A superb critique of Saint Athanasius’ apologetic on a topic quite appropriate for the season of Advent with its emphasis on Christ’s two comings. I especially appreciate his emphasis that Athanasius was concerned for the reclamation of creation from the ravages of human sin and the myriad Evil it unleashed. This is what real Christian theology looks like. Ignore it at your own peril. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
The fourth-century African theologian Athanasius is known for standing contra mundum, against the world. When much of the church had turned toward Arianism, he stood firm on the truth that Jesus is, and always has been, fully God. For this, Athanasius endured opposition and exile. Yet he never wavered.
Contra mundum, however, doesn’t capture the fullness of Athanasius’s approach to the world. He was against the world for the sake of the world. He opposed the idolatry, heresy, and injustice of the world because he was for the redemptive flourishing of the world.
In a culture shaped by compromise and confusion, Athanasius shows us what it looks like to hold fast to Christ with courage and love.
Hostile Environment
To understand Athanasius’s apologetic, we must begin with his context. He wasn’t writing from history’s sidelines but from the heart of one of the world’s most influential cities.
Alexandria was the cultural capital of the Roman Empire, a bustling crossroads of trade and ideas. Home to the greatest library in the ancient world and filled with representatives from every major school of philosophy, Alexandria was a melting pot of cultures, religions, and competing worldviews. To be a bishop there was to be at the center of global conversations about truth, meaning, and power.
As bishop, Athanasius faced constant attack. His opponents launched theological challenges, political schemes, and personal accusations. These battles often forced him into exile, five times in all, equating to nearly 20 years away from his church. Yet those exiles shaped him as a theologian. In the deserts of Egypt and in the cities of the empire, Athanasius found both refuge and perspective. Cut off from his familiar responsibilities, he wrote many of his most enduring works, sharpening his vision of Christ and clarifying his defense of the gospel.
Athanasius’s apologetic wasn’t abstract. It was forged in the crucible of cultural diversity, political pressure, and personal suffering. His life in Alexandria taught him to engage competing ideas with clarity. His years in exile gave him space to reflect and to write for the good of the wider church. Out of this unique context came an apologetic that was both deeply theological and profoundly pastoral.
Vision of the World Re-Created
If Athanasius stood against the world, it was only because he believed so deeply in God’s good purposes for the world. Unlike theologians shaped by Gnostic instincts that see salvation as merely spiritual, Athanasius began with the goodness of creation itself, affirming that the world was made through the Word and intended for life with God.
He was equally clear-eyed about sin’s ravaging effects. For Athanasius, sin is not only disobedience but de-creation. It unravels God’s design, corrupts human dignity, and sets the world on a path toward death and nothingness. Salvation, therefore, can never be reduced to forgiveness alone or escape from the material world.
In Christ, God entered creation to re-create it. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus weren’t a detour from creation but the renewal of creation. As Athanasius put it, “The renewal of creation has been wrought by the self-same Word who made it in the beginning.” Redemption is nothing less than the re-creation of God’s good but fallen world.
This vision fueled Athanasius’s apologetic. He was against the world’s distortions precisely because he was for the world’s flourishing in Christ.
For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
…God sent God, the Word, among us. He sent him to save us through persuasion rather than violence, for there is no violence in God. He sent him to call us rather than to accuse us; he sent him to love rather than to judge.
Who of us would ever have expected these things?
He took on himself the burden of our iniquities, and he gave his own Son as a ransom for us. Where except in his justice could we find that with which to cover our sins! By whom could we be justified—we who are wicked and ungodly—except by the only Son of God! What a wondrous exchange, unsearchable operation, and unexpected benefits! The crime of a large number is covered over by the justice of a single just one!
What a wondrous exchange, unsearchable operation, and unexpected benefits! The crime of a large number is covered over by the justice of a single just one!
In the past, he first convinced our nature of its inability to obtain life. Now he has shown us the Savior capable of saving even what was impossible to save. In these two ways, he willed to lead us to trust in his goodness, to esteem him as our nourisher, Father, teacher, counsellor, healer, and our wisdom, light, honor, glory, power, and life.
This is an excellent piece. I commend the author for recognizing true love being expressed when he sees it. No shrill voice here. Neither liberal idolatry or shortsightedness. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
At a recent Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi, JD Vance remarked that he hoped his wife, Usha, would convert to Catholicism. The backlash was swift and savage. People criticized the vice president for being a bad husband and not respecting his wife’s choices and Hindu faith. Most of it was just noise. The backlash does, however, express an unfortunate reality. It is the terminus of American small-l liberalism: The ultimate truth is individual autonomy, and by publicly expressing a desire for his wife to convert, the vice president committed the cardinal sin in the religion of liberalism.
The vice president’s marital situation is common. According to the latest data from Pew Research Center, just over 25 percent of marriages in America consist of spouses with different religions. And for a few years, I too was counted among them.
My wife and I were both raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, served as missionaries for the church, were married in the Los Angeles temple, come from devout LDS families, and were ourselves devout. We had been married about ten years with four children when I left the LDS religion and converted to Catholicism. My wife had no interest in leaving her faith at that time. But eventually, she too became Catholic. Not everyone’s experience is the same: Since writing about our conversions in various publications, I have received a number of emails over the years saying: “I converted to Catholicism, my spouse did not. What do I do?” There are, to my mind, two related answers.
First, a simple directive: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it” (Eph. 5:25). Given that to love is to will the good of the other, that God is the greatest good, and that religion is an aspect of the virtue of justice whereby we render unto God what is owed him, it follows that husbands are to will that their wives believe and practice the true religion. JD Vance ought to will that his wife convert. To do otherwise would be unloving.
I told my wife on more than one occasion that I hoped she would convert, and I even expressed that desire publicly. Willing the good of the other is a concept mostly lost on liberalized Americans. “You do you” is the motto of our day. But it is an uncharitable motto.
Second, once we desire the conversion of our spouse, we need to know how to prudently direct our will to that end. I am grateful to the pastor I had during the time in which my wife and I were of different faiths, because he counseled me against both indifference and coercion. He advised prudence. As Aquinas writes, “it belongs to the ruling of prudence to decide in what manner and by what means man shall obtain [virtue].” Each marriage is different; each will need a different approach. When is the time to have that “hard conversation”? When is the time to just let something go? No one knew my wife and our relationship and our family better than I did. Prudence helps us to do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right time, and the right place.
Ultimately, it is God’s grace that first moves our wills toward him. We are merely instruments. And we never know when the right moment to say this or that thing, make this or that invitation, will be. My pastor wisely told me to faithfully live the sacramental life and use prudent judgment. And that is ultimately all I can tell anyone who finds themselves in that situation. Trust God. Never doom. And remember, prudently and publicly expressing the heartfelt hope that one’s spouse convert may just be the means by which God gives that ever important “twitch upon the thread.” JD Vance should be commended, not condemned.
While addressed to a specific group of clergy within the Roman Catholic Church, this letter applies to almost all Christian denominations in the West, a sad state of affairs if ever there was one. A spot-on and much needed rebuke for Western Christendom. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
Fr. Clodovis M. Boff, OSM, was a leading figure in the development of liberation theology before emerging as one of its sharpest critics. In the letter that follows, he warns that the Latin American Church has been drifting in the last fifty years, leading to the worst crisis in its history.
Dear Brother Bishops,
I read the message you sent at the conclusion of your Fortieth Assembly held in Rio de Janeiro at the end of May. What good news did I find there? Forgive my frankness, but none at all. You, Catholic bishops of the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM), keep repeating the same old refrain: social issues, social issues, social issues—and you’ve been doing this for over fifty years. Dear brothers, don’t you see that this tune has grown tiresome? When will you bring us the good news about God, Christ, and his Spirit? About grace and salvation? About conversion of the heart and meditation on the Word? About prayer, adoration, and devotion to the Mother of our Lord? In short, when will you finally deliver a truly religious and spiritual message?
This is precisely what we most urgently need today and what we’ve been waiting for all these years. Christ’s words come to mind: The children ask for bread, and you are giving them a stone (Matt. 7:9). Even the secular world has grown weary of secularity and now seeks spirituality. Yet you keep offering them the social, always more of the social—and mere crumbs of the spiritual. To think that you are the guardians of the greatest treasure, exactly what the world needs most, and yet, somehow, you hold it back. Souls long for the supernatural, yet you persist in giving them the merely natural. This paradox is evident even in the parishes: While laypeople joyfully display symbols of their Catholic identity (crosses, medals, veils, religious-themed T-shirts), priests and nuns move in the opposite direction, often appearing without any visible sign of their vocation at all.
And yet, you declare without hesitation that you hear the “cries” of the people and are “aware of today’s challenges.” But does your listening reach deeply enough, or is it merely superficial? When I read your list of today’s “cries” and “challenges,” I see nothing beyond what even the most pedestrian journalists and sociologists already point out. Do you not hear, dear brothers, that from the depths of the world there rises today a formidable cry for God—a cry even many secular analysts hear? Doesn’t the Church and her ministers exist precisely to listen to this cry and respond with the true and full answer? For social cries, we have governments and NGOs. Certainly, the Church cannot remain absent in these areas, but she is not the protagonist there. Her specific and higher field of action is precisely responding to the cry for God.
I know that you bishops are continually pressured by public opinion to self-identify as either progressive or traditionalist, right-wing or left-wing. But are these appropriate categories for bishops? Aren’t you, rather, men of God and ministers of Christ? On this point, St. Paul is unequivocal: “This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1). The Church is first and foremost the sacrament of salvation, not merely a social institution, progressive or otherwise. The Church exists to proclaim Christ and his grace. This is her central focus, her greatest and perennial mission. Everything else comes second. Forgive me, brothers, if I’m simply repeating what you already know. But if that’s the case, why is none of it evident in your message—or in CELAM’s documents in general? Reading them, one can’t help but conclude that the Church’s primary concern on our continent is not the cause of Christ and the salvation he has won for us, but rather social issues like justice, peace, and ecology—which you repeat in your message like a worn-out refrain.
The very telegram Pope Leo sent to CELAM’s president explicitly stresses the urgent “need to remember that it is the Risen One . . . who protects and heals the Church, restoring hope to her.” The Holy Father also reminded you that the Church’s proper mission is, in his own words, “to go out to meet so many brothers and sisters, to proclaim to them the message of salvation of Jesus Christ.” Yet how did you respond to the pope? In the letter you wrote back, there is no echo of these papal admonitions. You didn’t ask him to help you keep alive the memory of the Risen Lord or to proclaim salvation in Christ, but rather to support you in your fight to “promote justice and peace” and to “denounce all forms of injustice.” In short, what you conveyed to the pope was the same old refrain—“social issues, social issues, social issues”—as if someone who had worked among us for decades had never heard that before.
You might say, “But we can take these truths for granted! We don’t need to keep repeating them.” No, dear brothers; we do need to repeat them daily with renewed fervor, or they will be lost. If constant repetition weren’t necessary, why would Pope Leo have reminded you of them? We all know what happens when a man takes his wife’s love for granted and fails to nurture it. This truth applies infinitely more to our faith and love for Christ.
It’s true that your message contains the vocabulary of faith—I see words like “God,” “Christ,” “evangelization,” “resurrection,” “Kingdom,” “mission,” and “hope.” But they appear only in a generic way, without any clear spiritual substance. Consider the first two words, fundamental to our faith: “God” and “Christ.” When it comes to “God,” you never mention him directly—only in stock expressions like “Son of God” or “People of God.” Isn’t that astonishing, brothers? And as for “Christ,” his name appears only twice, both times in passing. When recalling the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea, you speak of “our faith in Christ the Savior”—a grandiose statement that, unfortunately, carries no real weight in your message. From where I stand, I can’t help but wonder why you haven’t seized the opportunity of celebrating this profound dogmatic truth to powerfully reaffirm the primacy of Christ, our God—a primacy so feebly proclaimed these days in the preaching and life of our Church.
You rightly declare that you want the Church to be a “house and school of communion,” as well as “merciful, synodal, and [a Church] which goes forth.” And who wouldn’t want that? But where is Christ in this ideal image of the Church? Without Christ as her raison d’être, the Church is just a “charitable NGO,” as Pope Francis himself warned. And isn’t that precisely the path our Church is on? The one small consolation is that those leaving often become evangelicals rather than losing their faith entirely. In any case, though, our Church is bleeding. Empty churches, empty seminaries, empty convents—that’s what we see all around. In Latin America, seven or eight countries no longer have Catholic majorities. Brazil itself is becoming “the largest ex-Catholic country in the world,” in the prescient words of Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues back in 1970. Yet this continuous decline doesn’t seem to worry you, dear bishops. Amos’s warning against Israel’s leaders comes to mind: You “are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph” (Amos 6:6). It’s troubling that your message doesn’t even breathe a word about such an obvious collapse. Even more astonishing is that the secular world talks about this phenomenon more than bishops do. Bishops prefer to remain silent. How can we not recall the charge of “dumb dogs” that St. Gregory the Great leveled against silent shepherds and that St. Boniface repeated just the other day in the Office of Readings?
Of course, alongside this decline there is also growth. You yourselves say that our Church “still pulses with vitality” and contains “seeds of resurrection and hope.” But, dear bishops, where exactly are these “seeds”? They’re not in initiatives aimed at tackling social issues, as you might assume, but rather in the religious revival happening in parishes and in new ecclesial movements and communities, inspired by what Pope Francis called “a current of the grace of the Holy Spirit,” with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal as its most visible expression. And yet, even though these forms of spirituality and evangelization are the most vibrant part of our Church—filling both our churches and the hearts of the faithful—they didn’t even rate a brief mention in your message. But it’s precisely in this rich spiritual soil that the future of our Church lies. One clear sign of this is that, while our initiatives focused on social causes mostly draw “gray-haired” types, initiatives centered on spiritual life are seeing a massive influx of young people.
Dear bishops, I can already hear your restrained yet indignant response: “So, with this supposedly ‘spiritual’ emphasis, are you suggesting that the Church must now turn her back on the poor, on urban violence, on ecological destruction, and on so many other social crises? Wouldn’t that be blind—even cynical?” We can agree on this: The Church must absolutely engage with these social issues. My point lies elsewhere: Is it in the name of Christ that the Church engages in these struggles? Is her social action, and that of her members, truly grounded in faith—not just any faith, but a distinctly Christian faith? If the Church enters social struggles without being guided and inspired by a Christ-centered faith, she will do nothing more than what any NGO would do. Worse still, over time she will offer a shallow social commitment that, without the leaven of a living faith, eventually becomes perverted—turning from liberating into merely ideological, and ultimately oppressive. This is precisely the lucid and serious warning that St. Paul VI gave in Evangelii Nuntiandi to the precursors of liberation theology back in 1975—a warning that, it seems, went largely unheeded.
Dear brothers, allow me to ask: Where, exactly, do you intend to lead our Church? You often speak of the Kingdom, but what is its concrete meaning for you? Given that you repeatedly emphasize the need to build a “just and fraternal society,” one might assume that this is the central vision you have of the Kingdom. I see where you are coming from. However, as for the true substance of the Kingdom—present already in hearts today and awaiting its final fulfillment tomorrow—you say nothing. In your discourse, there is hardly any eschatological horizon at all. You do mention “hope” a couple of times, but so vaguely that, given the social focus of your message, it’s hard to imagine anyone hearing that word from your lips and lifting their eyes toward heaven. Please don’t misunderstand me, dear brothers: I do not doubt that heaven is also your “great hope.” But then why this reluctance to speak clearly and aloud—like so many bishops before you—about the Kingdom of Heaven, as well as about hell, the resurrection of the dead, eternal life, and other eschatological truths that can illuminate and strengthen the struggles of the present, while also revealing the ultimate meaning of all things? Of course, the ideal of a “just and fraternal society” on earth is beautiful and important. But it cannot compare with the City of Heaven (Phil. 3:20; Heb. 11:10, 16), of which we are citizens and co-workers by our faith—and of which you, by your episcopal ministry, are chief architects. You will certainly make your contribution to the earthly city. However, that is not your primary expertise, but that of politicians and social activists.
I’d like to believe that the pastoral experience of many of you is richer and more diverse than what comes across in your message. Especially since bishops are not subject to CELAM—which is merely a body at your service—but only to the Holy See, and, of course, to God—and therefore have the freedom to shape the pastoral direction of their dioceses as they see fit. That, at times, naturally results in a legitimate divergence from the line promoted by CELAM. There’s also another kind of divergence worth noting: Some documents come from CELAM as a whole (the General Conferences), while others, usually narrower in scope, come from the standing Council itself. And I’d add a third divergence, even closer to home—the divergence that can, and often does, occur between the bishops and those theological assistants who draft their documents. Taken together, these three factors give us a much more nuanced understanding of the inner workings of our Church. Even so, your message still feels emblematic of the Church’s sorry state today—one that places the social dimension above the spiritual. You used the occasion of your Fortieth General Assembly to insist on this path. You went to great lengths to embrace this option explicitly and resolutely, as you made clear by repeating the words “renew” and “commitment” three times.
I believe, dear bishops, that by so often—and understandably—bringing social issues and their painful realities to the forefront, you have ended up leaving the religious dimension in the shadows, without ever explicitly denying its primacy. In truth, this troubling process began almost imperceptibly in Medellín (at the Second General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate in 1968), and it has continued to this day. Yet you all know from experience that unless the religious dimension is promptly brought out of the shadows and placed clearly in the light—both in words and in practice—its priority will gradually be lost. That is precisely what happened with Christ’s centrality in the Church: Little by little, he was pushed into the background. And though he is still acknowledged as Lord and Head of the Church and of the world, it is often only a perfunctory acknowledgment, if at all. The proof of this slow deterioration is plain to see in the decline of our Church. If we continue on this path, that decline will only deepen. And this is because, long before we began to shrink in numbers, we had already lost the true fervor of our faith in Christ, who is the dynamic center of the Church. Dear brothers, the numbers themselves are a challenge to all of us—especially to you—to reconsider the general direction of our Church. Let us renew our commitment to Christ with genuine passion, so that the Church may grow once again—both in quality and in numbers.
I have friends who I am quite sure are Christians who do not believe in the bodily resurrection. But the view I take of them – and they know this – is that they are very, very muddled. They would probably return the compliment.
Marcus Borg really does not believe Jesus Christ was bodily raised from the dead. But I know Marcus well: he loves Jesus and believes in him passionately. The philosophical and cultural world he has lived in has made it very, very difficult for him to believe in the bodily resurrection. I actually think that’s a major problem and it affects most of whatever else he does, and I think that it means he has all sorts of flaws as a teacher, but I don’t want to say he isn’t a Christian.
I do think, however, that churches that lose their grip on the bodily resurrection are in deep trouble and that for healthy Christian life individually and corporately, belief in the bodily resurrection is foundational.
N.T. (Tom) Wright is one of my heroes. Of all the theologians, teachers, and scholars who have had a positive impact on my spiritual and professional life as a Christian man and priest—and that list is kinda long—Wright stands at the top of the list. You can imagine, then, my shock and dismay when I read the article’s title from above. To say that I am heartbroken over this is massive understatement, especially because Wright is almost singlehandedly responsible for clearing up my own muddled (and heretical) views on Christ’s Resurrection, thinking that resulted from teachers who really didn’t believe in the bodily Resurrection of Christ because it is too unbelievable from a human perspective. The irony is palpable.
As I read the article I realized the situation is a bit more nuanced than its title would have us believe, but it is still catastrophic, nuance notwithstanding. Why? Because to believe in Christ and his saving/healing power, is to believe in his Death, Resurrection, and Ascension as I explain below. Simply put, if you take away Christ’s Resurrection, you take away every other single claim the New Testament (NT) writers made about him. No Resurrection, no Christ, no salvation for humans. Period. End of story.
Having met Bishop Wright once and having read almost everything he has published, I know that Wright has a huge and generous pastor’s heart and I appreciate greatly that he does; would that every priest and bishop have such a heart! I can also relate to his agonizing over his friend Marcus Borg, a well-known heretic who was part of the Jesus Seminar (Seminar: From the Latin semi and arse, meaning any half-assed discussion, a name that truly fit that particular “Seminar”). I have family and friends who are not Christian in any meaningful sense of the word and I fear for the eternal destiny of their souls; it is heartbreaking and an ongoing heavy burden for me. I think they are terribly misguided and foolish not to believe in Christ, and I pray daily that God will change their minds and hearts and heal them from their foolishness because I do not want to see them headed toward eternal destruction. How could I claim to love them and remain silent about their unbelief? I even pray for friends who have died without knowing and/or believing in Christ and it grieves me to the core. Yet I still ask God to be merciful to them and to remember them for good, not for judgment because I know first-hand that God is a merciful, gracious, loving, and just God and I believe in the saving and forgiving power of the Cross of Jesus Christ. There is no biblical warrant for me praying in this manner for the dead and my prayers are probably futile. But I loved them in this mortal life and because I loved them, I can do no other, futile as it might be. So to repeat, I get where Wright is coming from and like him, I believe our ultimate salvation is for God alone to decide, not us. But I also believe that salvation without a saving faith in Christ, a saving faith grounded in his Resurrection, is very unlikely, if not impossible.
That is why I have never, ever once thought that belief in the Resurrection was optional for Christians because the Resurrection is at the very heart and soul of the Christian Faith and is entirely non-negotiable. I am not the only one who thinks this way. Consider what Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church a few decades after Christ’s Death and Resurrection:
I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw him.
But tell me this—since we preach that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying there will be no resurrection of the dead? For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. And we apostles would all be lying about God—for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can’t be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins.In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world (1 Corinthians 15.3-9, 12-19).
Saint Paul pulls no punches and makes no bones about this matter: Belief in the Resurrection is not optional for Christians. No Resurrection, no Christian Faith, no forgiveness of sins, no conquering of Death, no hope for a future bodily existence living in the direct Presence of God the Father in his new world, the new heavens and earth (see, e.g., Revelation 21.1-8). Elsewhere Saint Paul demonstrated that he too had a huge and generous pastoral heart and cared about the welfare of his people (see, e.g., here). But in Saint Paul’s view their welfare demanded that they believe the Faith once delivered to the saints by the apostles who had been eyewitnesses to Christ’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. If Christ isn’t raised, then his Death on the Cross did not take care of our sins and reconcile us to God once and for all, and if we are not reconciled to God then we have no hope and chance of living with him forever because our God is a Holy and just God who cannot allow any kind of sin (or sinner) to be in his Presence, and for our own good—who in his/her right mind would want to live with Evil forever? The stakes couldn’t be higher and by claiming that a belief in the Resurrection is optional for his friend (and therefore others like him), Wright is sadly prevaricating about this Truth out of a misguided sense of love, loyalty, and friendship for his wayward friend. I cannot imagine Saint Paul ever doing such a thing under any circumstance. That did not seem to deter Wright from quoting Saint Paul in Romans 10.9 in defending his opinion about Borg and Borg’s rejection of Christ’s Resurrection: “If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” But this is cherry picking Saint Paul’s entire body of work and is quite uncharacteristic of Wright as a theologian and scholar. Moreover, if one does not believe in bodily resurrection, one cannot really believe that Christ was raised from the dead as Saint Paul and countless orthodox Christians have understood resurrection.
Borg, of course, didn’t believe in the bodily Resurrection of Christ, mistakenly believing that Christ was raised in some spiritual sense. This isn’t a new way of thinking. It’s a heresy that has been with us in various forms from almost the beginning. But as Wright brilliantly explains and defends in his books, The Resurrection of the Son of God and Surprised by Hope (a book of which I keep extra copies on hand to give to others who struggle with their faith and/or the Resurrection), resurrection for the first Christians (and ever since) meant and means bodily resurrection. We see this belief manifesting itself in the gospel writers’ narrative of Christ’s Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. Here, for example, is Saint Luke recounting a scene from the Last Supper:
Then [Jesus] took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. Then he said, “Take this and share it among yourselves.For I will not drink wine again until the Kingdom of God has come.” (Luke 22.17-18).
If resurrection means some kind of continuing spiritual existence in a disembodied state as Borg and the other Platonists/heretics believe (and I used to think before I truly understood the nature of resurrection and the New Testament’s proclamation of the new creation), how will Jesus and his followers be able to drink wine and eat bread together? Does not compute. No, as Wright and others have brilliantly defended, Christ’s Resurrection points to the promise of God’s new creation, the new heavens and earth, a new bodily form of existence. God had to become human in Jesus to deal with the sins of the body, body being defined as body, mind, and spirit—the whole human package—not just our physical bodies. We see the NT writers affirm this in various places (cf. Luke 24.35-43). Consider, for example, this from the writer of the letter to the Hebrews:
14 Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. 15 Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying (Hebrews 2.14-15).
Our first ancestors sinned in the body, in their flesh and blood, in their body and mind and spirit—the whole human package—the way God created them and us, and were expelled from Paradise, from living in God’s direct Presence, the very definition of Paradise (Genesis 3). And because they had sinned in the body, Christ had to take on a human body to deal with and conquer Sin for all time. Saint Paul likewise affirms this when he wrote to the Church at Rome:
Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God (Romans 8.1-8).
Did you catch that? On the cross, God condemned our sin in the flesh (body), not Jesus the Son, so that God would not have to condemn us as we rightfully deserve; hence, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ (Romans 8.1). In other words, Christ bore the terrible brunt of God’s wrath and anger on all human sin willingly and in cooperation with the Father to spare us individually from having to bear that wrath forever in Hell. The body is important to God because we are important to God as creatures who bear his Image. And so God rescued the body as well as our souls because humans are comprised of body and soul, not just soul or not just body. This has been the consistent story of Scripture from beginning to end. None of this would be true if Christ were not raised from the dead as Saint Paul asserts above. The Resurrection validated Christ’s saving Death for us.
Moreover, without the bodily Resurrection of Christ, his Ascension becomes nonsensical. If Christ were nothing but a disembodied spirit, his body would not need to ascend into heaven, into God’s realm. But from the very beginning the Church has proclaimed that Christ’s resurrected body has gone to be with the Father in heaven, not just his spirit. Again, no Resurrection, no Ascension, no promised new creation, no Christian Faith.
And after the apostles had died, the Church has consistently maintained this Resurrection hope and faith (and not without a struggle!). Hear Irenaeus, a spiritual grandson of the apostles:
If our flesh is not saved, then the Lord has not redeemed us with his blood, the eucharistic chalice does not make us sharers in his blood, and the bread we break does not make us sharers in his body. There can be no blood without veins, flesh and the rest of the human substance, and this the Word of God actually became: it was with his own blood that he redeemed us. As the Apostle says: “In him, through his blood, we have been redeemed, our sins have been forgiven.” (Read more.)
Consider also the Creeds of the Church, statements of faith that sprang in part from the various heresies that threatened the Church’s teaching about resurrection and new creation. In the Apostles’ Creed, the creed usually recited at Christian funerals, we affirm explicitly the “resurrection of the body” as we do implicitly in the Nicene Creed (“we look forward to the resurrection of the dead”). Again, as the NT writers, the Apostles, the Church, and Wright himself all maintain, when we are talking resurrection we are talking about bodies. Creation matters to God because God created it and us to be good, not for evil and rebellion, and God has promised to restore his good but corrupted and cursed creation one day. That’s the overarching story of Holy Scripture.
I have already gone on longer than I intended, but this matter is critically important. The Church and world need Christian leaders to be clear and bold in their thinking, teaching, and preaching about the Faith because it is the Story of God’s power to save us from Sin and Death by intervening on our behalf personally in the man Jesus Christ. We have suffered too long from muddled and heretical Christian teachers who really don’t believe their own Story, the Story of Christ and God’s plan of salvation as laid out in the Old and New Testaments. This has led to Christians becoming timid in (and often dismissive of) their faith because they have been taught a watered down, toothless, and false version of the Christian Faith, and we certainly don’t need one of the best of the Christian thinkers heretofore to be giving damaging mixed and muddled messages like he did in the above interview, well-intentioned as it might be. The Resurrection is absolutely critical to having a saving faith in Christ. It is what makes Christianity the only real game in town. Without it, we are lost and without hope. With it, we have the hope and promise of the fulfillment of God’s promise to finally and completely deal with the problems of Evil and Sin, problems that inevitably lead to our death and destruction without God’s intervention on our behalf in and through Christ. I pray and hope Bishop Wright will recant this nonsense and repent of this grave error. Resurrection—bodily resurrection—is not an optional belief for Christians. I pray and hope he will once again speak boldly and clearly about Christ’s Death and Resurrection. Otherwise he ceases to be a credible witness to Christ and that would be a true shame and loss for the Church. Lord have mercy.
For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
Christians are indistinguishable from others either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of human beings. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them [to the elements to die]. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.
Christians love all people, but all people persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the lofty and divinely appointed function of Christians, from which they are not permitted to excuse themselves.
Chapters 5-6: Funk 1, 397-401
This remains as true today as it did in the early 2nd-century. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
Do you wish to see the transfiguration of Jesus? Behold with me the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him be simply apprehended. There he is beheld both “according to the flesh” and at the same time in his true divinity. He is beheld in the form of God according to our capacity for knowledge.
Do you wish to see the transfiguration of Jesus? Behold with me the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him be simply apprehended. There he is beheld both “according to the flesh” and at the same time in his true divinity. He is beheld in the form of God according to our capacity for knowledge.
Would that all bishops, priests, and deacons heed this warning, especially the bishops, and especially the bishops of the Church of England who are the most recent ones to lead their denomination down the road to perdition. These men and women took an oath to God to defend the faith against all kinds of heresy. But no, they couldn’t be bothered to do this. Why? Because most don’t believe their own Story in the first place! And as Saint Cyprian has warned, heresy is so dangerous because it inevitably leads to apostasy and apostasy leads to eternal destruction.
Nor are the bishops of the CoE the only ones who have led their denominations down the path of destruction. Just look at the Episcopal and United Methodist Churches. It makes the heart sad and angry. Lord have mercy on us.
Heresies have frequently arisen and continue to do so because of the fact that disgruntled minds find no peace and faithless rabble-rousers undermine unity. But the Lord allows and endures these things, while not touching our freedom, so that when our hearts and minds are examined by the norm of truth, the sound faith of those who are approved may clearly stand out. This is foretold by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle when he says: “There may even have to be factions among you for the tried and true to stand out clearly.”
Thus are the faithful approved, thus are the faithless detected; thus even here, before the day of judgment, are the souls of the just and the unjust set apart, and the chaff separated from the wheat. This explains why some, of their own accord and without divine appointment, set themselves over daring strangers, making themselves into prelates regardless of the rules of ordination, and assume the title of bishop on their own authority, although no one confers the episcopate on them.
In the Psalms, the Holy Spirit designates these as sitting in the chair of pestilence; they are the plague and disease for the faith, serpent-tongued deceivers and skilled corruptors of the truth, spewing forth lethal venom from their poisonous tongues; their speech resembles a creeping cancer and their preaching injects a fatal virus in the heart and breast of everyone.
Against such persons the Lord cries out, and from these he restrains and recalls his wandering people, saying: “Listen not to the voice of your [false] prophets, who fill you with emptiness; visions of their own fancy they speak, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say to those who despise the word of the Lord: ‘Peace shall be yours’; and to everyone who walks in hardness of heart, ‘No one shall overtake you.’ I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. Had they stood in my counsel, and did they but proclaim to my people my words, they would have brought them back from evil ways and from their wicked deeds.”
It is these same persons whom the Lord designates and censures when he says: ‘‘They have forsaken me, the source of living waters; they have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water.” Although there can be only the one baptism, they think they can baptize: and although they forsake the fountain of life, they still promise the grace of life and saving water. People are not cleansed by them but simply made foul; and sins are not taken away but only accumulated.
Such a ‘‘new birth’’ does not bring forth children for God but for the devil. Born by a lie, they do not receive the promises of truth. Begotten by perfidy, they lose the grace of faith. They cannot attain to the reward of peace, since they have broken the peace of the Lord with the madness of discord.
Would that we have bold leaders like this in the Church today.
Now, with regard to this rule of faith—that we may from this point acknowledge what it is which we defend—it is, you must know, that by which we believe that there is one only God, and that He is none other than the Creator of the world, who produced all things out of nothing through His own Word, sent forth before all things; that this Word is called His Son, and, under the name of God, was seen in various ways by the patriarchs, heard at all times in the prophets, at last brought down by the Spirit and Power of the Father into the Virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb, and, being born of her, went forth as Jesus Christ; thenceforth He preached the new law and the new promise of the kingdom of heaven, worked miracles, was crucified, and rose again the third day; then having ascended into the heavens, He sat at the right hand of the Father; sent in his place the Power of the Holy Spirit to lead such as believe; will come with glory to take the saints to the enjoyment of everlasting life and of the heavenly promises and to condemn the wicked to everlasting fire, after the resurrection of both good and evil, together with the restoration of their flesh. This rule, as it will be proved, was taught by Christ, and raises amongst ourselves no other questions than those which heresies introduce, and which make people heretics.
—On the Prescription of Heretics 13. CCL 1, 197-198
Christians are indistinguishable from others either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of human beings. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them [to the elements to die]. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.
Christians love all people, but all people persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the lofty and divinely appointed function of Christians, from which they are not permitted to excuse themselves.
Chapters 5-6: Funk 1, 397-401
This remains as true today as it did in the early 2nd-century. Listen if you have ears to hear.
Wonderful stuff. The video is over an hour but you don’t have over an hour to watch it. Do yourself a favor and watch it anyway.
And if you are the reading type rather than the viewing type, pick up Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, and read chapter 4 because it essentially contains the contents of this lecture.
