The revolutionary nature and impact of Jesus' Resurrection, as well as the event that it anticipates i.e. the Second Coming, were the primary reasons that I became a Christian. The truth of Christianity rises or falls on these events, as does my faith. So, what if the Resurrection never happened? What if God (if He exists at all) is never going to step in and complete His victory over sin and death? What if He will never transform our bodies or the cosmos? Is it possible (or probable) that I'm just fooling myself, and basing my life on a lie or a figment of the imaginations of Jesus' grieving disciples?
For the last few months, I've spent a lot of time thinking and worrying about these questions. This shouldn't come as a surprise to any of you who know me well. When it comes to deciding what I believe about the existence and nature of God, I've never really taken the easy way out. Over the years, I've rejected complacency and refused to simply accept wholesale what I've been told by others. My main goal has been to search for the truth about reality rather than for comfort. No matter how emotionally reassuring or attractive an idea might be, I don't want to believe in something that's not true. If I'm to be honest with myself, I would need to apply this criterium even to my Resurrection-centered Christian faith.
Perhaps “re-apply” would be a more appropriate word here. I first became convinced of the veracity of the main doctrines of Christianity, particularly the Resurrection, more than two years ago. I did so after spending countless hours researching and evaluating the claims of the New Testament writers. Eventually, I found the arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection offered by scholar NT Wright surprisingly compelling. I was further persuaded by the way in which he wove the event and the resulting formation of the Church into the context of first century Palestine and Judaism. As incredible as it sounded to me at first, Jesus coming back from the dead and appearing to his disciples really seemed to be the best explanation for the data that we possess.
This grand event and the vision of god that it implies didn't just make intellectual sense to me. The risen Christ grasped my heart as much as my head. I quickly came to love him, and sensed that I was a part of the amazing story to which the Resurrection provided a climax. I had deeply profound experiences of God in my life and believed that I could sense His presence in other people. In addition to the historicity of the Resurrection, then, there was also an element of “experiential evidence” involved in my decision to become and remain a Christian.
One of the main effects of the Resurrection, the promise that Jesus will come back to Earth and fully usher in God's New Creation, is where Christian theology gets both incredibly compelling and difficult to swallow. According to the Bible, upon Jesus' return our bodies will be rebuilt and restored to us much like his own i.e. immortal and indestructible. The apostle Paul also seems to teach that the planet itself will become imperishable at that point. This would mean that a central fact of the physical world, that all life ends with death, will no longer apply. Many of the natural laws of biology, chemistry, and physics will be annulled when the Holy Spirit implements God's incorruptible version of reality. The practical issues here are myriad: How will the transformation of our bodies come about, especially in the case of cremated remains? Will our cells no longer grow and die and be replaced? What will we eat, if anything? Will there be animals and plants in this New Creation, and if so, will they be immortal as well? How will the planet go on to exist for all eternity? Will suns continue to emit energy forever? (I'm sure that my scientifically-inclined friends could come up with even more questions along the same lines.)
If God is the Creator, then He is in control of the way the universe operates. Just because the laws of science seem set in stone to us doesn't mean this must always be the case. If He wanted to, He could implement these changes to reality in accordance with His will. He could resolve the tensions latent in the questions above in ways that are inconceivable to our puny brains. But for me, a conviction that there is a supreme being that can and will do this has to be premised on the historicity of Jesus' rising from the dead, the miracle that guarantees that Jesus will have a Second Coming at all. So, is the evidence for the Resurrection and the God of Christianity really strong enough to hold a conviction that He will intervene in the state of the universe in such a drastic manner? I would have given a solid affirmative answer to this question for much of my time as a Christian. However, for several months I've been re-evaluating the likelihood of the Resurrection and the consequent Second Coming compared to the chances that life in this world will simply go on as it always has (until it simply ends altogether).
There are several lines of thought running around in my head that have led me to this point. For one, when it comes to any sort of “experiential evidence” for the existence of this god, I've had a growing, nagging feeling that the term itself is a contradiction. In other words, because of the subjective nature of “what we feel to be true,” it shouldn't even count when weighing evidence. Paul claims that the presence of the Holy Spirit transforming Christians' lives is a down payment and a guarantee of the final Resurrection, when God's Spirit will suffuse all things. For now, though, it's almost impossible for us to see its effects in any concrete way. Perhaps we can look at Christians (including ourselves) and have a sense that they are alive in Christ rather than dead in their sins. But how is this anything other than subjective observation?
After all, people hold firm convictions and feel transformed by gods and figures of other belief systems. Telling a Muslim about your loving relationship with Jesus your Savior, for example, won't do much good in convincing him that his admiration for his beloved Prophet Muhammad is misplaced. Explaining that you can feel the Holy Spirit of the triune god in your life will do little to invalidate his own experiences with Allah. We have to at least allow for the possibility that some of our perceived interactions with a supreme being may have psychological and emotional causes rather than divine. Sometimes, my mind takes this idea to its limit, asserting that belief in the supernatural and transcendent stem from a subconscious desire to form patterns of meaning and significance where there simply are none. It asserts that the phenomenon of faith is mankind's futile attempt to reject what is everywhere apparent: that all living things die, that nothing is eternal, that there is no grand scheme or purpose behind existence.
Fears that I'm fooling myself by even trying to hold onto faith, and that the only honest thing I can do as a rational person is accept these facts and live out my remaining years without expectations of an afterlife, have settled their way into my heart in the aftermath of my mother's recent death (a topic that is too painful and fresh to write about more extensively at this time). However, my struggle with faith isn't a matter of me being angry at God for causing or allowing this to happen. I realize that people sometimes just get sick and die. But in my sadness, all I seem able to see most of the time is the inevitability that everything will end. It's been very difficult to hold onto hope, and to have that hope allied with whatever credible arguments there are for faith in the risen Christ.
On one end of a scale measuring evidence for and against the Christian God, then, I seem to have a wealth of empirical and scientific data that give me no reason to think that the universe will work in any other way than it does now. And on the other, I have historical and philosophical arguments that I'm struggling to even lift onto the scale because of my current state of mental and emotional weakness. All of those future changes to the laws of nature depend entirely on whether a man rose from the dead 2,000 years ago as depicted in the Bible. That's a lot riding on one unrepeatable, untestable event in ancient history.
I'm afraid that my faith will buckle under the weight of these considerations and eventually crumble. I'm afraid that one day I will be forced by rationality to see God's plan for creation only as a pleasant story, something fun to read about and fascinating to study, but ultimately a fairy tale for wishful dreamers. These fears stem from the very things that brought me to belief in the first place. The concepts of Resurrection, Second Coming, and God's New Creation have become a two-edged sword threatening to unravel the faith they once built up. To echo the comments of Paul when addressing the idea that Jesus did not rise from the dead, “...and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.” (1 Corinth. 15:17-19) Are Christians, including myself, to be pitied? Should we accept that we have been engaging in an act of cognitive dissonance and begin the difficult process of shedding off our delusions and committing ourselves to eating, drinking, and being merry? I'm not prepared to say that we should. In spite of all my intellectual and emotional struggles in believing in the risen Christ, I think there is still some hope to be found in the shadow of Easter.
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