The Easter enigma (13 days and counting…)

What’s the big deal about Easter?  What difference does it make whether we pay any attention to this story or not?  Well, for starters, the last 2,000 years of world history would be drastically – almost unimaginably – different without the Easter story.  Imagine, if you will, a world without Christianity (for many, this may be a rather pleasant thought) – no Crusades, no Inquisition, no collusion of the Church with colonialism, no European wars of religion[1], to mention only a few of the “sins of the Church”[2].  However, a world without Christianity would also be a world without universities, hospitals, innumerable charitable organisations, countless advances in agriculture and technology, and the modern scientific method itself.[3]  Actually, the 18^th-century French revolutionaries discovered that it’s no easy thing to eliminate Christian influence from Western culture – their attempt to change the Gregorian calendar[4] was short-lived (as was their reign of terror).  Neither was it an accident that scholarly “criticism” of the New Testament Gospels coincided with the broader 18^th-century cultural movement known as “the Enlightenment”.  Those who wished to create a new world devoid of (a credible) Christianity understood very well that in order to do so, they would have to (historically) discredit the Christian story, whose culmination was the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead on the third day following his crucifixion.  All this to say that the world we live in was in large measure “created” by the “idle tale”[5] of those women who ran from the rising Sun outside Jerusalem on that fateful first day of the week.  The Easter story not only influenced the way the world was perceived by those influenced by Christianity, but also had concrete ramifications for how the Western world was shaped.  Stories matter.

“Modernizing” the story.  Since the rise of Enlightenment modernity, the meaning of the Easter story can no longer be taken for granted as it was during the pre-modern period.  Prior to the Enlightenment, the Easter story, by and large, was simply understood as being part of God’s revelation in Scripture.  Period.  The resurrection was ensconced in the Creed, professed by most Christians every Sunday.  Across Western culture, the Easter story was simply assumed to be true.  Of course, to put it mildly, this is no longer the case.  At this point, it’s important to insist that those who rejected the Easter story in the 18^th century did not do so simply because it emerged out of the ancient world, a time when, according to some, such stories were simply accepted uncritically.  As we have seen, the motives of the modern Easter-deniers went beyond a simple desire for intellectual integrity.  Also, pre-modern people were not all “pre-critical” by any stretch.  Centuries before Jesus, classical Greek thinkers were busy debunking the myths of the Greek gods, goddesses and heroes.  The idea that reason should trump myth as a means of understanding the world is not a modern notion – it dates back (at least) to Socrates (5^th century BC).  The idea of someone coming back from the dead was no more plausible in the first century (AD) than it was in the 18^th century.

Modern Option # 1: the story is a lie.  Part of the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment included the notion of naturalism.  David Hume (1711-76), a Scottish philosopher, taught that in order to believe in the actuality of an event in the world, the event would have to occur on a regular, observable basis.  Hume thus claimed to have ruled out the possibility of “miracles”, i.e. sporadic, divine interventions into nature.  For the disciples of Hume, it was simply impossible to believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  After all, how often did dead people not remain dead?  Hume’s “elimination” of the possibility of events which contravened the observable laws of nature (“miracles”) was but one example of the 18^th-century cultural mood which rejected divine revelation and human authority as reliable sources of knowledge and embraced human reason (especially the scientific method) as being the doorway to truth.  Enlightenment thinking did not automatically lead to atheism per se; however, it did lead many to a belief in a god who did not act within the world, a god very different from the God of the Bible.

Modern Option # 2: the story is supernaturally true.  The Christian churches felt an acute need to respond to this cultural and intellectual shift.  There were two main reactions on behalf of the churches.  First of all, there was the fundamentalist/pietistic reaction which rejected all “criticism” of Scripture.  The fundamentalists simply insisted on the reality of a “supernatural” God – a God beyond the limits of the laws of the natural world – who could act “supernaturally” in any way His will dictated.  In other words, God was not limited by natural laws and could simply suspend those laws (i.e. perform miracles) if He so desired.  Concerning the resurrection of Jesus, fundamentalists simply affirmed that this miracle occurred, not least because it was recorded in Scripture, understood as being the inerrant Word of God, free from all possible error.  Fundamentalism was actually Christian rationalism, the flip-side of the skeptical rationalism of the Enlightenment.  Fundamentalism attempted to defend the integrity of the Christian faith, but it allowed modernity to establish the parameters by which the quest for truth was conducted.

Modern Option # 3: the story is symbolically true.  On the other hand, there was the “liberal” reaction on the part of those churches who embraced modernity and re-interpreted Christianity so as to reduce the tension between the faith and the widely-accepted scientific (materialistic) vision of the Enlightenment.  While the fundamentalists turned toward the category of the “supernatural”, the liberals availed themselves of psychological categories and the idea of “religious experience”.  As they accepted the conclusions of modern criticism of Scripture, they salvaged the scriptural data by infusing the Bible with new meaning.  Feeling it now impossible to affirm what appeared to be the surface meaning of the biblical text, the liberals interpreted the Bible as describing the religious experience of the authors, all the while rejecting the purported historical referent of the text.  For example, the Gospel stories of the resurrection didn’t actually refer to the dead body of Jesus being transformed into a state of bodily immortality and leaving behind an empty tomb; no, these stories refer to the religious experience of the disciples of Jesus following the crucifixion of their leader.  Telling these stories was their way of ascribing meaning to Jesus’ death.  While the Easter stories had no historical value, they were believed to have symbolic and metaphorical value for the Christian believer.  Both the fundamentalists and the liberals conceded – in accordance with Enlightenment thinking – that rationalism was the royal road to truth, and both groups attempted to affirm the doctrines of Christianity either by proposing an “orthodox” rationalism or by accommodating the faith to skeptical rationalism.

A fourth option.  There remains another option for those who wish to understand the Easter story – this consists of approaching the story on its own terms.  This involves setting aside modern preoccupations and simply allowing the story to be itself.  We will explore this way of approaching the story tomorrow.

(I’ve attached links below to the Easter narratives in the 4 New Testament Gospels)

Gospel of St. Matthew (chapter 28)

Gospel of St. Mark (chapter 16)

Gospel of St. Luke (chapter 24)

Gospel of St. John (chapter 20)

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[1] I.e. wars which began after the 16^th-century Protestant Reformation, waged between Protestant states and Catholic ones.  These wars lasted until the 18^th century.  Someone once cynically told me that a large proportion of those who died in wars during the 20^th century were Christians who had been killed by other Christians.  While there is much truth in that statement (cf. the opening scenes of the 2005 film “Joyeux Noël”, where children of the belligerent nations of WWI are taught to hate their “enemies”), let us not forget the many millions of Europeans (not to mention Asians) who perished under 20^th-century Communist (atheistic) regimes.

[2] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apologies_made_by_Pope_John_Paul_II (accessed March 30, 2020).

[3] Cf. https://read.amazon.ca/kp/embed?asin=B00C0JE80W&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_b7JGEbYFSKEH4 (accessed March 30, 2020).  The Big Bang Theory of cosmic origins was proposed by Roman Catholic Priest and physicist Georges Lemaître (1894-1966).

[4] Based on the (supposed) date of the birth of Jesus (Anno Domini (AD; i.e. “in the year of our Lord”) 2020).  Even the recent tendency to substitute “Before Common Era” (BCE) and “Common Era” (CE) for B.C. and AD is simply a restatement of the fact that we measure time as either coming before or after the birth of Jesus (CE 2020).

[5] Cf. Lk. 24.11.