In a mirror, dimly

Lee Strobel is quoted in an interview as saying:

Women in first-century Jewish culture were not given credibility in a court of law; their testimony was not considered reliable. So why [do the gospel writers] say that women discovered the tomb empty, even though it hurts their case in the view of their audience? I believe it’s because they were trying to accurately record what actually took place.

(read the full interview on Beliefnet.com)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in “Letters and Papers from Prison” wrote:

SOCRATES mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as “the last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26). There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection. It is not from ars moriendi, the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world. … If a few people really believed that and acted on it in their daily lives, a great deal would be changed. To live in the light of the Resurrection—that is what Easter means.

Lastly, Christianity Today has a superb interview with the current Bishop of Durham (N.T. Wright) - “You Can’t Keep a Justified Man Down“

Within the Enlightenment world of the last two centuries (as represented not least by liberal theology), we see a horror of any idea that God might actually act in the world. People produce fancy-sounding reasons for this, as though it would be quite wrong for God to step in and raise one person from the dead. Why didn’t he step in and stop the Holocaust? And so on. But in fact the whole Enlightenment project is at risk. They want God banished upstairs so they can get on with running the world downstairs.

But with the resurrection, we have God saying, “No, I want to put things downstairs to rights, thank you very much. I started doing it with Jesus and you’d better get in line.” That’s a shock to liberal theology, just like it’s a shock to all kinds of other tyrannies - and liberal theology has become its own sort of tyranny.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.