In thinking about the issues of history and faith, I’ve come to the conclusion that a key challenge facing Christianity in our time can be outlined as follows:
- First, Christianity as historically understood has a close connection with historical events.
- Second, historical study provides the only tools available by which to answer questions such as “Is this text from ancient Israel a folktale, a parable, a work of historical fiction, or a well-documented historical account of actual events?”
- Third, historical study deals in probabilities. The best it could ever say about Jesus’ resurrection, for instance, assuming it can deal with such an occurrence at all, is that “Jesus probably rose from the dead. That is the most likely of several possible explanations for the rise of this early Christian belief.” [I’m not saying this is the actual state of the historical evidence, just offering a “best-case scenario”].
- Fourth, it seems like an inadequate form of the Gospel to go around proclaiming “It is probable that Jesus rose from the dead.”
This is the conundrum Christians face. Even if we want to take historical study seriously, it can’t provide what most religious believers want: certainty. So even if the likelihood of Biblical accounts could be established (and in many instances this is clearly not the case), what is Christianity’s message?
Is Christianity faced with the choice of proclaiming a Gospel about what is probable, or of focusing on those things we can experience for ourselves in the present? Is there a third option?
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