Reflections on Easter and What it Means

…for those who are not Christians or are ambivalent about the whole Christian thing.

Let me start by saying, if you are not a Christian, I am not your enemy. If you are an atheist I am not your enemy. If you are a lesbian or transgender or a communist or a nihilist or anyone else who might rejects the story of Easter, I fully understand why you should be skeptical about a man dying and being resurrected, who claimed to be God and said he could forgive sins. That’s a whole lot a suspension of disbelief to require of anyone. But if you will allow me, I want to make the case that Easter and Jesus and the Messiah and Christianity make sense—more sense than you have given it credit.

So here goes.

First, let me indulge what will look like an informal logical fallacy. There have been lots of very smart Christians, very impressive thinkers and doers who have become followers of this “fairy tale”. Here’s a short list: Galileo, Pascal, Mendel Gregor, Newton, Martin Luther King, Michelangelo, Dostoevsky, Boyle, Handel, Leibnitz, Rembrandt, Dickens, Kepler, Joan of Arc, Copernicus, Van Gogh, Tolstoy, Maxwell, Linnaeus, Francis Collins, Descartes, Aquinas and, of course, Denzel Washington. Yes. Denzel is a Christian. This a very impressive list. In fact half of these names have changed the world—all for good. In science, mathematics, chemistry, genetics, biology, painting, literature, politics these are no subordinate minor dramatis personae here. These are some of the main characters in the story of human excellence. These are the minds that have shaped the modern world.

Now this list, which could be easily 10,000 names, proves absolutely nothing. It certainly doesn’t prove or disprove Christianity—as I said before, that would be to indulge what is called the informal logical fallacy from authority: argumentum ad verecudiam: part of a systematic approach to reason, developed by the Greeks, which, by the way, was carried into scholarship via 1,000 years of Christian university education! To believe something simple because someone of authority says it’s so is just nonsense.

But having said this, I will make an argument that their credibility as thinking, smart people, should give you pause before rejecting this “fairy tale” out of hand. If someone you respects says something is so and so, despite your skepticism, shouldn’t you pause and give time to listen?

This list shows this— and only this—that Christianity can be compelling even to the finest minds, the greatest talents, the boldest spirits. These “greats” embraced this “fairy tale” not because they were stupid or timid or because they were conformist. Rather, they took all of life, their experiences and thoughts into one great scope and stretch, just like you, and concluded Jesus was a very solid foundation for truth. In a world of unanswered questions, of mysteries and vast uncertainties, in a cosmos that had a mysterious beginning, or mysteriously has always been, a world of grotesque unfairness and iniquity bound in something called moral order, a world of war set against the deepest yearnings for peace, a world of death that seems alien to the spirit of life, a world of acquisitive greed set against the invisible realm of (caritas) love, all set under a sweeping expanse of sky so grand and overwhelming that it speaks to every heart of something very large and important in motion. They concluded that this guy Jesus made sense.

So let me start by trying to convince you that Christianity makes more sense than other worldviews— a method called the via negativa.

Okay, suppose I set before you other prevailing worldview hypotheses we call religions. I arrange before you Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Philosophical Naturalism which is, of course, a materialist worldview. I set before you absurdity and vague spiritualism. And now let’s compare.

Let’s start with Hinduism.

First, I confess that it has within it some compelling features of belief. It’s important to remember that there is no single type of Hinduism. It is sometimes called a plural religion because it has been around so long and uses so many sacred texts that it really is an umbrella term for a set of spiritual ideas that have some fundamental things in common.

Hinduism embraces the idea of a god. A god above other gods. It acknowledges, like all clear thinking systems, in my opinion, the stubborn fact that everything that is, the material universe we see, is not self-made. There is something immaterial and intelligent guiding life and energy and matter. Something behind and beyond the visible.

So far so good. But at this point we diverge.

You see, in Hinduism god is so great that he, she, or it, cannot or does not manifest himself directly to humans. God is not personal as Christ is personal. In Hinduism God is in everything, such that in a sense, everything is divine. Clouds and butterflies are divine manifestation of the godhead. You might say that god is the universe. Hence all life is sacred.

At first, you might say this wonder is exactly how I feel on a spring day. Everything is good. Until you realize that malaria and Hitler are also divine and they are also manifestations of godhead.

You think you know something about divinity and goodness, but clearly you do not or cannot. Human beings cannot really know the mysterious source of being that is this force of nature, that is the Hindu godhead. You can only indirectly refer to it in the same sense that Star Wars characters invoke the “dark side” and the alternate “force”, both of whom are god. In fact, the terms good and evil are mere impositions that western minds impress on these characteristics of the Hindu godhead.

Furthermore, this unattainable knowledge of the godhead can only be experienced or understood through manifestations that express themselves as the many gods and avatars of Hinduism. The gods of Hinduism operate as the modalities of a bigger unknown god. In one sense like the Trinity of Christianity, Hinduism operates as if god was a million avatars, all expressing different attributions of his otherwise inscrutable nature. I’ve made this very simple, but I think it will do.

So here’s the problem: If god is not outside of nature, as the God of the Bible is, he is in it; in fact, he is nature itself, for better or worse. He is not outside of nature because there is nothing but nature. There is no beyond or atemporal realm like the Jews and Christians believe. God and nature are coterminous. And nature being both beautiful and cruel, sensitive and savage all at once—means that the morality play that you and I experience every day, of good and evil at odds, is rather like two sock puppets being manipulated by the same invisible actor. The Hindu god is everywhere, like the Judeo-Christian God, but unlike the Judeo-Christian God, the Hindu god is a kind of substance that inhabits all things, which means that evil is also part of godhead, as are lies and falsehood.

Now, to me this is very, very troubling.

To restate the problem: the Hindu god is both good and evil, which means the moral order that you and I embrace, for the most part, which is part of the Judeo-Christian heritage— is all wrong. Evil is not outside and other. Evil is not like darkness which is an absence of light. It is a substance, a quality of godhead. In the Christian view, darkness cannot comprehend light, it is defenseless against the effulgence of truth. But in Hinduism, what we perceive to be evil is really a manifestation of the troubling and unknowable nature of an unfathomable god.

I may not have proven anything to you. But I ask, set against what you know of Christianity, is this the god or religion you’d desire? Or does the God of the Bible come closer to organizing your moral space, to use the modern vernacular. The Judeo-Christian God is good and only good, and He cannot lie. His nature makes it impossible to lie. He is outside of time, atemporal, which means he can reach in and out of every moment in history at will and in be in different places and times at the same moment. He is not a substance admixed into the fundament of nature and matter. He is independent and apart, over, under, around and trans-material without being in anyway bound in the universe. And most important, God has no darkness in Him, He is truth.

You choose. The choice doesn’t make Hinduism true or false, but if you had to choose between Christ, a personal, loving concerned God, and the remote, unknowable godhead who is both good and evil at once, which would you embrace?

Now, Islam.

My own feeling is that this alternative view is easiest to dispatch. Islam is based on the complete submission to the law of god. So far so good. Allah’s law is expressed in the Holy Quran. Men must submit to his law to attain salvation.

But here’s the problem.

In Islam, the terms of salvation are entirely a matter of obedience to the law. There is no savior, no messiah, only law. That is all we can know about Allah. In fact, whether we can know anything about the Muslim god is up for grabs, because Allah is not bound by a nature. Which means he can lie and make a promise and break it, and move an unmovable stone. What? I mean the rules that bind rational thinking by necessities do not bind Allah. The Judeo-Christian God cannot lie because The Christian God is bound by a nature. For Muslims, Allah is so sovereign, so powerful– that he is not ordered by any definite descriptions. He is outside the reach of reason or theology or speculation (in other words all the mental exercises and powers of logic that drive learning and science). We really can’t know anything about him that is true. This means that he and the universe that he created, are utterly unbound by coherent reasons and explanations. Ever wonder why Islam has under-performed scientifically and politically over the last 1000 years? Why there are fewer books published in all the Arabic world than are published in Spain in a single year. I am giving you the answer right now.

Islam does not believe in a fallen nature. It teaches that humans are perfectible. Hence if you are a republican or a Hindu or a homosexual or a criminal the Islamic state exists to wash all this imperfection out of you with law— and even harsher law— if the first applications of justice are insufficient to perfect you, there is always more law. Which means that there can be little or no toleration of anything that is not in complete conformity to that law. Hence, the whole purpose of religion and the state, which in Islam are one entity, is to shape people into obedient creatures of god’s law.

To my mind this isn’t a religion so much as an experiment in creating Hell on earth. And it should come as no surprise that the history of Islam is brutal, repressive, aggressive, intolerant, uncreative, militaristic and insensible to subtleties. Historically it is utterly unconcerned with tolerating the weakness and differences that naturally exist among humans. Those who are not Muslims must pay tribute or be killed.

In short The Muslim’s answer to the failure of mankind is law, and more law and more law, such that the answer to all human woes is just stricter laws and ultimately more exacting brutal repression of those who do not or cannot conform either for conscience sake or for failures of character.

Islam is all wrong.

Why do I say this? Because anyone who really thinks that law can reform the human race has never read any history or lived a minute among humans in society. Law can confine wrongdoing, it can squelch wickedness, but it cannot reform man. The problem of humanness is not a failure in the exactitude of law, it is the fallen nature of men in rebellion to Truth and it is not sticks that bring us into obedience to the truth. It is something more akin to an epiphany. Something like love. Indeed it might be love. Persuasion. Education. Compassion, and forgiveness along with something mysterious called Contrition. Law alone is not sufficient to bring us into union with God. Law is only a stick to beat people. And that, to me, is a rather brutal concept of redemption.

And what of Buddhism?

I think I can exegete this one in just a paragraph or so, but having said, I realize there are always more subtleties to other worldviews than I command, but I will try to be fair.

Buddhism’s central tenet is that life is suffering and human unhappiness and pain is derived from having expectations that cannot be satisfied. In short, life is tragic because we desire things and those desires drive us into restless yearnings and expectations that life simply cannot provide in our mortal condition. Thus we should strive to be moral and wise and to be in harmony with this truth, despite the harsh reality of life. Which of course I agree with. But the corollary to this set of beliefs is that life in some sense is not worth living and that our own identities are transient and not real in the sense that we in the West believe in personal identity.

Let me go no further. I think this is enough.

If life is suffering, if life is an illusion, I can think of no religious reason to fight for justice or to work hard. I cannot understand why I should desire to renounce desire. You can try to hide behind a veneer of enigma, but It’s incoherent.

Now none of these facts and ideas prove that Buddhism is false, but again, is this really the view you hold of life? Is desire really the problem? Indeed I would say that desire, the deep yearning for justice, truth, love and God are fundamental to our humanness and that rather than being a disease that aggravates the soul, desire for joy and love and goodness and truth are actually part of the image of God in us, the Imago Dei. You see we desire things because we sense something deficient–and we desire to right ourselves and our conditions in life because things are not the way they are supposed to be. Things are supposed to be right. And that knowledge that the world is all wrong, is not and should not be a cause to renounce life, but rather a spur to redouble the vitality and affirmation of life. To renounce desire is to renounce existence itself. And in my opinion and in the opinion of Judeo-Christianity life is good, and desire, properly directed, is all together fitting and proper for the human soul.

Again, even if you concur in my opinion, this does not prove the truth of Christianity or disprove the assertions of Buddha. But I do believe that taken in comparison, there really is no comparison. Christianity offer us personal salvation, a personal relationship with God, a basis for the vindication of our hope and are warfare against the injustice and inequity of the world. It rejoices in art and beauty and justice and love and offers consolation to all who desire these things. It encourages us to seek fulfillment, to strive for a better world, and anoints the desires of the heart with the approbation of living personal God who is watching and who cares. Because life matters. Because life is good. Because life is worth fighting for and it is also worth dying for. For in spite of it apparent contradictions and mystery, God in the flesh died that we may live. This is not Buddhism.

Once again, this is not a proof, but in contrast these are as different as light and darkness. To me, Buddhism reduces human wisdom to a formalized existential nihilism. You chose.

And now I shall address the last of these major alternative views: philosophical naturalism. In this worldview, unlike the preceding religions, there exist no immaterial order. There is no truth, no justice, no god, no beauty, no love, no good, no evil, no purpose, no better, and no worse. Just isness; that which is. There can be no ought, because ought is outside the realm of isness. Everything that you imagine that has no material existence is merely a trick played on the brain. In fact, there is only brain, no mind. The mind is immaterial. There is only gray matter.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Philosophical Naturalism denies Love as only a chemical process, Truth as a biological construction of electro-chemical transactions in the cerebral cortex. It denies Soul and Spirit because humans are only meat machines. Properly understood, free will is impossible. Life is only stimulus and response. And the thing called man, he is but a string of selfish genes struggling in competition for survival against hostile elements and other gene pools.

The funny thing is that philosophical naturalists while espousing these beliefs, do not live as if they really believe them. They all believe in free-will, they all are aware of something personal and meaningful as having existence apart from electro-chemical firings in the brain. They experience life as having meaning. All of them do. And they act with purpose and resolve for things like truth, love and beauty. They live as if there is intrinsic value to life, a belief that cannot be derived from Philosophical Naturalism. Indeed, non-awareness cannot be asserted to be any better than awareness, because they both are qualities of materials. To assert otherwise would be to say that solids are better than liquids, in a scheme that denies that there can be a better or a worse. In short Philosophical Naturalism is incoherent. And so I rest my case.

But this still doesn’t prove Christianity.

So allow me now to explain why this odd “fairy tale” of Christianity, the story of the death and resurrection of the man-God Jesus makes logical sense in relation to the problem of human life that the other worldviews do not and cannot answer. Indeed, it may be that you, yourself, have never come to grips with this problem.

Well, all these other religions have tried. Man desires the good, but good either does not exist or is an illusion. Man is deficient somehow. He yearns for things that do not seem possible. He needs purpose and order, but he cannot find it only in material things or in a material description of existence. He needs to love and he needs to be loved. He needs to matter. But there is nothing in nature that tells him he is any more valuable than a thing to be preyed on by wolves and kings. He is a victim. He is an oppressor. He is a liar who deeply desires to know the truth. This is our condition. We need purpose and identity and love. And ignoring these facts will only force your subconscious mind into depression or panic.

I offer you Jesus.

But why Jesus? Why the Death and Resurrection? Why can’t God just forgive us without all this blood and religious ritual, this passion play mumbo-jumbo?

Well, first, image for a moment that existence is both material and immaterial. It is a blend of matter and spirit somehow, like the Hindu thinks, and that there is a mind that supervises existence and gives it order. And image that that mind is eternal and remembers and knows all things. And imagine that the mind is God and that God having a nature, is bound by His nature, and that nature is that he cannot forget that which is or ever was. This is not the religion of Islam. The God of the Bible cannot not remember. That is His nature. And imagine that God is perfect and being perfect cannot tolerate, in His own nature that which is imperfect. You might ask, why did God make men who are imperfect? The answer is, he didn’t, man damaged and continues to damage himself because his nature being created in the image of God allows him the power of choice just like God. Man has something called free- will, a thing that Philosophical Naturalism says we cannot have. Since there is no escaping existence, man must suffer in eternity for the evils he does, even for one little evil done only once. Let me say this again, if God cannot forget, how do we return man to perfection? If man dissatisfied God by some slight or infraction, can law bring man back into wholeness? You and I live in the moment, but God sees the past and the present and the future all at once, and sees every sin and discrepancy of imperfect humans ever secreted away, whether you’ve promised to stop and whether you are able to stop sinning .

Law cannot purge this fact. Law establishes boundaries but once outside those boundaries, law does not map out redemption, it demands material redress. You see, the damage is already done. It cannot be undone. You may have paid your price to society, but your criminal record and the fact of your shortcoming will always remain indelibly written into the mind of God. This is the problem with Islam. Law provides humans the power to order life in states, but it can provide no remedy for the eternal damage sin does to our invisible being–the soul.

Now if you are a loving God, life and personal relationships matter, unlike the teaching of the Buddha, and if God, just happened to be three persons, (a doctrine called the Trinity) then imagine further than one of those persons could cover the imperfection of humans with his own being, in his eternal interposition, such that the father (the first person of the Trinity) could not see that imperfection. Jesus would provide a kind of living spiritual screen to our deficiencies. I know this all sounds odd, why all this byzantine nonsense?

But what if?

What if God really exists and if He really demands perfection, and perfection is completely beyond man’s capacity once he has damaged-himself, and if God is love and cares about his creature called man, and God, cannot not see sin ( I use the double negative), and sin means you are eternally outside the reach of the Creator: what solution would there be to bring man back into harmony with his Creator?

What is the solution? This is the fundamental question in life. How do we remarry, as it were, the one who made and oves us, once we are “eternally” divorced? Couldn’t God simply not punish man for his sin? No, because God is just, and sin must be recompensed. What are the wages of sin? Death. And death apart from God is called Hell, a condition of eternal separation from the light of God. It is a horrible place to be. God is an incorruptible magistrate. He cannot be bribed and he will fulfill the law every jot and tittle. The law will be satisfied. Because His nature demands that So how does the incorruptible and absolutely just magistrate, judge the criminal who has no defense and cannot redress the damage he has done to himself and to his relationship to a God who cannot forget?

We come now to the death and resurrection. We come to Easter.

If God is three persons, and one of those persons in the Son and the Son in His perfect loving nature were willing to mask the sin of man, by interposing himself, as it were, such that God the Father was blinded to our imperfection and scars of sin, and that He, Jesus, being an infinite sacrifice, could atone for all the sins of men, by his perfect blood, then there is a solution to the existential problem of man and sin and God and law. Again, remember the wages of sin, any sin, all sin, is death, is the drawing of blood. That is what the Hebrew and moral law demands. Notice that law properly understood is not redemptive. It is vindictive (and it is instructive). Islam has it all wrong. Retreating back into the boundaries of law after the crime is committed and material redress has been made, this still is insufficient to please God, because God, who always remembers, will always see the sinner. Then the only solution would be a “something” that could “blind God” to the sin. This is the substitutionary death of Jesus–who died for the sins of the world. Jesus stands like an advocate between the harsh Judgement of God and you, a screen, a sanctuary, a hiding place from the wrath of God. Jesus chose to die for sinful men because he loves us. Think about that. He loves us!!! This is not Buddhism! This is not Philosophical Naturalism. This is Christianity!

And since all human being have an immaterial part, that part must exist either eternally in the presence of God in Heaven or eternally in the absence of God in something called Hell. God did not create Hell in the same way he created the earth and the stars. Hell, rather, is the inevitable condition of the eternal soul that cannot be forgotten away or eradicated (once something exists, it must always exist. Existence cannot be made nonexistent–as a matter of logical coherence. Hence God cannot un-create you.) The sinner is ejected from the source of Goodness, Love and Beauty, into some condition that is so attenuated from the Source of everything wonderful in existence, their is no describing it but in imagery and metaphor: darkness, wrath, flames, dissolution.

This is why Jesus came. He did not come to condemn but to save us from ourselves. Until you fathom this distinction, you may resent Jesus or even hate God. But the problem that the resurrection solves is not a problem created by God, but rather by the problem of mankind being imperfect in a cosmos ordered by a Perfect Being. Man as man could exist in the cosmos in no other condition and still be man qua man. In short, God cannot not cast into darkness that which is imperfect, and man, all on his own, did this to himself.

You can shake your fist and cry out, “Why did you create humans such that they would rebel against God’s authority?” And I would answer, “What nature would a loving God give His cherished creatures other than one that could make its own choices?” Please pause and think about this. Human beings are free, free in a way that nothing else is, including God. Think about that. That’s extraordinary and even frightening. I means as creatures we are in a completely unique category of being. The Bible says we shall; judge angels. God does not hate us. God made us very very special. You cry out, “But did we need to be given the choice to rebel?” And I will answer, “Would you love you wife more, if you denied her the power to reject you?” To state it another way, to be human as God would have us to be human is to love your wife, even when she rejects you. That is the story of Hosea. That is the story of Jesus. That is the story of God. We’ve been made in His image.

I realize this is a rather long explanation of Easter. But I really want you to think about this last part. If you were God, the God with a nature that I’ve described, such that He cannot forget, cannot un-create, cannot not-see, cannot undo that which man has done, cannot ignore the demands of justice that are His nature, and yet, and yet, He still loves you–what would you do?

Well, the answer is here, today. It is called the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, son of God, who in substitution, offered Himself for us, to cover our sins, the sins God cannot not see. And therefore he sees in us, the perfect man Jesus. I hope this doesn’t sound like clap trap or mumbo-jumbo. It is the reason for Easter. It explains why the story had to unfold the way it did—with no other options. This was and is, the only way.

Therefore rejoice all those with understanding! He is risen! In defiance of death, he rolled back the stone. He has taken captive sin and opened a door to salvation that we could never achieve on our own.

Hallelujah! He is risen!

This is why Christians celebrate Easter.