Thinking to Believe

It has been popular for 100 years for liberal scholars to claim there was no Christian orthodoxy from the beginning of the church.  Rather, they claim, there existed a bunch of disparate community-based theological movements loosely centered on a historical—but mythologized Jesus—each vying with the other to become the orthodox version of the Christian religion.

According to these theorists, the Jesus tradition spread rapidly to different geographical regions.  Each local community would re-tell the Jesus story, but the re-telling of the tradition was wild and uncontrolled, so that the Jesus of history quickly became swallowed up by the various and competing Jesuses constructed by each community.  With no way of knowing (and perhaps little concern for) which version of Jesus was accurate—if any—the battle for orthodoxy in the first 300 years of the church became more of a political battle than a theological and historical quest.  Recent and popular proponents of this view include Bart Ehrman, Marvin Meyer, and Elaine Pagels.

In the way of critique, this thesis has an extremely weak historical and logical foundation.  It is based largely on the (more…)

Christianity is unique in that its veracity depends on the reality of particular historical events.  Christianity is not a philosophical religion.  Christian faith is not faith for the sake of faith, but a particular understanding about the significance of particular historical events—events that were either supernatural in character, or pregnant with supernatural significance.  If these purported historical events are actually fictional or mythical in nature, the very foundation of Christianity crumbles.

While our faith depends on the veracity of particular historical events through which God revealed Himself and His purposes, there is no question that we believe much more than can be demonstrated historically.  Historical and archaeological investigation can only verify and bolster some of the Bible’s historical claims.  While it can cover a lot of ground, the remaining gaps still must be transposed by faith.  That faith is not a blind and absurd leap as Kierkegaard suggested, but a reasoned judgment in reality based on the evidence available to us.