Hi, Burgy,
Let me respond, and address Adrian's response to the same statement.
Jim has long retired (and, sadly, is ill). His own spiritual odyssey took
him from neo-orthodoxy and a southern populist engagement in civil rights
(he's a good friend of Will Campbell; he also edited the journal
"Katelagete" ["Be ye reconciled"], to eastern Orthodox Christianity. Jim
taught New Testament courses at Berea, focusing in particular on Paul. He
was (is) an old curmudgeon, and loved to shake up his students, especially
those who came into his Bible classes convinced that they already knew what
the Bible said and expecting to have their views confirmed. Jim forced them
to look at the text in ways they never had been asked to do before. One
example, as his students read the gospels, was to challenge them to break
out of the complacent notion that everything in the gospels is factual, and
if they said Jesus rose from the dead, he must have. Jim wanted them to
understand what is to be taken on faith and what is to be established on the
basis of the kind of firm and clear evidence that compels historical or
actual assent. The only information about the resurrection, he would point
out, comes from the testimony of believers, and that on this topic the NT
writings amount to "hearsay evidence" in the legal sense. There is no
independent confirming evidence, (I would add that there were other reports
in ancient literature of people coming back from the dead), and human
experience is that when you die you stay dead. Acceptance of the early
Christian community's proclamation that God raised Jesus from the dead, he
wanted his students to understand, is an act of faith.
I respect Adrian's contention that there is sufficient evidence in the
gospels themselves to give him reasons to think that the resurrection did in
fact happen. John Polkinghorne, in _Quarks, Chaos and Christianity_, makes
a thoughtful case for it on the basis of the same accounts. Still, Jim
would say, "I *believe* that God raised Jesus from the dead," not "I know
that Jesus rose from the dead."
Personally, I do not believe that Jesus' resurrection was an act of
resuscitation; what it was and just what the resurrection experience of his
disciples was, I leave to story and mystery--and a mystery is not a puzzle
you solve but something you enter into, like the incarnation, that other
profound and central mystery of the Christian faith. I shall enter into the
mystery liturgically this coming Sunday and meet the resurrected Christ in
the Eucharist.
God is great, and Jesus is Lord,
Bob Schneider
----- Original Message -----
From: "John (Burgy) Burgeson" <hoss_radbourne@hotmail.com>
To: <rjschn39@bellsouth.net>; <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: BIBLE: Marcus Borg
> Bob Schneider wrote: "Finally, my former colleague at Berea College, Jim
> Holloway, a Barthian and NT professor (once Southern Baptist, now
Antiochene
> Orthodox), use to tell his students, "The resurrection is not a fact."
How
> would you take that?"
>
> Wow! Now you have my attention!
>
> Please do not leave me hanging!
>
> Hoss (alias for Burgy. Sorry about the name confusion earlier. This is my
> "use away from home" email service; I had changed the name for a baseball
> discussion & did not change it back).
>
> If you got peeved with Hoss in the past week, cut him some slack. He was a
> great baseball pitcher in his day -- won 60 games one year. But he is long
> gone to that diamond in the sky.
>
> JB
>
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