CADRE Comments

One of the more compelling reasons for taking the early Christian resurrection claim seriously, in my opinion, is how different it was from analogous claims advanced by Jews and pagans around that time. There was a wide variety of concepts available in the ancient world to describe afterlife prospects, and stories were told of resuscitations, manifestations of spirits of the dead, the divinization of heroes, etc. There was even a kind of resurrection anticipated in ancient Egyptian religion, which implied a continued bodily existence in the underworld. The Jews around this time, of course, were expecting a general resurrection at the end of time which involved God raising human beings and the rest of creation to new life. But the early Christian claim about what happened to Jesus was strikingly different. As Christopher Bryan says in his excellent new book, The Resurrection of the Messiah : In speaking of their encounters with the risen Christ, the first Christians seem to have gone ou...

[Note: The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, Chapter 50, can be found here. ] [This entry constitutes Chapter 51.] If God is going to maintain all the various balances in His creation, while still working to His utmost to help effect our salvation from our own sins and the sins of our predecessors, then He will have to go about it within our history--not merely within the stories we tell ourselves (although He will do some work along those lines, too), but within the real natural reality we inhabit as synthetic creatures. This means He will act within a historical context, and it will be a context of His choosing: designed and guided, even 'tweaked' by Him to fit His plans; but also incorporating the choices of the people, the families, the nations, who will be a part of this particular story of history. But those people will not be sock-puppets. They will be real people; they will be fallible, even though God works with them to the best of ...

Michael Sudduth is one of the sharpest, most erudite and innovative philosophers of religion writing today. He has just come out with a massive study of The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology which is required reading for anyone interested in arguments for the existence of God, and whether and what kind of natural theology is a proper Christian activity. Given his 'empirical' orientation to natural theology it is no surprise that he would be interested in possible empirical traces of the supernatural. He recently updated his website with an absolutely marvelous resource: Postmortem Survival Here you will find a thoroughly comprehensive examination of afterlife ideas in history, philosophical examination of the concepts of disembodied survival, resurrection, reincarnation, etc. as well as a brisk overview of the best empirical evidence for psi, mediumship, NDEs, etc. I think it's no exaggeration to say that this resource is one of a kind. Controversy over the scientific...