Remember that speech of the Rev. Katharine Ragsdale’s that I linked to earlier this week? The one where she proclaimed abortion a blessing? Well, it’s gone down the memory hole. Alerted by Stand Firm, I checked her site this morning and, poof! It had magically disappeared. It is now an un-speech–except on the who-knows-how-many sites that have saved it for anyone to see.
While I was there, I found myself looking at some of the sermons she’s preached, and discovered that she’s actually perfect for the position she’s been called to as president of an Episcopal seminary. Seems that to her, it doesn’t matter whether the resurrection of Christ actually took place or not:
So, off they went to the tomb – and they found it empty. They must have been outraged as well as grief-stricken. The authorities had removed the body to keep it from becoming a rallying point. Without a by-your-leave or even a by-the-way to the family, they had taken even his corpse. All things, even common decency, had been made subservient to the needs, or fantasies, of the Empire.
Except they hadn’t.
He hadn’t been removed; he’d been resurrected. He had Risen.
Now, this is the point where I always expect to lose some of you. I’m sure there are at least a few folks in the room who are saying to yourselves right now, “Well, that’s a lovely story. Very sweet. But surely I’m not expected to actually believe in the Resurrection – that someone rose from the dead. It’s all a misunderstanding or a manipulative fiction.” So, should you be one of those people, let me say to you that you’re in excellent company. There are many people, respected scholars, faithful church-goers – bright people of strong faith and good conscience who don’t believe in a literal Resurrection – as there are bright, faithful people who do believe in it. Good, bright, faithful people who disagree. So, either way you go, you’re in good company.
And thinking about whether the Resurrection literally happened or not can make for an engaging academic exercise – but it’s not the point. There’s a danger of becoming so obsessed with the facts that we lose sight of the truth.
Here’s what’s true:
Out of dust and ashes – utter defeat – God created something new and beyond our imaging. And 2000 years later it still shapes our world. Those fear-filled men came out of hiding to proclaim what they had come to know – the power of Resurrection. And, as they had feared, some of them were killed for it. Some of them were killed horribly. And they did it anyway. Because the power of the Resurrection was too intense to be ignored.
Resurrection – those amazing times when things work out, not in spite of all that has gone wrong but somehow through, even because of, the very wrongness.
Now, I’m not suggesting that Ragsdale doesn’t believe in the resurrection–it sounds from this sermon like she does. But what she told her congregation on Easter Sunday morning in 2005 is that it doesn’t matter whether they believe it or not. The important thing isn’t that they believe in the resurrection, but resurrection as an idea that simply means that “things work out.” To my mind, that’s homiletical and theological, not to mention pastoral, malpractice that puts Ragsdale in direct contradiction to what St. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:14–”if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”
But then, that simply puts her in the long line of liberal preachers who thought they knew what Christian faith was about better than the Apostle Paul. She should fit in perfectly at the Episcopal Divinity School.
April 3, 2009 at 11:23 am
One, thing that I ask of this clergyperson, is to please do not sit on a jury that the evidence is documentry. To her words mean what she wants them to mean.
The trial, execution, and the resurrection, are the best document event in antiquity.
April 3, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Surprise of surprises, she was rejected for ordination by a number of bishops (based on her heterodoxy or her homosexuality) until she met John Shelby Spong.
April 3, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I certainly hope that Ragsdale does believe in the resurrection of our Lord. But it’s really not clear to me from this excerpt whether she really does or not. To basically say that whether or not anybody else believes in it (after all, she notes, plenty of intelligent, decent people do not) is a matter of indifference is bad enough. But to then equate the resurrection with some vague “power” for “those amazing times when things work out” is frankly ridiculous. Are we seriously expected to believe that this the reason why so many of the early Christians were willing to die – some of them horribly (as she notes)? Because they believed that sometimes things work out?!!
A healthy dose of N. T. Wright’s book The Resurrection of the Son of God is definitely in order here!
April 3, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Bryan: Consider me giving her the benefit of the doubt with regard to her personal faith. That mitigates nothing with regard to this performance.
April 3, 2009 at 6:20 pm
What exactly is “the power of the resurrection” if Jesus didn’t actually rise from the dead?
April 4, 2009 at 10:38 am
By “the power of the resurrection” liberals seem to mean some vague sense that “there is always hope.” It gets expressed by such statements as, “spring always comes after winter,” or “if we remember them in our hearts they never really die.”
Exactly why we should hope is a bit fuzzier. Their optimism seems groundless.
I agree with one of the above posters who said that Wright’s book “The Resurrection of the Son of God” might be helpful. He shows that there is no historical or exegetical validity for the kind of “spiritual resurrection” liberals want to cling to. In fact a “spiritual resurrection” is an oxymoron. Resurrections were, by definition, physical.
I suspect the liberal distaste for belief in the resurrection has more to do with Western culture’s Platonic Greek distaste for the body and a risidual Descartian mind/body dualism than even their lack of trust in the Scriptures. I’ve read other liberal bloggers (John Shuck for one)who refer to resurrection stories as “zombie” stories.
In their dismissal of the resurrection as physical, they don’t seem to get that the whole point of redemption in the New Testament isn’t that your soul will be in heaven. It’s the renewal of all of Creation and our participation in it. And that is quite physical. Or, rather, it involves the whole person. It’s all in Romans 8.
April 4, 2009 at 11:36 am
Well put, Elliott. Thanks.
April 4, 2009 at 12:54 pm
We have established that she does not believe that whether the Resurrection of Christ happened or not, matters.
Therefore we already know what she believes about the Resurrection of Christ as the apostles taught it – plain and simple, she does not believe it.
For if Christ is not raised from the dead, you are still in your sins (1 Cor 15:17 – this is exactly what a preacher like Ragsdale will not say to doubters, instead she flatters them that they can still be Christians regardless). And thus that Christ arose from the dead is part of the irreducible biblical minimum of the gospel. (1 Cor 15:1-4 – note that Christ was raised according to the Scriptures, not in some fictitious sense invented centuries later by cultured nominal unbelievers.)
As a further exegetical point – note that the Scriptural confession of the resurrection of Christ locates it on that specific day, “the third day”. Now if the essential point of belief in resurrection is regaining hope, it is impossible to limit it to that day. On this view for Peter and John Christ was raised the third day, for Thomas on a later day, for others hope is regained at some different day. But by locating it on the third day, it is obvious that the Scriptural confession makes it irreducibly objective, not a subjective regaining of hope.
Thus, Ragsdale’s appointment does not appear to be a “hopeful” sign.