The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Reason #1 Why People Reject Jesus – They Lack the Story, and the History:   Mt.11:2 – 5

^11:2 Now when John, while imprisoned, heard of the works of Christ, he sent word by his disciples ³ and said to him, ‘Are you the Expected One, or shall we look for someone else?’ ⁴ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Go and report to John what you hear and see: ⁵ the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.’

A friend of mine once said, ‘I can’t believe in God or miracles because miracles are unscientific.  All the things recorded in the Bible couldn’t have happened.’  Hmm…  What to say, what to say? 

          In my experience, people evaluate Jesus through four main avenues:  science, philosophy, history, and personal experience. 

Science is inconclusive.  You just can’t make conclusions about the supernatural world based on the natural world we can observe.  What if you are really a brain sitting in a jar, with ‘sensory data’ about the ‘natural world’ being supplied to you in a way that seems real?  You can’t even design an experiment that would decisively tell you that.  So the sensory data we acquire from science doesn’t tell us enough about the supernatural world beyond the natural.  And miracles?  People the world over experience all kinds of supernatural things, more frequently than we in the secular West tend to think.  Yet miracles are precisely the kind of thing that cannot be reliably repeated in a laboratory experiment.  If they were, they would be part of the natural world, but they aren’t, by definition.  Miracles belong to the realm of history, because they are one-off events that need to be explored using historical disciplines. 

Philosophy leans towards the view that there is a ‘god’ of some sort.  Is there an uncaused cause?  An original unmoved mover?  And in order to have a real foundation for ethics, you need to have a foundation for human worth and value.  So philosophy leans towards there being some sort of ‘god,’ but it can’t tell us what kind of ‘god’ exists.

Personal experience is important, but by itself becomes chaotic and messy.  If we took all of our personal experiences as a reflection of the character of a ‘god,’ we would have to conclude that this ‘god’ is both good and evil.  Why?  Because the world has both good and evil, however we define those things.  So based on personal experience alone, it’s most natural to conclude that there’s a ‘god’ who is the same way.  This would make you share the same basic foundation as Hinduism. 

History is where we need to look, and how we need to look.  The Christian claim itself is grounded in historical facts.  It is not ‘blind faith.’  If you’ve ever served on a jury, you know that you can’t repeat the crime as if it were a scientific experiment.  Instead, you have to honor the historical nature of the crime.  And you have to acquire knowledge of the past based on historical evidence:  testimony, witnesses, material evidence, logic, along with everything that we know about human behavior so that we have to factor in motives, storyline, etc.

So I told my friend, ‘You’re evaluating an historical claim using the wrong tools.  Science cannot truly evaluate a one-time event because it’s unrepeatable by definition.  If you’ve served on a jury you know that.  You need to switch gears and switch disciplines.  You need to investigate all this using the tools of history.  Shall we start with Jesus’ resurrection?’

I could end there.  But for more information, in a later email, I wrote:  ‘Here are some books I’d recommend, and the reasons for my suggesting them to you:

• Francis Collins, The Language of God.  Collins brings his research into the human genome together with his Christian faith.  Collins is now director of the NIH.  I think it will be helpful for you to read another biologist.

• N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God.  Wright begins with an explanation of historical knowledge in chapters 2 – 4 that is very helpful.  Then, in chapters 6 – 10, he gives an excellent summary of second Temple Judaism.  That really sets the stage for understanding how early Christianity is related to that backdrop, which he explores in chapters 11 – 15.  Although that is quite a bit of reading, I would say that it is well worth it.  If you want to build an historical case against Jesus and the first Christians, which incidentally is the only responsible thing for you to do, you'll have to engage with what we know historically about this time period.

• N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God.  A thick book, but don't worry.  I'm not recommending that you read the whole thing, only a few chapters.  Wright employs the same historical-critical method by first examining what ancient Greco-Roman pagans and Jews believed about resurrection in chapters 1 – 4, which is important because no one would have spontaneously generated the view that Jesus alone was resurrected.  Chapter 12 relates specifically to why Jesus would have been called ‘messiah’ even though every other so-called ‘messiah’ was military.  And chapters 18 – 19 round out the argument that the resurrection of Jesus can be historically understood, and that we can make a case that the resurrection of Jesus happened.

• Rodney Stark, Discovering God.  Stark is a sociologist who looks at the world's religions from a social-scientific and historical point of view.  His first chapter, on the religious views of so-called ‘primitive peoples’ is thought provoking.  And his relatively short chapter on Christianity will add a few things here and there to the case that N.T. Wright builds.  Then in the conclusion, you can see how he views a comparison between Christianity and all the other religions.  I think those 3 chapters would be worthwhile for you.

• If you have the chance to find it, you would also benefit from the work of chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, namely his book Personal Knowledge.  His book is, among other things, an attack on what might be called ‘naive objectivism,’ which can be defined as the epistemological view which holds that the only valid knowledge is that which can be articulated and tested by strictly impersonal methods.  Polanyi demonstrates why this view of knowledge is untenable.