Miracles don’t happen. The God of the Bible offends me. I can’t base my life on something that may or may not have happened 2,000 years ago. Such reasons not to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ can reflect willful decisions to maintain one’s unbelief.

Often Christians are accused of willfully ignoring arguments and evidence against their faith. One example of this is Van A. Harvey’s book The Historian and the Believer.[i] On the cover of this book, he pits “the modern historian’s principles of judgment” against “the Christian’s will-to-believe.” In other words, Christians refuse to be responsible historians because of their desire to maintain their Christian faith.  In particular, their failure to be responsible historians is due to their belief in miracles.

In  preparation for this video, I reread Harvey’s book and listened to Gerd Lüdemann, one of his followers, debate the Christian William Lane Craig on the possibility of the resurrection.[ii] In doing so, it became evident that non-Christians, even New Testament scholars like Harvey and Lüdemann, have a will not to believe. In other words, they willfully ignore arguments against their unbelief.

I will give three examples or signs of a willful persistence in unbelief from these two New Testament scholars.

First, the philosophical prejudice that miracles don’t happen.

Second, the moral prejudice that the resurrection of Jesus Christ can’t be true because I find the biblical God offensive.

Third, the existential prejudice that refuses to base one’s life on an historical event

Before discussing these three examples of a willful persistence in unbelief, I need to define the word “prejudice.” A prejudice is an opinion that is adhered to, but lacks evidence whether from reason, scientific experiment, historical documentation or some other legitimate source.

Therefore, in calling these two New Testament scholars’ unbelieving views prejudices I mean that they are unproven assertions that control how they look at the biblical writings. They prejudge what can or cannot be true without giving an argument to support those views.

Let’s look at the first example, the philosophical prejudice that miracles don’t happen.

When secular historians, like Harvey and Lüdemann, see the Bible’s multiple claims that Jesus rose from the dead, they reject them outright. They claim that our modern scientific understanding of how nature works means that any witness to a miraculous event is inherently improbable and can be rejected without further consideration.

Their rejection of the miraculous is ultimately not based upon historical research but upon philosophical naturalism. Philosophical naturalism claims that the universe is governed by its own inherent causes and processes. Because of naturalism’s worldview, it denies the existence of a supernatural realm that created, controls or intervenes in the universe. It is an atheistic belief. In other words, there is no God that acts in history and thus there are no miracles.

Now, the historian’s rejection of witnesses to miracles based upon philosophical naturalism has the potential to be a reasonable position. However, when historians reject the occurrence of miracles on this basis, they are doing so because of a philosophical worldview. They must prove the validity of this atheistic position before they can proceed as historians to reject testimony to miracles.

Unfortunately, neither Harvey nor Lüdemann attempt to prove atheism. In fact, Lüdemann constantly states that he is not a philosopher and won’t discuss philosophical issues. Not to examine one’s beliefs and not to demonstrate their validity makes those beliefs unfounded opinions or prejudices. The result is that Lüdemann’s rejection of miracles is a philosophical prejudice. This prejudice makes him and others like him to be unreliable historians because their wholesale rejection of miracles is unproven.

The outright rejection of the biblical witnesses to miracles, specifically the resurrection, has two curious consequences for the writings of atheistic historians, such as Harvey and Lüdemann.

The first consequence is that the atheistic historians can’t trust the biblical witnesses, that is, the Gospels and the epistles. So, because of their philosophical beliefs, they have to get behind the records of Jesus’ life to discover the “real Jesus.”

As I said before, their research is flawed as historians because it is based upon philosophical prejudice. Since they can’t trust the written sources that we do have, their philosophical prejudice also necessarily leads them into the murky waters of speculation about what “really happened.” And the historical evidence is often dubious.

The other curious consequence of their unbelief is that after supposedly discovering who the real Jesus was and what he taught, they create a different kind of Christianity.

Van Harvey clearly does this. He rejects the miraculous elements in the Gospels. They are “stories that are, judged by modern criteria, mythological, which is to say, factually untrue” (280). The problem here is that the modern criteria he uses are not ultimately those of the historian but of the atheist or philosophical naturalist. And, to repeat, if he does not demonstrate the philosophical truth of his naturalist viewpoint that miracles don’t happen, his arguments fall to the ground.

However, he argues that the image of Jesus created in these factually untrue stories is still effective for our self-understanding as humans and how we relate to our present existence. True Christianity does this, he claims. It does not have to be linked to historical events like the resurrection.

The problem with Harvey’s view is that all the evidence we have from our earliest sources for Christianity do affirm that the historicity of the miracles of Jesus, and especially the resurrection, is necessary to the faith.

John states his purpose in writing the Gospel that bears his name. “Now Jesus did many other signs (his word for miracles) in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you can have life in his name” (John 20:30-31).

II Peter 1:16 explicitly states, “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

As a final example, in I Corinthians 15:1-4 Paul identifies the gospel with events like the saving death of Christ and the resurrection. Then he catalogues in verses 5-8 a list of those to whom the risen Jesus appeared. His negative conclusion is “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (v. 14). Then he adds, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (v. 19). Of course, Paul states positively in verse twenty that Christ has been raised from the dead and so our faith is valid and full of the promise of life-changing power.

These and other New Testament writings clearly affirm that Jesus worked miracles and that he was raised from the dead. In other words, these earliest interpreters of the Christian faith affirm without hesitation that miracles are historical and that belief in them transforms our lives for the good.

Therefore, there is no solid early evidence for a Christian faith that saw the miracles and resurrection as myths or factually untrue, but which give meaning to life anyway. Such a Christianity is an invention of Van Harvey. It is the result of his secular historical principles which are based upon an unproven philosophical naturalism. It is an example of a will not to believe.

The second sign or example of the will not to believe stems from moral prejudice. It is the argument that the resurrection can’t be true because the biblical God is offensive. Lüdemann makes this point explicitly in his debate with Craig. He claims that if the resurrection is true, we must believe that God chooses people, does things that are immoral, and excludes the possibility of having dialogue with those who hold different views. Since these beliefs are evil, the resurrection cannot be not true.

The problem here is that once again Lüdemann is not operating as an historian. The historian cannot reject the occurrence of events because he does not like the consequences. When Lüdemann or any other historian does that, he is willfully clinging to his beliefs and not seeking to examine the reliability of his historical sources.

Furthermore, Lüdemann can be justly charged with moral prejudice because he refuses to engage in philosophical discussions about whether there is a God or whether philosophical naturalism is true. One can also legitimately challenge his moral criticisms of the biblical God by asking him to explain the basis for his own moral principles. Since he refuses to enter into the realm of philosophical discussion, his moral criticisms of the biblical God remain unproven assertions or prejudices.

The third and final example of willful unbelief is an existential prejudice. By existential I mean the activity of choosing how we live in the present.

Harvey contends, “No remote historical event—especially if assertions about it can solicit only a tentative assent—can, as such be the basis for a religious confidence about the present” (282).[iii] He asserts that such a distant event as the resurrection “can never have the immediacy of an event that impinges on my own life” (282). In other words, an historical event, especially from 2,000 years ago, cannot give us the certainty we need to base our lives upon. There are two difficulties with Harvey’s contention.

First, he does admit that with sufficient data and warrants, one can have a high level of certitude, presumably enough to live by. The problem is that because of his unproven philosophical naturalism he rejects the data and warrants for the historical validity of the resurrection. His philosophical prejudice keeps him from accepting even the possibility of the occurrence of the resurrection.

The second difficulty is Harvey’s understanding of faith. He claims that “faith finds its certitude, its confirmation, in the viability of the image for relating one to present reality” (283). Faith is not concerned with whether that image is based upon fact or fiction. If we find an image that helps us live well, that is good enough. The image could be of historical figures like Jesus or Muhammad, even if that image is not identical to the actual historical figure. Or the image that helps us to live is from a purely fictional character such as Aragorn in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.

The problem is that faith, as understood by Harvey, is individual and arbitrary. It depends upon a pragmatic test of what works for me. It may not work for others. Even the image of a Hitler or a Casanova may work for me. We cannot exclude such choices as evil without some philosophical justification.

Harvey’s understanding of faith means that the choices that we make are based upon unproven beliefs or even merely personal inclinations. This is where Harvey is guilty of existential prejudice.

There is another significant problem with Harvey’s suggestion that what matters is that following the insight that the image gives us enables us to live well. But how can we know that the image will work for us? We can’t until we try it. Harvey’s way makes faith a leap into the dark. How many leaps do we need to take before we find the one that works? Worse yet, some leaps may end up being self-destructive.

Now, some of you may want to suspend judgment. “I can’t know about the truth of these things; so, I’ll just go along living my life without worrying about having a reasoned basis for my choices. I’ll go on living without thinking about whether God exists or Christianity is true.

The problem with suspending judgment about the basis for life’s decisions is that when you live you must make choices, and those choices are a judgment. They are judgments that this is good or this is bad, but without examining those choices and having a basis for them.

At his trial upon which is life depended, Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”[iv] As human beings we are made to make choices that we have examined as good or bad. Anything less is to live a subhuman life and is ultimately unfulfilling. It is not an authentic human existence.

In conclusion, if you are not a Christian, I would urge you to examine the evidence for the Christian faith and life. Do not conduct your life based upon unfounded opinions or prejudices, whether philosophical, moral or existential. A good place to start would be to read the scriptural accounts of Jesus in the Gospels. If you want to hear arguments for the truth of the historical resurrection, listening to the debate between Craig and Lüdemann would be one possible option.

Christians, at times we are guilty of an unwillingness to examine our beliefs. It behooves us for our witness and the strength of our own faith to give heed to I Peter 3:15 that we should always be prepared to have a reason for the hope that is in us.

As always, comments are welcome.

 

[i] Van A. Harvey, The Historian & the Believer (New York, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1969).

[ii] Here’s the link to the debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MWcFv0ySm0&t=6968s

[iii] This assertion by Harvey is one way of formulating the eighteenth-century philosopher Gottfried Lessing’s famous “broad and ugly ditch” between the accidental truths of history and the necessary truths of reason. For him reason was the only universally acceptable means to understand the world. Since historical truth is accidental, it cannot be the source for truth. Thus, the ditch is cannot be crossed.

[iv] Found in Plato’s Apology.