Re: Easter homily #3

I second all this and Tom sums up my long-held views.

Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Davis" <tdavis@messiah.edu>
To: <asa@lists.calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 5:50 PM
Subject: Easter homily #3

> This one comes from one of the best books I've ever read, NT Wright's The
> Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 717.
>
> The question which must be faced is whether the explanation of the data
> which the early Christians themselves gave, that Jesus really was risen
> from
> the dead, 'explains the aggregate' of the evidence better than these
> sophisticated scepticisms. My claim is that it does.
>
> The claim can be stated once more in terms of necessary and sufficient
> conditions. The actual bodily resurrection of Jesus (not a mere
> resuscitation, but a transforming revivification) clearly provides a
> *sufficient* condition of the tomb being empty and the 'meetings' taking
> place. Nobody is likely to doubt that. Once grant that Jesus really was
> raised, and all the pieces of the historical jigsaw puzzle of early
> Christianity fall into place. My claim is stronger: that the bodily
> resurrection of Jesus provides a *necessary* condition for these things;
> in
> other words, that no other explanation could or would do. All the efforts
> to find alternative explanations fail, and they were bound to do so.
>
> Many will challenge this conclusion, for many different reasons. I do not
> claim that it constitutes a 'proof' of the resurrection in terms of some
> neutral standpoint. It is, rather, a historical challenge to other
> explanations, other worldviews. Precisely because at this point we are
> faced with worldview-level issues, there is no neutral ground, no island
> in
> the middle of the epistemological ocean, as yet uncolonized by any of the
> warring continents. We cannot simply arrive at a topic and make grand
> declarations, as in Francis Drake's celebrated annexation of California,
> and suppose that all the local inhabitants will take them as binding.
> Saying that 'Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead' is not
> only a self-*involving* statement; it is a self-*committing* statement,
> going beyond a reordering of one's private world into various levels of
> commitment to work out the implications. We cannot simply leave a flag
> stuck on a hill somewhere and sail back home to safety.
>
> To which I add, "AMEN." -- Ted
>
Received on Wed Apr 12 17:10:15 2006