Why, Today, I Believe in Resurrection
I am a skeptical person. I don’t believe in ghosts, witches, astrology, or Bigfoot. I’m allergic to woo. I roll my eyes when people bring up personality profiles.
I’m also a Christian. Christianity is, for better or worse, a religion of miracles. Its founder walked on water, healed the sick, appeared with long-dead saints, and himself rose from the dead. It grows out of a religion that attests to such wonders as the parting of the sea, water flowing from a rock, a river turning to blood, and the sun standing still. And that’s not to mention all the talk of angels and demons, visions and prophecies, signs and charisma.
It’s a lot to take in. Enough that I get it when people compare it to other ancient myths or Santa Claus or the flying spaghetti monster. Even though I know those are usually lazy comparisons, in some moods I agree with them. When someone would ask me if I believed in miracles, I used to say “Depends on the day of the week.” Now I’m more inclined to say something like “I accept them, but I don’t believe them.” This is a philosophical distinction, and true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t quite satisfy.
I feel its inadequacy most powerfully at Easter. When I meditate, as Christians are wont to do, on Jesus’s resurrection from the dead after three days in the tomb and his subsequent appearances to his followers for forty days after, I confess that I find it very difficult to assent to the factual nature of the events. I imagine being there at the tomb, waiting for the angel to appear, for the stone to roll away, and try as I might, I can’t get past the waiting. A couple years ago, I was watching the show Devs, a heady dystopian bit of sci-fi in which quantum computing makes a shocking leap forward, enabling its creators to view a visual representation of any past event. The writers boldly chose to use Jesus’s crucifixion as a way to introduce viewers to the immensity of the discovery, with the computer’s creators marveling at what they’ve done as they watch Jesus hang on the cross, and for a moment there’s a will-they-won’t-they as you wonder if they’re going to fast-forward three days to the next scene. To their credit, they didn’t, but the scene had its intended effect anyway: I knew in that instant what I would expect to see if they had, and I knew that I didn’t believe.
This can be a startling revelation for someone who once stood over my grandfather’s failing body, groping for words of encouragement and conviction as he breathed his last, finding myself speaking of the resurrection to come, of the hope in our grieving, as though it were a certainty, as though I had seen it myself, put my hands in the side as Thomas did. Or, as they said he did.
It’s not that I have any metaphysical objections to miracles. I don’t. As far as I can tell, if God exists, all bets about what They might or might not do are off. And I’m a Pentecostal, which means, among other things, that I’m the kind of Christian who is supposed to look for “signs and wonders,” to pray for the sick expecting them to be healed, to listen for God’s voice in specific, practical contexts. And I have heard the voice. Or at least, I believe I have. I believe it in the same sense that I believe I’ve seen El Capitan in the sunlight, or that I’ve felt the hot springs of Iceland on my skin, or that I’ve tasted some of the best whiskey in the world. Well, not quite the same sense. I’ve also enjoyed leisurely days with my wife, had my infant son kiss my face, and been moved to tears by music. There was something of all those experiences in it too.
I could be wrong about all of these things, of course. And yet I remember them clearly, and they all contain a richness of experience that I cannot verbalize. What’s more, they all presented themselves to me as real. As concrete, tangible, alterous things. To disbelieve them would not be to reject a metaphor, or to reinterpret a vague memory with the aid of inference (“I seem to recall it was warm, so it must have been summer…”); it would be to question my own perceptual capacity. That could be faulty too of course, but it seems to be working fine otherwise, and at any rate, I have no reason to doubt it in any of those cases. In the most powerful ones, I was not looking for the experience; it was just there, like turning a corner on a path to find a waterfall.
Now, while I have no metaphysical objections to miracles happening, I do have epistemological objections to believing reports of them. As such, I don’t expect anyone who reads the previous paragraphs to find God’s existence any more likely, or to believe it at all, unless they’ve experienced something similar themselves. Similarly, when people tell me of extraordinary things they’ve witnessed, or even documented, I tend to believe them about their belief — just as I expect them to believe me about mine — but I also believe that, from my perspective, the odds of them being mistaken in some way about the explanation of the event are higher than the odds that the course of nature was interrupted in this instance for a divine purpose and they were there to witness it. The justification for this is complicated, and I’m not sure about it either, but the upshot is that I don’t generally find miracle reports credible even when they’re recent, much less when they’re thousands of years old. And I certainly don’t think anymore that the fact of Jesus’s resurrection has some evidential role to play in an argument for Christianity or theism. On the other hand, while virtuous reasoners having such experiences or believing such things doesn’t mean I must believe them too, it does mean I can’t just dismiss them. Does it bother me that highly intelligent, accomplished people trying very hard to be unbiased disagree with me about this in both directions? Yes, very much. Thus, I remain agnostic about modern miracles.
As you might imagine, this leaves me with complicated feelings about Easter. There have been years when I’ve swelled with emotion and conviction again, my hope settled deep within me. I remember one year in particular when I visited an old country church with my mother. As the sun rose outside, the Son rose inside the painfully off-key voices of the small choir. Something about the complete lack of hesitation of those voices, as though they had never met a piece of sheet music nor needed to, kindled confidence in me. The voices were owned by some I knew, likely ignorant of fact and argument, yes, but not of suffering or perseverance or, from the tears that were on their faces too, the presence of God. As we sang about the old rugged cross, I thought about my mother beside me, about the polio that had taken so much from her, I envisioned her healing, and I wept.
Other years I feel nothing at all and I’m sure that death is the end.
And what if it is? What if, as some like to speculate, we had proof that the resurrection didn’t happen and that Jesus’s body returned to the earth like the rest of us? What would be different? “What,” as biblical scholar Marcus Borg asked, “is added to the meaning of the resurrection by believing… that it happened in a material physical bodily way?” I have friends who feel similarly, who note, whether they believe in the resurrection or not, that if it weren’t factual, their faith would remain intact. They’d practice the same and hope the same and in some cases believe the same because they understand the resurrection to have tremendous metaphorical and ethical power whether or not it has physical power, whether or not the dead have been or will be raised. What really matters is that the way of Jesus accords with “the grain of the universe,” as Hauerwas put it.
I confess this does not move me. I sometimes feel like a bad liberal (a label I own proudly in most cases) because I just cannot see the value in it. I guess it’s partly because I’m aware of lots of ethical systems and lots of other beautiful metaphors and narratives that can accomplish the same things, many of them doubtless springing from similar psychic origins as the Christian metaphor would on this reading. This takes nothing from the particular Christian one, I hasten to add; I am enough of a pluralist to see the value in a number of overlapping but discrete metaphors. But Christianity contributes nothing unique on this view. I hasten to add again: it’s not that it needs to claim anything unique. I just think that it does.
But this isn’t really why it fails to move me, even though I understand it. That’s put better by, of all people, Wittgenstein.
What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s resurrection? I play as it were with the thought. — If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like every human being. He is dead & decomposed. In that case he is a teacher, like any other & can no longer help; & we are once more orphaned & alone. And have to make do with wisdom & speculation. It is as though we are in a hell, where we can only dream & are shut out from heaven, roofed in as it were.
And if you say “It’s love! Love is what matters. Love is what’s resurrected and what enables us to believe in a general resurrection!” he replies:
Then you will see that what you are holding on to is this belief. So this can only come about if you no longer support yourself on this earth but suspend yourself from heaven… (It is true that someone who is suspended looks like someone who is standing but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless a quite different one & hence he is able to do quite different things than can one who stands.) (MS 120 108c: 12.12.1937)
In other words, you’ve already left the mode of action for the mode of thought. I can think the resurrection as well as anyone else, can believe in the power of its story, but thinking it won’t heal my mother. Believing in a future righting of wrongs and the bowing of every knee won’t either.
Why do people think that things can be made right once they’ve happened? Punishment, or even rehabilitation, of a perpetrator does nothing to make their act just; it’s simply an expression of vengeance or of mercy, as the case may be, a demonstration of our character and moral conviction, but not an adjustment of the scales, not really. That’s not within our power. Even resurrection doesn’t solve this. But at least it lets the conversation happen. The conversation wherein we all say to the one who presumably does have the power what we’ve wanted to say since we learned what death was. How could you.
Why do people think that the ultimate triumph of love and goodness is enough? Ivan Karamazov put the lie to that, didn’t he? Paul should perhaps have clarified: If these dead are not raised, then we are to be pitied.* Does any amount of future bliss compensate for what I read on Twitter every day? Any amount of miraculous intervention, always temporary, always insufficient? Would unmaking it even make the difference? I don’t see how it could, if it’s even a coherent question. Yet I intend to ask it, if there’s a resurrection.
I understand if some see atheism in these words, as many see it in Ivan’s words. And yet he claims to believe, as do I. I think it’s because when I say these things, when I reach into my gut for what I really think and not merely for what I can justify, I feel Christ there. I feel him as I felt him that day in my friend’s apartment, just before he suffered his psychotic break, as though Jesus sat next to me on the couch and all I could do was lay on the floor and apologize to my friend. I feel him asking it too, as he asked it, in his own way, from the cross. And yes, I know how Psalm 22 ends, but you try reciting a whole poem when searing pain is clouding out anything but the rawest emotion. I once had a doctor burn a hole through my thumbnail to relieve the built-up pressure of a subungual bleed, and all I could do was curse at him though I had consented to the procedure. If he had set up the situation so that the bleed had happened, I imagine my curse would have come from a deeper place.
The only resurrection that’s meaningful to me is the one in which the little girl herself gets to demand an explanation, of her abuser and of God, who from her perspective may be the same. So I cannot find hope or comfort in a symbolic resurrection. It’s blood and sinew and bone and memory and reason or it’s nothing. And I think Jesus, at least the one I’ve experienced, agrees. If I didn’t think this, I wouldn’t bother with Christianity, which is not intrinsically more beautiful or justifiable or compelling than other moral or religious traditions. I’d still be moral, sure, and I’d still love people, and I’d vote the same and spend my money the same and perhaps say the same words at church on weekends and at funerals. But I’d have no hope and I’d believe pain and death are meaningless, and I defy anyone to tell me that’s not a change. The point of resurrection was never to make us good people or to make life make sense or to dull our grief or indignation at death. If it was for that, it’s wholly inadequate for the task. The point of resurrection is that in a life without it, suffering and death are a cruel, humorless joke, far beneath the dignity of any God worthy of the title.
And that may yet be the truth, for all I know. But at Easter, this Easter anyway, I find that I am able to believe it isn’t. I don’t really know why. I think there is a social aspect of belief, especially belief in things that are evidentially undecided and of universal import, that plays some role. When our Christian community says univocally on this day, with the saints of two millennia behind us, that Christ Is Risen, it’s a little easier to trust that it’s true.
But maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe I believe it because I watch my son play on the floor as I write and I think that any power that could have made him must see at least as much as I do when I look at him and would never let whatever may befall him be the end of the story, because I wouldn’t. Whatever the reason, today I believe.
*I think he does mean this. As he says: “If Christ has not been raised… then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.” (1 Cor. 15:17–18)
