Christians Speaking About The Resurrection
Sunday, July 17, 2011 at 7:58AM | by Otter Yesterday at a function for home schoolers somebody pulled me aside to tell me about her son's writing teacher at the local community college. "She makes everybody write about aliens," she said.
"Weird," I said.
Another home school mom chirriped a bit shrilly, "That's so when the Rapture comes they can say it's alien abductions. Anything to avoid the Word of God."
When I hear things like this my heart always sinks. Maybe I'm what scripture calls a "scoffer," or maybe I'm just too good a teacher to let these things go. But whatever the reason, I know when I hear certain religious phrases that a tiresome discussion is coming, and I have to either ignore it or challenge it. But for some reason I just have the hardest time ignoring it. Qui tacet consentit: silence implies consent, as the legal maxim has it. And I bloody well do not consent to the propositions that (1) there will be a rapture, which is a misreading of scripture; and (2) that the Christian should cultivate an attitude of self-righteousness in this way.
I waited for a second, collecting my thoughts, and somebody said, "Crackpot ideas."
And that of course was the cue, so I said with as much light irony as I could inject into the sentence, "Well, hey, be fair. You believe a man was raised from the dead."
There was a pause of about a second and a half, and in the chatter that immediately followed, I discerned two phrases and one mood, all coming from different directions but in a strong unified current.
The phrases were, "Yeah, but that's a fact," and "I'm not gonna hear people run down the Word! I live it first and then read it," from which I gathered that some miracle or other lived at the root of her experience of God. There was a lot more talk, but there was too much of it simultaneously to catch.
The mood was fear, almost panic.
I'm not sure that it was anything so flattering as the panic that comes on students when they're having their presuppositions challenged and are reconsidering them. More like the panic that comes on a horde of wasps that have had a stone tossed into the nest. It was directed. It was defensive in the best sense. Their faith, indeed their Lord, had been insulted, and their voices took on that slightly "covered" quality that people's voices get when they are angry or afraid.
There was no opportunity to explain, to converse, or to challenge any of this. It just hit the fan.
That's how it goes.
There are two things I want to say about this.
The first is that I believe that whatever freaky shit (I'm sorry, "miracles") that these people think is best explained as evidence for the Resurrection is a matter of their own conscience, and I don't scoff at it. I haven't seen it. I'm naturally skeptical of other people's miracles, but I don't know what those are. And I certainly am not in a position (and wouldn't attempt) to pry them loose from the belief that they've been healed psychologically or physically or whatever by the powerful spirit of Jesus Christ, whatever that might mean. And I can think of a lot of things it might mean without being precisely what they think. But not a lot of good can come from having that impression challenged gratuitously, whether it's accurate or not. Faith makes many people positively horrible. But it also makes many much better people. It certainly situates one in a different way to the world.
The second is that it's continually depressing to me that Christians can say such things as, "The Resurrection is a fact." It's sloppy thinking. It takes the word "fact" and turns it into a thing equivalent with "truth." But a fact is something that responds to all reasonable objective observation; the Resurrection, for all its power in peoples' lives, leaves us with no such objective observation.
What's so hard about smiling and saying, "Yeah, I guess we really are pretty weird to believe this"? Why is that such a stretch?
What is it about the Resurrection and the experiences that seem to support it that so completely makes the believer like a believer in alien abductions, so persuaded that the truth to which she is privvy is private, personal, and undeniable, that sets her so far outside the human community (where words like "fact" are useful) and puts her in some realm where she can refuse to listen to voices that seem to think differently?
Could it be fear?
What happens to children raised in fear?
Reader Comments (8)
Re: "What's so hard about smiling and saying, 'Yeah, I guess we really are pretty weird to believe this'? Why is that such a stretch?"
Such a reaction would be more possible were the catalyst "Well, hey, be fair. WE believe a man was raised from the dead."
They reacted defensively because there was an attack. You weren't really expecting reasoned discourse,were you?
I have no answers but, man, do I feel your questions! Only the last one do I feel even remotely qualified to comment about: children raised in that kind of knee-jerk religious fear grow up to think the world is essentially a scary place out to get them. Even after I have worked really, really, really hard to make a benevolent undergirding of Life my default position (because it has been my experience in 46 years of life that people are generally as good as their circumstances allow them to be, and often even better), I still automatically assume the worst, expect apocalypse in some form, and act from a position of Fear rather than Love. I have to consciously choose Love over Fear. Every time. And I haven't been part of any Christian community for close to twenty-five years. Nearly half my life, almost all of my adult life, outside religion, and this is still as good as it gets for me. The Jesuits were right: it only takes the first seven years to irrevocably indoctrinate someone's worldview. Sometimes I can forgive that.
Excuse me, I have to go kick something now.
Otter, despite some possibly rather marked differences between you and me in our beliefs and temperament and in what, specifically, triggers our snarkiness, it seems we are soul brothers when it comes to suffering homeschool events of this ilk. Earlier this summer I attended a three-day "classical, Christian" homeschool seminar and spent the bulk of it biting my tongue long enough to wrestle my thoughts into coherent, non-inflammatory paragraphs.( I started tensing up right when they started passing around the introductory folders and I saw they were emblazoned with the American flag and "We the people . . ."). I managed to get through with only one sarcastic outburst, but the two women I attended with and the regional director got to hear some rather impassioned and extended monologues from me on how horribly, horribly destructive this particular strand of Christian subculture is both to the church and to education.
So, the seminar was useful to me mostly because it turned into a crash course in the current state of culture-warrior culture. Despite the fact that I am both a Christian (of a theologically conservative sort) and a homeschooler, I happen to live in a happy bubble that is, for the most part, free of culture warriors. I'm sure it sounds overly dramatic to say that I found this experience to be horrifying and deeply distressing, but it was. I agree with your assessment: by the time I got to the point where I felt I had a grip on where all the weirdness was coming from, I had identified "fear" and "hostility" as the most two salient features of the attitude there.
The core uniting beliefs seemed to be: 1) The zenith of American culture was the era of "our founding fathers" (and due to nationalistic solipsism, America is the only country that matters) 2) Since that zenith, all aspects of culture have been steadily descending to hell in a handbasket 3) Non-Christians in positions of power are solely responsible for said descent. Also Satan. 4) The appropriate response to this descent into hell? Fear and hostility, of course! In tandem with attempts to shove as many Christians into positions of power.
If anyone (say, me, for example) questions or SEEMS to question ANY SINGLE ONE of those tenants--no matter how gently, offhandedly, or inadvertently (!)--heads swivel in unison to stare at the heretic (again, that would be me), the temperature in the room drops 20 degrees, and the previously bright, interesting adult holding the microphone retreats behind a solid wall of pre-scripted jargon that bears no discernible relation to the matter at hand.
It was un-effing-believable. And heartbreaking. I love, love, love the church (ahem!--organized religion, that is). Love it. It remains impossible for me to understand how the aforementioned tenants of "faith"--patriotic fetishism, really--can have gotten such a damnable stranglehold on the church when not one of them has anything at all to do with the Christian faith and most of them could hardly be more contrary to it!!
Stizzy: respectfully, no sale. Even when I was much more committed to the belief in a physical resurrection than I am now (now my views are a bit more complex), I was capable of a little more irony than this. Critiques didn't have to come from within for me to sleep at night or enjoy a critic's company.
So yeah. Reasoned discourse would have been nice, actually.
Sandra and Susan: there's not a syllable I can add to that.
Did they react in fear? Well, yeah. Duh, they are human. As much as we hate to admit it, we humans are often motivated by fear, especially when dealing with things we like to pretend we are experts in.
It's a helluva shock when you rip magic carpets from beneath the faithful, especially when they're absolutely certain that rug was sitting on solid ground.
But, Perfect Love casteth out all fear. So, there's hope.
Otter, could you elaborate on the "fact" vs. "truth" idea, as you see it? Some of the dictionary definitions of fact actually use truth as a synonym for truth, and the link below is certainly thought-provoking, as it states that facts can be easily proven or disproven.
http://oii.org/cyberu/html/fact.htm
Which leads to my follow up question: how, or to what degree, can "historical facts" (vs. scientific facts) be proven or disproven? For example, is a statement such as, "My mother was born in Harvey, IL." a fact, strictly speaking? Certainly it would be regarded as one in ordinary conversation . . . but I'm not sure it could be easily proven or disproven. That event (my mother's birth) took place only 73 years in the past, but the only evidence that could be given is pretty slim. Her brothers may or may not remember the name and location of the hospital where she was born, and I have come to regard documents like birth certificates as somewhat suspect. (My own marriage license records her birthplace--incorrectly, as it turns out--as Chicago, IL; and her death certificate--also incorrectly--recorded it as Markham, IL until we corrected it.)
Since, as far as I can tell, the resurrection of Jesus cannot be easily proven or disproven, I can see where you would object to its being regarded as a fact. But that's a mighty big can of worms you're opening: millions and millions of facts (statements that can be easily proven or disproven) would cease to become facts as time marches on and proof becomes inaccessible. Do those facts then get downgraded to opinion? theory? What, then?
Sorry: that second sentence should read "truth as a synonym for fact." But you probably figured that out already. :)
Susan, my reply to your comments is here.