Tag: Resurrection
0 Mr Deity and the Tour de Hell
This week for our Razing Hell series we’re descending into Hell. Why not? Jesus did, right?
Here’s a send up of God, Mr Deity, talking about Lucy’s (Lucifer) preparations for the grand opening of Hell.
0 What the Hell Do We Make of Hell?
Here’s an audio podcast with some reflection and questions on the Doctrine of Hell, our topic this weekend for the Razing Hell sermon series. You’ll also find another podcast on heaven ‘Thinking about Heaven’ there.
Both are available to download in the iTunes Library under ‘Tamed Cynic.’
5 If the Bible Teaches Resurrection of the Body, What About Cremation?
If the biblical teaching of eternal life is physical resurrection of the body into God’s new creation, then what do you say about cremation and organ donation?
I get this question often.
First, it’s important for Christians to keep in mind that this is a question the first Christians- or Jews for that matter- would’ve also asked.
Second, it’s important for Christians to realize the first Christians- and Jews- were well aware (perhaps much more so than contemporary people who can push death off into hospital wards and nursing homes) of what happens to material bodies when they die.
Third, it’s important for Christians- and Jews- to remember that Resurrection flew in the face of what every worldview and religion in the ancient world presumed.
And yet, Resurrection was the fundamental Christian proclamation.
Now, to the question.
There’s a story, which may be just a story, of a pagan asking an early Church Father (Origen, I think): ‘What if a Christian is eaten by a cannibal? In the resurrection, whose body would be raised? The eaten or the eator?’ It’s best not to think too hard or impose our categories of what’s possible on resurrection was the reply.
And that’s usually how I respond. It’s certainly not good news that if someone’s body is lost or ruined then they can’t participate in the resurrection. Just as its best not to think too woodenly about the continuity of my earthly body and my resurrected body. The stress is on the material nature of eternal life; scripture isn’t implying that if you’re bald now you will be eternally.
And I’m an organ donor myself.
But here’s my BUT.
I don’t like cremation. Not because I think the God who made heaven and earth and raised Jesus from the dead can’t somehow restore a cremated person to full resurrected life in the new creation.
I don’t like cremation for aesthetic reasons. In the same way, I don’t like it when communion is served with eenie weenie pieces of bread and little plastic individual cups. It’s supposed to be a feast. The liturgy uses feast language because that’s what God’s Kingdom is like. Eenie weenie pieces of bread point to something else.
I don’t like cremation because the language of our faith (and the funeral liturgy) points to bodily resurrection, and the popularity of cremation goes hand in hand I suspect with modern Western Christians no longer making resurrection the central claim of their faith.
We in the West forget that cremation is still very much forbidden and/or looked down upon among Orthodox Christians, Jews and African American Christians- groups that haven’t lost the importance of incarnation and the body in scripture.
2 Why are American Christians Obsessed with Hell?
NT Wright reflects on that very question…
0 What Difference Does It Really Make What One Believes About Eternal Life?
This week for our sermon series, Razing Hell, we’ve been deconstructing the popular misconception of our souls going off to heaven when we die and reclaiming the biblical hope of eternal life being marked by resurrection and new creation.
In response, someone asked me:
What difference does it really make in this world and life whether I believe in one or the other? Does it make any difference what I believe will happen after I die? Isn’t really just about what brings someone comfort?
Here are my thoughts in response:
I spent the week before Christmas in a small mountain village in Guatemala with twenty other adults and students from my church. It was our fourth time in that region. We were building a ‘center,’ a building that can be used to teach health clinics and other workshops and also to lodge future service teams like ours.
It’s easy sometimes spending the week before Christmas in an impoverished place to be struck by a sense of hopelessness. It can be difficult to see how a voiceless people, a people whose own government has a long history of trying to ‘pacify’ and assimilate, have any real hope of freeing themselves from victimhood. Seen in such a light, it also can seem a weak and ultimately meaningless gesture to be doing a building project for such people. Why bother if it doesn’t remedy their pressing and urgent situation?
That’s just an isolated example of a despair that could creep over any Christian for any act of mercy we do in the world.
Understood only in terms of cold realism, all the soup kitchens, malarial nets, wood stoves and rice banks in the world won’t undo poverty.
Individual congregations praying for peace on Sunday mornings won’t eliminate violence and war. Christians witnessing to racial reconciliation won’t erase the stain of racism in our country, and to think otherwise is to fall victim to naive utopianism
But neither cold realism nor naive utopianism is Christian hope in Resurrection and New Creation.
What I realized once again in Guatemala this December: we weren’t there working with block and mortar because we thought we were going to permanently solve a social ill. We were not building for poor, persecuted Mayans because we had foolish illusions about what the immediate future might hold for the indigenous villages. The stakes are high for those people and, seen only from a finite point of view, our acts of service might prove meaningless gestures.
But we weren’t there to be realistic.
And we weren’t there to be idealistic.
We were there doing what we were doing because what we were doing was in harmony with what God will do in the End.
Christian service isn’t an idealistic stab at trying to make the world come out right.
Rather, Christian service is anchored in the faith that God alone makes the world come out right. No matter how things look on the ground in the ‘real’ world, one day God will get the world God wants and that world is one where the hungry are filled, the mourning stop their crying and the poor are lifted up.
Far too many Christians, by adopting a spiritualized notion of our souls going off to heaven when we die, take a laissez faire attitude to this world. Overly spiritualized notions of eternal life too often underwrite a politics that couldn’t have less to do with the God of scripture.
But if the End isn’t our souls going off one day to a disembodied heaven and casting this world into the rubbish bin, if the End, as it’s seen in Revelation 21-22, is this creation renewed then everything we do today in this world as Christians we do, as Paul says, in anticipation of that End. We work, as Paul says, as ambassadors of the Christ who will come again when Heaven comes down. This is truly what it means for us to have our citizenship in heaven: to live in this world in such a way that things on earth are as they are in heaven and will one day be finally in the New Earth.
Christian service isn’t a solution to the present problems of the world. Christian service is a sign, a gesture, of what we believe God will do.
If the future is one where God comforts and lifts up indigenous Mayans then we anticipate that future with our actions in the present- no matter how ineffective or meaningless other might judge them.
Christian service isn’t our attempt to fashion a world we think God wants from us nor does it idealistically put band-aids over top systemic issues. And it certainly isn’t deeds we do in the vain hope they’ll earn us gold stars from God so one day we’ll be able to walk the streets of gold in heaven.
No, Christian service, by being rooted in our hope of the End, is done with the confidence that it’s action done with the grain of the universe.
0 A Short Defense of the Resurrection
This weekend the Rev Dr Dennis Wayne Perry will kick-off our fall sermon series, Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas. First up, is our belief that not all dead men stay dead.
In anticipation of what I’m sure will be a riveting sermon by our facial hair-challenged assistant pastor, here’s a good account of the Resurrection as historical happening from Parchment and Pen.
Just as we test the historicity of any event, not through emotional conviction, but with historical evidence, I would like to devote some time to laying out a brief historical case for the Resurrection of Christ, the central issue of the Christian faith.
Here is what we need (the tools of the trade):
1. Internal Evidence: Evidence coming from within the primary witness documents, the New Testament.
2. External Evidence: Collaborative evidence coming from outside the primary witness documents.
Internal Evidence:
- Honesty
- Irrelevant Details
- Harmony
- Public Extraordinary Claims
- Lack of Motivation for Fabrication
Honesty:
The entire Bible records both successes and failures of the heroes. I have always been impressed by this. It never paints the glorious picture that you would expect from legendary material, but shows them in all their worst moments. The Israelites whined, David murdered, Peter denied, the apostles abandoned Christ in fear, Moses became angry, Jacob deceived, Noah got drunk, Adam and Eve disobeyed, Paul persecuted, Solomon worshiped idols, Abraham was a bigamist, Lot committed incest, John the Baptist doubted, Abraham doubted, Sarah doubted, Nicodemus doubted, Thomas doubted, Jonah ran, Samson self-served, and John, at the very end of the story, when he should have had it all figured out, worshiped an angel (Rev 22:8). I love it! (ahem).
And these are the Jews who wrote the Bible!
In addition, the most faithful are seen as suffering the most (Joseph, Job, and Lazarus), while the wicked are seen as prospering (the rich man). In the case of the Gospels, the disciples who recorded it claimed to have abandoned Christ and did not believe in His resurrection when told. Even after the resurrection, they still present themselves as completely ignorant of God’s plan (Acts 1:6-7). Women are the first to witness the resurrection which has an element of self-incrimination since a woman’s testimony was not worth anything in the first century. If someone were making this up, why include such an incriminating detail? (I am glad they did—what an Easter message this is for us today!)
Irrelevant Details:
The Gospel writers (especially John) contain many elements to their story that are really irrelevant to the big picture. Normally, when someone is making a story up, they include only the details that contribute to the fabrication. Irrelevant details are a mark of genuineness in all situations.
Notice this small segment of the Gospel of John 20:1-8 (HT: Gregory Boyd, but modified):
“Early on the first day of the week (when? does it matter?), while it was still dark (who cares?), Mary Magdalene (an incriminating detail) went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one who Jesus loved (John’s modest way of referring to himself—another mark of genuineness) and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have taken him!” (note her self-incriminating lack of faith here). So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. They were running, but the other disciple out ran Peter and reached the tomb first (who cares who won the race? a completely irrelevant detail). He bent over (irrelevant, but the tomb entrance was low—a detail which is historically accurate of wealthy people of the time—the kind we know Jesus was buried in) and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in (why not? irrelevant detail). Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb (Peter’s boldness stands out in all the Gospel accounts). He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head (irrelevant and unexpected detail—what was Jesus wearing?). The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen (somewhat irrelevant and unusual. Jesus folded one part of his wrapping before he left!). Finally the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went inside (who cares about what exact order they went in?)
Harmony:
The four Gospel writers claim to have witnessed the resurrected Christ. The same is the case for most of the other writers of the NT. The four Gospel writers all write of the same event from differing perspectives. Although they differ in details, they are completely harmonious to the main events surrounding the resurrection, and all claim that it is an historical event. Many people are disturbed by the seeming disharmony among the Gospels since the Gospel writers do not include all the same details. However, this is actually a mark of historicity since if they all said exactly the same thing, it would be a sign that they made it up. However, the Gospel writers contain just enough disharmony to give it a mark of genuine historicity.
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