Heaven, are you really
Waiting outside the door?
Never though I’d hear
The words before the road

Sever, it’s the simple things
That are so hard to grasp
Can’t find myself in all
The days that passed

But I can feel it when it shines
Never mind I’m falling in love with you
Can’t find the road that runs though
Falling love with you

Heaven, are you really
Waiting outside the door
Never thought I’d hear
The words before the road

Sever, it’s the simple things
That are so hard to grasp
Can’t find myself in all
These days that pass

But I can find feel it when it shines
Never mind the way they shy
Turning around along the trail
My whole world is falling in love with you

Can’t find the road that runs through
Falling in love with you
Can’t find the road that gets through

~Heaven, The Fire Theft

• 
  Fire Theft
  Artist: Fireft

Is heaven a place you find or a reality you desire?

Do all who earnestly seek arrive?

1″Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God[a]; trust also in me. 2In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4You know the way to the place where I am going.”

5Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

6Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7If you really knew me, you would know[b] my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

8Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

9Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. 12I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. 14You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

~John 14:1-14

Categories: Kingdom of God, Heaven, Bible Study, Music
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He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: He is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life…

…the presence of God.

~George MacDonald, Divine Burning

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Sanctification, Growth, George MacDonald, Books
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We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.

We hugged the brownstone wall behind us
To keep our dress clothes dry
And watched the sudden summer storm
Floodlit against the sky.

The rain was like a waterfall
Of brilliant beaded light,
Cool and silent as the stars
The storm hid from the night.

To my surprise, you took my arm–
A gesture you didn’t explain–
And we spoke in whispers, as if we two
Might imitate the rain.

Then suddenly the storm receded
As swiftly as it came.
The doors behind us opened up.
The hostess called your name.

I watched you merge into the group,
Aloof and yet polite.
We didn’t speak another word
Except to say good-night.

Why does that evening’s memory
Return with this night’s storm–
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointment warm?

There are so many might-have-beens,
What-ifs that won’t stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.

~Dana Gioia, Summer Storm

• 
  Interrogations at Noon
  Author: Dana Gioia

Perhaps the most dangerous of all nostalgia, the imaginary alternate life fueled by a missed opportunity…

Or maybe a hopeful reminder to pay attention next time.

Either way, loved this poem…

Categories: Memory, Regret, Desire, Poetry
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That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”

~George MacDonald, Dryness

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: George MacDonald, Faith, Books
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At 33, I find that I am especially prone to life reflection. There is a natural bend towards confessional writing as years of pretense and childish behavior finally give way to the inevitable decay of their charm.

I believe Augustine was 33 as well when he had his conversion experience and put to ink his monumental self diagnosis and theological treatise in the Confessions.

It is liberating to simply read and agree with this classic work. There are better than 16 centuries between our times, but in many ways the struggles, failures, revelations, and confessions are continuously one in the same.

I, wretch, was even as a child abandoned to Society, left at the edge of the arena where I was to contend, where I was more afraid of committing a solecism than concerned, if I did so, with my envy at any who did not commit it. I tell you this, and testify, my God, that this kind of praise was what I sought from those whose approval was my goal in life. I did not realize in what a maelstrom of ugliness ‘I was being swept off from your gaze.’ What could be fouler than the way I earned disapproval even from the worldly with my endless lies told to pedagogue, to teachers, to parents, so I could indulge my love of games, my passion for trivial plays, for re-enacting them with ludicrous clumsiness?

~St. Augustine, Confessions

• 
  Confessions (Penguin Classics)
  Author: Augustine

Over the last decade of hobby and profession I have entered into the “arena” of modern media communications and independent film. Youtube now offers the allure of viral fame and an endless collection of “trivial plays”, remember when people used to mock the hundreds of useless cable channels? I know there is a good handful of authentically valuable and inspiring original clips on Youtube (nothing immediately comes to mind), mixed in with the ever widening catalog of the entirety of modern media chunked out into 10 minute clips… but I would have to put most of it into the classification of “trivial plays”.

My heart sinks a little bit every time someone looks at me with eager excitement and says… “Have you seen such and such!” or “I have got to show you this, it is so funny…” And then they scurry to Youtube while entreating me to come around and look over their shoulder at the next spectacle.

I usually do enjoy whatever it is (most recently the double rainbow guy), I will ask to see it again even… and then enjoy the shared reference as a comical overtone later in conversation. This is my cultural moment, and I do share in it…

Augustine’s “arena” was not exactly Youtube, remember this was a real place where real people were torn limb from limb by real lions for sport and spectacle. The comparisons between modern western culture and that of late Rome (Augustine’s time) is one that I am so familiar with that it has already grown thinly trite before I even knew the true context.

Even now, it is difficult for me to make the connection from the Roman Colosseum to what is now referred to as “War Porn”, all those leaked videos from military moments of obliterating violence. There is no context, just a first person view of a fluid stream of liquid metal killing people that I do not know… followed by a large explosion of a place that I do not recognize. It feels very different than even watching a movie, say something like Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan, these are stories with people that I begin to know and the violence is part of their environment and personal narrative. No, “War Porn”… that is much closer to a video game… being behind a meaningless trigger that can be pulled as often as I like, with no relevance… just the juvenile glee of watching death and destruction in progress.

As reprehensible as this may be… it is the last of Augustine’s confessions on this quote that really grabbed me…

What could be fouler than the way I earned disapproval even from the worldly with my endless lies told to pedagogue, to teachers, to parents, so I could indulge my love of games, my passion for trivial plays, for re-enacting them with ludicrous clumsiness?

It is one thing to shirk responsibility and dodge wisdom for the enjoyment of something trivial… but to do so for the…

re-enacting of them with ludicrous clumsiness

…now that is a direct indictment that lands on the door step of every would be filmmaker. That desire to arrive at viral approval through the recreation of something enthusiastically base (an insult, a slander, a murder)… and a recreation that is even shoddy in comparison to the original…

…what a supreme waste of time, a Sin even.

A Youtube video (perhaps unjustly ripped from its film context) does now come to mind, one that I believe is much in the spirit of an Augustinian introspective confession.

Categories: Culture, Media, Film, Creativity, Confessions, Books, Film Making, Movies
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I have not read a page of Ayn Rand and I could hardly present what her philosophy of Objectivism is or means, other than to say that she believed that reality existed and it did not depend on our minds to do so.

Regardless, the title of her book Atlas Shrugged was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw this image in a recent article on the Architecture of Saint Patrick’s cathedral in New York City.

Curiously, in the same public square, directly across Fifth Avenue and in his own confined enclosure, crouches one of the most aggressively pagan responses to the Christian faith ever promulgated by the arts. In direct alignment with the cathedral’s great western doors, long center aisle, and high altar of sacrifice, the long-shelved Titan Atlas struggles in obsolescent effort to carry creation. We thank Atlas, for his constant vigil lends unintended richness to the Christian tradition of penitential veneration.

~James McCrery; First Things, A Proper Place

Is the story of Atlas a response to the Christian faith or just another precursor that is reasonably aligned with it?

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

~Romans, 8:22

The story of Atlas may have appeared as early as the 6th century BC, placing it well before the birth of Christ and Christianity.

I was recently amazed to learn of the nature of Augustine’s conversion being built upon the pre-Christian writings of Plato. When he read the theology presented in the gospels he saw immediate congruence with the wisdom of Plato, it made sense… it was rational. He was not trying to bend his mind into another dimension, he could just be honest about what he knew to be true already…

As a preliminary way of showing me how ‘the proud you rebuff, while favoring the lowly,’ and how great is the pity you show to humans on the lowly Path of your ‘Word made flesh in order to live with men,’ you brought to me a man, himself inflated with raging winds of pride, to acquaint me with certain books of the Platonists, translated into Latin from the Greek. What I found in reading them no precisely in these words, but saying the same thing in varied and very convincing ways, was this:’At the origin was the Word, and the Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God. This was at the origin with God, and all things were made through it, and nothing was made without it. In it, life was made, and the life was men’s light, and the light shone in the darkness, and darkness could not control it.’ Further, that the human soul, however it may bear testimony to the light, is not itself the light. God’s word is ‘the true light that gives light to every man who arrives in this world’ Further, that ‘He was in this world, and the world was made by Him, and the world did not recognize Him.’

but this I did not read there: ‘He came among His own, and His own did not accept Him, but to all who accepted Him, who believed in this title, He gave the right to become God’s sons.’

~St. Augustine, The Confessions

• 
  Confessions (Penguin Classics)
  Author: Augustine

It sounds familiar and it should, it’s basically John 1…

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.

3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

~John 1:1-5

Anyone who is conscious knows that there is a struggle going on in this world; externally and internally, its nothing new but it bears down fresh on every generation of humanity… “the weight of the world.” This is something every human can attest to, even with a pagan polytheistic cultural environment. But there is more, and this is what Augustine admits to as well…

but this I did not read there: ‘He came among His own, and His own did not accept Him, but to all who accepted Him, who believed in this title, He gave the right to become God’s sons.’

~St. Augustine

The scriptures brought him Christ. And in some way this photographic perspective of looking through the hollow atlas at the Church with a small yet centered cross is our continual testimony, mission, and commission. It is what the Church can do that mere philosophical or scientific speculation can not…

28″Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

~Matthew 11:28-30

Go ahead and try to hold up the world, try to fix everything in your own power… and when the banks fail, the ecology gets plundered, the noise is unbearable, and the loneliness is palpable even with 500 million friends… when you are truly weary and burdened… perhaps then you can shrug, drop the world, kneel even, and crawl across the street and into Communion…

18I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

26In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.

~Romans 8:18-27

Categories: Christianity, Plato, Architecture, Church, First Things, Bible Study, Philosophy, Books
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Autobiographical grandfatherly voices from the past are ever growing in my fondness and gratitude. I only knew my grandfathers in passing as a youngster, so I feel I may have lost out on a few moments of wisdom delivery that should be common in familial heritage.

Malcom Muggeridge is the latest addition. He writes this while reminiscing about his work with MI6, ya that’s right… imagine a real deal Tom Cruise, not crazy, with a sweet English accent, and ninety years of age at story time.

Before finally taking off, I had a few days’ leave, which of course I spend at Whatlington with Kitty and the children. It was the only place I ever wanted to be, and the place I was constantly leaving; my heart was there, but my body was restless and nomadic. Kitty and the children were with me always, yet easily forgotten in the foolish, and often vainglorious, if not squalid, preoccupations of the moment. The saddest thing to me, in looking back on my life, has been to recall, not so much the wickedness I have been involved in, the cruel and selfish and egotistic things I have done, the hurt I have inflicted on those I loved–although all that’s painful enough.

What hurts most is the preferences I have so often show for what is inferior, tenth-rate, when the first-rate was there for the having. Like a man who goes shopping, and comes back with cardboard shoes when he might have had leather, with dried fruit when he might have had fresh, with processed cheese when he might have had cheddar, with paper flowers when the primroses were out. Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy as the good, Simone Weil writes. ‘No desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil.’ True; but as she goes on to point out, with fantasy it is the other way round–Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm. Alas so much of my life has been spent pursuing this fictional good, and forgetful of the other, the real good, that is ever inspiring, ever renewed, making us, again to quote Simone Weil, ‘grow wings to overcome gravity’…

…Looking back I feel this more than ever; the loss was inestimable, the gain, to me or to the war effort, negligible. All that I can be grateful for is that, despite my shallow departure, thanks to Kitty our little bark remained afloat, and remains so still.

~Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time

• 
  Chronicles of Wasted Time
  Author: Malcolm Muggeridge

Sure, it reads like a Christmas special with a trite punch line about putting your family first. But you have to remember this guy is world traveler extraordinaire recruited into her majesties secret service… and still it is found wanting.

Just a little advice from an old man who has been there and done that.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

~C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

• 
  The Weight of Glory
  Author: C. S. Lewis

I like this twist on desire and it does seem accurate, desire is not something that should be squashed but rather directed appropriately and then encouraged to grow even greater.

Categories: Priorities, Malcolm Muggeridge, Advice, Family, Books
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Forget about the other six, says Pride.
They’re only using you.
Admittedly, Lust is a looker,
but you can do better.

And why do they keep bringing us
to this cheesy dive?
The food’s so bad that even Gluttony
can’t finish his meal.

Notice how Avarice
keeps filling his glass
whenever he thinks we’re not looking,
while Envy eye’s your plate.

Hell, we’re not even done, and Anger
is already arguing about the bill.
I’m the only one who
ever leaves a decent tip.

Let them all go, the losers!
It’s a relief to see Sloth’s
fat ass go out the door.
But stick around. I have a story

that not everyone appreciates–
about the special satisfaction
of staying on board as the last
grubby lifeboat pushes away.

~Dana Gioia, The Seven Deadly Sins

This cruise-liner is named PRIDE… and it is going down, those who choose to stay will ride it straight to Hell.

I first heard Dana Gioia speak as part of the Mars Hill Audio journal. I was taken back a bit by his decision to step down from the head of the National Endowment for the arts in order to pursue of all things, poetry. He made a statement to the effect, and I paraphrase…

I want to pursue the writing of poetry while I have the strength and vigor to fully attend to it.

I had never read any of his poetry until I discovered this little gem snuggled in-between the articles of First Things. Looking forward to reading more of the fruits of his poetic vigor as he focuses on this good work and art. He puts to poetry what Lewis laid out in prose…

The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride–just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains (rash) cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

~C.S. Lewis; Mere Christianity, The Great Sin

• 
  Mere Christianity
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Sin, Hell, Pride, Poetry, First Things
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Standing on a boulder you cast a line,
Your bare feet rounded by the flickering water
Of your native river thick with water lilies,
And who are you, staring at the float
While you listened to echoes, the clatter of paddles?
What is the stigma you received, young master,
You who are ill with your apartness
And have one longing: to be just like the others?
I know your story and I learned your future.
Dressed as a Gypsy girl I could stop by the river
And tell your fortune: fame and a lot of money,
Without knowledge, though, of the price to be paid
which one does not admit to the envious.
One thing is certain: in you, there are two natures.
The miserly, the prudent one against the generous.
For many years you will attempt to reconcile them
Till all your works have grown small
And you will prize only uncalculated gifts,
Greatheartedness, self-forgetful giving,
Without monuments, books, and human memory.

~Czeslaw Miloscz, A boy

• 
  New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001
  Author: Czeslaw Milosz

Autobiographical? Perhaps, but still full of the common experience of childhood desire, selling out, and then redefining value after a few hard knocks of wisdom.

It’s true, there are early mistakes we make as “young masters” that are hard to shake, envy can follow you for many days.

The fight between the natures, both so compelling… was it miserly behavior or was it prudence that I pit against generosity?

Those things most appreciated do grow small with their authenticity and intimacy; even desire for posterity will taint it.

Categories: Innocence, Czeslaw Milosz, Poetry
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I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions… It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. but it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and shares and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless he sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. but you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for the light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the questions should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’

when you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. if they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

• 
  Mere Christianity
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Membership, C.S. Lewis, Church, Books
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I am in love again, seems to happen about once a year… and usually by surprise. The less I know going in, the better it is. I have had my disappointments, so it is true that I am a bit jaded. But all it takes is one great night and I am all in again.

Something similar happened to me about 10 years ago. Walking through the parking lot afterward, I knew something special happened, but I could not quite describe it… merely enjoy it and relive it in my mind and later conversations with friends. Well, I did return for subsequent reunions, maybe a dozen or so in public… and who knows how many in private…

A few months ago something of promise along the same lines occurred… but it was mostly hype and in hindsight I had to admit it was pretty juvenile… much like my experiences of 10 years ago. But this time, entering into the reality of someones mind was more than entertaining… it was by far the best movie watching experience of this year, and I am in love with movies all over again.

Inception = Near Perfect, but I will settle for amazing…

• 
  Inception
  Artist: WaterTower Music

Ok, give me a few more days to back down from the infatuation… but this film really is good.

It’s true, I am a big fan of the first (only) Matrix film and I do consider it a modern-day masterpiece. So anything that takes the best elements of that story / film and re-meshes them into a retelling that has even deeper philosophical / spiritual relevancy scores very well with the shape of my film appreciating palette.

Avatar was a fun ride, and I do love big robots… but in the end I do believe its environmental charm is shallow and its neon 3D beauty will be fleeting.

Inception mashes up something better, by taking the very best visuals and metaphors of The Matrix and intertwining them with the emotional / psychological quandaries of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind into a package that is not only entertaining, but I do believe chock full of poignant commentary on the life of the mind, what it means to be human, the context of relationships as defining reality, and the search for authenticity.

When a film imaginatively invites me into exploring the reality of my own relational and spiritual issues; I am initially delighted, then horribly uncomfortable, but in the end… thankful.

It is when we are most aware of the factitude of things that we are most aware of our need of God, and most able to trust in Him… The recognition of inexorable reality in any shape, or kind, or way, tends to rouse the soul to the yet more real, to its relations with higher and deeper existence. it is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good. All who dream life instead of living it, require some similar shock.

~George MacDonald, Realism

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Reality, Film, George MacDonald, Movies
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Is our time at an end, and has the gospel been given to another people… to be preached perhaps with totally different words and deeds?

How do you view the indestructibility of Christianity given the situation in the world and our own lifestyles today?… How is one to preach such things to these people here? Who still believes in these things? The invisibility is killing us… To be continually cast backwards to the invisible God is insane; we can no longer accept it.

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Bonhoeffer was unable to hide his aversion for attempts to etherialize the church into structures of empty ritual and perfunctory services that merely fronted for what purported to be an essentially “invisible heavenly reality.”

~Geffrey B. Kelly, Life Together Introduction

• 
  Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 5)
  Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I did a brief tour of Europe about 3 years ago; including Berlin, the place from which Bonhoeffer was speaking when he asked the question…

Is our time at an end?

There is a good collection of survey data that would concede that the Christian faith is at best languishing in Europe and at worst, it has come to an end.

During my backpack gallivanting tour, I spent a fair amount of time visiting church buildings, mostly cathedrals of exquisite craftsmanship and enduring historical heritage.

Every city seemed to have at least a couple of landmark church buildings that were in the midst of some form of preservation. These buildings were spectacles of architectural wonder and beauty. But, I was left with the overwhelming impression that all of these buildings were now a relic of the past, preserved only for their tourist attracting capacity. There was not much evidence of the Church happening in these ornate facilities… it was invisible.

A fully etherialized church was a great fear of Bonhoeffer. But this is not to say that he was in any way against a well reasoned and articulated set of orthodox Christian beliefs, he just wanted to make sure that the things he believed were livable.

This is where I encounter a difficulty or even dichotomy between pragmatism and heretics. In many ways, folks who present a view of Christianity that is completely compatible with secular progresivism and humanism arrive at something that seems perfectly livable, sensible, and compatible with modern enlightenment. An enlightenment that can go to work immediately in the most visible forms of work on every conceivable front of social justice. But in a twist of irony, some of these folks need to etherialze Christian doctrine in the process, a bodily resurrection of Christ is somehow problematic to an embodied and enlightened Christian faith.

When one reads the New Testament in the order in which these books were written, a fascinating progression is revealed. Paul, for example, writing between the years 50 and 64 or some 20 to 34 years after the earthly life of Jesus came to an end, never describes the resurrection of Jesus as a physical body resuscitated after death. There is no hint in the Pauline corpus that one, who had died, later walked out of his grave clothes, emerged from the tomb and was seen by his disciples.

What Paul does suggest is that Easter meant that God had acted to reverse the verdict that the world had pronounced on Jesus by raising Jesus from death into God. It was, therefore, out of God in a transforming kind of heavenly vision that this Jesus then appeared to certain chosen witnesses. Paul enumerates these witnesses and, in a telling detail, says that this was the same Jesus that Paul himself had seen. No one suggests that Paul ever saw a resuscitated body. The Pauline corpus later says, “If you then have been raised with Christ, seek the things which are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” Please note that the story of the Ascension had not been written when these Pauline words were formed. Paul did not envision the Resurrection as Jesus being restored to life in this world but as Jesus being raised into God. It was not an event in time but a transcendent and transforming truth.

~Bishop John Shelby Spong

Somehow the proclamation as metaphor, “Elvis has left the building” seems especially applicable to this sort of revisionist theology. If the bodily resurrection of Christ leaves the church and all you are left with is a spiritual metaphor of “transcendent and transforming truth”, well maybe you will end up with a bunch of hollow architectural shells of an out-moded faith that no longer “works”.

Before the effects of such beliefs are contemplated, the historical accuracy and probability of the resurrection can be defended by scholars quite readily, N.T. Wright is the name that currently contends against this sort of allegorizing of the resurrection.

I have not spent a lot of time with all of his arguments, but I think the crux of it is that the bodily resurrection of Christ is the best explanation for the history of Christianity and it is something that completely took the Jewish theologians by surprise… they would not have been able to make it up.

…the foundation of my argument for what happened at Easter is the reflection that this Jewish hope has undergone remarkable modifications or mutations within early Christianity, which can be plotted consistently right across the first two centuries. And these mutations are so striking, in an area of human experience where societies tend to be very conservative, that they force the historian… to ask, Why did they occur?

The mutations occur within a strictly Jewish context. The early Christians held firmly, like most of their Jewish contemporaries, to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. ‘Resurrection’ is not a fancy word for ‘life after death’; it denotes life after ‘life after death’.

~N.T. Wright

Categories: Resurrection, Europe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Community, Books, Church, Theology
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