The inner light can only testify to spiritual truths…. It can tell us that Christ is risen, and that he is alive for evermore, but not that he rose again on the third day.
William Inge
Habermas’s expert evidence about the historicity of the resurrection concludes with an intensely personal testimony.
In 1995, he says, his wife died of cancer. He got through his terrible grief by imagining God asking the question “Did I raise my son from the dead?” Habermas’s conviction that this was true helped him through the ordeal.
It was a horribly emotional time for me, but I couldn’t get around the fact that the resurrection is the answer for her suffering….If there’s a resurrection, there’s a heaven. If Jesus was raised, Debbie will be raised. And I will be someday too. (p84)
Now, at this point, I am going to stop being a pedant. I am not going to ask in what way the conviction that Jesus rose from the dead is the answer to the question of why God created a universe such that a young wife and mother might die of a horrible illness. And I am going to put to one side my questions about whether Habermas believes, like Jesus’ earliest followers, that when Jesus comes back to earth he will physically raise our loved ones from the dead; or whether, like the majority of Anglo-American Christians, he thinks that their Platonic souls are currently in bliss with their Lord in a place called Heaven.
I do think that the conviction that lovers will be reunited in the hereafter is a bit too easy. Our friend CS Lewis, wrestling with his own bereavement, accepted that on no possible view would the happiness he would have enjoyed with Joy had she recovered be restored in heaven. In a particularly despairing moment, he wondered if he would only get to be with his wife again if he wanted to be with God so much that he no longer cared about being with his wife. If a woman loses her child, says Lewis, faith in heaven can comfort her as a Christian, but not as a mother.
The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.
Is Habermas argument that only the combination of the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances enable one to believe in the kind of afterlife we all earnestly desire: our identity retained but transferred to some eternal, perfect state? Other faiths offer re-incarnation, translation to a purely spiritual realm, or amalgamation with the Force. Or else they offer an extended second chance at life on a much improved planet earth. Christianity thinks in terms of both at once: a spiritual resurrection of the whole personalty. This would be an interesting and subtle theological idea that I would like to hear developed.
In these passages, the writer is doing exactly what a person of faith ought to be doing: using stories and texts to express a deep inner conviction about God and death and heaven and the soul and human identity and love which couldn’t be described in purely material terms. The word “resurrection” is standing in for the whole Christian understanding of the human condition. Indeed, it almost seems to be acting as a koan or a mantra: believing in “the resurrection” enables us to treat death and suffering as explicable, without actually explaining them.
These are absolutely the kinds of things that you would expect a religious person to do: they are precisely what religion is for. Throw in Strobel’s own claim that when his wife identified as a Christian, she became a nicer and more fulfilled and worthwhile human being, and then you very much have the whole package. Religion works.
Only the biggest pedant in the world would ask the follow-up question “Yes, but is it true?”
There are Christians who say that if they sit together, quietly and purposefully, they sometimes feel that God is present, or even that he is talking to them. And since that is the case, they find that all the teaching and theology and texts and rituals assume a much reduced importance. Once you have admitted that, it is quite a small step to saying “God is the name for whatever it is we feel when we sit in silence. Whether that feeling is really coming from a personal being outside the physical universe or not, we aren’t certain; and we aren’t even sure if it matters that much one way or the other.”
Is “resurrection” simply a name for same feeling?
But what strictly speaking, is the connection between the feeling, and the resurrection defined more narrowly? How do we get from “definitely, as an historical fact, Jesus was seen alive after he died” and “I am going to see my late wife in heaven when I die”?
Some years ago, there were some rather silly TV shows and very silly colour-supplement articles about how some archaeologists had definitely discovered Jesus’ actual tomb. What they had found was an ossuary, containing, according to the custom of the time, the bones of “Jesus the Son of Joseph, the wife of Mary, and the father of Judas”. Since we have no serious reason to think that Jesus married or had a son, and since Jesus, Mary and Joseph were incredibly common names (and since inscription experts weren’t even sure this was what was actually written on the jar) this discovery almost certainly didn’t mean what the archaeologists wanted it to mean.
But supposing it had.
Supposing we literally discovered Jesus’ literal bones.
Would Christians fall into despair and say that they would never see their wives again and there is nothing waiting for them at the end of life but oblivion and it doesn’t matter because we’re all only clouds of atoms in any case?
Or would they maintain, in the face of however much evidence, that the bones must be fake because they know that their loved ones are in heaven, because Jesus walks with them and talks with them along life’s narrow way?
Or would they say that the new evidence was irrelevant, that the resurrection was far more than a conjuring trick with bones, and that no-one sensible ever took the empty tomb story seriously in the first place?
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