Last Sunday we celebrated the resurrection, that is, those who believe, many don’t believe it even with the historical witness, therefore, they don’t have much hope in any situation of life, especially the difficult days that we are in at the moment. Today we will look a little more at the resurrection and Christianity, and what our basis is for hope.

Historically, people claim to know God on the basis of one of three platforms:
mysticism, reason, or revelation.

Knowing God Through Mysticism

Mysticism classically refers to unmediated, direct, and intuitive experience of the Ultimate Reality, of God. The experience does not come from reasoning or an emotional high and is not based on what others have said about the object of experience. Mystical teachings are often secret, given only to those who can understand them correctly.

When we ask what is mysticism? the very associations of the word suggest the extreme difficulty of a definition. It is the belief that man can come into union with the Infinite Being by means of a wholly passive self surrender to divine influence. The characteristic of mysticism is that it strives after an immediate experience and vision of the Divine.

When associated with a religious tradition (as is usually the case), the mystic holds that it is possible to gain an awareness of God or ultimate reality through certain kinds of experiences, which are often claimed to be those that can not be explained or expressed Many mystics have claimed that an experience of God is un explainable (though that has not stopped them from attempting to describe the experience).

Mysticism is not kin to the Doctrine of Spiritual Illumination.

They differ in many ways.

Mysticism, is not to be confounded with the doctrine of spiritual illumination as held by all evangelical Christians. The Scriptures clearly teach that the mere outward presentation of the truth in the Word, does not suffice to the conversion or sanctification of men; that the natural, or unrenewed man, does not receive it.
The doctrines of spiritual illumination and of Mysticism differ not only in the object,

The inward teaching of the Spirit is to be sought by prayer, and the diligent use of the appointed means; the intuitions of the Mystic are sought in the neglect of all means, in the suppression of all activity inward and outward, and in a passive waiting for the influx of God into the soul.

They differ in their effects. The effect of spiritual illumination is, that the Word dwells in us “in all wisdom and spiritual understanding” (Colossians 1:9). What dwells in the mind of the Mystic are his own imaginings, the character of which depends on his own subjective state; its up to you, and whatever they are, they are of man and not of God.

Some mystics you probably have heard of are; Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, Gerson, Thomas à Kempis.

Knowing God by Reason

The person who rests on reason thinks he or she is able by the force of the ontological argument or some other structure to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt the existence of God and perhaps even some of his attributes. This has been done again and again in various structures across history.

The famous René Descartes, for example, with his “I think, therefore I am,” which every first-year philosophy student comes to know, was, in fact, a devout Roman Catholic who thought by this base he was going to be able to win just about everybody to his own faith. He thought he could reason people to Christianity. Reason alone is not how one comes into a personal relationship with Jesus.

Knowing God by Revelation

The majority of Christians across time have depended in the first instance on revelation; on the belief God has disclosed himself in events, in words, in a variety of ways. That immediately raises the issue.… How do we know it’s revelation?

2Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

All Scripture has its origin in God, is the product of the breath of God. God has breathed his character into Scripture so that it is inherently inspired. Paul was not asserting that the Scriptures are inspiring in that they breathe information about God into us, even though the statement is true. The Scriptures owe their origin and distinctiveness to God himself.

Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

The Word is alive and it gives life.

The Basics for truth of Revelation about the Resurrection or any other event is the Scripture.

The Christian view of the Bible is it is a mediated book. It was not sent to just one person like the Mormons book, to Joseph Smith, or the Muslims book the Quran.

This is really very important. If you ask a devout Mormon or a devout Muslim how his or her book came down, it is by a kind of direct disclosure without much mediation. Whether the golden plates that reached Joseph Smith or the Qur’an to Mohammed.

However, the Bible for its part comes to us in a surprisingly mediated form. There are parts of the Bible which claim to be by dictation. There is so much of the Bible that emerges out of the experience, the pain, the agony, the suffering, the hope, the belief, the witness of the people who lived in these various places and periods of time.

For some people that is proof positive against the work of the Spirit, but what the biblical claim is that God has actually worked through these forms of human mediation so what comes out is nothing less than what God wants disclosed even while it is an astonishingly human document. The result is the gospel of John does not sound like the gospel of Luke. The vocabulary of Paul is not the vocabulary of the letter to the Hebrews, and so on. There are different genres.

The biblical books include narrative, discourse, lament, proverb, genealogy, letters, indignation, praise, apocalyptic literature, and much more, different genres that have emerged within the framework of human existence.

In other words, the biblical claim is God has actually disclosed himself through people writing in the framework of their own deep experiences, preserved, no doubt, by God to bring out the truth but still immensely human documents.

Christianity and its “God Revelation” is a peculiarly historical religion.

Supposing you could prove, Gautama the Buddha never lived, and I don’t know how you can do that. Supposing you could prove, would you destroy Buddhism? No, of course not, because the credibility of Buddhism depends finally on the coherence of the entire philosophical-religious structure, on its attractiveness as a system. It does not depend in any particular historical datum from the life of Gautama.

If you go to India. Supposing you could prove Krishna never lived, would you destroy Hinduism? No, you would not, Hinduism has millions of gods, and nobody knows them all. They all nestle within a framework in which truth underlies all existence, good, bad, and indifferent.

The framework of advance is within a karma system in which you can rise in increasing cycles or fall back in decreasing cycles, but if you lose a Krishna, you can go down the street to a Shiva temple or others. The system does not fall apart because somehow you could prove one god didn’t exist.

If you go to Islam, and ask a friendly Muslim, a neighborhood imam. Ask him, can you conceive Allah, had he chosen to do so, could have given his final revelation to somebody else other than Muhammad?” He would probably say, it’s inconceivable in the light of what happened, but the revelation is not Muhammad. God could have given his revelation to anyone he chose. We believe he gave it to Muhammad. We believe it is the final revelation, but there is nothing intrinsic to Muhammad. Though we believe he is the final prophet, there is nothing intrinsic to him that makes him himself the revelation. Allah alone is god.

Now come to Christianity.

I don’t know how, just as with the others, but suppose you could prove somehow Jesus never, ever lived. Would you destroy Christianity? Yes you would, because the Christian claim is God has disclosed himself not only in words or events, but ultimately in Jesus of Nazareth, himself simultaneously God and man.

Ultimately, if there is no Jesus or Resurrection, there is no useful Christianity left. If you could prove Christ never rose from the dead, you’ve destroyed Christianity. Do you know the first person to make that argument was a man called Paul, writing with just over 20 years from the events themselves.

Paul said, 1Corinthians 15:14 And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. 15 Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. 15:17 And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; you are yet in your sins.

“Let us suppose for a moment Christ did not rise from the dead. What would follow from this?”

Paul concludes, if Christ is not risen, all this is useless. Christianity is an astonishingly historical religion. It depends on historical claims.

The way we have access to history in the first instance is by documents and witnesses, people who claimed to have seen and touched and handled, people who were there, and report what they see and what they heard. That’s precisely why debates about Christianity do turn at least in measure on historical matters.

I don’t believe anyone is able to convince anyone of Christianity’s rightness by simply historical arguments. Somebody might believe Jesus really did rise from the dead and simply say, “But I don’t want any part of it.” In other words, there may be moral dimensions or cultural dimensions to the reasons why we believe or disbelieve.

But, there is an unescapable historical element in Christian claims
of Jesus and the Resurrection that sooner or later has to be faced.

Paul, writing 25 years after Christ, is a lot more blunt. There he says, “If you really conclude Christ has not risen, then Christian faith is futile and empty,” which raises some very interesting things about the nature of faith,

How Do We Come To Believe?

We are all culturally located, we are all affected by the culture we were raised or live in.

No one approaches any of these subjects with a mind that has not been affected by something. We all bring our cultural baggage with us. That does not mean the cultural structures which we have inherited cannot be changed or modified or contraindicated or reshaped. I don’t mean that.

Any thought process can be changed, and we should allow the Word of God to change ours as we study and pray.

Forty or more years ago, the notion of tolerance that dominated in North America was very different from the current notion of tolerance that dominates in North America. Because we live today, most people just go with what society thinks with the current notion without even asking tough questions.

Back then, most still operated with a notion of tolerance that was best articulated by the great French philosopher and thinker, Voltaire, who said, “I may detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This became almost the definition of tolerance. In other words, there was the possibility of strong disagreement, even insisting what you are saying is despicable or stupid or ignorant or corrupt, but still, “I defend your right to say it.” In a free society, that is what tolerance means. “I disagree, and yet I insist you may speak.”

Nowadays, tolerance has so been redefined. What you do not have the right to do is, in an assortment of domains, to say someone else is wrong. That’s the only wrong thing. If you say they’re wrong, you’re intolerant. That’s not what Voltaire said. Voltaire said, “I may detest what you’re saying but insist you have the right to speak.”

To speak of tolerating someone by insisting you can’t say they’re wrong is not toleration at all. Moreover, it eventually comes morally perverse. In that, the one thing this new vision of tolerance says is wrong is disagreement with its new vision of tolerance.

This clearly has some huge bearing on religious discussion. We should be able to disagree and not be jailed for it. Otherwise, what you have is a kind of mushy-headedness that pretends we’re saying the same thing when we’re not.

We should be able to discuss why or why not we believe what we believe and why it is true or false.

We must look at the scriptures that have real live witnesses that testify what took place with Jesus and the resurrection. And not all agree on this.

What was the gospel, regardless of which book in the Bible you look at? Look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, their witness. In every case they spoke in some way or other of the beginnings of Jesus, his public ministry, his teaching, his miracles, his claims, and in every case the narrative moved toward his death and resurrection.

The good news about Jesus was not that he went around saying some good things and that was it; the good news was who he was and not only what he taught but what he accomplished by his death and his resurrection.

The witness wrote it down.

The manuscript evidence is so astonishingly rich, about 5,000 copies of the Greek testament of whole or in part, about 8,000 early translations,

It’s within that framework the accounts of the resurrection of Christ take place in the New Testament in documents claiming to be written either by eyewitnesses or by those in touch with eyewitnesses. The first documents written, according to Paul, was when the 500 or more witnesses who actually saw the resurrected Christ were not yet deceased.

Hundreds of them are still alive, Paul said, if you don’t like what I’m saying, go and have a chat with them.

The Jesus that offers hope, I am commending to you today, is the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jesus whom we approach through the lens of history. We approach also in faith, which we will discuss some next week.

We approach Jesus and the Resurrection, the basics for our Hope, through the lens of history. Any disagreement with those who want to dismiss the biblical accounts as irrelevant or extremely late or not reliable, seems to indicate they might not study history enough before they try to study theology.