Resurrection - Fact or Fiction ? A Debate Between William Lane Craig & Gerd Ludemann

166 Pages·2000·2.18 MB·English

by  Paul Copan ( Editor ) Ronald K. Tacelli (Editor) William Craig

Edited by Paul Copan & Ronald K.Tacelli

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... 7
PAUL COPAN & RONALD K. TACELLI
PART 1
THE DEBATE
OPENING STATEMENTS
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG ................................................................. 31
GERD LUDEMANN ....................................................................... 40
FIRST REBUTTALS
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG ................................................................. 46
GERD LUDEMANN ....................................................................... 52
SECOND REBUTTALS
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG ................................................................. 56
GERD LUDEMANN ....................................................................... 60
CONCLUDING STATEMENTS
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG ................................................................. 63
GERD LUDEMANN ....................................................................... 66
PART 2
RESPONSES
THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES, ASCENSION & ANTI-SEMmSM
STEPHEN T. DAVIS ...................................................................... 71
THE EXPLANATORY POWER OF CONVERSION-VISIONS
MICHAEL GOULDER .................................................................... 86
TRIMMING THE DEBATE
ROBERT H. GUNDRY ............................................................... 104
A CONTEST BETWEEN ORTHODOXY & VERACITY
Roy W. HoovER ...................................................................124
PART 3
CLOSING RESPONSES
GERD LUDEMANN ...................................................................149
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG .............................................................. 162
"What inclines even me to believe in Christ's resurrection?" The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put
this question to himself in a private notebook that recorded his many interior struggles. "It is," he
explained:
as though I play with the thought.-If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the
grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other
and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content
ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but
dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven.'
This passage might seem to some naive and overwrought. But it does in fact capture the seriousness
and urgency of the question Did Jesus really rise from the dead? as well as the far-reaching
implications for countless lives that a negative answer holds.
To make this a bit clearer, consider the biblical story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal (cf. 1
Kings 18:20-39). Elijah, the outspoken prophet of Yahweh, and the four hundred and fifty prophets of
Baal are engaged in a kind of contest to determine which is the true God. To this end sacrificial bulls
are prepared, and the true God, when called upon, is supposed to send down fire to consume the
offering. The prophets of Baal go first.
They ... called on Baal from morning to noon, saying, "Answer us, Baal!" But there was no
sound, and no one answering. And they hopped around the altar they had prepared.
When it was noon, Elijah taunted them: "Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating, or
may have retired, or may be on a journey. Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened."
They called out louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom,
until blood gushed over them.
Noon passed and they remained in a prophetic state until the time for offering sacrifice. But
there was not a sound; no one answered, and no one was listening. (1 Kings 18:26-29 NAB)
The story is meant to be grimly humorous, and we are invited to laugh, or at least smile, at the
spectacle of the prophets' vain and empty devotion. But what about Christians? As they have
traditionally held, unless Jesus rose bodily from the dead, how could their devotion be any less vain
or empty? Christians pray and call out to God-even shedding their blood for their faith. But if Jesus
did not rise, then for them, as with the prophets of Baal, no one is listening. All their prayers and
petitions, all their acts of faith, hope and love-however costly-have been directed to a God who is not
there. And the book they claim to be the revealed word of God--to which they turn for infallible
guidance, for solace and inspiration-turns out to be a book like all the others: bound by the twin
horizons of merely human wisdom and all-too-human folly.
So the question is important-surely important enough to debate. And on September 18, 1997, the St.
Thomas More Society of Boston College hosted two internationally celebrated scholars, William
Lane Craig and Gerd Ludemann, to make the best possible case for each side.
According to Craig, "The most reasonable historical explanation for the facts of the empty tomb,
the resurrection appearances, and the origin of the Christian Way would therefore seem to be that
Jesus rose from the dead. ... The rational man can hardly now be blamed if he infers that at the tomb
of Jesus on that early Easter morning a divine miracle has occurred."'
Ludemann defends a visionary hypothesis of the resurrection. He has long maintained that "we can
no longer take the statements about the resurrection of Jesus literally ... the tomb ofJesus was not
empty, but full, and his body did not disappear but rotted away."3 Given the "revolution in the
scientific view of the world," all statements about the resurrection of Jesus have lost their literal
meaning.
At the time of the debate, Ludemann considered himself to be a Christian theologian. He had
insisted, as far back as 1995, when asked if one could still be a Christian while rejecting the bodily
resurrection of Jesus, his deity, and so on, that "the answer is a confident 'Yes'."5 The reduction of the
Christian faith "to a minimum by comparison with former times" is, he said, "a great liberation."6 But
all that has changed. Though he still stands by his historical methodology and visionary hypothesis,
Ludemann now "deeply regret[s]" having taken such a position. He has come to embrace an atheistic,
human-centered spirituality.
Despite Liidemann's change of viewpoint-or rather, perhaps precisely because of it-the present
book will engage its readers in a debate involving clearly delineated and sharply opposed positions.
Philosophical Considerations
Necessarily, either Jesus died and rose from the dead or he did not. If he did, then Christianity is true.
The canonical Gospels make the claim that Jesus did in fact rise and appear to his followers. But how
are we to interpret "rise" and "appear"? What are we to make of the historical evidence? The
debaters, as one would expect, interpret and assess these matters in starkly contrasting ways. But they
agree enough to fight on the battlefield of critical historiography. Both ask us to consider what, in the
light of all the evidence we have concerning Jesus' resurrection, is the most reasonable conclusion to
draw.
This procedure is fair enough. But certain implicit philosophical claims are rumbling about in the
background of the debate. And it might be helpful, here in the introduction, to bring them briefly into
the light of center stage.
1. Hume on miracles. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711- 1776) proposed an argument
that, if sound, would nullify any debate on the resurrection before it could even begin. For, by any
account, the resurrection must be a miracle: it could not be something one would expect to happen
simply in the natural course of events. If it happened, it had to involve the extraordinary intervention
of God. But, according to Hume, there can never be a good reason to believe that such an event really
happened. For a "miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable