What Does Belief in the Resurrection Look Like?
I believe all kinds of things: I believe E = mc2 (though I do not understand it); I believe warm weather will finally come to South Bend (eventually); I believed my GPS yesterday as it brought me to this doorstep; and so forth. But surely different kinds of truths call for different kinds of belief. The object requires something of the subject. Something different is required of me to believe the weatherman when he tells me tomorrow it will be sunny, than is required of me when I believe my wife when she tells me that she loves me. Different degrees of commitment by the believing subject are required, and the difference is created by the object of knowledge. This is what I have in mind when I ask: what would it mean to believe in the resurrection?
My teacher, Paul Holmer, investigated the subjective quality of knowing, which is not the same as subjectivism. As a philosopher, he considered the cost of knowing some things. He wanted to ask how we are capacitated to know truth, and I share two of his summary remarks with you. First, “You cannot peddle truth or happiness: what a thought cost in the first instance, it will cost in the second.” In other words, what it cost Augustine to understand grace, it will cost you to understand grace. He can point the way, but he cannot travel the road for you. In one kind of knowledge, scientists stand on the shoulders of previous scientists as they pile up knowledge, but there is another kind of knowledge (wisdom, I would say) which cannot just be piled up. Each person must take it and apply it to herself individually. The second remark by Holmer was “What we know depends upon the kind of person we have made ourselves to be.” There are things a coarse and egocentric person cannot know; there are things a gluttonous and avaricious person cannot know.
Now, what kind of person must we be in order to believe in the resurrection? I would like to suggest three names for the subjective condition for believing in this objective truth. I am describing one state, but naming it works better using three names instead of one.
First, the subjective state required to believe in the resurrection may be called faith. I am thinking both of the beginning touch of faith, and its greater extension in our lives. I mean it in the sense of metanoia—conversion, repentance. We take on a “new mind” (a meta nous). There are some things for which, to see them, a new mind is required, which capacitates us for this belief. A profound modification of the human being is needed. We do receive new minds from time to time, and with a little effort you can think of examples. That philosopher who opened up for you a whole new way of seeing things, or that theologian who made the penny drop. A man might boringly till a field to plant the most boring crop of turnips ever put in the ground, but one day he falls in love, marries, has children, and begins planting his garden to feed his family, and the old action becomes different. Teleology is connected with meaning.
