The Matter of Birth and Resurrection: A Response to Timothy Keller
Today the New York Times featured the reflections of a prominent Presbyterian pastor, the Rev. Timothy Keller, as he considered journalist Nicholas Kristof’s doubts about Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection.
These are basic questions most pastors are called upon to answer, but it is quite another thing to do so in the secular glare of the Times. I appreciate that Keller did not reinforce the journalist’s secular humanist inclinations and suggest that Scripture and the creeds are irrelevant the way some clergy often do. Had I been part of the conversation, there are a few points I would have hastened to add in explaining why the two doctrines remain important in our century.
It’s not uncommon for Christians to struggle with the doctrine of the virgin birth. My response to such struggles always begins with why it became a creedal sentence. The context is key. The church was threatened by the rise of movements which held that Jesus could not have been made of flesh. This claim arose from their peculiar relegation of material things to the realms of nothingness or evil. Thus, they taught, the Jesus who appeared as a man was a phantom, not really enfleshed.
The church’s practices and creeds inoculate the church in many ways against the denial that material things are good. The greatest of these is the prism of the Eucharist, which sees the most ordinary of things — like bread, wine, and water — as redemptive. Another key way was the naming of Jesus as ‘born of a woman’ in the same way as you and me. Flesh, blood, after-birth, flatulence, pimples, emotion, temptation…. The creedal statement is rooted in this naming of Jesus as that which the proto-Gnostics denied: fully human. The theological point of the creedal sentence is not to describe a miracle birth but to describe an ordinary birth. And it did so in a way entirely consistent with the Jewish story of the Tabernacle in Genesis, how the Word that nourished Israel arose from the “womb” of the space where man met God.
The Resurrection is central to Christianity in the same way. It is first and foremost a description of the way the world is — a place where God is always creating and recreating such that all things are made new. This worldview denies the common account of a static world wherein all that is possible for us is given in the past and therefore time is going nowhere. The Resurrection says that the world is indeed being recreated in every moment and time is moving towards creation’s fulfillment, becoming what God dreams it to be. Time has meaning. The world will not end in a great conflagration as the Stoics (and many Stoicized Christians) believe, but will continue towards our destiny of harmony and union with God, in spite of all the signs to the contrary. This worldview is the foundation of hope.
Some folks struggle with the Resurrection because they mistake life for the capacity of one’s breath to steam a mirror. But, biblically, life is not about absence but presence — not about the absence of bodily function but the presence of an enduring relation. As Karl Barth reminds us, the Resurrection is paradoxically about the simultaneous humiliation and exaltation of Jesus, through whom God speaks to all humankind, summoning all to his recreative purpose. “He lives!” means that, in spite of your death, you live, too. Eternally.
The mechanics of God’s achievement are beyond our view. The salient point is that God determined to be in relationship with God’s creation based upon who God is and not upon who we are or whether we understand the Resurrection. I agree with N.T. Wright that the most we can say about the Easter event — as a singular point in time — is that something happened on that first Easter that was so extraordinary that it inspired countless martyrs to lives of exalted humiliation, imitating Jesus. Their lives thereby carry on Jesus’ Word, speaking it in fresh ways in and to each generation. In the Resurrection, something happened that transformed history. Whatever happened, it was an irruption into history, transforming it. We live!
Keller errs, I think, in accepting the premise of Kristof’s question: the idea that there are certain assertions that are decisive in determining if one is a Christian. I like the way he subtly changes the description of what is at stake: these questions do not determine one’s relation to God but rather whether one’s truth claims about Jesus are within the boundaries of what is believed by concrete Christian communities. So it is not a matter of one’s relationship to God but about one’s location relative to a particular community pledged to follow Jesus as Lord. Subtle, but spot on.
That said, I would have preferred Keller to reject the premise. Kristof and many Christians have it exactly backwards. It is not our answers that make us Christian, but our acts of following Jesus that make our answers. This is Paul’s logic in Romans 10:1–30, where Paul talks about those who declare Jesus as Lord. Declaring Jesus as Lord does not suffice to make one Christian. The acts of following do. Such an assertion is not causative but descriptive. It is not that one can make a declarative statement about Jesus and thereby become a Christian, but rather that the way we can recognize the community of people who follow Jesus is that they are the ones who name through their actions that Jesus is Lord.
So, too, neither belief in the virgin birth nor the Resurrection are causative in making one a Christian such that mouthing those doctrines causes one to be a Christian. Rather, if one observes the set of people actively following Jesus and seeking to construct lives that declare him as Lord, then one also observes a people pursuing lives that begin with two premises.
First, that God is not a phantom but indeed enfleshed and so immanent as to be as close as our breath. Immanuel, God-with-us. We are never alone. Hope is always a rational act because God is as near as your neighbor’s face.
Second, that the nature of the world is not that of a static ordering that limits our possibility but rather that of an endless creation and recreation due to God’s ongoing irruption into history, justifying God’s creation again and again so that it is brought to its fulfillment in time. Hope is always a rational act because God’s nature is to make all things new so that we might enjoy the fellowship of abundant life.
Or, as we shall remember this Christmas, “the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not extinguish the light.”
Christmastide 2016
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