From the outside, they were just another group of men who would meet regularly at the pub. They met at the same place, most weeks, for a drink and a chat. They talked about all manner of things on their minds: what they were working on, what they were thinking about doing.
This story becomes more interesting when the men in the group are revealed. This little band of friends, mostly writers, were known as ‘The Inklings’, and they counted amongst their ranks men such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
For years Lewis and co. would spark off each other at the pub. Great literary works such as The Lord of The Rings (Tolkien) and The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis) would have first been tossed around as emerging ideas here as these men drank their ale and smoked their pipes.
The pub which was the scene for these gatherings of the Inklings was The Eagle and Child, on St. Giles in Oxford. Well, on one particular day the Eagle – affectionately known as ‘The Bird and Baby’ – ran out of beer. And of course a pub without beer is bordering on useless so the Inklings tried other pubs around the city before settling on the Lamb and Flag, directly opposite the Eagle and Child. The Inklings crossed over the road and never looked back.
For C. S. Lewis, one of the chief members of the Inklings, crossing the road in pursuit of a drink marked a fairly insignificant change. However, a much greater “crossing over” was to become the central defining point of his life.
Lewis first arrived in Oxford, as a student in 1917, a committed atheist. But after 10 years or so things began to change. He was challenged by Christian writers and his friends – in particular J. R. R. Tolkien – to reconsider his position. Lewis had originally dismissed Christianity because he failed to see how it could hold together rationally. Yes, Lewis was a man of incredible imagination who could write exotic sci-fi tales and stories of imaginary worlds far away, but he was also endowed with razor-sharp logic. For Lewis, belief in God had to make sense intellectually to hold any merit.
However, when pressed to examine his beliefs he found that perhaps they weren’t as well-founded as he had first thought. He had believed that Christianity wasn’t properly grounded, but had he done enough investigation to fully justify that position? Did he hold that intellectual position for weak reasons, or for strong?
With time Lewis came to see that not only was his lack of belief in God not properly thought through, but that also the intellectual coherence of Christianity started to emerge more clearly after closer inspection.
What followed – after much walking, smoking, drinking, and discussing (naturally) – was a conversion to Christianity at the end of the 1920’s, entirely against the line of his imagined future but totally in keeping with his observations. Of all the people taken by surprise by this, Lewis was perhaps the most astounded. He records that when he finally made the switch he felt that he was indeed the most “reluctant convert in all England”.
Two years ago a plaque was laid for Lewis in Westminster Abbey to commemorate his life. The words chosen to adorn the plaque were taken from an essay Lewis wrote in 1944: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” It was Christianity’s explanatory power of the way the world is, the way Lewis was, and a hope for the future that convinced him to cross over from his atheism. After properly examining Christianity Lewis found it to be emotionally and rationally satisfying. His reason and his emotion now pointed to a truth he originally had denied. It took a step of humility, but Lewis followed the evidence to its natural conclusion.
C. S. Lewis has inspired millions of people through his stories, but perhaps the greatest inspiration he left us was his courage to find the truth about God and to commit to what he found.

In the 6^th Century a monk by the name of Dionysius Exiguus suggested that the calendar be reworked from the existing Roman model to a model based around the birth of Jesus Christ.
1500 years on and still the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus comprise the pivotal period of history upon which everything else hangs.
Because the Jesus’ death and resurrection took place in time and space, and is recorded in history, we can look at it and enquire of it.
It’s one thing to agree that the Resurrection happened; it’s another to believe in the risen Jesus as Lord and Saviour. To understand the implications of the historical events of the Cross, we need to understand what the mission was.
And this indeed was a mission. The cross, far from being an unexpected catastrophic event – what the disciples mistook for what was happening – was foreknown. Indeed, the origins of the Cross go back before the origins of the world.

Jesus’ Mission Was Pre-Set

The Biblical account of the creation of the world (Genesis 1) is quickly followed by the first humans getting things wrong (Genesis 3), introducing sin and decay to the world and everyone and everything in it.
Put simply, God created a perfect world and we messed things up.
Sin affects everything. It is no small problem; it is the underlying affliction that is the root of all that is wrong in the world today. It robs everything of its beauty because it sets the human heart as “hostile toward God” (Romans 8:7). It is a divorce of monumental proportions.
Where Adam and Eve first deviated, every human heart has since followed suit: we’ve chosen ourselves before God. We’ve made something other than God to be God. We’ve “missed the mark” and introduced aberration, which has poisoned everything.
We might think that at this point God reverts to Plan B: enter Jesus. But the Bible tells us a different story. It says that Jesus was “foreknown before the foundations of the world” (1 Peter 1:17-21). This is remarkable. Before God created the world he knew that things would go wrong, and he knew that he himself would put things right, at unimaginable cost.
And the intrigue builds as we are told that not only was Jesus’ plan foreknown, but we too were known before the beginning of time. The Bible does not tell us that we are simply a random collection of molecules, the product of blind chance. It says that God “chose us” before the beginning of the world (Ephesians 1:3-10).
You and me, we were known by God, chosen by God, and before we had taken our first breath God had already enacted an outrageous plan in love to rescue us. This was the way that God planned it from the very beginning! In love he created us, and in love he came to rescue us.
The story of the age is that we are basically good people that get things wrong from time to time.
The story of the Bible is that we are more depraved than we can possibly fathom, yet we are more loved and more valuable than we can possibly imagine.

Jesus Knew His Mission

The Good News continues when we learn that as a man Jesus knew of his mission on earth. In John 2:19 Jesus prophesies his own death and resurrection when he tells the Jews, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
Whilst the Jews were thinking he meant the temple building at the time, they later understood he meant physical resurrection of himself as Matthew records in his gospel:

“The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can.” So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.”

God from the foundations of the world knew of the cross. Jesus from the beginning of his ministry knew of his mission on earth.

Jesus Died For Us

The ultimate problem with sin is that it comes with a cost. It separates us from God, it incurs a debt, and it results in death.
The ultimate problem for humanity is that it has no way of dealing with this cost. What power do we have over death? How can a now imperfect person return him or herself to perfection, paying off their debt? How can we find our way back to God?
The pattern of the religions of the world goes something like this: live a good life, doing the right things, and you will have eternal bliss.
The message of the Bible is: only perfect people go to Heaven. That leaves us with a problem. There are two types of people on this earth: the imperfect, and those who claim to be perfect (thus displaying for all their imperfection!).
Jesus Christ was God, come to earth, in all of his perfection. The Bible says that he was the only one to live a perfect life.
When the Romans were nailing Jesus to the cross they were unaware of what they were doing. They thought they were executing just another man. What they were doing was killing the only perfect man to ever have lived. The only man who could have ever escaped death on his own.
Jesus’ voluntarily died on the cross and in doing so gave to us his righteousness. Not that we asked him to; he chose to do this in love for us. As the Bible says,

“but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

On that cross Jesus absorbed all of our sin. Martin Luther called this the ‘Great Exchange’ – his righteousness for our sinfulness.
At once, the separation between humanity and God was removed. At this point in history, the Bible records that the heavy curtain used to separate the Holy of Holies (where the presence of God resided) in the temple was torn in two, signifying that access to God had now been restored (Matthew 27:41).
God came to earth to restore and redeem his own. We, who were known before the foundation of the world, were rescued by God by the greatest act of love the Universe has ever witnessed or ever will witness.

Once, For All

 “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,” (1 Peter 3:18, ESV)

Flogged. Mocked. Abused and hung upon a tree to die. Jesus, God himself, made good the world. He bought us back at tremendous price.
Three days after his death, the tomb in which he was laid was found empty. On Easter Sunday, we say – as his disciples said – “He is risen!”
Death could not contain the creator of the world! In dying on the cross Jesus took away the sin of the world; in rising again Jesus broke the power of death.
For the Christian death is not the end of this world. Our lives have been secured by Jesus’ sacrifice and as this world and our physical bodies are passing away, we know that our souls are secure.
Having faith in Jesus Christ means accepting all that he said about himself, all that he said about us, and all that he did for us. It is realising that our individual stories are caught up in his ultimate story. When we come to see all that he’s done for us, the only proper response is to make him Lord and Saviour of our lives.

This is the fourth post in our series on  The Resurrection. We’ve seen so far that:

1. Jesus died
2. The tomb was found empty
3. Many people reported seeing the resurrected Jesus

Fact 4: The Transformation of the Disciples

The night before the crucifixion of Jesus, Simon Peter – one of Jesus’ closest friends – in an act of cowardice, denied that he even knew Jesus (John 18:15-18 & 25-27). As the tension rose and the threats grew, the disciples just walked away from their leader.
The following day the leader of this once-happy band of disciples was executed. It appeared that it was game over.
The execution of Jesus – ordered by the Jews on the charge of blasphemy – was designed put an end to this new movement. This method is as old as time: remove the leader and let the movement that followed him wither away.
This is what the Jews thought was going to happen. But history records a different story.
Mere days after the death of Jesus, the disciples far from being defeated and dispersed, popped up again in Jerusalem. Led by the same man that had only just denied he knew Jesus, Peter, they were proclaiming in public the Resurrection and calling men to repent (Acts 2:14-41).
They preached with such passion and fervour that records show 3,000 people believed and started to follow Jesus after their very first public appearance. All of this in the same city where Jesus was just very recently nailed to a cross for all to see.
The disciples then went on to spread the message of the Resurrection far and wide. It became their life goal. For most of them, it would be their death sentence too. Out of the 12 original disciples, 1 betrayed Jesus and then took his own life (Judas), 1 died of old age (John, the brother of James), and the remaining 10 were martyred for their faith.
In the years to come the early Christian church would face horrendous persecution under the reign of Nero with many believers paying for their faith with their life. It would be a few hundred years before Christianity secured state protection. But through all the torture and the horrors, the church grew and grew, with people putting their trust in the Resurrected Jesus and placing their faith in Him above their own lives.
The question that must be asked of this is: what on earth caused this to happen? And that is precisely the question that has to be asked by one who is unwilling to consider a supernatural explanation.
So what could have happened?

Self-Delusion?

Perhaps the disciples decided, even now they knew that Jesus had died, that they couldn’t revert to their old life. They had invested too much. The show had to go on. So they summoned up the inner strength required to move past the defeat of the cross and grouped together to keep the band on the road.
You wouldn’t be the only one who thinks this is hard sell. Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish New Testament scholar said this,
“If the defeated and depressed disciples overnight could change into a victorious movement of faith, based only an autosuggestion or self-deception-without a fundamental faith experience-this would be a much greater miracle than the resurrection itself.”
Could one man summon up the strength to suppress the truth he knew and live a lie? Could 11? Could 3011?

Conspiracy?

Well maybe the disciples had something else in mind. Perhaps they had something else up their tunic sleeves. Perhaps, even, they were bribed and induced to lie and continue proclaiming the message of Jesus.
But cracks do appear in this hypothesis too. Who was bribing the disciples? What was the value of their reward, and why was it greater to them than their own lives?
And the point is made that someone who has been bribed once can always be bribed again. It would only have taken one of the disciples to crack – say under the threat of death – and the game would be up, as Blaise Pascal noted:

“The hypothesis that the Apostles were rogues is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus’ death and conspiring to say that he had risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost.”

As with Fact 3 the natural explanations offered become quite absurd when they play out, each becoming more and more complicated until they undo themselves.
The one solution that’s left is the simplest one: Jesus rose from the dead, appeared to the disciples, and the disciples were transformed on the basis of this witnessed miracle.
These four minimal facts of the Resurrection all say one thing: something big happened. Some extraordinary took place. So what do you make of it all?

What is the simplest explanation for the historical accounts of the Easter weekend? That is what we’re asking in this series. In parts 1 and 2 we looked at two basic facts of the Resurrection story: that Jesus died, and that on the Sunday the tomb that he was placed in was found empty. Part 4 looks at the amazing transformation of the disciples.
The third fact that requires an explanation is the multiple sightings of the resurrected Jesus.

Fact 3: Post-Resurrection Appearances

On Easter Sunday, after the tomb was found empty, Jesus appeared to a number of different people. They hugged him (John 20:17) and examined his crucifixion wounds (John 20:27). This was a physical, walking Jesus.
This is when things get really interesting. The prior evidence strongly points to the death of Jesus (not at all unexpected) and an empty tomb (perplexing). Now we have resurrection sightings (extraordinary).
It is of course important for Facts 1 and 2 to be established. If Fact 1 was not true, then Fact 3 could not be true: you can’t have a resurrection without a death. And if Fact 2 was not true, then Fact 3 would be disproved by providing the body as evidence against the Resurrection.
If the death shocked Jesus’ followers, then the empty tomb raised hope, and the sightings of Jesus confirmed their hope and filled them with joy.
Not only did the disciples see and interact with the resurrected Jesus, but Saul (who changed his name to Paul) was transformed from militant anti-Christian to passionate Christian missionary by an encounter with the risen Jesus also (Acts 9).
Paul talks of all of this in his letter to Corinth, which we looked at in Part 2. It continues:

“and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” (1 Corinthians 15:5–8, ESV)

For the Resurrection to be real, a supernatural event must have taken place. Because naturally, dead people do not come back to life. The fact of the matter is that many people find the Resurrection story hard to believe because they rule out supernatural intervention to start with. If you don’t allow supernatural explanations, then you won’t find a supernatural answer, and the Resurrection can not possible be true.
But if we suspend bias and examine the evidence closely, we see that naturalistic explanations just don’t fit. And as Spock, quoting Sherlock Holmes, once said, “if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains – however improbable – must be the truth.”

Alternative Explanations

So what else could be an explanation for the post-resurrection sightings of Jesus?
Well, firstly, we could say that they simply weren’t real. They didn’t happen and the church made up the story later on. But as we saw with Fact 2, “legendary development” doesn’t fit because the early Christians (within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses to the resurrected Jesus) claimed to have seen a resurrected Jesus. The evidence informs us that people at the time believed Jesus had come back to life and people had seen him.
Secondly it has been suggested that the disciples and other witnesses did believe they had seen Jesus, but they were deceived, or they hallucinated.
The problem here is the sheer number of witnesses. Over 500 people were said to have seen the risen Jesus.
Hallucinations do occur, but there has been no recorded episode of mass-hallucination – that is, more than one person experiencing the same hallucination.
For example, let’s say that you were to slip in to a deep sleep and not awake until December this year. You then meet me, and I (as a passionate Scottish Rugby fan) fill you in on what you missed during your extended nap: chiefly, the Rugby World Cup. I tell you of the amazing feats of Scotland. How they ran riot over South Africa and topped their group, before beating Australia in the quarters, knocking over the All Blacks in the semis, and humbling England, at Twickenham, in the Final.
Barring any loss of judgement incurred during the shut-eye you would be right to question my story. When you see that I firmly believe it and I’m not trying to pull your leg, you would think I had lost it. You would probably want to check me in to a facility.
But then, if the next person you met, and the next, and the next all told you the same story and they passionately believed it too, you would have to come up with some other explanation other than individual mental disturbances.
The fact that many people claim to have seen Jesus removes the possibility of hallucination as a cause and requires us to ask, if the story is not true, why does a large group of people believe that it is?
Are they lying? Well then we have to ask, what’s in it for them? Furthermore, if they were lying, where was the body? So then maybe Jesus didn’t die? But the evidence from Fact 1 strongly suggests he did.
In the absence of a credible naturalistic explanation for these sightings, a supernatural explanation that fits the evidence – of not one, but now three facts – really ought to be considered. If we have a problem with that then we must ask ourselves if we’re really open to discovering the truth of the matter. For if we insist that our discovery must conform to our presupposed beliefs, then how honest are we really being with ourselves?

The “minimal facts” of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ are there to be investigated. In the first part of this series we looked at Fact 1: Jesus Died, and asked whether the ‘swoon theory’ held any weight. Today we move on to the second fact. (Skip ahead to Fact 3: The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus and Fact 4: The transformation of the disciples)

Fact 2: The Tomb Was Empty

“Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”” (John 20:1–2, ESV)

Jesus was crucified on a Friday and laid in a known tomb nearby (John 19:38-41). The next day was the Sabbath (Saturday) and the “first day of the week” was the Sunday. It was on the Sunday that Mary Magdalene found the empty tomb and informed the disciples.
There are a few alternative theories about what might have occurred over those couple of days. The point is made that the absence of a body does not lead one to immediately conclude ‘supernatural resurrection’. Indeed. So, the question is, ‘What are the competing naturalistic explanations?

Jewish/Roman Conspiracy?

Well, firstly, someone could have come and removed the dead body from the tomb (which is what Mary seems to think happened at first). But who would have done that?
Both the Romans and the Jews had much to gain from Jesus remaining dead. The Romans crucified him at the request of the Jews who two days prior were screaming bloody murder.
Later on, when the Resurrection story began to gain traction, whatever reason the Jews or the Romans had for removing the body would have paled in comparison to the need to check the growing ‘heresy’ that was threatening unrest. The body could have been presented at this time and tChristianity stopped in its tracks.

Stolen Body?

Secondly, we could suggest that the disciples stole the body and then made up the story about the Resurrection. But some problems emerge with this theory too.
To start with, the disciples would have had to regroup from the shock of seeing Jesus crucified and come up with a plan to steal the body in just a day or so. Then they would have had to overcome the Roman guard, which was stationed by the tomb for the very reason of preventing the disciples doing just this (Matthew 27:62-66). After all of this, the disciples – knowing that they have faked the story – would have had to lie consistently, in fact, lie all the way to their death for what they proclaimed. The point was made in Part I, ‘why would they die for something they did not believe happened?’

Legendary Development?

A third theory is that the church made up this story later on when it was more powerful. We’ve looked elsewhere at the reliability of the eye-witness testimony of the Bible, but in addition there are a couple of other points to made about this.
Firstly, the Bible records that it was women that found the tomb of Jesus. Times have changed and perhaps what is not immediately apparent is that this fact significantly weakens the credibility of the story. A women’s testimony was inadmissible in court – equivalent to a drunken man’s testimony – and so to hang the story on women, as all Gospel’s do, would not make sense if the goal of the writers were to create a strong story.
The next thing to consider is to ask how long it was before the church invented this story. 100 years? 500? This idea, ‘legendary development’, suggests that the church over time came up with the idea of physical resurrection. The problem for this angle is that believers were proclaiming the resurrection very early on.
A portion of a letter Paul writes to Christians in Corinth contains what many scholars believed to be an early creed. This would have been a statement of faith that Christians would affirm.

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:3–6, ESV)

Scholars date this creed to within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of Jesus’ death. That is, the very first Christians believed and stated their belief in the Resurrection.
The tomb was found on the Sunday to be empty and neither the historical record nor competing theories for the absence of the body lead us to think that anything else actually happened than what the gospels claim.
Of course, the account gets stronger when we include the stories of the many people who claim to have seen the resurrected Jesus. This is what we will look at next.

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the focal point of the Christian faith. The whole of Christianity hinges upon it. What happened 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem is incredibly important to us today precisely because something did happen.
The Christian faith is built on historical events that present themselves to us as questions. The Resurrection is the chief event and it asks us to look at it and decide, individually, whether we will accept Jesus as King and God.
What happened all those years ago and started a movement that has been growing ever since. From hundreds to thousands to billions today, people all over the world have come to believe in and follow Jesus Christ.
We at the Demolition Squad have been offering arguments that suggest that belief in Jesus is credible. We see that the evidence is there to be examined. In this series we’re going to look at the four key historical facts about the death and resurrection of Jesus.
And this is important because if we don’t have a resurrected Jesus, we lose the testimony of Jesus and Christianity then has no foundation. Jesus didn’t come to merely offer a good strategy for life. He came saying he was God and he prophesied his own death and resurrection. So if the Resurrection didn’t happen, then we can put to rest all of Christianity. As Tim Keller has written,
“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.” Reason for God

Four Minimal Facts of The Resurrection

There is an approach to looking at the Resurrection known as the “minimal facts approach.” It seeks only to examine the core pieces of evidence that the broad majority of scholars – Christian and sceptic alike – agree on.
Taken from Biblical records (in the form of historical testimony) these facts are in and of themselves neutral. How we interpret them is what’s important.
We’re going to look at four of these facts, starting with Jesus’ death.

Fact 1: Jesus Died

We don’t have a resurrection from the dead if the person said to have been resurrected did not in fact die.
The Bible makes quite clear that Jesus died (all the gospels tell us this). These accounts say he died by crucifixion, a common Roman method of execution.
John records in his gospel that the soldiers broke the legs of the two men crucified next to Jesus. Because the body needed to push up on the legs to inhale air, breaking the legs would prevent this from happening and speed up death.
“But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.” (John 19:33–34, ESV)
I was talking recently about the Resurrection with a medical doctor. He told me that it was on the reading of the history of this event that he took seriously the claims that Jesus made.
The Biblical record that a spear was thrust into Jesus’ side and “blood and water” came out indicates that the sac around the heart, most likely filled with fluid as a result of the shock the body was in (both from crucifixion and the whipping Jesus received before), had been punctured resulting in this discharge.

Swoon Theory

One theory to be presented in opposition to Jesus’ death is the so-called ‘swoon theory’. This position says that Jesus did not die but rather passed out, and was revived later on in the tomb. However, this idea is problematic for a number of reasons:

1. The trained Roman soldiers overseeing Jesus’ death would have failed to do their job. They were given orders to kill Jesus and they knew how to do it. Failing to do this would be unthinkable unless they had another (unknown) motive.
2. Before enduring the crucifixion Jesus had to carry part of his cross to the execution site after receiving a flogging and having a crown of thorns pressed into his head. The blood loss from this event was traumatic alone. This wasn’t some prep-school cane-whacking, this would have been truly awful. The historian Eusibius tells us what a Roman flogging was like: “The sufferer’s veins were laid bare, and the very muscles, sinews, and bowels of the victim were open to exposure.”
3. There are no competing historical accounts of Jesus have merely passed out on the cross and coming to later on.
4. The disciples actually thought Jesus was dead. They then believe they saw the resurrected body (we’ll cover this in more detail later). 10 out of the remaining 11 disciples (post-Judas) were martyred for their faith, which they proclaimed hung on the resurrection. If Jesus did not die, and the disciples knew this to be a lie and further propagated this lie, why would they die for something they did not believe happened?

The simplest account for what went on is that Jesus died. To suggest that somehow Jesus survived requires a much greater leap of faith.
(For more on the evidence for Jesus’ death, take a look at Lee Strobel’s interview of Dr. Alexander Metherell in Stroble’s book The Case for Christ)
Next in the series:

• Fact 2: The tomb was empty
• Fact 3: The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus
• Fact 4: The transformation of the disciples

What is the one thing about you that is off-limits? Even your closest friends know not to talk to you about this. It’s personal and it’s private and it is not open for discussion.
It’s not that you’re ‘closed off’. Just careful with certain parts of who you are. After all, it is wise to be careful, isn’t it?
One area we tend to cover up contains the things in our lives that we don’t like. Perhaps this is what we call shame. You could be in debt, or you messed up at work, or there’s emotional pain from things long ago that prevent real relationship with those persons involved.
But equally, our hopes and dreams, those that are left, are often cocooned in emotional bubble wrap. We store them like the wedding china, unused for fear of breaking them and not being able to find a replacement.
As a squirrel buries their nuts before the coming winter, we can bury our deepest thoughts and feelings, and like some of those squirrels, often forget all about them.
We think that they’re safe, deep down, out of the way. We’re unaware though, of how these emotions seep through us, like unsecured toxic waste. We think we’re immune to their presence because they’re buried deep, but every now and again they become exposed.
Sometimes it’s someone else doing the digging. Maybe it’s our wife, or a friend prodding a little too deeply. It’s amazing what people find when they get under the surface (just ask the Crossrail guys who have recently finished the new train tunnels below London).
More often than not however these things are exposed by complete accident. In the fields of Flanders after WWI, the frosty winters were known to bring up unexploded shells to just below the surface. The Belgian farmers knew all-too-well about this annual menace and the problems they posed to their ploughing.
Sometimes it’s a friendly, unassuming conversation that touches something of us we had forgotten about long ago. And sometimes it’s something with a little more bite.
At the beginning of the year Stephen Fry was interviewed on Irish television channel RTE and when asked what he would say to God were he ever to visit the pearly gates of Heaven, he replied vehemently, “Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”
Of course Fry isn’t the first to voice this age-old problem in such strong terms. But the response seemed unnaturally large. Newspaper articles and blogs were published in reply and the clip from the show went viral on YouTube.
For many people Fry touched on a nerve. His words shattered the flimsy structures constructed around such buried thoughts like, ‘why did I have to experience that horrible thing?’
There are some big questions in this world that aren’t easy to answer. There are also big parts of who are that we’d rather leave unquestioned. But it was Socrates who told us that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’.
Sometimes the thought of sifting through our inner person feels about as fun as receiving a do-it-yourself-molar-extraction kit for Christmas. Thankfully, we’re not left to our own unskilled hands to do this. In an ancient Hebrew poem a request is made of God: “Search me, O God, and know my heart!”⁽¹⁾
The God of the universe, who made you and knows you and loves you and has complete skill in all matters, wants to work with you to uncover who you really are. If you let him he will deal with your unexploded ordinance and he will unearth your buried treasures.
God’s love frees us from the fear of tough questions, from the pain of deep memories, and it frees us to be the person he created us to be. Life is too precious to live it in avoidance of who we really are, so why not, as the Good Book says, ‘cast all your anxieties on him.’⁽²⁾ It’ll be a load off your mind.
Incidentally, if you are interested in the problem of pain, might I recommend ‘Why Suffering? Finding Meaning and Comfort When Life Doesn’t Make Sense’ (Faith Words, 2014) by Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale as an excellent starting point on the subject.
1. Psalm 139:23
2. 1 Peter 5:7

This seems like a good place to start a book that answers the tough questions posed of Christianity. After all, if there is no such thing as truth then Christianity cannot possibly be true in the way that Christians hope it is, and so there’s no point writing a book that tries to support and outline the truth of Christianity, is there?

So, is there no such thing as truth? Or, to put it another way, is the statement, ‘There’s no such thing as truth’ actually…true?

We live in a very post-modern world. A world where radical scepticism is king. The most pure definition of post-modernism is simply: not modernism. However, when we talk about things being ‘post-modern’, we often mean that they reject the idea of absolutes – absolute truth, for example.

And it would be lovely to think that truth is whatever we decide it to be. Indeed, you will hear people say, ‘This is my truth; what’s yours?’ But what if my truth is that your truth can’t possibly be true? What happens then? If my truth is true, then my statement that your truth can’t possibly be true is also true, and so your truth can’t possibly be true. Alternatively, if my truth isn’t true, then it’s not truth at all.

Somebody once said, ‘If someone tells you there’s no such thing as truth, they’re asking you not to believe them, so don’t.’ And here’s the problem with the statement, ‘There’s no such thing as truth’: it’s a self-refuting statement. If the statement is true, then it proves itself false. And if the statement itself is false, then it’s still false.

It would seem that using the idea that there is no absolute truth is just a way of making ourselves feel like the kings of our own lives. But nobody really lives as though truth is so easy to manipulate – it’s all around us. If I told you, in my native English tongue, that ‘I only speak Russian and Turkish’, then there isn’t really any way of that being true. It’s obviously untrue from the moment I start telling you in English.

Every adult who has ever died was born. A giraffe has never played Premiership football. There are no married bachelors.

Lots of things are objectively, absolutely true. And we all know it. Nobody is post-modernist when they are reading the warning label on a bottle of poison.

We live in the world of scepticism. We don’t like to commit to truth claims, because it makes us feel controlled. We want to be free, to be critical thinkers. But to be truly sceptical, you have to be sceptical about your own scepticism. How do we know that scepticism is the best way to view the world? If we’re prepared to accept that we need to be sceptical about our own scepticism, and that the idea of truth is a true on – that there are things out there that can be said to be true – then we can ask the next logical question: what, exactly, is true?

This is the first of a series of excerpts from the forthcoming book from the Demolition Squad, tackling #25objections to the Christian faith.

Have you ever introduced a friend to a favourite sport of yours? I tried this with my wife (then fiancée) during the Six Nations last year. “It’ll only take one game and she’ll be hooked,” I mused. But which game would I choose? It couldn’t be Scotland v. England (I have split loyalties). Now, I love the way the French play, but only when they decide to play which frankly left too much to hope for so they were out of the question. I settled on Ireland v. Wales thinking that’s where the magic will happen.
It’s all easier with hindsight of course. Looking for the best examples we would all (Brits, that is) pick the 2005 Ashes over 2014 or the 5-1 against Germany over most-any World Cups finals post 1966 etc. When we want to sell something we’re going to look to the best example we can find and offer that moment as our chief evidence.
I’ve found this pattern true of most things. We point to the best of something – be it a product, or a sport, or an idea – when we’re seeking to promote it. Advertisers tell us what their thing does best of all. The fact sheets tend to be stacked with the favourable measurements at the top.
We do this too with religion when we point out the merits of a particular faith. Ideas and arguments from every viewpoint seek to offer the top example. It seems to me however that in all of the selling and highlighting of religions, only one really does stand out because, well, it just goes about things differently.
I am of course talking of Christianity. At the heart of the Christian faith is a man who claimed to be God. This is a claim that none of the leaders of other major world religions dared to make.
Every religion, or non-religion, has its best examples and top arguments. Christianity however claims that best isn’t good enough and offers ‘perfect’ instead. Jesus Christ was so bold to claim that not only was he a great man and therefore a great example, but more than that he was a perfect man and therefore the only example.
That’s why the early Christians would talk about the gospel – literally, the good news – of Jesus Christ. He was and is the example.
Christians follow Jesus’ example of offering the same Good News. But instead of pointing to ourselves, we point to Jesus.
A Christian following Jesus may themselves be an excellent illustration for the Good News, but their example really, ultimately, looks past. Christians aren’t saying ‘We’re perfect, follow us’ but rather ‘Jesus is perfect, follow Him’. The life of a Christian ought to serve as a pointer to Jesus himself.
Of course, it’s not always that simple and Christians, who though friends with Jesus and becoming more like him, are still human and get things wrong too. It was Mahatma Gandhi who famously pointed out, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
But it was Saint Augustine who wisely pointed that we should “never judge a philosophy by its abuse”. The testimony in a Christian’s life should be that he or she isn’t the same person that you knew last month, last year, 10 years ago etc. That over time there is evidence of change into a person of character more similar to Jesus’ own.
When Jesus called his first disciples he said to them, “Follow me.” Over time Christ’s followers came to see that his invitation wasn’t just a good idea from a good leader, but the most valuable summons ever from the most perfect of men.

“Here, take this.” Looking down I found in my hands a lovely copy of the Bhagavad Gita. “We want to give you something to help to find inner peace this Christmas,” said the young lady who plucked me from the streaming Christmas crowd in the centre of town. “Are you from this city,” she asked? “I am,” I replied. She smiled and proceeded to tell me how special this time of year is to her and her religious beliefs. I smiled back. “Yes, December is a pretty special month for me too.” A short conversation, that was much warmer than the street itself, then ensued right across from Marks and Spencer.
This happened just a couple of days ago and I’m still smiling about it. Oxford, like many cities in the UK, is a multicultural city, full of people of differing beliefs and different religious and cultural backgrounds. As the lights go on and the trees go up and the shoppers search for ultimate list-fulfilment, the rush that results often leaves us breathless until we stop on Christmas Day.
One of the titles of Jesus is ‘Prince of Peace’*. Sounds almost ironic, doesn’t it, amidst pre-Christmas madness?
We know that the setting for that first Christmas also lacked that a peaceful presence. A country occupied by a foreign military power may not be Debenhams on Chritmas Eve, but it sure isn’t a Spa room full of candles either. A country groaning under the weight of oppression was seeking a liberator, a king to lead them to freedom and peaceful prosperity.
Their yearning was fulfilled by the birth of a little boy to Jewish parents in Bethlehem. This little boy, foretold by the prophets, announced by the Angels, would grow up to lead a movement that would change the world forever. But even more than that, this little boy really did grow into his title, ‘Prince of Peace’.
Peace. The absolution of anxiety and worry. We all want it, and in various ways all will seek it this Christmas. Be it through family (or not), or presents, or a little tipple, or time away from work … We will seek to quiet the chaos when we can to enjoy a moment of peace whilst we can.
We might even turn to a book, or meditation, or some other spiritual practice to help. And we may even achieve some measure of calm for ourselves through these things.
But Jesus Christ offers a deeper and truer peace. Yes, the hustle and bustle of life wearies us and demands rest. That rest is good and proper. But Jesus’ peace touches a condition far too deep for our own efforts alone to fix.
When our families get together at Christmas there can be much joy and fun. But when there is strife and brokenness at home, then joy can be painfully elusive. God is described as a Father, who loves us and who longs to be in joyful relationship with us. And Jesus? The Prince of Peace? Well, he introduces us to our Heavenly Father.
Christmas is a time of fun and laughter. Hopefully a little break in our lives to relax with those we love. Soon it will be over and we will be back to work. We can bring a certain measure of peace to our lives, but is fleeting and it is never certain. Jesus Christ – whose birthday we celebrate together this Christmas – offers a peace to everyone that is sure, steady, and inexhaustible.
“Hark the herald angels sing ‘Glory to the newborn King!’”
*Foretold by Isaiah the prophet (Isaiah 9:6)