true. But, in that context, I can't get out of my head the point raised by Rev. Morgan Guyton in his response to Rev. Jones. To paraphrase Guyton, it is pretty easy to have a calm, not-particularly-well-tethered belief in the power of love when your life is basically pretty great and moving from strength-to-strength. It's pretty easy to say love overcomes suffering when there are many people around who love you and very little suffering. But when your life doesn't reflect this balance, when the suffering is immense and the love is fleeting or non-existent, you are going to need stronger medicine to be able to swallow what Rev. Jones is offering.
I don't know Rev. Jones's life, and could not begin to speak to her experiences. But I can say in my own life, modest though my struggles and suffering has been in comparison to many or even most, when the chips are down, when things are bad, that the kind of sunny, untethered optimism offered by Rev. Jones has been the first thing to fall by the wayside. Perhaps this is a product of my depression, but a confidence in the power of love (either my love toward others, or their love toward me) has never, ever characterized my dark places. Instead, all I have had to rely on is a promise of a radical change in the fundamental state of things and of my basic status in the world. In other words, a resurrection.
And, again, my trials and sufferings have been extremely modest. How does "love is true" sound to the child who is being beaten or sexually abused by the people who claim to love them? How does "love is more powerful than death" sound to the parent whose child was gunned down in a mass shooting? How can they make sense of that? Only, it seems to me, in reference to a radical discontinuity in the reality they are empirically experiencing. Only, it seems to me, as a possibility beyond that which they can reasonably project from their present situation. As Guyton says "[r]esurrection is not something to believe in because it’s reasonable. It’s something you believe in because you can’t bear the thought of it not being possible."
Bishop Matthew Gunter, the Episcopal bishop of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, sums up my thoughts well:
Even talk of God as love, by itself, seems to me to too easily slip into sentimentality. All such talk falls flat in the face of the horror story that is much of human history and the extravagant brutality that exists in with and under the extravagant beauty of creation.
The only way I can believe in any God is if it is the God who in Jesus Christ poured out his love on the hard wood of the cross. And then blew the doors of death off their hinges in the very real, very historical resurrection of the one who took all death and sin and suffering into the grave.
The promise of Easter is not merely that “love is stronger than life or death”. It is the promise of new creation in which all the very real, historical physical and spiritual suffering and death we endure and inflict are overcome and will in the end be healed.
And that's where I end up with Rev. Jones's approach. Absent the resurrection to provide a backstop and a reason for hope, I find Rev. Jones's free-floating confidence in the power of love to be naive sentimentality, something that even I, a deeply privileged person, can recognize as only the product of a massively protected, sheltered life experience. Unless Jesus represents the forerunner and sneak peak of a wholly new Heaven and Earth, I don't see what Christianity has to offer to those who are under threat of lethal violence, or persistent abuse, other than empty platitudes.
But, I think, there is also another objection, one that attacks the very idea of love itself. And, that, finally, brings us to Nietzsche.
But, first, let's start with what Rev. Jones said:
KRISTOF Happy Easter, Reverend Jones! To start, do you think of Easter as a literal flesh-and-blood resurrection? I have problems with that.
JONES When you look in the Gospels, the stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves. But that empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed. . . .
[KRISTOF] Isn’t a Christianity without a physical resurrection less powerful and awesome? When the message is about love, that’s less religion, more philosophy.
[JONES] For me, the message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death. That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there. For Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that. . . .
[KRISTOF] What happens when we die?
[JONES] I don’t know! There may be something, there may be nothing. My faith is not tied to some divine promise about the afterlife. People who behave well in this life only to achieve an afterlife, that’s a faith driven by a selfish motive: “I’m going to be good so God would reward me with a stick of candy called heaven?” For me, living a life of love is driven by the simple fact that love is true.
The underlined passages are my emphasis. Now, I agree with everything that she says in the underlined passages. But my belief in those statements is explicitly predicated on and flows out of my belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. The resurrection of Jesus is the proof that those statements are true, and but for the resurrection I don't think I would believe these things.
Clearly, Rev. Jones's support for those ideas is not predicated on the physical resurrection. And, insofar as one believes for whatever set of reasons that love is more powerful than death without reference to the resurrection of Jesus, then I guess belief in the physicality of the resurrection is unnecessary and irrelevant. But, for me this begs the question--why does she believe these things? What is the basis for her to believe that "love is true" and "the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed"?
In the interview, Rev. Jones talks about how the crucifixion of Jesus is a lynching and an act of political murder, with parallels to a host of modern situations. All true. But, absent the resurrection, in what sense did Jesus overcome those realities? Or provide any indication that those realities can be overcome? If He is dead, then the Roman military occupation and certain self-serving elements of the religious establishment of Jerusalem conspired to eliminate a potentially disruptive agitator. They won. And to the extent they didn't win, it was only because His followers asserted the claim that He had risen from the dead and that claim found purchase with some segment of the population and developed into a movement. Which, of course, Rev. Jones doesn't really believe.
So, is there any empirical evidence that love is more powerful than violence and political coercion (absent, perhaps, the Christian movement, which on this framing is predicated at least in part on a delusion)? Do we see evidence of this in our world? Love did not defeat the evil and horror of Nazi Germany--only a counter-acting application of brutality did that, and only then after millions had died in the Shoah and other millions we killed. 20th Century Communist regimes were not defeated by love, so much as they broke on the wheel of a more effective capitalist economic model (a model which is far, far from being morally blameless). Genocides in Rwanda and in Yugoslavia either burned out by consuming all of their fuel, or were forced to stop as a result of the application or threat of force by an interventionist international community, or both. It's a pretty messy and problematic definition of "love" that would attribute the the defeat of Nazism or the Rwandan genocide to the principle that love is more powerful than violence.
In the U.S. context, the standard example of a non-violent, non-coercive movement to address injustice is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. But, if the last three years have taught us anything, perhaps we (or, rather, some of us) declared victory a little too fast on that one. And even in the more narrow context our own lives, as wonderful and beautiful as love is, equally powerful and real is the pain when those we love are taken from us. We have our memories of those we love, but not their presence, and since Rev. Jones is agnostic about life after death, we can't even fall back on the comfort of being reunited with those we love in the time-to-come.
In the face of these realities, I take comfort in the promise that those realities do not define the horizon of God's possibilities. But that horizon is explicitly demarcated by the physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In preaching the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the first apostles were announcing the opening of a conceptual space beyond the empirical realities that they, and we, all can see and experience. Love is stronger than death because Jesus went to the place of death and came back to prove it. If that's not true, if Jesus didn't got there, then I see no reason to believe that love is stronger than death, or is capable of overcoming the violence and loss that we see around us.
You might say that Rev. Jones is an optimist about the human condition and that I am a pessimist. I suppose that is true. But, in that context, I can't get out of my head the point raised by Rev. Morgan Guyton in his response to Rev. Jones. To paraphrase Guyton, it is pretty easy to have a calm, not-particularly-well-tethered belief in the power of love when your life is basically pretty great and moving from strength-to-strength. It's pretty easy to say love overcomes suffering when there are many people around who love you and very little suffering. But when your life doesn't reflect this balance, when the suffering is immense and the love is fleeting or non-existent, you are going to need stronger medicine to be able to swallow what Rev. Jones is offering.
I don't know Rev. Jones's life, and could not begin to speak to her experiences. But I can say in my own life, modest though my struggles and suffering has been in comparison to many or even most, when the chips are down, when things are bad, that the kind of sunny, untethered optimism offered by Rev. Jones has been the first thing to fall by the wayside. Perhaps this is a product of my depression, but a confidence in the power of love (either my love toward others, or their love toward me) has never, ever characterized my dark places. Instead, all I have had to rely on is a promise of a radical change in the fundamental state of things and of my basic status in the world. In other words, a resurrection.
And, again, my trials and sufferings have been extremely modest. How does "love is true" sound to the child who is being beaten or sexually abused by the people who claim to love them? How does "love is more powerful than death" sound to the parent whose child was gunned down in a mass shooting? How can they make sense of that? Only, it seems to me, in reference to a radical discontinuity in the reality they are empirically experiencing. Only, it seems to me, as a possibility beyond that which they can reasonably project from their present situation. As Guyton says "[r]esurrection is not something to believe in because it’s reasonable. It’s something you believe in because you can’t bear the thought of it not being possible."
Bishop Matthew Gunter, the Episcopal bishop of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, sums up my thoughts well:
Even talk of God as love, by itself, seems to me to too easily slip into sentimentality. All such talk falls flat in the face of the horror story that is much of human history and the extravagant brutality that exists in with and under the extravagant beauty of creation.
The only way I can believe in any God is if it is the God who in Jesus Christ poured out his love on the hard wood of the cross. And then blew the doors of death off their hinges in the very real, very historical resurrection of the one who took all death and sin and suffering into the grave.
The promise of Easter is not merely that “love is stronger than life or death”. It is the promise of new creation in which all the very real, historical physical and spiritual suffering and death we endure and inflict are overcome and will in the end be healed.
And that's where I end up with Rev. Jones's approach. Absent the resurrection to provide a backstop and a reason for hope, I find Rev. Jones's free-floating confidence in the power of love to be naive sentimentality, something that even I, a deeply privileged person, can recognize as only the product of a massively protected, sheltered life experience. Unless Jesus represents the forerunner and sneak peak of a wholly new Heaven and Earth, I don't see what Christianity has to offer to those who are under threat of lethal violence, or persistent abuse, other than empty platitudes.
But, I think, there is also another objection, one that attacks the very idea of love itself. And, that, finally, brings us to Nietzsche.
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