On New YOrk State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett

 

On New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett

April 26, 2021

 

We learned today that the United States Supreme Court has accepted review of a case out of New York state that raises an important issue under the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. That case comes before the court that ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), that the Second Amendment creates a right for private citizens to possess firearms in the home for self-defense. The case the Court has now accepted for review, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Corlett, raises the issue of whether the Second Amendment creates a right of private citizens to carry a concealed weapon outside the home without regulation by the state or at least with less regulation than New York now imposes.

The Second Amendment reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” In the Heller case the Supreme Court in effect read the first clause of the Amendment out of it and held, in effect, that only the second clause of the Amendment, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” has legal effect. That language raises two legal issues. First, just what is the right of the people to keep and bear arms? What are the terms of that right? What actions, if any, relating to citizens keeping and bearing arms are beyond the scope of the right? Second, what does “infringed” mean in this context?

The answer to the first question is that Heller held that the right the Second Amendment creates extends at least as far as permitting a private person unconnected with a well regulated militia to keep and bear arms. On its face the Second Amendment quite clearly asserts that the people have that right only as they are part of such a militia. Unfortunately the Heller case ignores that language of the Amendment and creates a private, personal right to bear arms at least in the home for purposes of self-defense. Heller thus defines that private right to keep and bear arms that it creates as extending at least to that extent.

Second, what does it mean when the Second Amendment says the right in question shall not be “infringed?” One online dictionary defines “infringed” to mean “act so as to limit or undermine (something); encroach on.”[1] Another online definition of infringed reads “to encroach on in a way that violates law or the rights of another.”[2] Under the first definition here it could appear that the Second Amendment prohibits the state from doing anything that limits or regulates the right of a citizen to keep and bear arms. Under the second definition the issue would be whether state action has encroached on that right in violation of some law, here presumably the Constitution itself. The Court in the present case will have to decide whether or not New York’s regulation “infringes” the Second Amendment right in an impermissible way.

In the current case the Court has various options before it. It could just allow the New York regulation to stand. It could in theory revisit the Heller decision, overrule that case, and hold that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies only in relationship to a well regulated militia. Given the conservative nature of the Court it is a virtual certainty that the Court will not do that. It could strike down the entire regulation as violating the Second Amendment. It could let New York’s right to require a permit to carry a concealed weapon but strike down the requirement of a particular showing of need in order to get the required permit. If the Court does not simply allow that New York regulation to stand as it is, the issue in the case  becomes whether or not the New York state regulation at issue “infringes” on the right the Heller court created. Does that regulation limit or undermine the Second Amendment right? Does it “encroach” on that right in a way that violates the law?

The Supreme Court will decide this case against the background of a long-established legal rule that no constitutional right is absolute. The classical expression of this legal rule is that you cannot yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Why not? Because the risk of panic and resulting injury from your false and unnecessary shout outweighs your right of free speech. The U.S. Constitution also creates a right of free exercise of religion. In a real case, Reynolds v. U.S. 98 U.S 145 (1879), the court held that the claim by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that its religion permits and even requires the practice of polygamy did not stop the state from prohibiting polygamy. Why not? Because the state has a compelling interest in regulating the legal relationship of marriage that outweighs the church’s right to practice its religion. Courts must often weight conflicting, important rights and interests in cases involving constitutional rights.

The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association case that the Supreme Court has accepted for review raises the competing interests of Second Amendment rights on the one hand and the state’s compelling interest in protecting public safety on the other. Of course the case has not yet been briefed at the Supreme Court level, so we cannot know just how the state of New York will defend its regulation. The issue appears to be whether an unregulated right to bear concealed firearms in public creates a danger to public safety that outweighs the individual right to keep and bear arms that the Supreme Court has ruled the Second Amendment creates. Personally I would feel safer if no one were permitted to carry concealed or unconcealed weapons in public, but the Supreme Court is unlikely to issue such a sweeping limitation on Second Amendment rights.

Still, there is no way to know how the Supreme Court will decide this case. The conservative nature of today’s Supreme Court leads me to believe that the Court will strike down all or part of New York’s concealed weapons regulation as violating the Second Amendment. I certainly hope that the Supreme Court will do neither of those things but will uphold New York’s regulation as not violating the Second Amendment. I believe that the Court striking down any part of New York’s regulation would make the people of New York less safe than they are now, a reality that I fear will not lead the Court to uphold the regulation in question. All we can do is wait to see what the Court decides and hope that its decision is not too disastrous for the people of this country.

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[1] Google.com in response to the search request “define infringed.”

[2] mirriam-webster.com/dictionary/infringe.

On the Nature of the Law

 

On the Nature of the Law

April 25, 2021

 

I used to be a lawyer. I have a law degree, and my legal training and experience are still with me though I no longer practice law and am no longer a member of my state’s Bar. After many years as a lawyer I burned out badly on the practice law, but I can still do legal analysis, which was always my strength in legal practice in any event. I still find the law to be interesting and important, though I certainly will never practice it again. I have been thinking a good deal recently about just what the law is and is not, what it can do and what it cannot do. I don’t know that practicing lawyers think about it much, but those are foundational questions that any in depth understanding of the law must address and answer. I want here to consider just what the law is and what it can and cannot do. Those are pressing questions today because we face such profound issues of police reform and systemic racism in this country. We must understand to what extent the law can resolve those issues and to what extent it cannot.

What is the law? A couple of online definitions of law help us here. The website google.com defines law in the sense I am using it here are “the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties.” The website merriam-webster.com defines law in this sense as “a rule of conduct or action prescribed…or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority.” A law then is a rule of conduct with enforcement authority behind it. In the United States it comes in numerous forms. There are laws enacted by governmental authorities from the local to the state and national levels. There is also what we call common law (in every state except Louisiana) which consists of a body of legal concepts and rules established not through legislation but through court decisions. Criminal law is always statutory. Civil law may be either statutory or common. Criminal law is enforced through the enforcement of legal penalties, usually prison sentences, imposed on those found to have violated a criminal law. Civil law generally deals with judgements between individuals that may be enforced through various legal means of making the provisions of a judgment a reality.

There is one underlying fact about all law that I fear too many Americans do not understand. All a law, whether criminal or common, can do is establish a standard of conduct that a particular jurisdiction considers to be the minimum level of acceptable conduct. Conduct that falls below that level constitutes a crime in the case of criminal law and results in the imposition of legal penalties, usually a term of imprisonment. Violations of civil law can result in a judgment, usually but not always for the payment of damages, against a party to a civil law case. All law establishes only that minimum level of acceptable conduct. Behavior that falls below that level has legal consequences, or at least it can have those consequences. The law does not specify ideal conduct or even desirable conduct beyond that establishment of legal minimums. The aim of the law is not to make people behave well, it is only to stop people from behaving unacceptably badly and to impose either criminal or civil consequences on them when they do behave unacceptably badly. The law does not and cannot create an ideal society even when everyone obeys it. It only seeks to prevent behavior that a jurisdiction considers unacceptable by imposing legal consequences on those who behave unacceptably.

At the most basic level then the law is a set of rules of behavior enforced by some authority authorized to enforce them. There is however another question about the nature of law that has agitated legal scholars for a long time. The conventional wisdom about law used to be that each law has a set meaning that doesn’t change in response to the facts of any particular case or its reading by any particular judge. In this way of thinking about the law all a court has to do is apply those set meanings to the case before it in a rational, logical way to reach the one and only correct result. To this way of thinking a judge could be more or less competent in rationally applying the law to a case at issue, but the judge’s character, beliefs, convictions, and biases are irrelevant. This view sees the law as more or less mechanical. Rationally apply the one meaning of a relevant law to the case before you to get the correct outcome of the case. To this understanding of the law that’s about all there is to it.

In more recent times a different view of the law has become more prominent. This view sees the law as anything but fixed, clear, and rational. The law always requires interpretation. The outcome of any case is not a logical certainty. Different judges will understand and apply the same law differently. To this understanding of the law who the judge in a case is makes, or at least can make, an enormous difference. The Judge’s character, beliefs, convictions, and biases play a crucial, perhaps even determinative role in the outcome of a case. This view certainly seems to be more in tune with the way the law actually works than the older, more rationalistic view is. A couple of realities will illustrate the point.

In recent years we have seen Republicans in the White House and in Congress pack the federal courts with judges they deemed to be sufficiently conservative. The current Democratic administration, with its razor thin majority in the Senate, intends to correct what it perceives to be an ideological imbalance by putting as many judges on the federal bench as it can who it deems to be sufficiently liberal. Clearly politicians of both parties perceive that who the judge is in a particular case makes a big difference. Every judge brings his or her full self to the task of judging. We all have our political, economic, and sociological leanings. Those leanings can play a huge role in how a judge decides a case.

One example of that reality is the development in federal constitutional law of a personal right to privacy. The phrase “right of privacy” does not appear in the US Constitution. However, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), the US Supreme Court held that the Constitution nonetheless creates such a right. The case involved a Connecticut law that prohibited married couples from using artificial birth control drugs. The case thus involved a conflict between the value of personal liberty and the value of governmental regulation of citizens’ behavior. A majority of seven justices decided to favor personal liberty. That majority held that the Constitution protects “marital privacy” even though that phrase does not appear in the Constitution. The opinion of the court never made it very clear just where or how the Constitution creates such a right, but it nonetheless held that it does. Two justices dissented. They contended that because the Constitution does not mention privacy there is no basis for the court to read a right to privacy into it. These two justices appear to have valued government regulation of behavior over personal liberty at least in this case. Different justices thought very differently about the case. Who a particular justice was made all the difference.

My own experience in court confirms for me that who the judge is can make all the difference. For much of my legal career I practiced personal injury law, almost always on the defense side. Both we defense lawyers and the plaintiffs bar knew that there were plaintiff’s judges and defense judges. Sometimes a case would be assigned to a judge who one side or the other thought to be so biased against them that they exercised their right under Washington state law to have that judge removed from the case. Who the judges are can make a big difference in a case on appeal too. I’ll use one case that I tried as an example. I’ll try to keep this discussion brief.

Back in the 1980s I tried the case of Campbell v. ITE Imperial Corporation.  It was a product liability case. An employee of the Snohomish County Public Utility District had been seriously wounded when he reached out to clean a piece of electrical equipment that had not been deenergized. He sued the manufacturer of the piece of equipment, ITE Corporation, which I represented at trial. I argued first of all that the piece of equipment that my client had manufactured was not unreasonably unsafe (the legal standard in a product liability case in Washington state) in the context of work by professionals on high voltage electrical equipment. I also argued that the piece of equipment was not the cause of the plaintiff’s injuries. His supervisor on the job on which he was injured sent him to clean a piece of equipment that was not on the original work order for the job and without going through the standard procedures for making sure that a piece of equipment someone was to work on had been turned off. The jury agreed with that argument and returned a defense verdict.

The plaintiff appealed directly to the Washington State Supreme Court. I had left the law firm I had been with when I tried the case by the time the appeal came up for argument. Another lawyer from that firm argued the case before the Supreme Court. In a divided opinion the majority of the Court held that there was insufficient evidence in the record to support the trial court giving the jury an instruction on the law of what’s called subsequent superseding cause.[1] A minority of the judges on the Court, in a separate opinion, listed all of the evidence I had gotten into the trial court’s record and couldn’t figure out how the majority could say there was no such evidence in the case. The state Supreme Court reversed the trial court’s defense judgment. It remanded the case to the trial court for a retrial. I understand that the parties then settled the case.

The conclusion is unavoidable, I think, that the majority in that case reversed the judgment of the trial court not because the law dictated that result, which it certainly did not. The majority reached its decision because those judges favored the injured plaintiff over the corporate defendant. To rule in the plaintiff’s favor the majority had to disregard all of the evidence of subsequent superseding cause in the record of the trial and make the totally unsupported claim that such evidence wasn’t there. The inclination of a majority of the Court to favor an injured individual over a corporation decided the case. Other judges may well have reached a different conclusion.

That’s how the law works in actual practice. Who the judge is can make a significant difference in the outcome of a case. Perhaps we’d like to think that the law works the way scholars used to say it works, that it is perfectly rational, that there is only one correct result in every case, and that every competent judge will reach that result and no other. Any lawyer with any amount of trial experience will tell you however that that is not how it works. The law simply is not as clear and firm in actual application as we’d like it to be or even believe that it is. Because it is human the law is not perfect. Because they are human judges are not perfect. Each judge reacts to the case before her with all of her experience, beliefs, and biases. It cannot be otherwise. The law is therefore fluid and subject to being interpreted in many different ways. That’s why those politicians work so hard to put judges they like on the federal court bench.

We have asserted that all the law can do is set a minimum standard of conduct and provide legal consequences for people who do things that do not meet that standard. Another example very much in the news these days will illustrate that point. The history of the United States is rotten to its core with racism. Everything is legal that is not legally prohibited, a fact that made it possible for racists in both the south and the north to create strictly segregated societies in which white people were privileged and Black people were oppressed. It took nearly one hundred years after the abolition of slavery for the federal government to enact laws that sought to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, laws that make at least some forms of racial discrimination illegal. President Truman integrated the armed forces in 1947. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that racially segregated public schools are unconstitutional even if they are supposedly equal. Only in 1964 did Congress pass the Civil Rights Act of that year. Only in 1965 did Congress pass a law designed to end racial discrimination in voting, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those laws establish legal minimums of acceptable conduct with regard to race relations and provide for various penalties in cases where the laws are violated. Those laws are important, but they can only do what any law can do. They establish those legal minimums. As important as that legal function is, it does not end racism. It doesn’t even end racial segregation, for states, businesses, and individuals are immensely creative in finding ways to discriminate while not technically violating the law. Today the state of Georgia, for example, has enacted a voting law the obvious purpose of which is to suppress the vote of the Black citizens of that state. The proponents of that law think that it can survive constitutional and legal challenge in court because they say that its purpose is not to discriminate against anyone, its purpose is to improve election security. It remains to be seen what the courts will do with that law. I hope and pray that it will be declared invalid, but that result is far from certain.

Because all a law can do is establish a legal minimum of conduct, and because the outcome of any case in court is not certain, establishing racial justice in the United States is not primarily a matter of passing new laws. Some new laws may be necessary, laws reforming police procedures for example. But laws will not end American racism. They can’t. Racism is only marginally a legal issue. It is much more a matter of the head and the heart, of individual attitudes and institutional dynamics, than it is a matter of the law. Law can regulate behavior to some degree, but it cannot change hearts and minds. Those of us who abhor our country’s history and present reality of racism must do much more than pass laws. We must change hearts and minds. Laws won’t do that. I pray that other means of defeating racism will.

 

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[1] You’ll find the state Supreme Court’s opinions at Campbell v. ITE Corp., 107 Wn. 2d 807, 733 P. 2^nd, 696 (1987).

On the Failings of Religious Literalism

 

On the Failings of Religious Literalism

 

My wife, the Rev. Jane Sorenson, has been proofing a revised edition I have written of my first book, Liberating Christianity. She read the last paragraph of Chapter 5 to me. It’s the last paragraph in this post. I’ve added two paragraphs that appear before it. These paragraphs are among the best things I’ve ever written, so I’m posting them here. I am not generally one to boast, but these paragraphs speak profound and important truth. They are well worth the short time it will take you to read them.

 

We saw earlier in this study when we considered the nature of symbol and myth as the language of faith that neither any symbol nor any myth can fully encompass the spiritual. All they can do is point beyond themselves toward the transcendent reality with which they function to connect us. To take symbol and myth literally is to ignore both their inherent nature and their legitimate function. It is to turn them into something they are not and cannot be. It is to fail to understand the no that necessarily accompanies every symbolic or mythic yes. To use symbol and myth without understanding what they truly are and are not is to confine the spiritual, the divine, within the symbol or myth. It is to claim to have confined the infinite in the finite, something that is ontologically impossible. It is to have committed an error that goes to the inherent nature of faith. It reduces faith to knowledge. It reduces mystery to certainty. It reduces the mythic to the factual.

Religious literalism leaves us with the outer form of faith without its heart. It gives us the external while killing the internal. Literalism gives us a shallow faith with no spiritual essence. While as we noted above literalistic Biblicism can function to connect people with the spiritual (or at least something that is partially the spiritual) for a time, it will however inevitably, unavoidably fail in that sacred work. It will fail because it fails to understand the nature both of its own finite form and the sacred, infinite nature of the spiritual.

The most profound, the truest varieties of religious experience do not make that error. They live not with dead form but with living mystery. They live not with smug certainty but in awe before the grandeur and enormity of God, knowing all the while that that grandeur and enormity eternally transcend all human knowing. They know that we can and are called to live with wonder and humility before and with that which we can never fully understand but toward which we are inexorably drawn and with which our souls long to connect. Mere facts do not draw us. Longing to connect with dead facts is not part of being human. Transcendent mystery draws us. Longing to connect with spiritual reality that is so much more than fact inheres in our very nature as created beings. It is not possible for us finite creatures ultimately to know the fullness of God. It is possible for us to allow symbol and myth to draw us into the wonder, majesty, and mystery of God. To live in wonder and awe before the ultimately unknowable God is to become more fully who God created us to be, mortal creatures whose fullness lies in connection with the immortal. We are finite beings created to live intimately with ultimate being. Mere fact will never make us who we really are. Understanding God as so much more than mere fact can. The mythic and symbolic understanding of the faith therefore has not only the potential to save the faith for non-Christians. It has the potential to save the faith even for a great many Christians. It can allow those Christians to give up untenable literalist positions without giving up their faith.

Sometimes the Bible is Just Wrong

 

Sometimes the Bible is Just Wrong

April 14, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

The Bible is the word of God, right? Because it is it contains no errors, right? We’ve all herd those claims about it, right? I mean, if God wrote it the Bible can’t have any errors in it, right? So everything in it is God’s honest truth, right? If the Bible says it, it’s right, right? An awful lot of people believe those things, so they must be correct, right?

Well, actually no, not right. The Bible is full of things that are just flat wrong. Of course it also contains truly profound truth, but that doesn’t mean everything in it is correct. Today I was reading the Revised Common Lectionary’s texts for Sunday, April 25, 2021. Those readings include Acts 4:5-12 and John 10:11-18. Both of those texts include statements that either theologically or historically speaking just aren’t correct. Let me begin with Acts.

In Acts 4:5-12  Peter and John have been arrested for proclaiming that in Jesus there is resurrection of the dead. It seems they were also arrested for performing healings. The next day they’re brought before the Jewish authorities. Those worthies demand to know by what power or name they do healings. Peter, supposedly filled with the Holy Spirit, says they do healings “by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified….” Now, it may well be true that Peter and the others did healings in the name of Jesus Christ. I’m not going to quarrel with that claim here. But when Peter says that the Jewish authorities crucified Jesus he’s just wrong. The Jewish authorities under the Romans never crucified anyone. In Jesus’ time at least they had no legal authority to execute people. Only the Romans could do that. And even if they had had the legal authority to execute people they wouldn’t have done it by crucifixion. That was a Roman method of execution not a Jewish one. When in Acts the mob turns against St. Stephen they stone him to death, they don’t crucify him. Acts 7:54-60. So no, book of Acts, the Jewish leaders didn’t crucify Jesus. The Romans did. That’s error number one in this passage.

There’s another. This lectionary reading from Acts ends at Acts 4:12, which reads, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” The name in question of course is Jesus Christ. This verse is one of the many in the New Testament that claims that salvation comes only through Jesus. It at least implies that to be saved, whatever that means, one must believe in Jesus, whatever that means. And it just isn’t true. I understand, I think, why the New Testament makes the claim so often that it is. It was the first Christians’ way of saying to the Jews you’re wrong when you deny that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. You’re also wrong when you throw us out of the synagogues because we confess that he is, which by the late first century CE at least the Jews were doing. Those early Christians were mad as hell at the Jews for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah and for excluding them from what had been their spiritual community. So they said Jesus is the only way.

Yet of course Jesus isn’t the only way. He is a true and powerful way in which we can know and live our relationship with God, but he isn’t the only one. We know that he isn’t the only one because of a couple of quite undeniable truths. First, it makes absolutely no sense that God would establish only one valid way for people to live their relationship with God, then make that one way known to only some of humanity not all of humanity. That God would make that way known only to us Christians is absurd, and God is not absurd. Second, in today’s world we know that huge numbers of people find a valid connection with God through faith traditions other than Christianity. The world is full of faithful, caring, loving people who aren’t Christians. Does God reject them or even damn them though they live good lives of love and care just because they aren’t of our faith? Of course not! God isn’t that narrow. God isn’t that petty. God’s just whole lot bigger than that. God doesn’t care about the thoughts in our heads to the exclusion of care about our living good lives of love and care for all of God’s people. So no, book of Acts, the name of Jesus Christ is not the only one by which we must be saved.

Then there’s John 10:11-18. In those verses Jesus first says “I am the good shepherd.” John 10:11a. There’s no problem there. Metaphorically speaking he is. But at John 10:15 he says “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” Now, the author of the Gospel of John clearly wanted that to be true of Jesus. John is the Gospel of incarnation par excellence. In John Jesus is only barely human. He’s much more divine and much less human than he is in the other Gospels. Mere humans like the Romans surely couldn’t kill God, so in John they don’t. The armed mob come to arrest Jesus fall to their knees before his divine majesty. See John 18:1-12. See the translators note on what Jesus actually says in the Greek original, and remember who “I am” is. See Exodus 3:14. In John, though Jesus dies, no one kills him. He dies only because he has determined to die as his way of going back to heaven where he came from in the first place.

As an historical matter John’s account of Jesus’ dying because he laid down his own life is utter nonsense. It works as a confession of Jesus Christ as God Incarnate, and we can value it for that reason. As historical fact it doesn’t work at all. There’s little doubt about what happened as historical fact. Jesus carried out a ministry of teaching and healing that drew many followers to him. He led a popular, messianic movement. There had been popular, messianic movements before Jesus. The Romans knew how to deal with them. Kill the movement’s leader, and the movement disappears. The Romans didn’t tolerate popular movements, especially not ones like Jesus’ that proclaimed a truth that directly contradicted the Romans’ way of doing things. So they crucified Jesus. They executed him as a political criminal. That they would was virtually inevitable, and Jesus knew it. See Mark 8:31. As an historical matter Jesus didn’t lay down his life except perhaps in the sense that he was willing to run the risk of crucifixion to proclaim what he knew to be God’s truth. The Romans arrested and killed him. They had the power to do it. They’d done it before. They’d do it again. There was no way Jesus could avoid it except perhaps by renouncing  everything he’d said and everything he stood for. Surely Mark’s scene in the Garden of Gethsemane is closer to what actually happened than is John’s “I lay down my life.” See Mark 14:32-42. As an historical matter John’s Jesus saying “I lay down my life” is just wrong.

The errors I’ve discussed here are but a few of the many things in the Bible that just aren’t correct. Some of the errors are theological—Jesus is the only way—and some are historical—no one takes my life from me but I lay it down. Christian Fundamentalism insists that the Bible is inerrant. It isn’t. It so obviously isn’t that when I hear someone say that it is I always want to ask if they’re actually read it. So what are we to do with it? Throw the whole thing out? By no means! For all its problematic aspects, the Bible is the one book Christianity cannot do without. What we are to do with it is work harder to understand it than most of us do most of the time. The Bible doesn’t give us God’s truth nicely prepared on a silver platter. Rather it calls us to the hard but sacred work of doing our own discernment. We might wish that it made things easier than that. It doesn’t.

I’ll close by giving you once again what I consider to be the best paragraph I’ve ever written:

 

Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be with you in that work. Amen.

Christ is Risen! Really?

 

Christ is Risen! Really?

April 7, 2021

 

It’s the first week of Easter. Few people perhaps know that there is more than one day of Easter, but there is. In the Christian calendar Easter is a season. It lasts from Easter Sunday until Pentecost. So my not getting this written for Easter Sunday doesn’t matter, or so I tell myself. In any event, here it is either on time or late. Whatever.

Christianity is resurrection faith. Christians confess that on the Sunday after his crucifixion on a Friday Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. He wasn’t resuscitated like Lazarus is in the Gospel of John. He was resurrected, which isn’t the same thing. For my purposes here however the difference between those two things doesn’t matter. What matters is that we Christians confess that Jesus of Nazareth was well and truly dead, and then he wasn’t. Christ’s resurrection makes all the difference for Christianity. St. Paul wrote that “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” 1 Corinthians 15:14 NRSV. Easter Sunday is the day of the Christian year dedicated especially to celebrating Christ’s resurrection. On that day Christians around the world proclaim, “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”

Which is all very well and good, but how do we know? How much do we know? We know because the New Testament tells us so. How much we know is a thornier issue. We have four Gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrection, and they aren’t all the same. Here’s a table that shows what those four accounts have in common and what they don’t:

 

	Mark	Matthew	Luke	John
Stone rolled away	x	x	x	x
Empty tomb	x	x	x	x
Mary Magdalene	x	x	x	x
Two women	x	x
Three or more women			x
Women come with spices	x		x
One “man” in the tomb	x
Women told Jesus has risen	x	x
Women told to tell the men/disciples	x	x	x	x
Women flee from the tomb	x
Women say nothing	x
Earthquake at the tomb		x
Guards at the tomb		x
Angel descending from heaven at tomb		x
Jesus speaks to women/woman		x		x
Two “men” in the tomb			x
Peter goes to the bomb			x	x
The disciple whom Jesus loved goes to the tomb				x
Two angels at the tomb		x	x	x
Women tell the disciples he has risen		x	x	x

 

We see that the only things these four accounts have in common are that Mary Magdalene either goes to the tomb alone or is one of the women who go to the tomb, that the stone that had sealed the tomb is rolled away, the tomb is empty, and some figure tells the women to tell the men that Christ has risen. The other details differ in the four accounts.

What are we to make of the fact that the four accounts of Christ’s resurrection are so different? We are to understand, I think, that we can’t take those accounts at face value. We can understand that each of these accounts tries to convey a sense of something that happened that it’s nearly impossible to talk about with ordinary words. They are stories told to tell people that Jesus’ death was not the end for him. Something impossible had happened. It looked to all the world like the Romans had killed Jesus. They executed him as a political criminal. To the world that was the end of him. To the eyes of faith it wasn’t.

Let me suggest that you look at the resurrection of Christ this way. Clearly Jesus had created a popular movement in Galilee. A significant number of people followed him as a new kind of teacher and healer. At least some of the participants in that movement believed that he was the long anticipated messiah. There had been other messianic movements in Galilee before Jesus. There would be others after Jesus. The Romans killed at least the leaders of those movements, and the movements died out.[1] It is an undeniable historical fact that the Jesus movement did not die out after the Romans killed Jesus. Rather, within a relatively few years it had become a religious movement that spread across the Roman Empire. How did that happen?

The explanation of how it happened that makes sense to me  is that the Jesus movement didn’t die out when Jesus died because Jesus’ followers had some kind of powerful experience of his continuing presence with them after his death. That experience energized them. It emboldened them. It gave them courage it seems they otherwise would not have had. Just what was that experience? I don’t think we can know. Several early Christians tried to convey that experience by writing stories of an empty tomb, of a missing body, and of witnesses being told by heavenly messengers that he had been raised from the grave. Writing stories is how the people of the first century CE conveyed deep truth. That’s why we have gospels they wrote and not theological essays. We don’t know the historical details of what happened. We do know that something profound, something life changing, must have happened. If it hadn’t happened the Jesus movement would have died out, and we would never have heard of him. After all, how many of us have heard of Judas the Galilean (not Judas the disciple who betrayed Jesus)? He led a violent popular movement in Galilee that the Romans crushed in 4 BCE. If Jesus’ followers had not had an empowering experience of Jesus with them after his death surely the Jesus movement would be as obscure to us as Judas the Galilean is.

So we quite appropriately proclaim, “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” We don’t need to know the details. Even without the details we can proclaim with our first century siblings in the faith that death couldn’t hold him, the grave couldn’t keep him, God saw to it that crucifixion was not the end of him. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Thanks be to God!

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[1] John Dominic Crossan contends that if a popular movement the Romans didn’t like was nonviolent the Romans killed only the movement’s leader. That’s why the Romans didn’t immediately come after Jesus’ followers after they had killed Jesus. If the movement was violent the Romans killed everyone they could get their hands on who had been part of the movement. That they didn’t do that to the Jesus movement is one way we know that the movement was nonviolent.