- 5 Objections
- Response to 5 Objections
- The Historical Case for the Resurrection of Jesus
- 3 Points of Departure
- On Christian Origins
- On the Holy Spirit
- On Belief
- The Trouble with (Traditional) Worldviews
- Imagination, Authority, and Knowledge
- On Marxism
- Christianity and Marxism
- In Defense of Skepticism
- Skepticism and Ethics
- Where I’m Coming From
- Tradition, Knowledge, and Metaphysics
Belief
I suppose I would have to agree that belief that an extraordinary event has occurred requires somewhat stronger evidence than belief that an ordinary event has occurred. I would also have to agree that agnosticism can be a reasonable position to hold on an issue; everyone is agnostic about certain matters. On important issues that may be a matter of life or death (or even of eternal life or death) I think we have very good reason to try hard to move past our agnosticism, but this doesn’t necessarily mean we will have access to enough information to do so. I do think Pascal’s Wager should be taken into consideration here, although I think it only works if one is already leaning significantly enough toward believing something is probably true.
History
I actually do not think that holding to historic Christian orthodoxy necessarily requires us to believe that there is “one distinct tradition we can identify as the correct one leading all the way back to the beginning.” Many Catholics, who do not hold to a sharp distinction between the apostolic and later periods, seem to hold the perspective that the church has grown and matured into a better understanding of Christian belief and practice over the centuries. Even Protestants can reasonably hold that the early Christian community grew and developed into a fuller understanding of Jesus and his message over the course of the first century. In any case, I am not convinced that the diverse and polyphonic New Testament writings give us any real contradiction. And I am highly skeptical of efforts to reconstruct a hypothetical prehistory of the sources of these texts which purportedly shows an earlier Christian understanding that contradicts the New Testament picture. My tendency is to basically accept the New Testament texts, as they are our earliest actual sources for early Christianity, although I understand that people with different historical epistemologies and approaches may disagree. I am quite intrigued by your mention of your approach to history being “colored by significant Marxist leanings” affecting your understanding of the history of early Christianity; I would be interested in hearing you flesh this out a bit at some point so I can get a better handle on where you’re coming from.
The Holy Spirit
A topic related to everything we have been discussing, but which has not been explicitly brought up, is the Holy Spirit. The claims of the Christian gospel call us to believe not just certain things about the historical Jesus, but also that, after his resurrection, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on his followers to lead them into God’s truth, empower them for his mission, and to form them into his body, the church, a church which in some sense still exists and which we can participate in today. Unless God’s Holy Spirit was active in the early Christian community, we do not have reason to believe with certainty that their theological claims are true, or that they can have any real significance for us. This is what I meant when I said that everyone who is a Christian must be implicitly Trinitarian. God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the church all seem to me to be connected as part of a “package deal” in the message of Jesus’ apostles. Belief in the Authority of Scripture and/or Church Tradition is a further extension of this belief in the Holy Spirit’s activity in the early church. So, the argument from Jesus’ resurrection to the Christian gospel being true is: Is it reasonable to believe that Jesus did these miraculous things, made these extraordinary claims, rose from the dead, but then did nothing ensure his message and movement would accurately continue? If he did ensure this, then we should accept the theological claims of the early Christian community.