The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candourPhelips, Vivian
Religion
The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candour
Phelips, Vivian
Rationalism
The final argument is that "the Resurrection is, so to speak, of a
piece with the whole character and the claims of Christ.... Even had we
no Testament at all, we should be obliged to postulate something very
much like either the Resurrection or the belief in the Resurrection in
order to account for Christianity." No one disputes, I should think,
this necessity for the Resurrection, if we are to remain Christians;
but it is of the fact of the Resurrection that unfortunate doubters
wish to be assured. The Bishop of Ripon argues that the miraculous
accessories connected with the birth and resurrection of Jesus
Christ find a place only in the group of secondary witnesses, and
adds significantly: "Our belief in Jesus Christ must be based upon
moral conviction, not upon physical wonder." The meaning of this, in
plain English, is clear enough, and I leave it for the honest-minded
reader to decide whether this is a satisfactory foundation for the
Christian dogmas. Is this what he was taught, or what his children are
now being taught? Will it suffice? Can he remain a Christian? Will
his children, when they grow up and begin to think for themselves,
remain Christians? The Dean of Westminster writes to the Archbishop
of Canterbury: "Students of natural science find themselves left
with St. Luke as the strongest historical evidence within the New
Testament." Now, the author of St. Luke is also the author of the
Acts, and his propensity for miraculous decoration is by no means
reassuring. Besides, he was not an eye-witness. Then, too, we have
Canon Henson, in the Hibbert Journal for April, 1904, informing us that
"Any candid Christian reading through the accounts of the New Testament
evidences ... cannot escape the inference that the evidence for the
quasi-historical statements of the Creed is of a highly complicated,
dubious, and even contradictory character." He then asks us: "Is an
honest belief in the Resurrection really inconsistent with a reverent
agnosticism as to the historical circumstances out of which in the
first instance that belief arose?" The reply of an ordinary candid
layman is, I think, sufficiently obvious. Similarly, Abbé Loisy,
the champion of advanced theology in the Roman Catholic Church,
considers the Resurrection to be a spiritual fact only, and not a
fact of the historical order. "La Résurrection n'est pas proprement
un fait d'ordre historique." The powerful article in the Encyclopædia
Biblica also leads us to the same conclusion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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