Getting
Right to the Point!
The
Resurrection of Jesus is a Fact – of Faith!
The
very existence of the true Christian religion depends upon the bodily
resurrection of Christ. This miracle, more that all others, proves that Christ
was and is God, and that His Father accepted His Passion and death as full
payment for the sins of all people. Without the physical coming back to life of
the once-dead corpse of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth, all
the rest of the claims of the Christian Church are useless, foolish, and even
cruel.
But
the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a fact. No other event of ancient times is
so well attested. The actual eyewitnesses, pagan and Jewish, as well as
Christian, are more numerous and more well regarded than for any other
happening since Creation!
Still,
something so amazing and world-changing cannot be believed except by faith,
given through the Bible by the grace of God. Those with this faith will rise
again to eternal bliss. Those who reject this miracle will rise also – to hell
forever. Believe it! And that's the point!
1 comment:
"The Resurrection of Jesus is a Fact"...
Dr. Gene Veith made this recent observation on his blog (here): "My fear, though, is that we have crossed the event horizon of the black hole of postmodernism, so that as a culture we are oblivious not only to objective truth but now to objective facts, including those facts that impact us the most."
I tend to agree with him. In my "socializing," especially when I meet new people, I am not merely "having an experience." I am evaluating them by what they say as I subconsciously seek out those with whom I might have edifying discussion. That search grows more earnest with each passing year, as there seems to be a swiftly shrinking segment of the population with any kind of healthy regard for fact, and for the impact of facts, while a growing number of people make no effort to conceal disinterest in, or outright disregard for, any conversation in which objectivity or fact is a material element. Not knowing how to distinguish fact from evidence, relevance from irrelevance, or meaningfulness from meaninglessness, it all gets lumped into the same category of information, and judged holistically on the basis of the subjective "experience" such information creates and whether that experience is preferable to the individual or not. All meaning in culture is becoming "self-referential".
And it isn't just "contemporary Western Culture," as if entirely external to the visible Church, which is in decline. We are all, to one degree or another, products of our culture, and we carry unhealthy worldly influences into the church with us. We see it today in our declining regard for the utility of language, in the declining importance we lay on the objectivity of form and the meaning of content, and in our increasing reliance on subjective language games to communicate Scripture teaching -- such as the astonishingly frequent use of metaphor and analogy to weakly define what we no longer have the language (and thus the reason) to understand in direct terms, and the sharp rise in "synonyms" and "slippery terms" that we never before knew that the Bible used. We see it in discussion of church practice: relationship and experience are everything; objectivity is nothing, except as a tool to placate aging and irrelevant luddites. Most in the church, it seems, uncritically accept what the world hands to us -- "The culture is what it is, and we must be the culture" -- while others, seeing the danger but ill-equipped to struggle against it, make the conscious decision to join the world in its post-Modern preferences and sensibilities, to "valiantly fight from within." A shrinking minority, it seems, are equipped to critically evaluate what the world offers and to reject it on that basis. Whether a "fact of history" or a "fact of faith," if facts are regarded as opinions, as post-Modernism ultimately requires, then the Resurrection and all that follows from it is of no more consequence than strongly held opinion. Christians who join the post-Modern world, do so to their own demise.
I'm only summarizing here what I've written about in more detail elsewhere on this blog -- here and here, for example. From a cultural standpoint, I lay the blame on modern pedagogics, on broad addiction to entertainment, and on the oppression of personal devices which facilitate our insatiable and sinful demands for immediate gratification. With the reality of such reinforcements (personal gratification in social contexts), it's no wonder that all information is evaluated with sole reference to self.
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