Apr, 27

2018

What makes the resurrection of Jesus so significant to Christianity?

Dr. Gary Habermas is one of the foremost defenders of the historical Jesus and the Resurrection, the crux of Christianity. He is the Distinguished Professor of Apologetics and Philosophy and chairman of the department of philosophy and theology at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He has authored or coauthored more than three dozen books and has been a visiting professor at more than a dozen graduate schools.

Dr. Habermas was recently a guest on two episodes of Hank Unplugged. The following dialogue is adapted from that discussion.

Hank Hanegraaff: Let’s look at comparative religions. There is just nothing on the landscape like Christianity. So often people have this idea that you are going to find facsimiles of the Resurrection in other religions; however, that is not the case. In fact, the more you look, the less there is for the historicity of the other religious figures in some cases, and in the main there is no good reason for believing that what people are giving their lives to, or what they have believed to be reality, has any validity at all.

Gary Habermas: That is right. In fact, my teaching assistant, who is a PhD candidate, and I just finished two articles. One of them is for the Christian Research Journal. The other for another publication. For both, I was asked to write an article on the uniqueness of Christianity vis-à-vis other religions. We list about six things that are really different, all of which surround the nature of the gospel. You are so right in that comment.

In fact, if I could expand it just a little bit. All religions have what you might call negative apologetics. They will say, “You are a loser,” “you are wrong,” “that is not correct;” however, no other faith, including Judaism, no other religion has what we would call positive evidences, wherein they could say, “My faith is true for these reasons,” and really give solid reasons. When I give a lecture on this subject, about what is true about religion and what is not, I give a list of about ten reasons, and four of them are simply true of religion in general. For example, intelligent design. You could say, “I’m a Buddhist, and I think the universe is designed also.” You can also talk about near-death experiences, and a person can say, “I’m a Hindu and my uncle had a near-death experience.” That is for religion in general. But, six of the ten evidences are evidences that indicate Christianity specifically is true. To my knowledge, other religions do not have this empirical, measurable data that says, “Our faith is true because of this, this, and so on.” You are exactly right. The Resurrection heads the list for Christianity.

Hank: Take me through the progression on how things have changed in the academy since the time of your PhD work to the present in terms of how the Resurrection is viewed.

Gary: Sure. You know what? That is a tricky question, because oftentimes when I do this general lecture on the Resurrection, which I have given something like two thousand times, I will talk about differences just like that. I tell them when I was in graduate school (you talk about our ages); I was finishing my PhD when I was still quite young. I finished my PhD when I was twenty-five years old. I was twenty-one years old in graduate school when I started my MA. If I were to say in my grad classes in those days, “Hey, you know what? I believe Jesus did miracles,” “I believe the tomb was empty,” or “I believe He appeared in bodily form to His followers,” if I were to say one of those three things (Jesus did miracles; tomb was empty; He appeared bodily), my classmates would probably judge, whether or not they said so in public, that they just heard from a guy that is either an evangelical or a conservative Catholic. This is, at least at our university. I have my master’s degree from a Catholic university. They might say, “Oh, yeah, he must be studying for the priesthood or something. Well, only conservatives believe those things.”

Today, I will give you a rundown on all three of them. Jesus is a miracle worker. Where is that? It has been said in books that 100 percent, though that is not quite true, but some of the research books today say that 100 percent of schools believe that Jesus did miracles, at least healing miracles and exorcisms. He either did the ones in the Gospels, or things just like them. In other words, maybe instead of feeding five-thousand, he fed three-thousand, but that thing happened. Miracles are “in” today.

Empty tomb. Where are we on that? Empty tomb is held by about 75 percent of scholars today, whereas when I was in school, it might have been 20 percent.

Lastly, what about the view that Jesus was raised in bodily form, not just some sort of wispy or ghostly sort of form? The majority view today is that Jesus appeared, and that He appeared bodily. A recent survey I did a few years ago, less than one in four critical scholars now come up with naturalistic theories to explain away the Resurrection. In my headcount, this was very unofficial, but in the little headcount I did, it was like 23 to 24 percent who come up with naturalistic theories. Naturalistic theories are kind of ignored today. This is kind of a day when the supernatural is “in.” Yet, so many say, “I’m Buddhist.” This is surely a popular thing, and you can be a Buddhist while not being really conservative, so people do not go, “Oh, really?” Rather, they just go, “Huh, yep, go right on.” But if you say, “I am a conservative Christian,” you will get screamed at.

The field is changing to answer your question. Belief in the supernatural is way up. Personal belief in miracles, personal belief in the afterlife, 70 percent, 80 percent, and sometimes 90 percent.

Hank: You alluded to this already, but I think it will be good for people listening in to get just an idea, a flavor, of why we are so passionately supporting the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You think about the quintessential text, 1 Corinthians 15, when Paul says,

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born (vv. 3-8 NIV).

The first thing that strikes me is that Paul is receiving something and passing it on. It turns out that he is passing along a creedal statement that can be traced all the way back to the Messiah’s murder. How significant is it that Paul is talking about something that has no time whatsoever for legendary corruption?

Gary: It is extremely important. Critics, even those who are Jesus Seminar members (that may not be a phrase a lot of your listeners know about, but the Jesus Seminar is the group that throw the beads in the hat, and if you count the so-called red-letter words of Jesus, based on how the colors of the beads are counted, they reject between 80-90 percent of Jesus’ red-letter words, the sayings. They say Jesus did not say those things), well, there are Jesus Seminar scholars, I am thinking of one right now whose is very prominent, he calls that, as many of them do, he calls that phrase (1 Corinthians 15:3–8) a pre-Pauline utterance.

Someone can say, “Well, of course it is pre-Pauline; Paul said he got it from somebody else.” But, I am saying something a little bit different. Paul is saying he got it from somebody else. Okay, yep, that is for sure; however, pre-Pauline means when Paul was on the way to Damascus and met the risen Jesus, that creed was already in existence. If you call it pre-Pauline, you mean it was there when Saul of Tarsus was a persecutor.

If Paul’s conversion is, as it is often dated, one to three years after the cross — if you date the cross at AD 30, some say AD 33, but if you date the cross at AD 30, Paul’s conversion is at AD 31–33 — that creed was already there between AD 30 and the date of the conversion. Some of the leading critics will put that creed back at about AD 30. James D. G. Dunn, who’s as influential as any historical Jesus scholar today, says that creed was already formalized within a few months of the cross.

The way I like to think of it is we’re pretty accurate. We [are not certain of the year] of the death of Jesus, but the Resurrection happened in spring of that year. If He was raised from the dead, let us say in March (this year it is April), if He was raised from the dead in March or April, and if Dunn is right, that creed was in existence within a few months. This means by the time that year ended, AD 30, the creed already existed. That is how early it was.

The fact that it came down through several people who were witnesses — three of the six groups there — three of the six appearances that Paul lists — they are groups. This is very important. Groups do not hallucinate. This one sentence is very, very early, and very, very significant. It is real history.

Listen to part 1 of the Hank Unplugged episode with Gary Habermas here.

Listen to part 2 of the Hank Unplugged episode with Gary Habermas here.

Why Is It So Hard to Call Out Margaret Sanger on Eugenics?

Author and social critic Mary Eberstadt had a wonderful conversation with Hank Hanegraaff on the secularist religion birthed by the sexual revolution, and the real duplicity in the way it turned yesterday’s sinners into modern-day secular saints — Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger being a prime example. The following dialogue is adapted from their conversation.

Hank Hanegraaff: If you look at this whole idea of a secularist religion, there are high priestesses that come to mind, such as Gloria Steinem, Margaret Mead, and certainly Margaret Sanger. I want to single out Sanger for a moment because she was a person who was very much on the vanguard of the eugenics movement. Today, we have a new hypereugenics movement afoot. I was reading a couple months ago about what is going on in Iceland, where they are now declaring themselves to be almost 100 percent Down-syndrome-baby free. They’ve almost eradicated Down syndrome babies through abortion. They suppose this to be some great thing and laude it as a step forward. In fact, Richard Dawkins, probably the most influential materialist on the planet today, says that it is immoral to bring a Down syndrome child into the world. So, we have this new move toward a hypereugenics movement that eradicates those who are thought to be unfit in society; and in their place, we are looking toward designer babies.

Mary Eberstadt: Yes. There is an implicit cruelty, to say nothing of a lack of diversity in one’s outlook, that would wipe children like that from the face of the earth. I’m so glad you brought up Margaret Sanger. We live in a moment where there are upset, agitated groups who want to pull down statues of Confederates, and they are making their argument in the public square. I am glad that they are. They are not just making emotive appeals; they are making arguments about how things have changed, and how we have developed morally as a people. So, whatever you think of their case, it is astonishing to me that Margaret Sanger hasn’t been torn down from her podiums all over America.

As a matter of fact, consider this: Planned Parenthood, for years and years, gave annual awards (the last ones I think were in 2015) called the Maggies, and they were named for Margaret Sanger. They were given to journalists who had written pro-choice pieces, and to other figures who had somehow come into the pro-choice fold.

Alright, let us look at this for a minute. Margaret Sanger was unflinching in her insistence on the inferiority of certain other people. She wanted to keep down the numbers of certain other people. She believed very much that there were fit people and unfit people. But, guess what? Fit people looked like her, and unfit people looked like, well, fill in the blank. So, it is very hard to understand why she gets a pass in a moment of extra attention to racism and extra moral sensitivity to racism in America’s past, when she was the embodiment of this kind of eugenics thinking.

What we are seeing is that in any other context, besides defending the sexual revolution, nobody would be getting away with this; but Margaret Sanger is getting away with it because she is a paragon of the sexual revolution, and she is the equivalent of a secular saint. I think people who stand against what she stood for should be proud of themselves, and I think that those of us who do are on the right side.

Hank: You know what is really interesting about this? I have looked into this over the years. Eugenics has been a huge, huge issue in the United States of America. Talk about a really virulent evil in America, and there have been many, but this is at the top of the list. But, the odd thing about it is this: eugenics was considered progressive prior to World War II in universities such as Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard. This was considered very, very progressive. Pro-eugenics legislation was passed in blue states ranging from California to New York. You had prestigious people on this bandwagon — not just Margaret Sanger. They had bought into an ideology that said that the unfit were affecting the genepool such that the fit did not survive as well, and so the only thing that we can do is to make sure that we got rid of those that were unfit. Moreover, as you correctly said, the unfit were oftentimes people that did not look like the stereotypical American. They were Blacks. They were Jews. They were people who had some kind of a physical malady. But this was something that was orthodoxy within America, and it really did not see its demise, at least for a while, until it reached full bloom in the genocidal German death camps. Then it vanished into the night, and nobody wants to say that they had any association with this eugenics movement. We are quietly paying reparations for the harm that we did, particularly to the Black community, and we, for example, are doing that in North Carolina. But, most people do not want to own up to the fact that this was an ideology that was uncritically bought into that devastated lives, and we are now seeing history repeat itself in other places.

Mary: Yes, once again, Christianity should get some credit for being on the right side of that issue. It is Christianity, infused with Judaism, that taught humanity that all human beings are equal in the sight of God. That is a revolutionary idea. Christianity, correctly applied, should get some credit for that insight. Eugenics was not some kind of Christian thing. It was a progressive thing, as you correctly pointed out. When progressives today wonder why there are people who are “standing on the wrong side of history,” it is because we do not want to be standing wherever they are standing, certainly not in the case of eugenics.

Similarly, Hank, I think Christianity gets such a bad rap for being bad on women somehow, but it was Christianity that introduced the very idea that men and women were morally equal — so morally equal that consent was required for marriage. This is a very early Christian idea and it is revolutionary. Were there equal outcomes? No, of course not. Were there equal economic statuses throughout history? No. But the idea that a woman’s soul was just as important as a man’s and that it would be jeopardized if she could not freely consent to marriage, and the marriage would be invalid without both parties freely willing it, this is a fantastic liberating idea. It is among the most liberating ideas ever to appear in humanity, and that’s a Christian idea.

Part of what I am trying to say is this. I think, for reasons we all understand, a lot of traditional believers have been in a defensive crouch because they were not expecting how ferocious the winds against them would become; they were not expecting all these religious liberty cases suddenly proliferating across the land; and they were not expecting they would not be able to practice their faith without public ostracism. But the defensive crouch is not the answer when what you are in possession of are truths that other people are losing sight of that have been a boon to humanity. So be proud of standing on the right side of the eugenics discussion. Be proud of standing against what Margaret Sanger and all other people like her stood for. I think we can be emboldened — without patting ourselves on the back — to know some of the good that Christianity has done out there in the world.

This blog was adapted from “The Sexual Revolution with Mary Eberstadt,” which originally aired on episode 18 of Hank Unplugged. To listen to the full interview, click here.

For further related study, please access the following equip.org resources:

Margaret Sanger: “No Gods, No Masters” (Bob Perry)

How the West Really Lost God (Mary Eberstadt)

Sex, Lies, and Secularism (Nancy Pearcy)

Sex, Lies, and Christianity: Reclaiming Biblical Sexuality (Melanie Cogdill)

Mary Eberstadt is author of It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies. Her writing has appeared in TIME, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, First Things, and The Weekly Standard, and in March 2017, she was named Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute.

April 3rd, 2018 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard

Tags: Eugenics, Hank Hanegraaff, Margaret Sanger, Mary Eberstadt, Planned Parenthood, Racism, Sexual Revolution No comments yet

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What makes the resurrection of Jesus so significant to Christianity?

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