Is the Date of Easter of Pagan Origin?

You may have heard the claim that Christians should not celebrate Easter because of its origins. Many believe that what we call Easter today was developed as Roman Catholicism co-opted pagan festivals celebrated in different regions in honor of various false gods and goddesses. The claims are laced with names of scholars who have made connections between the names of the festivals and goddesses, the timing of the celebration, and the symbols used.

To take these scholars at their word seems charitable, but I question the wisdom of such wholesale abandonment of a celebration that is at the very heart of the Christian community and faith. Three separate issues need to be identified and evaluated: the date of the celebration, the name of the celebration, and the symbols employed in the celebration. My goal is to examine each of these ideas separately so we might understand the issue more fully, repenting of what is erroneous and embracing what is true.    Continue at Roger Patterson

Communicating the Claims of Easter

The focus of my last post was the public character of the resurrection that makes the gospel rather different from the sheer power of personal assertion or experience. Here are some suggestions for communicating this central Christian claim to others—and not only at Easter! 

Suggestions for Conversations
1. The gospel’s effects are deep and wide, so you can start anywhere in the argument. For example, in the philosophers’ forum in Athens, Paul began by telling his Epicurean and Stoic audience that they misunderstood who God is and how he relates to the world. God is neither irrelevant and aloof from the world (contra the Epicureans) nor part of the world (contra the Stoics). Though he doesn’t depend on the world, the world depends on him and God is concerned and involved with the world he has created, governs, and saves. It’s an argument for Christian theism, showing unbelievers how they cannot even live consistently with their own assumptions unless the Triune God known in Scripture is the source of all reality. You can also begin the conversation by sharing your own experience—the difference Christ has made in your life, as long as you realize that this isn’t the gospel itself. Or you can go straight to the resurrection and work more inductively, from the most particular claim to its broader implications.
2. On one hand, don’t assume that you and your conversation partner share the same assumptions. On the other hand, don’t assume that you don’t share any common ground. Especially to the extent that one has been shaped by the naturalistic presuppositions that dominate academic culture in our day, a claim like the resurrection will be ruled impossible at the start. Miracles do not happen because they cannot happen: that’s the a priori assumption of the deistic/atheistic worldview of today’s Epicureans. If you’re reasoning with modern “Stoics”—basically, a pantheistic worldview, the assumption will be that everything is divine and miraculous; so the idea of special divine interventions like the resurrection will seem just as foreign to New Agers as to New Atheists. Again, you can begin by exposing the irrationality and inconsistency of these worldviews and then discuss the resurrection within the context of a biblical worldview or begin with the resurrection claim. One strength of the latter approach is that the resurrection, as a historical event, disproves their worldview. Here is an event that actually happened, which their worldview cannot account for. Even if they do not accept the argument, much less trust in Christ, this can at least help to weaken their excuse that the biblical claim is nothing more than private assertion or experience, unaccountable to public debate. It can help to expose to our friend the fact that he or she is “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness”—that is, no longer rejecting the claim because of reason but because of the same irrational act of mere will that he or she had attributed to believers.  Continue at Michael Horton

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I Have Been Crucified WITH Christ

George R. Krahn has been crucified!

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Easter for Atheists and Skeptics

“Turn your scars into stars and your cross into a stepping stone.” Trivializations such as these have now become a staple even in many evangelical churches at Easter. 

A mainline Methodist tells the story of visiting a well-known evangelical church at Easter, hoping to hear the gospel. Waiting in anticipation, he says there was nothing in the service that pointed worshipers upward, to God and his saving deed in Christ. Perhaps it’s all in the sermon, he thought. However, his patience was not rewarded. The message was about how Jesus made it possible for us to come back from our losses even stronger than we were before. 

Just a few hours ago a friend sent me this announcement from a local church in his area for the upcoming Easter 2012 service: “Join us for two special Sundays. The Living Lord’s Supper! A live re-enactment of Da Vinci’s Last Supper featuring drama and music.” The sermon: “How Easter Can Change Your Life!” “Pastor Jack Millwood will explain how the power of Easter can change you from the inside out!…This true story (i.e., Palm Sunday and Easter) has changed the world- it can help you make the changes you want to make in your life!”

On Saturday, March 26, atheists and skeptics gathered on the Washington Mall for the “Reason Rally,” where speakers and singers mocked religion. Richard Dawkins, the movement’s pop star, called on the 20,000 gathered there to “ridicule and show contempt…publicly” for the beliefs of religious people. The movement’s organizers take pride in being the “marines” for a new war on faith. War language was all over the place<—an "onward atheist soldiers" sort of theme. As USA Today reporter Cathy Lee Grossman reported, “Outrage was the parlance of the day, however, for many speakers, including David Silverman, Reason Rally organizer and American Atheists president. He reveled in the group’s reputation as the marines of atheism, as the people who storm the faith barricades and bring ‘unpopular but necessary’ lawsuits. Silverman may have gone a bit further in his rhetoric than he intended. In a thundering call for ‘zero tolerance’ for anyone who disagrees with or insults atheism, Silverman proclaimed, ‘Stand your ground!’”   Continue at Michael Horton

Risen Indeed!

Every Easter affords fresh opportunities for national news magazines to take up the question of Jesus’s resurrection. It’s difficult to point with any firmness to a “consensus” in Jesus scholarship any more than in other studies. Nevertheless, even liberals recognize (and lament) a trend in New Testament scholarship away from many of the “assured results” assumed by their predecessors only a generation ago. 

Many factors have contributed to this more conservative trend, but two are worth mentioning. First, there has been a trend toward earlier dating of the Gospel accounts, which undermines the critical presupposition that the most obvious reports of Jesus’s bodily resurrection and deity are later interpolations. Second, especially since the last 40 years or so, there has been a trend toward placing Jesus in his Jewish milieu and this has led—generally speaking—to greater suspicion of the quite Gentile (Greek) biases that have dominated higher-critical (i.e., liberal) scholarship. Keep Reading...

Since When Did Bunnies Have Eggs?

How in the world did the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, the most sacred and central event in Christianity, come to be represented by a fluffy bunny who mysteriously has colored eggs and gives out cheap candy to kids? Keep Reading...

See Also: Easter Eggs or Spring Spheres?

Low in the Grave He Lay

All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name

Risen Indeed!

Ever since Christianity conquered the Greco-Roman world, Western civilization has been a little schizophrenic. On one hand, there’s the traditional pagan view of “the afterlife”: Plato’s “upper world” of eternal souls or intellects liberated from the “lower world” of material and historical embodiment. On the other hand, there’s the radical eschatology of the prophets and the New Testament, where the contrast isn’t between two worlds but between two ages: this age, under sin and death, and the age to come, under righteousness and everlasting life. Although our souls are dispatched to God’s safe-keeping upon death, Christians confess their faith in “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” The whole creation will be renewed, not destroyed, says Paul in Romans 8, so we wait for this final resurrection with patience. Read the rest HERE