Saunders - It's about Events, Facts

William Saunders expounds on the "positivity" of our Christian faith.

During Lent and Easter we remember the humanity of Christ. A man among men, he walked in the dust of Palestine, and was crucified on a wooden cross, outside Jerusalem’s walls.

In many ways, the essence of Christianity is these “intransigent historical claims,” as Evelyn Waugh put it in Brideshead Revisited. Christianity insists it is not only about fine ideas or soaring sentiments, but that it is also about brute facts. Again Waugh, in the introduction to his novel Helena, put it best: “Everything about the new religion was capable of interpretation, could be refined and diminished; everything except the unreasonable assertion that God became man and died on a cross; not a myth or an allegory; true God, truly man, tortured to death at a particular moment in time, at a particular geographical place, as a matter of plain historical fact.”

Without these plain historical facts, Christianity might be just another mystery religion. So we insist, we know, that Christ walked in the dust of Palestine. And we know He did not walk alone. Rather, as we have been hearing in Lenten and Easter readings, there were witnesses, and these witnesses recorded what they saw and heard and touched.

After His resurrection, Christ appeared to them, in the flesh but capable of passing through walls. Thomas, who had been absent, did not believe it. And so the Lord, infinitely merciful, appeared to Thomas so that Thomas could see and hear and touch for himself. Thomas then made the first proclamation that Jesus was “God,” and Jesus told him, and the others, to go make disciples of all men.

Keep reading Saunders' Intransigent Historical Claims.