All Shall Be Saved…Because the Church has Painted It

It is an odd sort of biblicism that supposes the Gospels are the lone texts by which we can interrogate the veracity of the Easter alleluia.

“Whoever knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows the logoi of all creatures. And whoever has been initiated in the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose for which God originally made all things.”

— St Maximus the Confessor

A former journalist in my congregation approached me after worship to thank me for my sermon on Easter Sunday. Over the years, she told me, she had interviewed scores of biblical scholars hustling popular level books aimed at making a buck by stoking suspicion about a key item of creedal Christianity. You know the sort of which she spoke. Books like Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth posit Jesus as secret political seditionist. Seasonal pieces in National Geographic reliably deconstruct the dogma concerning the virginity of the Mother of God. Just this week Christianity Today featured a piece suggesting Christ was not nailed to the tree but strung from it with rope (snore).

Notice—

In every instance the contrary take takes the historic truth to lie somewhere behind the testimony of scripture.

The former journalist in my parish has lost patience with what she now takes to be cynical (or self-interested) evasions of the straightforward claim of the gospel. Either the crucified was raised from the corruption in the tomb— an event in history— or he whom Rome killed remained dead.

True or false, the gospel purports to be news.

“Doubting” Thomas is right.

One pole of the gospel event will always necessarily be the assertion, “Jesus is risen.” If this is not the case, Christianity’s personal or social utility is beside the point; worse, it’s based on a fiction. The Christian kerygma is neither religious myth nor meaning-making experience; it is gospel.

To my parishioner’s expression of gratitude, I replied:

“That’s the problem with capitalism. The market incentivizes suspicion. Once you realize there’s a profit motive to raise doubts about faith, you should be more skeptical of popular scholars’ skepticism.”

Would an hermeneutic of suspicion be in vogue were it not for the marketplace?

To no small extent, the popular publishing industry has reduced proclamation to a whimper, and seminary often only further disempowers future preachers. They do so by ceding all authority to historical-critical study of the biblical passages. In fact, it is an odd sort of fundamentalist biblicism that supposes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the lone texts by which we can interrogate the veracity of the Easter alleluia. Why should believers accept that the history behind the biblical texts is the actual objective truth?

As the theologian Peter Brunner insists:

Faith has its own access to history, and to history precisely in the common notion, to what actually happened.