MetaCatholic

David Ritsema draws attention to a lecture by Tom Wright: “Can Scientists Believe in the Resurrection”. You can read it here, or choose to listen to it or watch it from the links provided by David, or on the NT Wright Page. Unsurprisingly, Tom quickly moves the question onto the grounds of history and “scientific” historiography. The lecture also provides a useful and compact summary of some of the key lines of argument in his massive book The Resurrection of the Son of God.

I want to pick up one thing here that Wright says specifically:

the Christian claim was from the beginning that the question of Jesus’ resurrection was a question, not of the internal mental and spiritual states of his followers a few days after his crucifixion, but about something that had happened in the real, public world, leaving not only an empty tomb, but a broken loaf at Emmaus and footprints in the sand by the lake among its physical mementoes

Now I happen to agree with Wright on the empty tomb, I’m not sure about whether Emmaus has its origins in witness memory or in Lukan creativity (or a combination of both), but the “footprints in the sand” raises the nub of the problem. How does Wright know there were footprints in the sand? Because people walking on sand leave footprints. But do resurrected bodies walking on sand leave footprints? How would we know? After all, if we fully take the gospel accounts as history, resurrected bodies can get into locked rooms, and resurrected bodies can choose when to be recognizable, as well as being able to eat broiled fish. So how would we know whether they leave footprints?

Wright doesn’t do ambiguity and ambivalence very well, yet what we might call the “physicality” of the risen Christ is ambiguous in the gospel narratives. Assertions that the resurrection is historical and then deduce “footprints in the sand” from what historical is presumed to mean are as problematic as those that assert it is eschatological and then deduce from what eschatological means to them that the empty tomb is irrelevant.

One of the stronger historical reasons, to my mind, for asserting the authenticity of the empty tomb comes from the pattern of belief. The disciples’ experience of the risen Jesus unquestionably transformed their believing, and also quite precisely their belief in resurrection, as a hitherto corporate, cosmic and creational event comes to be applied to a single individual ahead of the time expected. What does not change, however is the belief that the resurrection transformation they still awaited was still corporeal. The transformation of the world remains the heart of what they hope for, and ideas of escape from the world and the body do not start to make real headway until the second and third centuries, before being ruled out of the catholic court. That belief in corporeal transformation is a strong logical pointer to the transformation of the specific body that was once entombed.

There is another problem with the way that Wright treats that future corporeal resurrection that we now call the parousia, and its relationship to the resurrection of Christ. He seems to assume that we can simply restate the relationship between the two in a way that repeats affirmatively the statements of the New Testament, and need ourselves to return to a much more (in his view) biblical and Jewish way of conceiving the renewal of all things.

But even within, say, 1 Corinthians 15, we see a shift. At the start of Paul’s argument resurrection is defined by the Jewish and Pharisaic hope, and the explanation of what happened to Jesus is worked out in the categories of that understanding. By the end of the argument, what resurrection for all means is defined primarily by what happened to Jesus, and the hope for all things turns on the specific events of Easter. But the risen Jesus is no longer corporeally present; the last of his appearances to Paul is recognized as out of time and abnormal. There is something different about how Jesus is now present in his church and to the world, and that difference is precisely what allows the negative views of body and creation to gain headway as Christian views, before the church comes to clarify what a Christian view is.

But after 2000 years of resurrection being defined by Jesus risen, but whose presence among us is not corporeal in the way in which the Jesus of the limited time of appearances is corporeal, things look different. The corporeality of Jesus is known through the body of the Church and the body of the Eucharist. Resurrection seems to have a lot more to do with eternity, and with God beyond the world, than it did for Paul, and a simple restatement of Pauline theology may not be the right way to go.

Google’s famous early mission statement is “Don’t be evil”. But has this changed? Claude Mariottini notes this post by Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel, which offers a Jewish argument about copyright.

In Judaism, a different source is looked to address copyright issues, hassagut gevul (”infringement of boundary”) … the issue discussed was attribution of authorship rather than proprietary rights in the words spoken … The Tosefta (Baba Kamma 7:3), far from condemning use of other’s words without their permission as “theft” regards it as meritorious, so long as credit is given.

I generally leave aside the initial issue which provoked Mariottini’s initial post, of songwriters claiming copyright and royalties on their songs. Are songwriters in the category of ministers who should be worthy of their keep? Or are they in the Didache’s category of prophets asking to be paid for their prophecies? It’s not a straightforward question.

Here I want to note my suspicion of Google’s attitude to copyright. On the one hand it is in the interests of most of us web users to be able to access the vast array of information that is available on the web. Google is for most of us not only the tool of first resort, but the verb we use to describe what we’re doing.

At the same time, Google is, first and foremost, not our tool for accessing information, but a money making machine, for whom our searches are the fundamental building block of the company’s revenue. Today I was told I needed to upgrade my Java runtime environment: I was surprised that this offered me yet another opportunity for me to deselect the option to install Google’s IE toolbar, and select Google’s desktop search. No, I cried, bugger off! You’re not getting access to my desktop, and I’m never ever going to enable page ranking. I may use a lot of Google’s tools, but not this one. I’m very happy to have Google record whether any of my pages are search-worthy. I’m not happy that they should know what I’m searching for: they’ll only use it to sell things to me. I groan every time I go to delete spam from my Gmail account, only to be offered a recipe for Spam fritters.

Interestingly, even fake Steve Jobs takes Microsoft’s side about Google’s demand to have their desktop search included in Windows Vista. According to Google, I can’t have an operating system that allows me to search my own computer for my own files, unless I’m also compelled to be given a choice to use Google’s search to drive their advertising revenue. And Google isn’t entirely neutral: see this piece of research (which may be biased in favour of its funders and promoters) which shows that every search engine on the market is biased.

How much control do I want to give to a search engine that is a tool for selling advertising? How much trust do I want to place in what it gives me? And how much should I accept rabbinic arguments from a Google advocate that tell me it’s biblical to reject copyright legislation in favour of using material providing it’s attributed? Google’s copyright and search policies, as endorsed by God: biblical proof that it’s not evil. Somehow, I’m just not entirely convinced.