It’s not that hard (for some) to see Jesus’s walking on water as an allegory, richly conveying the sense of peace that Jesus brings to his follows (both then and now) in their times of deep trouble and worry. But most modern scholars I read (and I’m untrained in this area, BTW) seem to avoid an allegorical explanation, or any other non-physicalist explanation, when it comes to the resurrection appearances of Jesus. It seems that Christians, from the most conservative to the most “modern” [sic], require a bodily resurrection of Jesus in order to maintain their faith or else they just simply refuse to face and state clearly what their thoughts are about it. Where does Pete stand or fall on this? In a response to an Al Mohler NPR interview, Pete has said that the one-off nature of miracles, which leave no scientifically verifiable evidence behind, are outside of the scope of science and can (did he mean should?) only be accepted by faith, and he then specifically refers to the resurrection as an example. Yet, the laws of science are considered invariant in space and time (and a huge amount of science is successfully performed with this assumption), and so science may (will, in this case) have a lot to say about the possibility/probability of a particular description some past event. Wouldn’t recognizing the first century accounts of the resurrection as more of a non-physical, inner-mystical, experience on the part of Jesus’s followers (kind of like with Paul but expressed allegorically and in story form by other NT authors) free us up from having to discard science in order to be faithful Christians and, thus, guide us toward a more mind-centered approach in how to understand and live into the deep meaning of resurrection? (And perhaps I should have worded the original question this way in the first place.)
In moving from Evangelical formulaic thinking into B4NP-friendly questioning, are we committing the sin of certainty in favor of science if we’re moved very quickly to give up believing that Bible’s miracles are factual descriptions of past events?
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