The End of Christianity (27 page)

John Calvin also agreed that Christ suffered spiritual death upon the cross:

Nothing had been done if Christ had only endured corporeal death. In order to interpose between us and God's anger, and satisfy his righteous judgment, it was necessary that he should feel the weight of divine vengeance. Whence also it was necessary that he should engage, as it were, at close quarters with the powers of hell and the horrors of eternal death. We lately quoted from the Prophet, that the “chastisement of our peace was laid upon him” that he “was bruised for our iniquities” that he “bore our infirmities;” expressions which intimate, that, like a sponsor and surety for the guilty, and, as it were, subjected to condemnation, he undertook and paid all the penalties which must have been exacted from them, the only exception being, that the pains of death could not hold him…not only was the body of Christ given up as the price of redemption, but that there was a greater and more excellent price—that he bore in his soul the tortures of condemned and ruined man.
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Later advocates of the PST also argue that Jesus suffered spiritual separation from God on the cross. For example, Charles Hodge writes:

The penalty of the divine law is said to be eternal death. Therefore if Christ suffered the penalty of the law He must have suffered death eternal; or, as others say, he must have endured the same kind of sufferings as those who are cast off from God and die eternally are called upon to suffer.
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Another Evangelical, Loraine Boettner, states:

We should remember that Christ's suffering in his human nature, as he hung on the cross those six hours, was not primarily physical, but mental and spiritual. When he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” he was literally suffering the pangs of hell. For that is essentially what hell is, separation from God, separation from everything that is good and desirable. Such suffering is beyond our comprehension. But since he suffered as a divine-human person, his suffering was a just equivalent for all that his people would have suffered in an eternity in hell.
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What none of these defenders of the PST explain is how the second person of the Trinity can be separated even for a few hours from the other two members of the Trinity. Any breach within the Trinity would be impossible according to historic orthodoxy. The three persons are one in unity and essence.
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A. T. B. McGowan recognizes the problem without offering any solution:

Let me say that I fully understand the difficulty that attaches to this subject of the Son bearing the wrath of the Father, and I fully respect the theological complexity involved in maintaining penal substitution in the light of the need for a careful delineating of the relationship between the Father and the Son. In my view, this is the strongest theological argument to be faced by any doctrine of penal substitution.
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There has been a recent attempt at an explanation by Rustin Umstattd. In a paper titled “A Trinitarian Crucifixion: The Holy Spirit and Substitutionary Atonement,” he suggests:

[W]hen Jesus experienced the Father's wrath upon the cross and he cried out from the depths of his being the lament of dereliction, the Son was not separated from the Father and the Spirit ontologically, but experientially.…In this forsakenness, Jesus was left alone on the cross to bear the full weight of judgment. At this point, the Spirit is the bond that holds the Trinity together.
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I am not sure how one can be united ontologically and yet experientially be separated. It seems the only way this could happen is if someone only felt as if he were separated, but Umstattd maintains the separation was actual and not merely “felt.” Umstattd apparently holds that in one sense the Father and Son were separated on the cross, but that in another sense they were united by the Spirit. It is almost as if the Spirit is some kind of personal conduit who keeps the two connected even though they are
actually
separated. I don't see how Umstattd's position avoids contradiction. If two persons are separated, another person may serve as an intermediary between the two, but if the third person is actually a personal conduit through which the connection is ontologically maintained, then there is no
actual
separation between the persons. If the God-man is not actually separated from the Trinity on the cross, then he does not endure spiritual death. And since spiritual death is the penalty for sin, he does not endure the penalty for sin, thus negating the PST of the atonement.

This seems like a logical dilemma for the adherents of the PST. Either there was a break in the unity of the Trinity (which would be impossible), or Jesus Christ did not die spiritually (and thus did not pay the penalty for sins).

CONCLUSION

Since the doctrine of the atonement, as held by most Evangelical Christians,
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is illogical, immoral, and incoherent, I agree with Tertullian that the atonement is absurd. He wrote:

The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must need be ashamed [of it]. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd [Latin,
ineptum
]. And he was buried, and rose again: the fact is certain, because it is impossible.
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While Tertullian believed the atonement because it was absurd, I reject it because it is absurd. To accept the most fundamental Christian doctrine, namely that Jesus died for your sins, requires one to believe something that is illogical, immoral, and incoherent. In essence, it requires a
sacrificium intellects
, the sacrifice of our own intelligence. As former Christian Marlene Winell writes:

The most serious demand for unquestioned belief is, of course, the atonement. First the believer is to suspend familiar notions of justice, such as punishment of the guilty as opposed to an innocent party. You are then expected to accept the necessity of blood sacrifice for sin; that wrongdoing must be paid for, and not necessarily in proportion to the crime. A father's sacrifice of his innocent son is supposed to be not only just but generous and wonderful. Then the temporary three-day death [actually about thirty-six hours] of this one person is supposed to wipe out all the wrongdoing and ineptitude of the species. And finally, you should believe that all you need do to erase the responsibility for your actions and enter a haven of eternal reward is to believe. It's no wonder that once a convert has wrapped his or her mind around this story, anything can be accepted as truth.
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by Dr. Matt McCormick

T
he historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is important. Without it, the foundation of Christianity collapses. If we do not have enough evidence to justify believing that Jesus came back from the dead, then the central tenet of Christianity, that the son of God sacrificed himself to provide moral and spiritual salvation for humanity, isn't reasonable to believe. And if that isn't reasonable to believe, then Christianity and the beliefs of millions of followers are unfounded.

FAITH ISN'T ENOUGH

Do the people who are the typical believers in the United States—twenty-first-century adults with a modern education and with the benefits of all the knowledge at our disposal—have adequate grounds to justify their believing that Jesus was a divine being who performed supernatural acts? I am going to argue that we do not, and that by the conventional epistemic standards we already endorse in other comparable cases like the Salem Witch Trials, we should not believe that Jesus was resurrected. Before we can consider the Salem argument, however, some preliminaries concerning faith and historical arguments must be addressed.

I take the existence of hundreds of millions of Christians in the United States and elsewhere to be an indicator that the historical evidence for the resurrection is not widely viewed as important. Perhaps it is an indicator of my skewed sensibilities, but I find the widespread indifference to the question of evidence even more alarming than the widespread belief in Jesus. It is not
merely that so many people believe, but that so many of them find the questions of evidence, justification, or reasonableness to be irrelevant or unimportant regarding an issue of such profound importance. At its extreme, this attitude manifests as an outright hostility among believers in response to hard questions about their reasons. Inquiries from those of us who have doubts about the grounds in support of Jesus’ divinity are viewed by many as angry, intolerant, hateful, or strident.

A less extreme and more common defense invokes faith. Many assert that where evidence fails, faith may bridge the gap and allow epistemically inculpable belief. For them, the question of whether there is sufficient evidence to justify belief is beside the point. The most common uses of the term suggest that to believe by faith means believing despite insufficient or contrary evidence. Faith is invoked when there are some reasons to doubt or think that some hoped for claim is not true—that a favorite basketball team is going to win the championships despite being far behind—but we have faith that it will all work out. At the least, faith is how we describe believing when the evidence by itself, as we see it, does not provide adequate justification, but we are motivated to believe anyway by hope.

In this chapter, I will not accept the faith response to doubts about the historical evidence for the resurrection, for several reasons. One problem is that a person's faith, particularly with regard to such significant issues, is not a private or inconsequential matter. We should not be willing to ignore the fact that Christians have adopted an ideology that has a dramatic impact on their lives and the lives of those of us who live in society with them, but when the question of justification arises, many of them admit that they cannot give sufficient evidence that would make those beliefs reasonable or warranted. As social and political beings sharing a planet made smaller everyday by technology, our lives and our fates are deeply intertwined. Those connections place more and more responsibility on each of us for the safety, health, education, and future of the others. When religious beliefs dramatically affect those relationships with the rest of us, their foundation cannot be left to faith if having faith implies believing on the basis of preference or hope in the face of insufficient or contrary evidence. The rest of us cannot afford to allow the disdain for vital evidence to pass without comment.

If someone's response to my argument against the resurrection is that she has faith, then she and I do agree about something, however. My argument will be that comparable cases like the Salem Witch Trials show that there is insufficient evidence for the resurrection. If someone invokes faith to answer the problem, then it would appear that she is accepting the point. She is acknowledging that in order to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, one must ignore the insufficiencies in the evidence and believe anyway. So we agree on the central point, and what remains is to critically evaluate the prospects of believing by faith.

Another problem with the faith response is that if the believer decides to ignore the insufficiency of the historical evidence for her view, then she loses any criteria that she would have had to sort between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs. If the faithful believer deems the lack of historical evidence to be irrelevant, then the floodgates are now open for a long list of other religious and metaphysical views vying for her acceptance, and the believer has no grounds or criteria upon which to decide which ones are worthy of believing. If the historical facts do not matter, then Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Mormonism, Zoroastrianism, and thousands of other religious views are all on the same poor footing. Without the tribunal of reason and the demand for evidence, anything goes. There can be no rational or principled grounds on which to prefer a Christian doctrine over a non-Christian one, or even a view about the Great Pumpkin. Faith amounts to “going nuclear” in response to substantial questions about the reasonableness of the resurrection; the believer appears to avoid the evidential objection, but only by putting all views, no matter how irrational or insane, on the same level.
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Carefully analyzing the available evidence and drawing our conclusions accordingly is the only defense we have against insanity (or mutually assured destruction).

TAKING THE EVIDENCE SERIOUSLY

We should not believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Arguably, being a Christian requires, at a minimum, believing that Jesus was a divine being and he was resurrected from the dead, so it is not reasonable to be a Christian. Put simply, we have too little information, and it is of too poor quality to warrant our believing that Jesus returned from the dead. The problem I will consider here, although there are many, is that believing in Jesus’ divinity on the basis of the Gospels in the New Testament cannot be reconciled with the standards of evidence that we employ in other comparable cases.
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If we look at the sorts of claims that we typically accept or reject and the evidence relevant to them, some principles of reasonableness emerge. If these epistemic standards are applied objectively and without bias to the Jesus case, it is clear that we should reject it.

But before we consider the parallels between Salem and Jerusalem, I must make a few more remarks about the implications of the approach I am taking here. For the Christian to take the question of historical evidence seriously, as I am doing here, instead of resorting to the faith defense, is an important and positive step. By even engaging in the discussion about whether or not we have sufficient evidence for the resurrection suggests a number of important points. First, and most obviously, engaging the topic indicates that one thinks that the evidence matters. This is a vast improvement over the host of arational and nonevidential accounts of belief and its functions that have proliferated in the postmodern era.
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There are Wittgensteinian, Fideistic, Kierkegaardian, Tillichian, and Plantinga style approaches, among many others where, in one form or another, a straightforward appeal to the facts is not considered necessary or even important to the grounding of religious belief.

As I see it, the insufficiency of the evidence for the resurrection leads to a collapse of Christian doctrine; as these nonevidentialist thinkers see it, the lack of evidence doesn't matter because belief is acquired through some other route or because of the special status of religious belief in our lives. So for the Christian to take the question seriously with those views in the background represents a huge step forward. It would seem that the historical believer and I agree about the basics at least: whether or not we have adequate historical evidence for thinking that Jesus was real and that he returned from the dead after being executed
matters.

Second, what a willingness to engage in the discussion about the historical evidence also suggests is that this believer is prepared, at least in principle, to change her mind if that is indicated by the evidence. She thinks that since the historical facts are one way, then presumably, she would admit that if they had been another way—if the Gospels had been different, or if different archaeological evidence had been found, or if the facts about how the story of the resurrection came to be known by us were different—then that would warrant our not believing that Jesus was resurrected. And if some new information changes our assessment of the reliability of these historical sources, then we should revise accordingly. The historical Christian cannot have it both ways.

She cannot argue that all historical evidence, no matter what it had turned out to be, would support the thesis no matter what, or she's not really giving a historical argument at all. And on a related note, it would be a gross example of confirmation bias to accept or employ only those historical facts that support the resurrection while ignoring or rejecting relevant and legitimate information that would undermine it.

If the historical Christian is being intellectually honest, then she must be prepared to accept that the evidence could, in principle,
disprove
the existence or resurrection of Jesus, too. That's what gives her argument in favor of the historical resurrection force (if it has any at all). She can say to the nonbeliever, “Look, you're not being reasonable. Here is ample evidence that shows that the things that I believe are true. When we consider all of the relevant facts, they show that Jesus was real, and he was resurrected. Not believing in the face of this evidence is irrational. So, failing to be a Christian is irrational.”

A closely related and important question for the historical Christian is “What sort of historical evidence (or lack thereof) would lead you to conclude that Jesus was not resurrected?” If the answer is that there is nothing that could dissuade them, then there's something seriously amiss. The same goes for the nonbeliever who argues that there is insufficient historical evidence to prove the resurrection. What would convince the nonbeliever that it did happen? If nothing would change your mind, even hypothetically, then you are being dogmatic and irrational and there is no need to go any further. I am going to argue that the evidence we actually have concerning the resurrection falls far short, in terms of quantity and quality, of what it needs to be.

The central point here is that the historical Christian already acknowledges many cases in history where it was alleged that some supernatural event occurred, but she does not think we should accept that it actually did. There are accounts of magic, spiritual events, witchcraft, demon possession, visions of angels, voices of gods, and miraculous events within historical episodes such as the Salem Witch Trials, the Inquisition, the founding of many world religions, and in many other ancient histories, but viewing them from our vantage we do not accept them as real. Richard Carrier points out that in Herodotus's book on the Persian Wars, he reports without a hint of doubt “that the temple of Delphi magically defended itself with animated armaments, lightning bolts, and collapsing cliffs; the sacred olive tree of Athens, though burned by the Persians, grew a new shoot an arm's length in a single day; a miraculous floodtide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Poseidon; a horse gave birth to a rabbit; and a whole town witnessed a mass resurrection of cooked fish.”
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Yet despite its coming from an established and respected historical source that provides us with a great deal of reliable information about the past, we all reject these supernatural claims. Many Christians who would defend the resurrection historically will deny real witchcraft at Salem, black magic during the Inquisition, confrontations with the angel Moroni, or a mass resurrection of cooked fish. That is, for the person who believes that Jesus supernaturally returned from the dead on the basis of our historical evidence, there will also be other cases of alleged supernatural events in history that she denies. It is this asymmetrical acceptance of one historical case of magic while rejecting others that is of interest to us here. What will become evident is that the skeptical principles that we apply to historical reports about fantastic, supernatural, and implausible events must be applied with uniformity to all historical cases, not just to those that we wish to reject because of prior religious convictions.

There is a related fallacy that we are frequently guilty of committing. While it is not isolated to religious cases, it is often most flagrant there. Many believers will happily concur with any pro-Jesus argument from history that they hear while treating any historically skeptical argument about Jesus with an artificially high level of criticism. Prior enthusiasm and commitment to a Christian ideology, when brought to the historical question of Jesus, create a de facto nondisconfirmable position. Prohistorical arguments are accepted with less critical scrutiny while antihistorical arguments meet with inordinately high levels of skepticism.
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