The Nicene Creed

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was Incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. And I believe one holy catholic* and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

The Athanasian Creed

“Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic* faith;
Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
And the catholic* faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.
For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.
And yet there are not three eternals, but one eternal.
As also there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensibles, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.
So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty;
And yet there are not three almighties, but one almighty.
So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God;
And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.
So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Spirit Lord;
And yet they are not three Lords, but one Lord.
For like as we are compelled by the Christian truth to acknowledge every person by himself to be God and Lord;
So we are forbidden by the catholic* religion to say: There are three Gods or three Lords.
The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten.
The Son is of the Father alone; not made nor created, but begotten.
The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirit’s.
And in this Trinity none is afore, or after another; none is greater, or less than another.
But the whole three persons are co-eternal, and co-equal.
So that in all things, as said before, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.
He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the Trinity.
Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.
God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and man of the substance of His mother, born in the world.
Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.
Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.
Who, although He is God and man, yet He is not two, but one Christ.
One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God.
One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.
For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.
Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead;
He ascended into heaven, He sits on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty;
From there He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies;
And shall give account of their own works.
And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting. And they that have done evil into everlasting fire.
This is the catholic* faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.”


Definition of Chalcedon

Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.

*Catholic here refers to the 'universal' church and not to the Roman Catholic Church.

Apostles' Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
    the Creator of heaven and earth,
    and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
    born of the Virgin Mary,
    suffered under Pontius Pilate,
    was crucified, died, and was buried.

He descended into hell.

The third day He arose again from the dead.

He ascended into heaven
    and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,
    whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic* church,
    the communion of saints,
    the forgiveness of sins,
    the resurrection of the body,
    and life everlasting.

Amen.

Ravi Zacharias on Religion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWLzHt8ImyE

Jesus and Buddha

Article ID: DJ660

By: Dr. Douglas R. Groothuis

This article first appeared in the Effective Evangelism column of the Christian Research Journal, volume 25, number 4 (2003). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org

Popular and prolific Buddhist author Thich Nhat Hanh reports in his book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, that his “personal shrine” contains images of both Buddha and Jesus, whom he deems spiritual brothers, both worthy of veneration. Given the current popularity of the Dalai Lama and books and magazines on Buddhist meditation and practice, it seems many Americans might also hold Hahn’s perspective. Those caught in the strong winds of religious toleration and relativism shrink from logically judging the truth claims of these great religious founders. Instead, people often assume that they were equally significant “spiritual teachers” who taught roughly the same thing. Accepting both Jesus and Buddha as enlightened beings is taken to be nonjudgmental, inclusive, and affirming of both Christians and Buddhists. Why bother considering one teacher above the other — especially in our contemporary pluralistic culture? How should Christians, who worship Jesus alone, respond to this pervasive notion that Jesus and Buddha were great spiritual masters on the same plane?
The essential religious truth claims of Jesus and Buddha differ radically from one another. To think otherwise is to ignore history, logic, and the well-being of one’s soul, since Jesus and Buddha proposed radically different spiritual paths. Jesus, in fact, warned that the path to life was narrow and that many fail to find it (Matt. 7:13). Jesus’ followers must not shrink back from the seriousness of His statement, especially in our pluralistic society.

Before comparing the basic teachings of Jesus and Buddha regarding God, humans, and salvation, one should point out to those enamored of the Buddha that the earliest written documents about the life of Buddha (563–483 b.c.) come about five hundred years after his death. In his edited collection, Buddhist Scriptures, Edward Conze notes that Buddhism has nothing that corresponds to the Christian New Testament, which is an authoritative canon of Scriptures written a short time after the life of Jesus.¹ Let no one, therefore, take Buddhist records as hard history and then discount the New Testament for being too ancient to be historically credible.²

Two Virgin Birth Stories. Some try to narrow the gap between Jesus and Buddha by saying that both are recorded as having come into the world through spiritual means via a virgin birth. In their recent book, The Original Jesus, Elman Gruber and Holger Kersten go even further and argue that the story of Jesus’ virgin birth was borrowed from a Buddhist source that claimed the same kind of supernatural origin for Buddha.³ This is unlikely. First, this view overlooks significant differences between the two accounts. In the Buddhist account, the prehuman Buddha came in the form of a white elephant who entered the side of his mother. Religious scholar Geoffrey Parrinder notes that it “was not a virgin birth, since she was married, and in this story…it is celestial influence rather than a divine seed that enters her.”⁴ The Gospel’s account of Jesus’ conception and birth differs radically (Luke 1:26–35).

Second, the Buddhist sources are dated long after the gospels of Luke and Matthew. The Buddhist story comes from a fifth-century a.d. text and is absent from the most ancient Pali canon of Buddhism.⁵ If any borrowing occurred, it is more likely that Buddhists selectively borrowed from the Gospels than vice versa.⁶ The New Testament documents were all written in the middle to the late first century. According to renowned biblical scholar J. Gresham Machen, the virgin birth material had “been in existence only a few decades from the time when Jesus lived.”⁷ This is quite different from the late emergence of the Buddhist stories.
What about Jesus’ and Buddha’s essential worldviews, that is, their teachings on ultimate reality, the human condition, and spiritual liberation?

Two Views of Ultimate Reality. Jesus affirmed the existence and unity of a personal and moral God, who is both sovereign over history and involved with it. He taught His disciples to pray, “Our Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 6:9 nasb). Jesus never challenged the monotheism of His Jewish brethren but affirmed it and intensified its spiritual and moral challenges (Matt. 5–7).
Buddha, however, did not deem theological matters worthy of consideration. He regarded them as metaphysical speculations, unedifying and irrelevant to attaining spiritual liberation. He challenged key features of the Brahmanism of his native India but did not embrace belief in a Creator God as fundamental to proper spirituality. Buddha’s image is worshiped around the globe, but he never considered himself a revelation of God. He rather considered himself an enlightened teacher (“Buddha” is a title that means “the enlightened one”).

Two Views of the Human Condition. Human beings, according to Jesus, were created by God (Matt. 19:4) and ought to worship and obey God with their whole beings, as well as to love their neighbors as themselves (Matt. 22:37–39). Jesus taught that humans possess immaterial souls that persist after death and that will one day be reunited with resurrected bodies (Matt. 12:26–27; John 5:28–29). Jesus, however, also referred to humans as spiritually “lost” (Luke 19:10) and corrupt at their core (Matt. 9:13; Mark 7:21–23).

Buddha did not speculate about human origins but focused on the human condition as (1) suffused with suffering (2) brought about through unfulfilled desires (the first two of the Four Noble Truths, the essence of Buddhism). He taught that people cannot satisfy their souls with anything because they do not have souls. Just as a chariot has no essence, but is only a collection of individual parts, so the human person has no essence or substance; it is only a collection of parts or states called skandas. There is no personal essence or soul, and there is no personal afterlife. Buddha did not deny the Hindu doctrines of transmigration and reincarnation, but he denied that there is any individual soul that comes back in another form.

Two Views of Spiritual Liberation. According to Jesus, salvation is found in Him alone: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost” (Luke 19:10 niv). Jesus viewed Himself as the only way to restore fellowship with the heavenly Father: “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27 niv; cf. John 14:6). He claimed, moreover, to be God incarnate (John 8:58). In light of this, Jesus beckons us to follow Him (Matt. 11:28–30) and to believe in Him for the forgiveness of sins and eternal life (John 3:16; 6:29). These claims, however, were not uttered in a vacuum. Jesus demonstrated Himself to be the divine Messiah through the wisdom of His teaching, His fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy, the unparalleled power of His miracles, His authority over the demonic world, His sacrificial death on the cross, and His own death-shattering resurrection.⁸ 

Buddha taught that spiritual deliverance was found by letting go of desire and the quest to satisfy the nonexistent soul, and by detaching oneself from impermanent things. This teaching is the Third Noble Truth. The Fourth Noble Truth is that salvation is achieved through effort, which Buddha called “the eightfold path.” It requires wisdom (right understanding and thought), ethical conduct (right speech, action, and livelihood), and mental discipline (right effort, awareness, and meditation). Those who succeed leave the realm of karma and rebirth and attain nirvana, which is the blowing out of the human personality in a state that supposedly cannot be described in words. Buddha did not claim to bestow this state upon others, he simply pointed toward it. He never claimed to be God moreover; nor did he raise the dead, heal the sick, or cast out demons. At age 80, he died.
According to the New Testament, Jesus came into the world as a supernatural agent of redemption, who accepted suffering at the hands of sinful humans that He might vicariously atone for the sins of a rebellious world estranged from its own Source of goodness and life. He embraced suffering on the cross in order to rescue those suffering from sin and its effects (Isa. 53). As one poet wrote, “No other God has wounds but thee.” The risen Jesus presented His wounds to doubting Thomas as proof of the efficacy of His mission (John 20:26–29).

The oldest accounts of the life of Buddha do not depict him as a supernatural figure but as an illuminated sage. Images of Buddha worldwide show a man sitting in tranquil contemplation with his eyes shut to a world he wants to transcend. How different from this posture was the defining act of Jesus, who, though nailed to a cross, bruised and bloodied, gazed in love on the world He came to redeem. Buddha taught the dharma (the way or teaching) to many others, but he never claimed to overcome death through his own death or to offer life through his own life. He only pointed the way to nirvana whereas Jesus opened the door to heaven.
The essential teachings and ministries of Jesus and Buddha cannot be reconciled or synthesized. No amount of religious tolerance or pluralism can erase the deep and sharp differences between these two identities, their worldviews, and their actions. By accurately defining these differences we do justice to both religious leaders while communicating the truth in love to those who would place them on the same plane.

– Douglas R. Groothuis

NOTES
1. Edward Conze, “Introduction,” in Buddhist Scriptures, ed. Edward Conze (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), 11–12.
2. On the reliability of the New Testament, see Douglas Groothuis, Jesus in an Age of Controversy (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), chaps. 2–3.
3. Elmar R. Gruber and Holger Kersten, The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity (Rockport, MA: Element Books, 1995), 82–83.
4. Geoffrey Parrinder, Avatar and Incarnation (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 135.
5. See J. Gresham Machen, The Virgin Birth of Christ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), 339.
6. Ibid., 340.
7. Ibid., 342.
8. On the claims and credentials of Jesus, see Groothuis, Jesus in an Age of Controversy , chaps. 13-16; and Douglas Groothuis, On Jesus (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2003), chap. 8.

Truth Decay, by Doug Groothuis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4bXH6C0TSA&feature=relmfu

Dr. Doug Groothuis-Are All Religions One?

Enjoy this youtube of Dr. Groothuis on religion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xnw8qVheWQ

Truth, Humility, and Apologetics (Groothuis) by Reformed Reader Here's a great quote from a great book. "Postmodernists fret mightily about arrogance and dogmatism, but to avoid them they typically rebound into the equal and opposite errors of cheap tolerance and relativism.  However, a belief in the objectivity of truth and its importance for all of life does not entail an arrogant attitude or an unbending, irrational dogmatism.  Despite the strong convictions that drive this book, I want briefly to distinguish two claims, lest I be misunderstood.  It is one thing to claim that objective, absolute and universe truth exists.  It is quite another to claim that one has mastered these objective, absolute and universal truths or that one has nothing more to learn and is in no need of correction." "I will argue strenuously for the former claim but (not being omniscient) make no pretense to the latter.  In fact, it is precisely belief in a truth beyond one's own thoughts and culture that allows one to be rebuffed and reconstructed by reality.  We can, therefore, be realigned by the truth and with the truth.  This nonnegotiable distinction should engender humility, not arrogance; a quest for reasonable certainty through dialogue, not dogmatism through mindless affirmation and denunciation." "Richard John Neuhaus' comments ought to serve as a tonic for the Christian thinker, myself included, who may be tempted by visions of intellectual grandiosity. 'Few things have contributed so powerfully to the unbelief of the modern and postmodern world as the pretension of Christians to know more than we do...If Christians exhibited more intellectual patience, modesty, curiosity, and sense of adventure, there would be few atheists in the world, both of the rationalist and postmodern varieties.'" You can find this quote on pages 12-13 of Truth Decay by Douglas Groothuis.  If you want a scholarly, Christian, and informative resource on truth, I highly recommend this book

I just arrived from Pemba, Mozambique for 11 days. I am deeply grateful to ANM for allowing me to go minister along with Josh, and Sara of i2 Ministries. We had a wonderful time of sharing and teaching the gospel and revealing the teaching and practices of Islam. I taught on the topics of
1.  Folk Islam
2.  Islam in the Horn of Africa from 615 AD to the Present.
3.  The Unrevealed Christ of the Quran
4.  Christology part 1
5.  Christology part 2

We are deeply grateful to God, Roland, and Heidi, Founders and CEO of IRIS Ministries. Thanks for the job you're doing among the people of Mozambique. praying for you. CPIF

The Evidence for Jesus

William Lane Craig

Five reasons are presented for thinking that critics who accept the historical credibility of the gospel accounts of Jesus do not bear a special burden of proof relative to more skeptical critics. Then the historicity of a few specific aspects of Jesus' life are addressed, including his radical self-concept as the divine Son of God, his role as a miracle-worker, his trial and crucifixion, and his resurrection from the dead.

"Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: The Evidence for Jesus." Faith and Mission 15 (1998): 16-26.

Last time we saw that the New Testament documents are the most important historical sources for Jesus of Nazareth. The so-called apocryphal gospels are forgeries which came much later and are for the most part elaborations of the four New Testament gospels.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t sources outside the Bible which refer to Jesus. There are. He’s referred to in pagan, Jewish, and Christian writings outside the New Testament. The Jewish historian Josephus is especially interesting. In the pages of his works you can read about New Testament people like the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, King Herod, John the Baptist, even Jesus himself and his brother James. There have also been interesting archaeological discoveries as well bearing on the gospels. For example, in 1961 the first archaeological evidence concerning Pilate was unearthed in the town of Caesarea; it was an inscription of a dedication bearing Pilate’s name and title. Even more recently, in 1990 the actual tomb of Caiaphas, the high priest who presided over Jesus’s trial, was discovered south of Jerusalem. Indeed, the tomb beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is in all probability the tomb in which Jesus himself was laid by Joseph of Arimathea following the crucifixion. According to Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University,

Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate and continued to have followers after his death.1

Still, if we want any details about Jesus’s life and teachings, we must turn to the New Testament. Extra-biblical sources confirm what we read in the gospels, but they don’t really tell us anything new. The question then must be: how historically reliable are the New Testament documents?

Burden of Proof

Here we confront the very crucial question of the burden of proof. Should we assume that the gospels are reliable unless they are proven to be unreliable? Or should we assume the gospels are unreliable unless they are proven to be reliable? Are they innocent until proven guilty or guilty until proven innocent? Sceptical scholars almost always assume that the gospels are guilty until proven innocent, that is, they assume that the gospels are unreliable unless and until they are proven to be correct concerning some particular fact. I’m not exaggerating here: this really is the procedure of sceptical critics.

But I want to list five reasons why I think we ought to assume that the gospels are reliable until proven wrong:

1. There was insufficient time for legendary influences to expunge the historical facts. The interval of time between the events themselves and recording of them in the gospels is too short to have allowed the memory of what had or had not actually happened to be erased.

2. The gospels are not analogous to folk tales or contemporary "urban legends." Tales like those of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill or contemporary urban legends like the "vanishing hitchhiker" rarely concern actual historical individuals and are thus not analogous to the gospel narratives.

3. The Jewish transmission of sacred traditions was highly developed and reliable. In an oral culture like that of first century Palestine the ability to memorize and retain large tracts of oral tradition was a highly prized and highly developed skill. From the earliest age children in the home, elementary school, and the synagogue were taught to memorize faithfully sacred tradition. The disciples would have exercised similar care with the teachings of Jesus.

4. There were significant restraints on the embellishment of traditions about Jesus, such as the presence of eyewitnesses and the apostles’ supervision. Since those who had seen and heard Jesus continued to live and the tradition about Jesus remained under the supervision of the apostles, these factors would act as a natural check on tendencies to elaborate the facts in a direction contrary to that preserved by those who had known Jesus.

5. The Gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability.

I don’t have enough time to talk about all of these. So let me say something about the first and the last points.

1. There was insufficient time for legendary influences to expunge the historical facts. No modern scholar thinks of the gospels as bald-faced lies, the result of a massive conspiracy. The only place you find such conspiracy theories of history is in sensationalist, popular literature or former propaganda from behind the Iron Curtain. When you read the pages of the New Testament, there’s no doubt that these people sincerely believed in the truth of what they proclaimed. Rather ever since the time of D. F. Strauss, sceptical scholars have explained away the gospels as legends. Like the child’s game of telephone, as the stories about Jesus were passed on over the decades, they got muddled and exaggerated and mythologized until the original facts were all but lost. The Jewish peasant sage was transformed into the divine Son of God.

One of the major problems with the legend hypothesis, however, which is almost never addressed by sceptical critics, is that the time between Jesus’s death and the writing of the gospels is just too short for this to happen. This point has been well-explained by A. N. Sherwin-White in his book Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament.2 Professor Sherwin-White is not a theologian; he is a professional historian of times prior to and contemporaneous with Jesus. According to Sherwin-White, the sources for Roman and Greek history are usually biased and removed one or two generations or even centuries from the events they record. Yet, he says, historians reconstruct with confidence the course of Roman and Greek history. For example, the two earliest biographies of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch more than 400 years after Alexander’s death, and yet classical historians still consider them to be trustworthy. The fabulous legends about Alexander the Great did not develop until during the centuries after these two writers. According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be "unbelievable." More generations would be needed.

In fact, adding a time gap of two generations to Jesus’s death lands you in the second century, just when the apocryphal gospels begin to appear. These do contain all sorts of fabulous stories about Jesus, trying to fill in the years between his boyhood and his starting his ministry, for example. These are the obvious legends sought by the critics, not the biblical gospels.

This point becomes even more devastating for skepticism when we recall that the gospels themselves use sources that go back even closer to the events of Jesus’s life. For example, the story of Jesus’s suffering and death, commonly called the Passion Story, was probably not originally written by Mark. Rather Mark used a source for this narrative. Since Mark is the earliest gospel, his source must be even earlier. In fact, Rudolf Pesch, a German expert on Mark, says the Passion source must go back to at least AD 37, just seven years after Jesus’s death.3

Or again, Paul in his letters hands on information concerning Jesus about his teaching, his Last Supper, his betrayal, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection appearances. Paul’s letters were written even before the gospels, and some of his information, for example, what he passes on in his first letter to the Corinthian church about the resurrection appearances, has been dated to within five years after Jesus’s death. It just becomes irresponsible to speak of legends in such cases.

5. The Gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability. Again I only have time to look at one example: Luke. Luke was the author of a two-part work: the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. These are really one work and are separated in our Bibles only because the church grouped the gospels together in the New Testament. Luke is the gospel writer who writes most self-consciously as an historian. In the preface to this work he writes:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. (Lk. 1.1-4)

This preface is written in classical Greek terminology such as was used by Greek historians; after this Luke switches to a more common Greek. But he has put his reader on alert that he can write, should he wish to, like the learned historian. He speaks of his lengthy investigation of the story he’s about to tell and assures us that it is based on eyewitness information and is accordingly the truth.

Now who was this author we call Luke? He was clearly not an eyewitness to Jesus’s life. But we discover an important fact about him from the book of Acts. Beginning in the sixteenth chapter of Acts, when Paul reaches Troas in modern-day Turkey, the author suddenly starts using the first-person plural: "we set sail from Troas to Samothrace," "we remained in Philippi some days," "as we were going to the place of prayer," etc. The most obvious explanation is that the author had joined Paul on his evangelistic tour of the Mediterranean cities. In chapter 21 he accompanies Paul back to Palestine and finally to Jerusalem. What this means is that the author of Luke-Acts was in fact in first hand contact with the eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life and ministry in Jerusalem. Sceptical critics have done back-flips to try to avoid this conclusion. They say that the use of the first-person plural in Acts should not be taken literally; it’s just a literary device which is common in ancient sea voyage stories. Never mind that many of the passages in Acts are not about Paul’s sea voyage, but take place on land! The more important point is that this theory, when you check it out, turns out to be sheer fantasy.4 There just was no literary device of sea voyages in the first person plural—the whole thing has been shown to be a scholarly fiction! There is no avoiding the conclusion that Luke-Acts was written by a traveling companion of Paul who had the opportunity to interview eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life while in Jerusalem. Who were some of these eyewitnesses? Perhaps we can get some clue by subtracting from the Gospel of Luke everything found in the other gospels and seeing what is peculiar to Luke. What you discover is that many of Luke’s peculiar narratives are connected to women who followed Jesus: people like Joanna and Susanna, and significantly, Mary, Jesus’s mother.

Was the author reliable in getting the facts straight? The book of Acts enables us to answer that question decisively. The book of Acts overlaps significantly with secular history of the ancient world, and the historical accuracy of Acts is indisputable. This has recently been demonstrated anew by Colin Hemer, a classical scholar who turned to New Testament studies, in his book The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. 5Hemer goes through the book of Acts with a fine-toothed comb, pulling out a wealth of historical knowledge, ranging from what would have been common knowledge down to details which only a local person would know. Again and again Luke’s accuracy is demonstrated: from the sailings of the Alexandrian corn fleet to the coastal terrain of the Mediterranean islands to the peculiar titles of local officials, Luke gets it right. According to Professor Sherwin-White, "For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. Any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd."6 The judgement of Sir William Ramsay, the world-famous archaeologist, still stands: "Luke is a historian of the first rank . . . . This author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."7 Given Luke’s care and demonstrated reliability as well as his contact with eyewitnesses within the first generation after the events, this author is trustworthy.

On the basis of the five reasons I listed, we are justified in accepting the historical reliability of what the gospels say about Jesus unless they are proven to be wrong. At the very least, we cannot assume they are wrong until proven right. The person who denies the gospels’ reliability must bear the burden of proof.

Specific Aspects of Jesus’s Life

Now by the very nature of the case, it will be impossible to say a whole lot more beyond this to prove that certain stories in the gospels are historically true. How could you prove, for example, the story of Jesus’s visiting Mary and Martha? You just have here a story told by a reliable author in a position to know and no reason to doubt the historicity of the story. There’s not much more to say.

Nevertheless, for many of the key events in the gospels, a great deal more can be said. What I’d like to do now is take a few of the important aspects of Jesus in the gospels and say a word about their historical credibility.

1. Jesus’s Radical Self-Concept as the Divine Son of God. Radical critics deny that the historical Jesus thought of himself as the divine Son of God. They say that after Jesus’s death, the early church claimed that he had said these things, even though he hadn’t.

The big problem with this hypothesis is that it is inexplicable how monotheistic Jews could have attributed divinity to a man they had known, if he never claimed any such things himself. Monotheism is the heart of the Jewish religion, and it would have been blasphemous to say that a human being was God. Yet this is precisely what the earliest Christians did proclaim and believe about Jesus. Such a claim must have been rooted in Jesus’s own teaching.

And in fact, the majority of scholars do believe that among the historically authentic words of Jesus—these are the words in the gospels which the Jesus Seminar would print in red—among the historically authentic words of Jesus are claims that reveal his divine self-understanding. One could give a whole lecture on this point alone; but let me focus on Jesus’s self-concept of being the unique, divine Son of God.

Jesus’s radical self-understanding is revealed, for example, in his parable of the wicked tenants of the vineyard. Even sceptical scholars admit the authenticity of this parable, since it is also found in the Gospel of Thomas, one of their favorite sources. In this parable, the owner of the vineyard sent servants to the tenants of the vineyard to collect its fruit. The vineyard symbolizes Israel, the owner is God, the tenants are the Jewish religious leaders, and the servants are prophets send by God. The tenants beat and reject the owner’s servants. Finally, the owner says, "I will send my only, beloved son. They will listen to my son." But instead, the tenants kill the son because he is the heir to the vineyard. Now what does this parable tell us about Jesus’s self-understanding? He thought of himself as God’s special son, distinct from all the prophets, God’s final messenger, and even the heir to Israel. This is no mere Jewish peasant!

Jesus’s self-concept as God’s son comes to explicit expression in Matthew 11.27: "All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him." Again there is good reason to regard this as an authentic saying of the historical Jesus. It is drawn from an old source which was shared by Matthew and Luke, which scholars call the Q document. Moreover, it is unlikely the Church invented this saying because it says that the Son is unknowable—"no one knows the Son except the Father"—, but for the post-Easter church we can know the Son. So this saying is not the product of later Church theology. What does this saying tell us about Jesus’s self-concept? He thought of himself as the exclusive and absolute Son of God and the only revelation of God to mankind! Make no mistake: if Jesus wasn’t who he said he was, he was crazier than David Koresh and Jim Jones put together!

Finally, I want to consider one more saying: Jesus’s saying on the date of his second coming in Mark 13.32: "But of that day or that hour no man knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." This is an authentic saying of the historical Jesus because the later Church, which regarded Jesus as divine, would never have invented a saying ascribing limited knowledge or ignorance to Jesus. But here Jesus says he doesn’t know the time of his return. So what do we learn from this saying? It not only reveals Jesus’s consciousness of being the one Son of God, but it presents us with an ascending scale from men to the angels to the Son to the Father, a scale on which Jesus transcends any human being or angelic being. This is really incredible stuff! Yet it is what the historical Jesus believed. And this is only one facet of Jesus’s self-understanding. C. S. Lewis was right when he said,

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.8

2. Jesus’s Miracles.Even the most sceptical critics cannot deny that the historical Jesus carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcism. Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most sceptical scholars this century has seen, wrote back in 1926:

Most of the miracle stories contained in the gospels are legendary or at least are dressed up with legends. But there can be no doubt that Jesus did such deeds, which were, in his and his contemporaries’ understanding, miracles, that is, deeds that were the result of supernatural, divine causality. Doubtless he healed the sick and cast out demons.9

Back in Bultmann’s day the miracle stories were thought to be influenced by stories of mythological heroes and, hence, at least in part legendary. But today it is recognized that the hypothesis of mythological influence was historically incorrect. Craig Evans, a well-known Jesus scholar, says that "the older notion" that the miracle stories were the product of mythological divine man ideas "has been largely abandoned."10 He says, "It is no longer seriously contested" "that miracles played a role in Jesus’s ministry." The only reason left for denying that Jesus performed literal miracles is the presupposition of anti-supernaturalism, which is simply unjustified.

3. Jesus’s Trial and Crucifixion. According to the gospels Jesus was condemned by the Jewish high court on the charge of blasphemy and then delivered to the Romans for execution for the treasonous act of setting himself up as King of the Jews. Not only are these facts confirmed by independent biblical sources like Paul and the Acts of the Apostles, but they are also confirmed by extra-biblical sources. From Josephus and Tacitus, we learn that Jesus was crucified by Roman authority under the sentence of Pontius Pilate. From Josephus and Mara bar Serapion we learn that the Jewish leaders made a formal accusation against Jesus and participated in events leading up to his crucifixion. And from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a, we learn that Jewish involvement in the trial was explained as a proper undertaking against a heretic. According to Johnson, "The support for the mode of his death, its agents, and perhaps its coagents, is overwhelming: Jesus faced a trial before his death, was condemned and executed by crucifixion."11 The crucifixion of Jesus is recognized even by the Jesus Seminar as "one indisputable fact." 12

But that raises the very puzzling question: Why was Jesus crucified? As we have seen, the evidence indicates that his crucifixion was instigated by his blasphemous claims, which to the Romans would come across as treasonous. That’s why he was crucified, in the words of the plaque that was nailed to the cross above his head, as "The King of the Jews." But if Jesus was just a peasant, cynic philosopher, just a liberal social gadfly, as the Jesus Seminar claims, then his crucifixion becomes inexplicable. As Professor Leander Keck of Yale University has said, "The idea that this Jewish cynic (and his dozen hippies) with his demeanor and aphorisms was a serious threat to society sounds more like a conceit of alienated academics than sound historical judgement."13 New Testament scholar John Meier is equally direct. He says that a bland Jesus who just went about spinning out parables and telling people to look at the lilies of the field-- "such a Jesus," he says, "would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one."14 The Jesus Seminar has created Jesus who is incompatible with the one indisputable fact of his crucifixion.

4. The resurrection of Jesus. It seems to me that there are four established facts which constitute inductive evidence for the resurrection of Jesus:

Fact #1: After his crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in the tomb. This fact is highly significant because it means that the location of Jesus’s tomb was known to Jew and Christian alike. In that case it becomes inexplicable how belief in his resurrection could arise and flourish in the face of a tomb containing his corpse. According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the honorable burial of Jesus is one of "the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus."15

Fact #2: On the Sunday morning following the crucifixion, the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his women followers. According to Jakob Kremer, an Austrian specialist on the resurrection, "By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb."16 As D. H. van Daalen points out, "It is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions."17

Fact #3: On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead. This is a fact that is almost universally acknowledged among New Testament scholars today. Even Gert Lüdemann, perhaps the most prominent current critic of the resurrection, admits, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."18

Finally, fact #4: The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every reason not to. Despite having every predisposition to the contrary, it is an undeniable fact of history that the original disciples believed in, proclaimed, and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of Jesus’s resurrection. C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge University concludes that we have here a belief which nothing in terms of prior historical influences can account for—apart from the resurrection itself.19

Any responsible historian, then, who seeks to give an account of the matter, must deal with these four independently established facts: the honorable burial of Jesus, the discovery of his empty tomb, his appearances alive after his death, and the very origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection and, hence, of Christianity itself. I want to emphasize that these four facts represent, not the conclusions of conservative scholars, nor have I quoted conservative scholars, but represent rather the majority view of New Testament scholarship today. The question is: how do you best explain these facts?

Now this puts the sceptical critic in a somewhat desperate situation. For example, some time ago I had a debate with a professor at the University of California, Irvine, on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. He had written his doctoral dissertation on the subject and was thoroughly familiar with the evidence. He could not deny the facts of Jesus’s honorable burial, his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection. Therefore, his only recourse was to come up with some alternative explanation of these facts. And so he argued that Jesus had an unknown identical twin brother who was separated from him at birth, came back to Jerusalem just at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus’s body out of the grave, and presented himself to the disciples, who mistakenly inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead! Now I won’t go into how I went about refuting his theory, but I think that this theory is instructive because it shows to what desperate lengths skepticism must go in order to deny the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. In fact, the evidence is so powerful that one of today’s leading Jewish theologians Pinchas Lapide has declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead!20

Conclusion

In summary, the gospels are not only trustworthy documents in general, but as we look at some of the most important aspects of Jesus in the gospels, like his radical personal claims, his miracles, his trial and crucifixion, and his resurrection, their historical veracity shines through. God has acted in history, and we can know it.

Notes

1 Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), p. 123.

2 A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 188-91.

3 Rudolf Pesch, Das Markusevangelium, 2 vols., Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 2 (Freiburg: Herder, 1976-77), 2: 519-20.

4 See discussion in Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, ed. Conrad H. Gempf, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 49 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989), chap. 8.

5 Ibid., chaps. 4-5.

6 Sherwin-White, Roman Society, p. 189.

7 William M. Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), p. 222.

8 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 56.

9 Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1926), p. 159.

10 Craig Evans, "Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology," Theological Studies 54 (1993): 18, 34.

11 Johnson, Real Jesus, p. 125.

12 Robert Funk, Jesus Seminar videotape.

13 Leander Keck, "The Second Coming of the Liberal Jesus?" Christian Century (August, 1994), p. 786.

14 John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 177.

15 John A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973), p. 131.

16 Jakob Kremer, Die Osterevangelien--Geschichten um Geschichte (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), pp. 49-50.

17 D. H. Van Daalen, The Real Resurrection (London: Collins, 1972), p. 41.

18 Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus?, trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 80.

19 C. F. D. Moule and Don Cupitt, "The Resurrection: a Disagreement," Theology 75 (1972): 507-19.

20 Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. Wilhelm C. Linss (London: SPCK, 1983).

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-evidence-for-jesus#ixzz1yyOzINbh

Your Own Personal Jesus

Michael S. Horton

In fact, one reason that these forms of religion have survived modernity, against all expectations to the contrary, is that they not only can accommodate modernity’s privatization of faith as an inner experience but they actually thrive in this atmosphere.

Citing examples from TV, pop music, and best-selling books, an article in Entertainment Weekly noted that "pop culture is going gaga for spirituality." However,

[S]eekers of the day are apt to peel away the tough theological stuff and pluck out the most dulcet elements of faith, coming up with a soothing sampler of Judeo-Christian imagery, Eastern mediation, self-help lingo, a vaguely conservative craving for 'virtue,' and a loopy New Age pursuit of 'peace.' This happy free-for-all, appealing to Baptists and stargazers alike, comes off more like Forest Gump's ubiquitous 'boxa chocolates' than like any real system of belief. You never know what you're going to get. (1)

The "search for the sacred" has become a recurring cover story for national news magazines for some time now; but is a revival of "spirituality" and interest in the "sacred" really any more encouraging than the extravagant idolatry that Paul witnessed in Athens (Acts 17)?

Not only historians and sociologists but novelists are writing about the "Gnostic" character of the soup that we call spirituality in the United States today. In a recent article in Harper's, Curtis White describes our situation pretty well. When we assert, "This is my belief," says White, we are invoking our right to have our own private conviction, no matter how ridiculous, not only tolerated politically but respected by others. "It says, 'I've invested a lot of emotional energy in this belief, and in a way I've staked the credibility of my life on it. So if you ridicule it, you can expect a fight." In this kind of culture, "Yahweh and Baal-my God and yours-stroll arm-in-arm, as if to do so were the model of virtue itself."

What we require of belief is not that it make sense but that it be sincere....Clearly, this is not the spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy. It is a sort of workshop spiritu-ality that you can get with a cereal-box top and five dollars....There is an obvious problem with this form of spirituality: it takes place in isolation. Each of us sits at our computer terminal tapping out our convictions....Consequently, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest belief is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without an orthodoxy. It is heresy as an orthodoxy. (2)

While European nihilism denied only God, "American nihilism is something different. Our nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It's all good!" All that's left is for belief to become "a culture-commodity."

We shop among competing options for our belief. Once reduced to the status of a commodity, our anything-goes, do-it-yourself spirituality cannot have very much to say about the more directly nihilistic conviction that we should all be free to do whatever we like as well, each of us pursuing our right to our isolated happiness. (3)

Like Nietzsche himself, who said that truth is made rather than discovered and was described by Karl Barth as "the man of azure isolation," Americans just want to be left alone to create their own private Idaho. While evangelicals talk a lot about truth, their witness, worship, and spirituality seem in many ways more like their Mormon, New Age, and liberal nemeses than anything like historical Christianity.

We would prefer to be left alone, warmed by our beliefs-that-make-no-sense, whether they are the quotidian platitudes of ordinary Americans, the magical thinking of evangelicals, the mystical thinking of New Age Gnostics, the teary-eyed patriotism of social conservatives, or the perfervid loyalty of the rich to their free-market Mammon. We are thus the congregation of the Church of the Infinitely Fractured, splendidly alone together. And apparently that's how we like it. Our pluralism of belief says both to ourselves and to others, 'Keep your distance.' And yet isn't this all strangely familiar? Aren't these all the false gods that Isaiah and Jeremiah confronted, the cults of the 'hot air gods'? The gods that couldn't scare birds from a cucumber patch? Belief of every kind and cult, self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement of every degree, all flourish. And yet God is abandoned. (4)

As far back as the early eighteenth century, the French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville observed the distinctly American craving "to escape from imposed systems" and "to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things, looking to results without getting entangled in the means toward them." He concluded, "So each man is narrowly shut up in himself and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world." Americans do not need books or any other external authorities in order to find the truth, "having found it in themselves." (5) American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) announced that "whatever hold the public worship held on us is gone or going," prophesying the day when Americans would recognize that they are "part and parcel of God," requiring no mediator or ecclesiastical means of grace. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" captured the unabashed narcissism of American romanticism that plagues our culture from talk shows to the church.

During this same period, the message and methods of American churches also felt the impact of this romantic narcissism. It can be recognized in a host of sermons and hymns from the period, such as C. Austin Miles' hymn, "In the Garden":

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And he walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

The focus of such piety is on a personal relationship with Jesus that is individualistic, inward, and immediate. One comes alone and experiences a joy that "none other has ever known." How can any external orthodoxy tell me I'm wrong? My personal relationship with Jesus is mine. I do not share it with the church. Creeds, confessions, pastors, and teachers-not even the Bible-can shake my confidence in the unique experiences that I have alone with Jesus.

A Perfect Storm

If moralism represents a drift toward the Pelagian (or at least semi-Pelagian) heresy, "enthusiasm" is an expression of the heresy known as Gnosticism. A second-century movement that seriously threatened the ancient churches, Gnosticism tried to blend Greek philosophy and Christianity. The result was an eclectic spirituality that regarded the material world as the prison-house of divine spirits and the creation of an evil god (YAHWEH). Their goal was to return to the spiritual, heavenly, and divine unity of which their inner self is a spark, away from the realm of earthly time, space, and bodies. With little interest in questions of history or doctrine, the Gnostics set off on a quest to ascend the ladder of mysticism. The institutional church, with its ordained ministry, creeds, preaching, sacraments, and discipline, was alienating-like the body, it was the prison-house of the individual soul.

Pelagianism and Gnosticism are different versions of what Gerhard Forde called the "glory story." Following Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, which was following Romans 10 and 1 Corinthians 1, the Reformation contrasted the theology of glory with the theology of the cross. As Forde explains,

The most common overarching story we tell about ourselves is what we will call the glory story. We came from glory and are bound for glory. Of course, in between we seem somehow to have gotten derailed-whether by design or accident we don't quite know-but that is only a temporary inconvenience to be fixed by proper religious effort. What we need is to get back on 'the glory road.' The story is told in countless variations. Usually the subject of the story is 'the soul'...what Paul Ricoeur has called 'the myth of the exiled soul.' (6)

In neither version does one need to be rescued. Assisted, directed, enlightened perhaps, but not rescued-at least not through a bloody cross.

Both versions of the "glory story" drive us deeper into ourselves, identifying God with the inner self, instead of calling us outside of ourselves. The "cross story" and the "glory story" represent not merely different emphases, but entirely different religions, as J. Gresham Machen pointed out in his controversial book, Christianity and Liberalism.

Pelagianism leads to Christless Christianity because we do not need a Savior, but a good example. Gnosticism's route to Christless Christianity is by driving us deeper inside ourselves rather than outside to the incarnate God who rescued us from the guilt, tyranny, and penalty of our sins. Pelagianism and Gnosticism combine to keep us looking to ourselves and within ourselves. We're a self-help people and we like our gods inside of us where we can manage them. Together, these heresies have created the perfect storm: the American Religion.

Gnosticism as the American Religion?

Contemporary descriptions in news periodicals and polling data consistently reveal that the ever-popular "search for the sacred" in American culture shares a lot of similarities with Gnosticism. Of course, in the most popular versions there may be no explicit awareness of this connection or any direct dependence on such sources.

There is an explicit revival of Gnosticism in our day, however, in both the academy and popular culture, from Harvard Divinity School seminars to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The "Gnosticism" aisle in the average bookstore chain (next to religion and spirituality) is evidence of renewed interest in pagan spiritualities. Matthew Fox, repeating the warning of self-described Gnostic psychologist Carl Jung, expresses this sentiment well: "One way to kill the soul is to worship a God outside you." (7) Other writers in this issue focus on this revival of explicit, full-strength Gnosticism, so I will focus on the "Gnosticism Lite" that pervades the American spirituality today.

This watered-down Gnosticism does not require any explicit awareness of, much less attachment to, the esoteric myth of creation and redemption-by-enlightenment. The opposition, however, between inner divinity and enlightenment and redemption, an external God, the external Word, an external redemption in Christ, and an institutional church offers a striking parallel to America's search for the sacred.

In the American Religion, as in ancient Gnosticism, there is almost no sense of God's difference from us-in other words, his majesty, sovereignty, self-existence, and holiness. God is my buddy or my inmost experience, or the power-source for living my best life now. God is not strange (i.e., holy)-and is certainly not a judge. He does not evoke fear, awe, or a sense of terrifying and disorienting beauty. Furthermore, all the focus on making atonement through a bloody sacrifice seems crude and unspiritual to Gnostics when, after all, the point of salvation is to escape the physical realm. All of this is too "Jewish," according to Gnostics from Marcion to Schleiermacher to the "Re-Imagining Conference" of mainline Protestant leaders (especially radical feminists) who explicitly appealed to Gnosticism in their screeds against "men hanging on crosses with blood dripping and all that gory stuff." The god of Gnosticism is not the one before whom Isaiah said, "Woe to me, for I am undone!" or Peter said, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man." To borrow a nice phrase from William Placher, it represents "the domestication of transcendence." God is no longer a problem for us.

Instead of God's free decision to make his home with us in the world that he created, for the Gnostic we are at home with God already, in the stillness of our inner self and away from all entanglements in space and time. As the second-century church father Irenaeus pointed out, Gnostics simply do not care about the unfolding plan of redemption in history because they do not care about history. Time and space are alien to the innermost divine self. To mystics and radical Anabaptists like Thomas Müntzer who made even the external Word of Scripture and preaching subservient to an alleged inner word of personal revelation, Luther and Calvin said that this was the essence of "enthusiasm" (literally, God-within-ism). As Luther put it, this is the attempt to ascend the ladder from matter and history to spirit and the eternal vision of "the naked God." Yet, apart from the incarnate Word, this dazzling god we encounter at the top of that ladder is really the devil, who "disguises himself as an angel of light" (2 Cor. 11:14).

This characteristically American approach to religion, in which the direct relationship of the soul to God generates an almost romantic encounter with the sacred, makes inner experience the measure of spiritual genuineness. We are more concerned that our spiritual leaders exude "vulnerability," "authenticity," and the familiar spontaneity that tells us that they too really do have a personal relationship with Jesus than that they faithfully interpret Scripture and are sent by Christ through the official ordination of his church. Everything perceived as external to the self-the church, the gospel, Word and sacrament, the world, and even God-must either be marginalized or, in more radical versions, rejected as that which would alienate the soul from its immediacy to the divine.

It is therefore not surprising that today the "search for the sacred" continues to generate a proliferation of sects. In fact, sociologist Robert Bellah has coined the term "Sheilaism" to describe American spirituality, based on one interview in which a woman named Sheila said that she just follows her own inner voice. "Your Own Personal Jesus," parodying the title of a Depeche Mode song, seems to be the informal but intense spirituality of many American Christians as well.

Philip Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics (Oxford, 1987) and Harold Bloom's The American Religion (Simon and Schuster, 1992) point out with great insight the connections between this popular spirituality and Gnosticism. It is especially worth pondering Harold Bloom's learned ruminations here because, as he himself observes, Philip Lee laments the Gnosticism of American Religion while Bloom celebrates it. (8)

Hailed as America's most distinguished literary critic, Bloom displays a sophisticated grasp of the varieties of ancient Gnosticism as well as its successive eruptions in the West to the present day. First of all, says Bloom, "freedom, in the context of the American Religion, means being alone with God or with Jesus, the American God or the American Christ." (9) This unwritten creed is as evident in the history of American evangelicalism as it is in Emerson.

As a religious critic, I remain startled by and obsessed with the revivalistic element in our religious experience. Revivalism, in America, tends to be the perpetual shock of the individual discovering yet again what she and he always have known, which is that God loves her and him on an absolutely personal and indeed intimate basis. (10)

Second, as extreme as it at first appears, Bloom suggests that whatever the stated doctrinal positions that evangelicalism shares with historic Christianity,

Mormons and Southern Baptists call themselves Christians, but like most Americans they are closer to ancient Gnostics than to early Christians....The American Religion is pervasive and overwhelming, however, it is masked, and even our secularists, indeed even our professed atheists, are more Gnostic than humanist in their ultimate presuppositions. We are a religiously made culture, furiously searching for the spirit, but each of us is subject and object of the one quest, which must be for the original self, a spark or breath in us that we are convinced goes back to before the Creation. (11)

"The Christ of the twentieth century" is no longer really even a distinct historical person, but "has become a personal experience for the American Christian, quite clearly for the Evangelicals." (12) In this scheme, history is no longer the sphere of Christianity. The focus of faith and practice is not so much Christ's objective person and work for us, outside of us, as it is a "personal relationship" that is defined chiefly in terms of inner experience.

Although he may at times overstate his thesis, Bloom draws on numerous primary and secondary sources from the history of particular movements to build his case. In one chapter, Bloom explores the enthusiastic revivalism of Barton Stone, who broke away from Presbyterianism to found what he regarded as the finally and fully restored apostolic church: the Church of Christ (Disciples). According to his memoirs, Stone wrote, "Calvinism is among the heaviest clogs on Christianity in the world," even from the very beginning of its assumptions: "Its first link is total depravity." (13)

A full generation before Emerson came to his spiritual maturity, the frontier people experienced their giant epiphany of Gnosis at Cane Ridge. Their ecstasy was no more communal than the rapture at Woodstock; each barking Kentuckian or prancing yippie barked and pranced for himself alone.... American ecstasy is solitary, even when it requires the presence of others for the self's glory. (14)

"What was missing in all this quite private luminosity," Bloom adds, "was simply most of historic Christianity."

I hasten to add that I am celebrating, not deploring, when I make that observation. So far as I can tell, the Southern Jesus, which is to say the American Jesus, is not so much an agent of redemption as he is an imparter of knowledge, which returns us to the analysis of an American Gnosis in my previous chapter. Jesus is not so much an event in history for the American Religionist as he is a knower of the secrets of God who in return can be known by the individual. Hidden in this process is a sense that depravity is only a lack of saving knowledge. (15)

This intuitive, direct, and immediate knowledge is set over against the historically mediated forms of knowledge. What an American knows in his or her heart is more certain than the law of gravity.

"A pragmatic exploiter of his own charisma," Charles Finney was a formative influence in the American Religion, notes Bloom. (16) So the "deeds, not creeds" orientation of American revivalism is driven not only by a preference for works over faith (i.e., Pelagianism), but by the Gnostic preference for a private, mystical, and inward "personal relationship with Jesus" in opposition to everything public, doctrinal, and external to the individual soul. Religion is formal, ordered, corporate, and visible; spirituality is informal, spontaneous, individual, and invisible.

As sweeping as it may first appear, there are clear similarities between fundamentalism and Pentecostalism on the one hand and Protestant liberalism on the other. In fact, one reason that these forms of religion have survived modernity, against all expectations to the contrary, is that they not only can accommodate modernity's privatization of faith as an inner experience but they actually thrive in this atmosphere. Repeatedly in the past few centuries, we have seen how easily an inner-directed pietism and revivalism turns to the vinegar of liberalism. One example is Wilhelm Herrmann, a liberal pietist, whose statement early in the twentieth century could be heard in many evangelical circles then as now: "To fix doctrines...into a system is the last thing the Christian Church should undertake....But if, on the other hand, we keep our attention fixed on what God is producing in the Christian's inner life, then the manifoldness of the thoughts which spring from faith will not confuse us, but give us cause for joy." (17)

So it is not surprising when today's fundamentalists eventually become tomorrow's liberals, in recurring cycles that pass through stages of intense controversy. Bloom follows a similar narrative in relation to Gnosticism. For all of their obvious differences, fundamentalists and liberals, Quakers and Roman Catholics, Presbyterians and Mormons, New Agers and Southern Baptists sound a lot alike when it comes to how we in America approach religious truth.

While Luther, Calvin, and their heirs sought to reform the church, the more radical Protestant movements have often seen the church as an obstacle to the individual's personal relationship with God. (Evangelical George Barna, a guru of the church growth movement, has recently written three books arguing that the era of the local church is over, soon to be replaced by Internet resources for personal piety.) Where the Reformers pointed to the external ministry of the church, centering on Word and sacrament, as the place where God promised to meet his people, "enthusiasm" was suspicious of everything external. Similarly, Quakers gave up the formal ministry, including preaching and sacrament, in favor of group sharing of personal revelations. Even when evangelicals retain these public means appointed by Christ, they often become assim-ilated to self-expression and techniques for self-trans-formation: means of our experience and activity more than God's means of grace. Ultimately, it's what I do alone with God that matters, not what God does for me together with his covenant people through public, earthly, material means that he has appointed.

In the history of American (and to some extent British) evangelicalism, the fear of sacraments (as opposed to ordinances) has often been defended as a defense against the perpetual threat of Romanism. In all likelihood, however, a deeper (perhaps unwitting) source of such unease is that evangelicalism has listed toward Gnosticism: Nothing can be allowed to get in the way of my personal and utterly unique relationship with Jesus. Southern Baptist theologian E. Y. Mullins was not saying anything that was not already elaborated by American Transcen-dentalists when he wrote, "That which we know most indubitably are the facts of inner experience." (18) The individual believer, alone with his or her Bible, was all that was necessary for a vital Christian experience. Bloom quotes Mullins' axiom, "Religion is a personal matter between the soul and God." (19) However heterodox this assumption may be by the standards of historic Christianity, it is surely the orthodoxy of American Religion.

Furthermore, Bloom observes, triumphalism-the inability to face the depravity of the inner self even at its best-marks the Gnostic spirit. "Triumphalism is the only mode," says Bloom, in which Mullins and American religionists generally "read Romans," moving quickly through the body of Paul's epistle to chapter 8: "In all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us." (20)

Indeed, Gnostics are allergic to any talk about the reality of sin and death. It was in nineteenth-century America that Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science, whose explicitly Gnostic enthusiasms introduced into the vocabulary of Christians the euphemism "passing away" for death and resurrection.

For Bloom, two outstanding exceptions to this Gnostic trajectory are Swiss theologian Karl Barth and Princeton scholar (and founder of Westminster Seminary) J. Gresham Machen. "Barth knows the difference between the Reformed faith and Gnosis," says Bloom, pointing out the critical divergence: the subjective experience of the self over God's objective word and work. (21)

What we call fundamentalists, says Bloom, are really Gnostics of an anti-intellectual variety. If there were a possibility of an anti-Gnostic version of fundamentalism, says Bloom, such proponents "would find their archetype in the formidable J. Gresham Machen, a remarkable Presbyterian New Testament scholar at Princeton, who published a vehement defense of traditional Christianity in 1923, with the aggressive title Christianity and Liberalism." Bloom adds, "I have just read my way through this, with distaste and discomfort but with reluctant and growing admiration for Machen's mind. I have never seen a stronger case made for the argument that institutional Christianity must regard cultural liberalism as an enemy to faith." (22) In contrast to this defense of traditional Christianity, those who came to be called fundamentalists are more like "the Spanish Fascism of Franco...heirs of Franco's crusade against the mind, and not the legatees of Machen." (23)

In short, "the Calvinist deity, first brought to America by the Puritans, has remarkably little in common with the versions of God now apprehended by what calls itself Protestantism in the United States." Again, as Bloom himself points out, Philip Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics makes almost the same arguments, with many of the same historical examples. What makes Bloom's account a little more interesting is that he champions the American Religion and hopes for even greater gains for Gnosticism in the future. According to Bloom, a "revival of Continental Reformed Protestantism is precisely what we do not need." (24) Like ancient Gnosticism, contemporary American approaches to spirituality-however different conservative and liberal versions may appear on the surface-typically underscore the inner spirit as the locus of a personal relationship. As conservative Calvary Chapel founder Chuck Smith expresses it, "We meet God in the realm of our spirit." (25) This view is so commonplace that it seems odd to hear it challenged. Nevertheless, the church fathers, Protestant Reformers, and orthodox theologians have always directed us with the Scriptures, outside of ourselves, where God has chosen to meet with and to reconcile strangers.

Philip Lee's contrast between Gnosticism and Calvin can be just as accurately documented from a wide variety of Christians through the ages:

Whereas classical Calvinism had held that the Christian's assurance of salvation was guaranteed only through Christ and his Church, with his means of grace, now assurance could be found only in the personal experience of having been born again. This was a radical shift, for Calvin had considered any attempt to put 'conversion in the power of man himself' to be gross popery. (26)

In fact, for the Reformers, adds Lee, the new birth was the opposite of "rebirth into a new and more acceptable self," but the death of the old self and its rebirth in Christ. (27)

Like ancient Gnosticism, American spirituality uses God or the divine as something akin to an energy source. Through various formulae, steps, procedures, or techniques, one may "access" this source on one's own. Such spiritual technology could be employed without any need for the office of preaching, administering baptism or the Supper, or membership in a visible church, submitting to its communal admonitions, encouragements, teaching, and practices.

According to the studies of sociologist Wade Clark Roof, "The distinction between 'spirit' and 'institution' is of major importance" to spiritual seekers today. (28) "Spirit is the inner, experiential aspect of religion; institution is the outer, established form of religion." (29) He adds, "Direct experience is always more trustworthy, if for no other reason than because of its 'inwardness' and 'withinness'-two qualities that have come to be much appreciated in a highly expressive, narcissistic culture." (30)

The way many evangelicals today speak of "accessing" and "connecting" with God underscores this point, in sharp contrast with the biblical emphasis on God's descent to us in the incarnation. Profoundly aware of our difference from God not only as creatures but as sinners as well, biblical faith underscores the need for mediation. God finds us by using his own creation as his "mask" behind which he hides so that he can serve us. The Gnostic, by contrast, needs no mediation. God is not external to the self; in fact, the human spirit and the divine Spirit are already a unity. We cannot be judged-but, then, this also means that we cannot be justified.

To the extent that churches in America today feel compelled to accommodate their message and methods to these dominant forms of spirituality (dominant also in-perhaps even first in-American evangelicalism itself), they will lend evidence to the thesis that Christianity is not news based on historical events but just another therapeutic illusion.

The Flight of the Lonely Soul vs. the Journey of the Pilgrim

Longing for Christ's return, the Christian is world-weary because "this age" lies under the power of sin and death. As the firstfruits of the new creation, Jesus Christ has conquered these powers. It is only a matter of time before the restoration of redeemed creation at the end of history. In the meantime, the believer groans along with the rest of creation for this liberation (Rom. 8:18-25). So the Christian is longing for the final liberation of creation, not from creation. Precisely because the believer is rooted in the age to come, of which the Spirit's indwelling presence is the down payment, there is a simultaneous groaning in the face of the status quo and confidence in God's promise to make all things new.

By contrast, the Gnostic self is rootless, restless, weary of the world not because of its bondage to sin but because it is worldly, longing not for its sharing in the liberation of the children of God but in its freedom at last from creation's company; not the transformation of our times and places, but the transcendence of all times and places. "Taking no root," wrote nineteenth-century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, "I soon weary of any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I feel, or conceive of, as regards this earthly life." (31) Add to this philosophical orientation the practical transience of contemporary life that keeps us blowing like tumbleweed across the desert, and Gnosticism can be easily seen to jive with our everyday experience. Uprooted, we rarely live anywhere long enough even to be transplanted. Flitting like a bumble bee from flower to flower of religious, spiritual, moral, psychic, and even familial and sexual identities, our generation actually finds it plausible that there can be genuine communities (including "churches") on the Internet.

But the "glory story" is not all it's cracked up to be. Bearing the weight of self-salvation or self-deification on our shoulders is as foolish as it is cruel. The search for the sacred leads to hell rather than heaven, to death rather than life, to ourselves (or Satan) rather than to the God who has descended to us in Jesus Christ, veiling his blinding majesty in our frail flesh. In this foolishness God outsmarts us, and in this weakness he conquered the powers of death and hell. The truth that Jesus proclaims-and the truth that Jesus is-remains for all ages, even for Americans, "the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes" (Rom. 1:16).

---

1 [ Back ] Jeff Gordinier, Entertainment Weekly (7 October 1994).
2 [ Back ] Curtis White, "Hot Air Gods," Harper's vol. 315/no. 1891 (December 2007), p. 13.
3 [ Back ] White, pp. 13-14.
4 [ Back ] White, p. 14.
5 [ Back ] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: 1898), vol. 1, p. 66.
6 [ Back ] Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 5.
7 [ Back ] Cited in Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 75.
8 [ Back ] Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 26-27.
9 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 15.
10 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 17.
11 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 22.
12 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 25.
13 [ Back ] Quoted by Bloom, p. 60.
14 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 264.
15 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 65.
16 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 73.
17 [ Back ] Wilhelm Herrmann, Communion with God (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913), p. 16.
18 [ Back ] Cited by Bloom, p. 204, from E. Y. Mullins, The Christian Religion (1910), p. 73.
19 [ Back ] Cited by Bloom, p. 213, from E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion (1908), pp. 53-54.
20 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 213.
21 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 213.
22 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 228.
23 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 229.
24 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 259.
25 [ Back ] Chuck Smith, New Testament Study Guide (Costa Mesa: The Word for Today, 1982), p. 113.
26 [ Back ] Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 144.
27 [ Back ] Lee, p. 255.
28 [ Back ] Roof, p. 23.
29 [ Back ] Roof, p. 30.
30 [ Back ] Roof, p. 67.
31 [ Back ] Cited in Vernon L. Parrington, "The Romantic Revolution in America," vol. 2 of Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), pp. 441-442.

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Michael Horton is the J. Gresham Machen professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California), host of the White Horse Inn, national radio broadcast, and editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation magazine. He is author of many books, including The Gospel-Driven Life, Christless Christianity, People and Place, Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, The Christian Faith, and For Calvinism.

Issue: "The New Spiritualities" May/June 2008 Vol. 17 No. 3 Page number(s): 14-20

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