Easter Meditation
Why I Am Not a Christian, pt. 1

April 16, 2006

One vivid Bible college memory involves a chapel meeting in which some student speaker brought up a book entitled Why I Am Not a Christian, but then struggled to remember who the author of the book was. Professor Mike DeRidder solemnly called out "Bertrand Russell." It struck me then as odd that here I am in a Bible college and there is a certain amount of intellectual cache in knowing about this book that directly attacks Christianity. If I remember right, this was even a textbook used in some class.. maybe apologetics. I also marvelled at the inevitable irony that any serious attempt to debunk Christianity will just become fodder for Bible college instructors. And without doubt someone will stand up and proclaim in chapel somewhere: "Well, if that is the best someone can do against Christianity, then my faith is assured."

But I do want to say a few words against Christianity, and hopefully a steady trickle of blogs on this topic will turn into a collection that has some unity, and which examines Christianity from a number of critical angles.. and which Bible college professors will not be too eager to use in class.

It is good to start this project on Easter, as it gives me an excuse to consider the resurrection. Ask the apostle Paul, this is the central point of the Christian faith: “…if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (1 Cor. 15.14). Paul felt so strongly that he even listed witnesses. Many “evidence that demands a verdict” approaches to Christianity place the resurrection front and center in their defense of the faith.

Just last week I noticed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution a quotation from a certain Bob Hodgson, dean of the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship at the American Bible Society. Defending the traditional claims of Christianity against the alternative story embedded in a text such as the Gospel of Judas, Hodgson noted:

The only explanation I can come up with in the Easter story is that God raised Jesus from the dead, and Jesus appeared to his followers… and utterly transformed them and imbued them with such power and vision that they were able to literally turn history upside down.

Nothing particularly new there, but it is useful as it is such a common Evangelical position.

Now let me try a thought experiment. Say someone walked up to you and said that four hundred years ago in southern China there was a man who called himself God’s son… and even claimed a certain level of divinity. That man performed miracles and gathered around himself a group of disciples. He was eventually killed by the authorities, but shortly afterwards this charismatic leader was reported to have been raised from the dead. Not only that, but four accounts from the generation following his death survive and are widely distributed. Only one of these four is purportedly by someone who actually knew the charismatic leader, but it is oddly also the latest of the accounts, not being set down until a good 50 years after the events it recorded took place. Further, it is claimed by this person who has approached you that your belief or disbelief in this historical story is of utmost value to you, as it determines your eternal destiny.

OK, take a breath. Look this messenger up and down. What would you say? Your answer should parallel your response to the Christian story of Easter.

Here is what would be going through my mind:

This is an unlikely story. Human beings as we know them die and stay dead. While accepting the fact that something miraculous could be at work, the probability must lie in the chance that somehow these events have been garbled or altered in the transmission process.

It would take a lot of hard evidence to make me believe that something which would be utterly unique to my experience, and the recorded experience of so many others, had occurred. What is the proffered evidence? Four books that are of uncertain provenance, which testify to the resurrection and other miraculous works attributed to this leader. I would not take the time to examine these four books very closely.. as it is not my job to explain what happened, but simply to decide whether this is a claim that has the weight of probability. To explain the story would require a lot of research and is a hopeless undertaking since any alternative is probably lost.

Miraculous healings and other such stories were associated with this leader. Given the quick historical growth of his sect, there can be little doubt that people around him believed in this man and his miracles. But there have been many such figures in history. I always think of Aimee Semple McPherson, an evangelist and healer who flourished in the 1920s and 30s. The following is a contemporary newspaper account of her revival meeting in San Jose in 1921:

What followed beneath that tent on San Jose field will probably sound like the veriest hocus-pocus to many. But nevertheless it did happen. It happened not in the misty, nebulous long ago, to white-robed men and women in a time we cannot quite visualize as ever having had reality, but to children and men and women who had street addresses and telephone numbers, who came in automobiles and not on camel-back by caravan, as it was said they did long ago. The blind saw again; the deaf heard. Cripples left their crutches and hung them on the rafter. [Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson (1993) by Daniel Mark Epstein, pgs 229-30]

By analogy to other healers, I will assume that a fair amount of this was produced by psychosomatic suggestion.. although I would never accuse McPherson of trickery. Jesus of Nazareth, living in a far less educated and far more superstitious era, could obviously have evoked a similarly hysterical response from the crowds that followed him.

Finally, what about the final claim that my personal belief or disbelief in the story of this Chinese leader will determine my eternal destiny? That would be more absurd than anything else in the story: the idea that my fate depends on something as frail as a cognitive judgment of historical fact. It is no doubt reasonable to consider the claims concerning this Chinese leader and decide that the story is improbable.. and if it is reasonable to make that historical judgment, it will hardly be the determining factor in any scenario regarding my eternal destiny. Now, if an angel appeared to me and told me this story, then I would have another kind of claim to truth.. and I would have to decide whether someone put something in my orange juice.. but I think I will wait until that becomes an issue.

There is nothing in this line of reasoning that proceeds from an a priori assumption that God does not exist or that miracles do not happen. It is simply an example of how to think reasonably about a religious claim. I think most people, if presented with the same claims that are attached to Jesus of Nazareth, but displaced onto an otherwise unknown Chinese leader who lived four centuries ago, would come to a negative decision pretty quickly. The fact that the Christian claims appear more reasonable is simply a trick of perspective.. like the visual trick of lines that seems shorter of longer depending on their background.