From: Ted Davis (tdavis@messiah.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 04 2003 - 08:42:00 EDT
Howard asks me,
The question is, Does your term "biblical religion" necessarily entail a
commitment to the concept of supernatural divine intervention (the
overpowering or superceding of natural causes)? If your answer is, Yes, then
your rejection of minimal naturalism is indeed necessary to maintain your
commitment to biblical religion.
Ted replies: Yes, my answer is that "supernatural divine intervention" is
necessary to maintain my commitment to biblical religion. As an historian
as well as a believer, I cannot at all understand how Christianity would
exist if there had been no resurrection--and, like NT Wright, I think it
simply a red herring to think of "resurrection" as anything other than a
genuine empty tomb (without a stolen body) and genuine post-crucifixion
appearances (if you'd been there, you'd have been able to see and touch a
physical body that you would recognize as similar to that of Jesus). The
modernist "wishful thinking" view literally makes no congitive sense to this
historian, it's so fundamentally against what the texts both say and mean.
One either believes it, or one doesn't, but one can't have Christianity with
wishful thinking.
My faith begins with the passion/Incarnation/resurrection, and my rational
reconstruction of it (to borrow an old term and sometimes useful term from
the philosophers of science) begins in every case from the resurrection. I
go forward from there and back from there. To borrow Luther's words, here I
stand, no other stand can I take....
Such a God that raised Jesus, IMO, has precisely the kind of power over
nature that is *necessary* if we are to speak genuinely of nature as a
"creation." I know we don't agree on that point, but I think it's
insightful, that the early modernist theologian Gerald Birney Smith did not
think that "the word 'creation', which inevitably suggests a definite
beginning in time [I agree with him], is an appropriate word to use in
connection with the idea of the immanent direction of a never-ceasing
process." The context here, is that one ought not to retain traditional
language to mean something so fundamentally different that it isn't even
recognizably the same concept.
I would say, ditto, to "resurrection," as used by Bultmann et al.
I can see the legitimacy of using the word "Christian" to describe many ways
conceptually of framing one's understanding of God's relationship to the
world we see around us. I can't see it applying legitmately to all such
ways, without in effect denying the essence of monotheism; or the
incarnation; or even a reasonably historical understanding of the gospels.
My interest in "religious" understandings of the world, other than the kind
of Christian understanding of the world outlined above, is purely academic
and not personal. Ironically, for once I'm with Steven Weinberg on this
one--if God isn't "God" in the traditional sense, it isn't really very
interesting to me.
ted
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