Tag Archives: resurrection of Jesus

The Church’s Christology Or The Real Jesus?

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In the previous post we began a study of the identity of Jesus Christ. We looked at many New Testament texts that speak about Jesus’ identity. We spent most of the time examining the Gospel of Mark. We saw there and in the rest of the New Testament a very important distinction being made between the offices and functions that Jesus is said to have held and performed and his person, that is, the personal characteristics that qualified him to perform these functions. Perhaps divinely chosen and empowered human beings could hold some of these offices and perform some of these functions, for example, prophet, priest, and king. There were other lawgivers, exorcists, and miracle workers. But the New Testament makes clear that Jesus performs many of these functions by his own authority and some of the titles given to him clearly refer to his person as well as his offices. This is clearly true of the title “Lord” and “Savior” and “Word” and “Son of God.” It is impossible to imagine designating a mere human being by these titles.

Jesus’ Authority Over Kosher Laws

Before I move on to the question of the validity of the New Testament’s Christology, I want to consider one other text in the Gospel of Mark. Mark gives 23 verses to the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees and the teachers of the law over the disciples’ eating without observing the traditions about ritual cleansing before eating (Mark 7). Let’s take up the story at verse 14:

14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”

17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)

Notice Mark’s extension and application of Jesus’ statement in verses 18 and 19. “Jesus declared all foods clean.” Compare Mark’s observation with the story of Peter’s vision in Acts 10. Peter sees a sheet full of clean and unclean animals being lowered from heaven. A voice from heaven tells Peter to “kill and eat” (10:13). Peter protests. But the heavenly voice, whom Peter addresses as “Lord” (Jesus?) rebukes Peter, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean” (10:15). Because of this encounter with the Lord, Peter understands that God has opened the door of the kingdom to gentiles. Mark contends that even during his earthly ministry Jesus had implicitly declared all foods clean. Mark clearly views Jesus as having the authority to change the Old Testament kosher laws. Jesus does not need a vision and a voice heaven to give him the right to make this declaration. He already has that right because of who he is.

The Origin of Christology

The New Testament views Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God, the Word of God who has taken on human nature for our sakes. The wording of the Nicene Creed (381) in reference to Christ does not differ in content to the New Testament teaching:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
begotten from the Father before all ages,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made;
of the same essence as the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
and was made human.
He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried.
The third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again with glory
to judge the living and the dead.
His kingdom will never end.

But were the first disciples, Paul, John, and the writer of Hebrews making legitimate inferences from their knowledge of what Jesus actually said, did, and what happened to him to their high Christology? Can the church’s Christology be justified by the facts about Jesus? I dealt with this question from the angle of apologetics in the January 2015 posts on the resurrection. I shall address it here briefly as the question of the origin of Christology.

Apart from their belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the apostles’ embrace of such an exalted view of Jesus Christ as we find in the New Testament is inconceivable. [Note: the term “bodily resurrection” is redundant, but I use it anyway since Liberal Christianity claims Jesus was “raised” only in a spiritual or metaphorical sense, a use of the term resurrection I consider duplicitous.] It would never have occurred to anyone to see in the crucified, dead Jesus God’s triumph over sin and death. No one would have dreamed of preaching that Jesus’ death on the cross was the turning point of the history of salvation. Pursuing the question of the identity of Jesus would not have been worth the effort. Only the bodily resurrection could have provided justification for developing Christology. This much is certain.

The question I am asking, however, is not whether the bodily resurrection of Jesus provoked the origin of some type of Christology but whether or not it justifies the exalted Christology of Paul, John, Hebrews, and the Nicene Creed. For it is (superficially) conceivable that God could raise a human being from the dead for a reason other than declaring him to be the eternal Son of God. In the case of Jesus no such ambiguity was possible for at least three reasons:

(1) clearly the resurrection would be understood as God’s validation of Jesus’ teaching and activity and a declaration of his innocence of the charges that lead to his death. But as we have seen, Jesus taught and acted with unprecedented authority and his claims about his relationship with God were considered blasphemous by the Jewish rulers. By rescuing Jesus from the dead God declared Jesus’ claims to be true. Hence Jesus claims, his teaching, and his actions—as the disciples remembered them—became significant for the development of Christology.

(2) Jesus’ resurrection was not merely a return to his former life. It was the definitive salvation into eternal life promised for the end of the age. Jesus is the bringer of salvation. In him the end of all things has appeared and the meaning of creation has been completed. Christology seeks to understand the connection between the one through whom God brings salvation to the world and the God to whom Jesus prayed.

(3) Paul and the original apostles experienced Jesus alive after the resurrection in a way that convinced them not only that Jesus was alive but also that he was united to God, permeated with the Holy Spirit, and endowed with divine authority. Hence they called him “Lord,” worshiped him, prayed to him, obeyed him, and expected salvation from him. Their experience of the resurrected Jesus made necessary the development of an account of his person and his relationship to the God of Israel and the Spirit of God.

Taking all three of these aspects into account, we begin to understand why the apostles and Paul developed the very exalted Christology we find in the New Testament. Nothing less could do justice to the facts of their experience of Jesus.

Why I Find “Liberal Christianity” so Boring

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I’ve been trying to put my finger on the essential difference between Liberal Christianity and traditional or orthodox Christian theology. In the previous post I mentioned several important differences. Liberal theology denies miracles, rejects the incarnation, reinterprets the atoning death of Jesus and accommodates to the ever-changing moral views of de-Christianized progressivism. These are real and significant differences, but is there one fundamental difference that unites these differences? Yes there is, and I think I’ve got it.

The apostolic faith and its faithful articulation in orthodoxy assert that in the existence and activity of Jesus Christ an ontologically real interaction between God and the world took place. By “ontologically real” I mean that God acts causally to change the being of world, to change the way it exists. In miracles, God actually works on the existence of the lame, the blind and the dead to change their real, physical being. In the resurrection of Jesus, God actually renewed the life of Jesus’ dead body and brought Jesus to a new mode of existence. In the incarnation, God actually united the humanity of Jesus to Himself in a way different from all other human beings. The eternal Son of God, the Word, who was with God and was God, became flesh and lived among us (John 1:1-14). In the death and resurrection of Jesus, something actually happened between God and humanity that changed humanity’s status from being condemned to death to being set free for life. God really counts and actually makes Jesus’ sinless faithfulness ours.

In Liberal Christianity, real divine action, causality and change are missing. For Liberal theology, God does nothing. Every action, every cause and every change in the world is exclusively human. The significance of miracle stories is their metaphorical meanings. They teach moral lessons or ideas about God’s benevolence or justice. Nothing physical actually changes. All change occurs in the human subjective reaction to a symbol. Jesus’ body was not transformed ontologically from death to life, from mortality to glory. No. The resurrection is a metaphor for the rightness of his cause. And the rightness of his cause is the really important thing, the essence of Christianity. How we know that his cause was right apart from the real bodily resurrection Liberalism leaves obscure, but the Liberal answer is obvious: we know it because of our own moral insight. Jesus Christ is not really the ontological union of God and man, as the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation teaches. The incarnation is a metaphor for Jesus’ complete devotion to God. He is united to God in love. And we too can be united to God in love. Jesus’ death and resurrection was not really God acting causally to change the being of sinful humanity. No real change occurred. Jesus died “for us” only in the sense that he died serving a good cause that we also judge to be a good cause. His faithfulness unto death serves as an example of devotion to God and highlights the importance of his moral and religious cause. But his death is no more a divine act of atonement than the deaths of other martyrs. Its power for salvation is limited to the inspiration it provides for others to serve good causes.

Why this ontological shyness? Why such hesitancy to make assertions about real, effective divine action in the world? Two reasons come to mind. The first reason is a historical connection. Liberal theology traces its lineage back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his epoch-making book Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that theoretical reason cannot reach beyond the world to speak about God. Reason’s competence is limited to relationships within the world and it cannot speak about God’s relationship to the world or the world’s relationship to God. We cannot speak about God as the cause of the world or of any event within the world. For Kant, the only legitimate way to form an idea of God is through our own moral sense. God is a postulate, an hypothesis, required to make sense of our moral experience. Kant famously said that he had destroyed reason “to make room for faith.” Proofs for God, miracles and all the other orthodox doctrines are vulnerable to rational critique and disproof. But the moral sense is immediately present and cannot be denied. It is a secure basis on which to ground faith in God and the moral life. Liberal theology exists because it accepts Kant’s critique and it is afraid to let faith in God or the value of a religious and moral life depend on rational proofs or historical reports of miracles.

The second reason for its ontological shyness follows from the first. Liberal theology wants to insulate itself from rational critique of divine causal actions, such as those cherished by orthodoxy. It wants Christianity to be founded on a source of knowledge that is universally available and rationally unassailable. It does not relish having to defend the ontological aspects of apostolic and orthodox Christianity. Hence it downplays their importance. In reading Liberal Christian theologians you will hear a recurring theme, that is, the desire to rid Christianity of vulnerability to rational critique. According to Schleiermacher, the religious significance of Jesus’ accomplishment does “not depend upon a visible resurrection or ascension, since of course Christ could have been raised to glory even without these intermediate steps: and so it is impossible to see in what relation both of these can stand to the redeeming efficacy of Christ…Hence we may safely credit everyone who is familiar with dogmatic statements with a recognition of the fact that the right impression of Christ can be, and has been, present in its fullness without a knowledge of these facts” (The Christian Faith, p. 418).

In dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, Harnack distinguishes between the “Easter message” and the “Easter faith.” The Easter message focuses on the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances while the Easter faith “is the conviction that the crucified one gained a victory over death.” Harnack is anxious to show that the Easter faith does not depend on the Easter message. He is not willing to allow faith in Jesus’ message “to rest on a foundation unstable and always exposed to fresh doubts.” We can believe that Jesus achieved the victory over death without believing that “deceased body of flesh and blood came to life again.” According to Harnack, “Whatever may have happened at the grave and in the matter of the appearances, one thing is certain: This grave was the birthplace of the indestructible belief that death is vanquished, that there is a life eternal” (The Essence of Christianity, p. 162).

The late popularizer of Liberal Christianity in America, Marcus Borg (1942-2015), continues the theme begun by Schleiermacher. Borg explains his view: “Rather than focusing on “what happened,” this approach [Borg’s reinterpretation] focuses on the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament. What did it mean for his followers in the first century to say that God raised Jesus from the dead? Believe whatever you want about whether the tomb was really empty, whether you are convinced it was or uncertain or skeptical—what did Easter mean to his early followers? The answer to the question of meaning is clear. In the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus has two primary meanings: “Jesus lives” and “Jesus is Lord.”…Focusing on the empty tomb reduces the meaning of Easter to a specular event in the past. It makes the resurrection of Jesus vulnerable to skepticism…This alternative way of understanding Easter sees the Easter stories as parables—parables about Jesus. That is, it understands these stories metaphorically” (Speaking Christian, pp.111-112).

In these three examples of Liberal Christian theology you can see clearly their anxiety to remove any need to believe a miracle or to believe that God actually acted in history to change the being and existence of humanity and the world. Everything is about the “meaning,” and references to God’s actions are just metaphors. The “meaning” of miracle stories, which function like metaphors, is always something in humanity, a human possibility for morality or mystical experience. It never means God’s action in the past, present or future. The Liberal “truth” of Christianity is always a “truth” that can be validated by experiences universally present in human beings. There is no real need for faith in the witness of Paul, Peter, James the Lord’s brother and the others. No real need to submit ourselves to apostolic authority for instruction about what it means that God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead.

But why does Liberal Christianity want to make itself invulnerable to critique? Why does it wish to make it so easy to be a Christian? Here is my hypothesis. Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack, and others realized that enlightenment rationalism and the progressive moral vision were going to marginalize Christianity and the institutional church in western culture. Christianity had been the dominant cultural force in the west for over a millennium. What a frightening prospect to envision living a post-Christian culture! The Liberal project centers on making sure that Christianity and the institutional church are not marginalized. For Liberal theology, the moral influence of Christianity is its most important contribution to western culture. It seemed essential to its survival. Hence to Liberals sacrificing the ontological doctrines seemed a reasonable price to pay to maintain Christianity’s moral influence in a culture on the move. However, as I argued in the previous post, accommodation to post-Christian progressive culture keeps Liberal Christianity on the run breathlessly trying to keep up. Eventually, it will have to give up the pretense of exerting any Christian influence on culture. As I also said in the previous post, Liberal Christianity has no prophetic message for progressive culture. And for this reason most people don’t find it interesting or challenging or redemptive. The health of Liberal churches depends on receiving a continual flow of fallen fundamentalists and wavering evangelicals looking for a comfortable stopping place on the way to atheism and secularity.

Marcus Borg wanted to reconstruct Christianity so that it would not be “vulnerable to skepticism.” I understand that desire. When I was a child the truth of God, Jesus and the Bible were as evident as the Oak trees and corn fields I could see from my bedroom window. As a child, I never questioned the faith of my parents and my church; I never even thought of questioning it. However when I learned more about the diversity of belief in the world and especially when I learned about atheism, skepticism, historical criticism, and other challenges to faith, my untroubled certainty was brought to a troubled end. I faced a choice. I longed nostalgically for the clarity, certainty and undisturbed confidence of childhood. Doesn’t everyone? Liberal Christianity appeals to this desire. It promises to stop the progression toward atheism and nihilism. It offers, as you can see in Harnack and Borg, return to an untroubled faith invulnerable to skepticism and rational criticism. Just give up whatever cannot be validated by subjective experience and you will rest secure in the self-evident truth of Christianity! You can still attend church and celebrate Christmas and Easter. You can enjoy ceremony and sacrament. You can relish your enlightened superiority over fundamentalists. You can employ the Christian vocabulary of sin and salvation, justice and love, redemption and hope and the love of Jesus—all without taking any risks of being refuted by facts and rational arguments. As this series makes clear, I rejected this path. I came to see clearly that my childhood faith, the faith of my parents and the faith I was taught in Sunday School had a much greater warrant as true Christianity than so-called “invulnerable” Liberal Christianity. I realized that Liberalism’s invulnerability was purchased at the price of its utter vacuity.

Indeed Borg is correct that asserting a real bodily resurrection makes Christianity vulnerable to falsification. The apostle Paul knew this. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile…we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:17-19). But the bodily resurrection also grounds the claims of Christianity in objective reality, in an unambiguous act of God. In contrast, Borg’s metaphorical understanding of the resurrection is grounded only in a subjective decision to connect Jesus to human aspirations. Hence Liberal theology is vulnerable to the charge of wishful thinking and making an arbitrary decision to attach subjective meaning to Jesus without a rational warrant. It is vulnerable to the critique that it possesses no real knowledge of God, that its claims about the kingdom of God, God’s benevolence, justice and love are really human aspirations and characteristics projected onto an imaginary God. Liberal theology may look tempting to doubting evangelicals and fleeing fundamentalists. But it must look pathetic, nostalgic and sentimental to atheists and other post-Christians…and orthodox Christians.

In this year-long series I have defended orthodox and apostolic Christianity. God really acted in Jesus Christ to conqueror sin and death. God really raised him from the dead and reconciled the world to himself through the suffering and death of Jesus. The tomb is indeed empty. “He is not here. He has risen!” The apostles are our teachers. I will not revise this message just to maintain power and influence in contemporary western culture. I am not interesting in making it easy for others or myself to believe in Jesus Christ and cheap to become his disciples. I am intensely interested in original, ontologically robust Christianity. Apostolic Christianity is as exciting as it is demanding, as deep as it is costly. Liberal Christianity is as boring as it is indulgent, as empty as it is cheap.

Note: This week’s post marks the end of the year-long series that addressed the question, “Is Christianity True”? I am in the process of revising and publishing all 48 of these essays in a book tentative entitled, The Case for Christianity: Essays on Faith and Reason for a Post-Christian Culture. I will let you know when it becomes available. Perhaps some of you will want a copy for yourself or to give away. Next year’s theme will be “A Catechism of Mere Christianity for a Post-Christian Culture.” More about that next time!

The Resurrection of Jesus: The Event that Changed Everything for the First Christians

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In this 20th installment of our series “Is Christianity True” we finally get to the decisive event in Christian history, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. If this event really happened as the first Christians believed, everything changes. If they were wrong and it did not happen, Christianity as it originally came to exist and developed through the centuries is false. In the next few essays, we will pursue the question of whether or not we can reasonably hold to the resurrection faith.

We hear the Christian message from within our wider and narrower context. We bring our own beliefs, thoughts, experiences, and expectations to this encounter. In this series we are asking how a contemporary person can make a rational judgment and responsible decision to believe the Christian message. I think a good place to begin is to reflect on how the very first Christians made their transition into Christian faith. Surely, our coming to responsible faith cannot be wholly different from theirs.

Our knowledge of the careers of the first Christians comes from the documents of the New Testament, especially from the gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul. Let’s delay the question of the historical reliability of these sources and concentrate on the story. The first Christians were Jews and came from among the original disciples of Jesus. They believed in the God of Israel and looked to the Law and the Prophets for guidance in their religion and life. After Jesus began to preach about the coming kingdom of God, these people and many others flocked to hear his message and witness his actions. Because of his radical teaching, his bold actions, and the miracles he performed, people speculated about who he was and how to fit him into their categories. Was he a prophet? Was he the Messiah-King? Was he an apocalyptic fanatic? They speculated about his aims. Did he aim to liberate the Jews from Roman rule? Did he aim to bring the age to an end with divine judgment and renewal? Jesus did not seem into fit any preconceived category.

Jesus called twelve of his disciples into his inner circle, but there was also a larger circle of above a hundred close disciples. Apparently, even these inner circles of disciples were not much clearer than others about who Jesus was and what his intentions were. But they were loyal to Jesus and were certain that the God of Israel was doing something new in the person and ministry of Jesus. According to the Gospel of Mark, Peter believed Jesus was “the Messiah” (8:29). But it’s hard to tell exactly what Peter meant by the title.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, debated with the Pharisees, entered the Temple and drove out the money changers, the religious and political leaders of Jerusalem were alarmed. They captured Jesus, tried him in at night, and convinced the Roman governor Pilate to crucify him. Jesus was crucified in public in the presence of solders, enemies, the curious crowd, and friends. His disciples saw him die. Some of them were able to secure his body and bury it in a nearby tomb.

What must his disciples have thought about this end to the story? Did God abandon Jesus? Was Jesus self-deceived? Or did Jesus simply suffer a martyr’s death as did many of the ancient prophets? According the gospel accounts, the disciples were stunned, afraid, and disappointed. But then something happened they had not expected. Less than 48 hours after they had seen Jesus die and be buried, on Sunday morning some women visited the tomb where Jesus had been buried and found it open and empty. Peter ran to the tomb to see for himself, and seeing the empty tomb, he wondered what had happened (Luke 24:12). Shortly thereafter, Jesus appeared to Peter and the other disciples and spoke with them. Jesus, contrary to all expectations, had been raised from the dead. This experience of the risen Jesus changed everything. Everything had to be rethought and reoriented.

The writings of Paul are the earliest preserved witness by someone who experienced a resurrection appearance. According to his own words Paul persecuted the first Christians but was confronted by Jesus himself and called to preach the gospel—a most unlikely convert! (In Acts, we have three extensive accounts of the conversion of Saul. But I am concentrating here on Paul’s words from his own pen.) In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul argues for the general, end-time resurrection of the dead from the complete consensus of the first Christians that Jesus was raised from the dead: to deny the general resurrection is to deny the resurrection of Christ. But the resurrection of Christ was a foundational belief in Corinth and all other churches. Paul lists, apparently in order, those to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection: Peter, the Twelve, James, the 500 (many of who were still alive), all the apostles, and finally Jesus appeared to Paul himself. According to Galatians 1:18-20, Paul spent two weeks with Peter in Jerusalem and while there visited with James the Lord’s brother. Hence we have in the words of Paul a direct witness from one who experienced an appearance of the resurrected Lord. Not only so, Paul was personally acquainted with many others who also independently experienced the risen Jesus.

Two conclusions follow from these considerations: (1) there can be no doubt that the event that caused the disciples to believe that God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead marks the decisive beginning of Christianity. Without it, Christianity would not exist. Christian faith is more than belief in the resurrection, but belief in the resurrection is essential and it changes dramatically how the teachings, miracles, and the death of Jesus must be understood. (2) There can be no doubt that Paul, Peter, James the Lord’s brother, the twelve, and many others experienced an appearance of Jesus, which for them unambiguously demonstrated that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Many questions remain for us to address, but I think these conclusions are sound historical judgments.

 

Christian Faith: An Outsider versus An Insider View

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As we concluded last week, we cannot move from mere theism into Christian faith by reasoning from the phenomena of nature to their metaphysical cause or from the inner world of our minds and their ideas to necessary truths about God. At best, these routes can take us to theism as a reasonable—and for some people even compelling—explanation for our experience. Though Christianity shares many background beliefs in common with theism, it appeals to specific events within human history as the basis for its identifying truth claims. In an interesting and controversial move that I will need to defend in future posts, Christianity sees revealed in these unique and non-repeating historical events truths of universal significance and application: truths about the identity and purposes of God, truths about the human condition in relation to God, and truths about ultimate human destiny. Today, however, we will address a question preliminary to this issue.

Where do we learn about these historical events and truth claims? I am not asking the question of how we know these events really happened and these claims are true. It’s too early to talk about this issue. I am asking a prior question: how do we get into the position of needing to evaluate and decide about the reports of the events and the truth claims derived from them? The simple answer is that we read about them in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. True. However, we are not looking for the simplest answer but for the most accurate and persuasive description of the move from not believing to believing Christianity. And this means that we must distinguish between insider and outsider views of these reports.

For Christian believers, the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are authoritative for their faith and practice of Christianity. The scriptures contain extensive teaching beyond the basic and decisive gospel message. When people come to believe the foundational message about Jesus Christ and decide to follow the Christian way, they commit themselves to listen to the scriptures’ detailed instructions about how to believe and live as a Christian. In other words, in their decision to become Christians they place themselves under the authority of the scriptures. The authority of the Holy Scripture is a doctrine of faith and makes sense only from an insider perspective.

But things look different from an outsider’s perspective. If you have not yet come to believe the basic gospel of Jesus Christ, you have not yet placed yourself under the authority of the scriptures. In other words, as an outsider you don’t feel an obligation to conform to Scripture simply because of its authority. It is important to keep the two perspectives distinct. In my view, we should not urge non-believers to accept the Christian faith simply because of the authority of Scripture. In so doing we are asking them to view the scriptures from an insider angle before they come to faith. Additionally, this strategy would require the apologist to offer evidence for the authority and inspiration of the scriptures and defend them from attacks—all apart from a decision about the basic gospel message of Jesus Christ. Such an approach would lead to interminable debates and would delay the decision about Jesus indefinitely. The proper order is to confront the basic message about Jesus Christ as witnessed to by the reports recorded in the New Testament writings, examine them as one would examine other historical claims, and make a decision to believe or not. If we come to faith in Jesus Christ through the testimony of the apostles, then we will acknowledge the unique placement of those who witnessed these events and gladly put ourselves under their authority as our teachers to whom we look for detailed instruction in Christian faith and life.

What is the gospel? What is the fundamental and decisive message about which one must decide in order to transition from not possessing Christian faith to possessing it? For the Apostles, the core of the Christian message is that Jesus is Lord and Christ, and they offer as evidence for that assertion their witness to resurrection of Jesus from the dead. In future posts I hope to clarify the meaning of this claim and present evidence that puts us in a position to make a rational and responsible decision to embrace this faith.