Zack Hunt, here:
[W]e can begin to see [the resurrection's] transforming power in how we respond to the tragedies in our own lives, how we love and console one another, how we work together to keep evil from ruling tomorrow, and how we come together to alleviate the daily suffering that is all around us.
Apart from its orientation, this is really little different than the historic catholic approach, in which the supposed "already" of the kingdom of God is manifest sacramentally, primarily through the Eucharist. It makes little difference, however, how the divine is immanentized. Either way it is immanentized by human agency through temporal means.
Neither conceptualization pays the proper respect due to the singular character of the resurrection as an idea, as a metaphysical phenomenon, if that oxymoron be allowed. The born again Christian protests that Jesus changed his life even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary available to outsiders looking in, while the sacramentalist protests that he literally eats the body and blood of the Lord, purchased though it may be from a church supply house. The cemeteries are no respecters of these persons, and are as full of such people as of any other.
The thinking person must reject these expressions of human enthusiasm, for that is what they are, pale reflections of the "real" thing. The real thing was not under human control, was not susceptible of human interference and manipulation. To insist otherwise is to misunderstand the claim made by the resurrection.
If God ever transformed us, there wouldn't be any doubt about it. In truth that remains "not yet" for the Christian. Only the resurrection of Jesus can seem to lay claim to express such an "already" about which there is no doubt.
And yet there is doubt, as there is belief.
The problem of the resurrection of Jesus is not just a problem for the history of apocalyptic, with which the resurrection represents a radical break. The question also remains whether God really acted in human history in such a way, or did human hope once again overstep its bounds, as it is perennially wont to do, in claiming the apotheosis of a man? If we in our own day can insist on our own participation in the divinity to some extent on the very thinnest of evidence, the likelihood of the early Christians having committed this ancient sin is high.
The latter question is not new by any means. Jews, but also Muslims, have asked it, or rather charged it, for centuries. The great success of the West has much to do with the fact, from their point of view, that Christianity is a form of human hubris, a blasphemy. It is hard to imagine the world as it is today without it, or that it would have become the way it is without it, and the prospect of actually losing what we have achieved in the West by abandoning this plastic way we look at human nature to some extent stands in the way of our thinking about this important question on a Tuesday.
A lousy Tuesday.
The latter question is not new by any means. Jews, but also Muslims, have asked it, or rather charged it, for centuries. The great success of the West has much to do with the fact, from their point of view, that Christianity is a form of human hubris, a blasphemy. It is hard to imagine the world as it is today without it, or that it would have become the way it is without it, and the prospect of actually losing what we have achieved in the West by abandoning this plastic way we look at human nature to some extent stands in the way of our thinking about this important question on a Tuesday.
A lousy Tuesday.
