Word: christe
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Five churchgoers sit around a table in the rectory of St. George's Episcopal Church in Hawthorne, California. They all hold different views about whether the stories of Christ's miracles are true; they disagree about how much they matter. "Whether those actions actually occurred is somewhat irrelevant to me," observes Alan Roulston, a mechanical engineer. "It's the spirit of the message that is more important...
...disguised as the Star in the East. As for the healing, even the enemies of Jesus talked about his miraculous powers, so it would seem churlish for academics, at a distance of 2,000 years, to dismiss them outright. But liberal theologians are prepared to reduce the role of Christ to that of a placebo: people's belief in his healing power was enough to cure ailments that were psychosomatic to begin with...
...traditional Christian, no miracle is more important than the Resurrection, the event that lies at the heart of the faith, containing within it the promise of eternal life. "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain," Paul wrote to the Corinthians. But it was St. Augustine who observed that "on no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body." And indeed no assertion of modern biblical scholarship can match, in its capacity to horrify and gall, the statement that Christ never actually rose...
...liberals argue that it is not blasphemy to say the Resurrection never happened, because accounts of Christ's rising are meant metaphorically. In this view, one robs the Bible of its richness and poetry by insisting it should be read literally. Jesus was resurrected in the lives and dreams of his followers; the body of Christ is the church, not a reconstituted physical body. The Resurrection represents an explosion of power, a promise of salvation that does not depend on a literal belief in physical resurrection...
...Testament scholars from this school point out that the Gospel writers made a crucial distinction between flesh and spirit. "They were talking not about the resurrection of the flesh but about the resurrection of Christ's selfhood, his essence," says Jackson Carroll, a professor of religion and society at Duke Divinity School. "The authors of the New Testament had experiences with an extraordinary person and extraordinary events, and they were trying to find ways to talk about all that. They weren't writing scientific history; they were writing faith history...