The Son Rises: Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus

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Death and Resurrection

THE MODERN PREDICAMENT

Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan.1 He is the only creature in the universe who asks, Why? Other animals are guided by instincts, but man has learned to ask questions. That is why he is an orphan.

For many centuries man believed that the universe was created by God and that He had placed man on the Earth. But this world view broke apart like an ill-nailed raft caught in a torrent. Space, which had been thought to be a small and homey place for man, suddenly widened into infinity. The earth was seen to be a mere speck drifting in the wake of a minor star, itself rotating around an immense galaxy composed of innumerable suns. Beyond and beyond, billions of light years away, other galaxies vast and innumerable glowed through clouds of wandering gas and interstellar dust. Man finally knew that he was alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe.

“Who am I?” the Orphan cried. And science answered back,

You are a changeling. You are linked by a genetic chain to all the vertebrates. The thing that is you bears the still aching wounds of evolution in body and in brain. Your hands are made-over fins, your lungs come from a creature gasping in a swamp, your femur has been twisted upright. Your foot is a reworked climbing pad. You are a rag doll resewn from the skins of extinct animals. Long ago, 2,000,000 years perhaps, you were smaller, your brain was not so large. We are not confident that you could speak. Seventy million years before that you were an even smaller climbing creature known as a tupaiid. You were the size of a rat. You ate insects. Now you fly to the Moon.2

As the Cosmic Orphan looked to his past he saw only the purposeless, blind processes of mutation and natural selection. Now as he looks to his future, he sees—death. Eiseley relates how this reality was brought home to him as a youth:

When I was a young lad of that indefinite but important age when one begins to ask, Who am I? Why am I here? What is the nature of my kind? What is growing up? What is the world? How long shall I live in it? Where shall I go? I found myself walking with a small companion over a high railroad trestle that spanned a stream, a country bridge, and a road. One could look fearfully down, between the ties, at the shallows and ripples in the shining water some 50 feet below. One was also doing a forbidden thing, against which our parents constantly warned. One must not be caught on the black bridge by a train. Something terrible might happen, a thing called death.

From the abutment of the bridge we gazed down upon the water and saw among the pebbles the shape of an animal we knew only from picture books—a turtle, a very large, dark mahogany-coloured turtle. We scrambled down the embankment to observe him more closely. From the little bridge a few feet above the stream, I saw that the turtle, whose beautiful markings shone in the afternoon sun, was not alive and that his flippers waved aimlessly in the rushing water. The reason for his death was plain. Not too long before we had come upon the trestle, someone engaged in idle practice with a repeating rifle had stitched a row of bullet holes across the turtle’s carapace and sauntered on.

My father had once explained to me that it took a long time to make a big turtle, years really, in the sunlight and the water and the mud. I turned the ancient creature over and fingered the etched shell with its forlorn flippers flopping grotesquely. The question rose up unbidden. Why did the man have to kill something living that could never be replaced? I laid the turtle down in the water and gave it a little shove. It entered the current and began to drift away. ‘Let’s go home,’ I said to my companion. From that moment I think I began to grow up.3

Eiseley’s beautiful and melancholy prose describes poignantly the predicament of modern man. Lost in a universe without God, he is truly the Cosmic Orphan. He was thrown into life as an accidental product of nature, and he faces inevitable extinction in death. His lot is only made more bitter and more tragic by the fact that he of all creatures is aware of it.

But the reason modern man is an orphan is not simply, as Eiseley intimates, because man is a product of evolution or because he asks, Why? It is not even because he is doomed to die. Modern man is an orphan because he has lost God. An orphan is a child without parents. If God existed, then even if He created man by means of evolution, man would still be His child. If His child asked, “Why?” there would be an answer in God. Even if man’s life ended at the grave, God would still be man’s parent.

Modern man is the Cosmic Orphan because he has killed God. And, by doing so, he has reduced himself to an accident of nature. When he asks, Why? his cry is lost in the silence of the recesses of space. When he dies, he dies without hope. Thus, in killing God, modern man has killed himself as well.

It is the absence of God that ultimately makes man the Cosmic Orphan. It is the grim finality of death that makes his life a tragedy. Even if God did exist and had created man, it would still be a tragedy if a personal being like man should have no better fate than to be forever extinguished in death. Death is certainly man’s greatest enemy. In losing God, modern man has lost immortality as well. Death means eternal annihilation. This prospect robs life of its meaning and fullness. It makes the life of man no better than the life of a cow or horse, only more tragic. In light of death, the activities that cram our life seem so pointless. Thus Archibald MacLeish described the life of man as an idiotic circus—until one day the show is all over:

Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot

The armless ambidextrian was lighting

A match between his great and second toe

And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting

The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum

Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough

In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb—

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over

Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,

There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,

There with vast wings across the canceled skies,

There in the sudden blackness the black pall

Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

“The End of the World”

Herein lies the horror of modern man: because he ultimately ends in nothing, he is nothing. The playwright Samuel Beckett also understands this. In his play Waiting for Godot, two men carry on trivial conversation for the entire duration of the play while waiting for a third man to arrive. But he never comes. Our lives are like that, Beckett is saying. We just kill time, waiting—for nothing. In another tragic portrayal of the life of man, Beckett opens the curtain to reveal a stage littered with junk. For several long seconds, the audience stares in silence at that junk. Then the curtain closes. That is all.

If there is no immortality, then the life that man does have becomes absurd. To make the situation worse, life is itself only a mixed blessing, for at least four reasons.

First, there is the evil in the heart of man, which expresses itself in man’s terrible inhumanity to man. Many people wonder how God could create a world with so much evil in it. But they seem to overlook the fact that most of that evil is the result of man’s free choices. War, torture, theft, rape, jealousy, and a thousand other sins are man’s own actions. Prior to the twentieth century, people tended to be optimistic about man. The popular slogan was “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” Around the turn of the century a liberal theological magazine called The Christian Century was founded. That is what they thought the twentieth century would be. Then came World War I—and then World War II. No longer could man portray himself as an innocent child. Something was radically wrong with him. This conviction is powerfully displayed in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness. The title of the novel refers, not to the heart of deepest Africa, where the story takes place, but to the heart of man himself. As the dying man in the story looks into his own heart, his last words are, “The horror! The horror!”

The title of William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies also contains a deep truth about man’s nature. For “lord of the flies” is the translation of the ancient word Baal-zebub, one of the names of Satan in the New Testament. In Golding’s gripping tale, a planeload of English schoolboys marooned on an island degenerates into murderous savages. Golding shows that the evils of society at large stem from the heart of man himself, which is under the domination of the lord of the flies. Perhaps the predicament of modern man was best summarized by G. K. Chesterton in a letter to the London Times, which had invited people to write on the subject “What’s wrong with the world?” Chesterton answered, “Dear Sirs, I am. Yours truly, G. K. Chesterton.” The evil is in man himself. Man’s only answer to this problem is to try to program evil out of man by behavioral conditioning. But he thereby reduces man to the level of a laboratory rat, coaxed into the programmer’s behavior pattern by rewards and punishments.

Second, there is the problem of disease. Modern man lives in constant fear of killers like cancer, heart disease, and leukemia. You probably have loved ones or friends who have been taken or incapacitated by such diseases, for which no sure cure has been discovered. And what of those born physically deformed or mentally retarded? Is there no release for them? With no hope of immortality, life is often painful and ugly because of such scourges.

Third, all of us confront the specter of aging. Old age is inevitable—unless we die young. It often brings feebleness of body and mind. A visit to a geriatric home where so many elderly are cast away and forgotten can be very depressing. I am saddened by films that depict the life story of a hero from his youth to his old age or death. By condensing the hero’s life into the space of a couple of hours, the film brings home to us the fleeting nature of life. The contrast between the vigor of youth and the feebleness of old age is often shattering. If man is not immortal, that is all he can look forward to. Is it no wonder that the elderly are often brushed aside, since they remind us so powerfully of our future and of the transitoriness of life?

Fourth, there is death itself, the great and cruel Joker who cuts down all men, often unexpectedly in the prime of life. Bertrand Russell once remarked that no one can sit by the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God. But when I was in Paris, I met a young American minister who had been trained in seminary and worked in counseling dying children. What would Bertrand Russell have said to those children? I wondered. What could he say? Too bad? The cruelty would be unimaginable. If there is no immortality, then the capriciousness of death is a tyranny of the bitterest sort.

Confined to this life alone, modern man is set upon by the pressures of life and plagued by his own evil, disease, old age, and ultimately death itself. Historian Stewart C. Easton concludes,

Thus man is penned within his earthly world; his life began with a birth before which there was nothing and will end with a death after which there is nothing. . . .

Death marks the end of all the life he will ever know; and though there may not be much left to enjoy on earth, it is better than nothing. . . .

Thus modern man is hag-ridden by fear and worry, in spite of all the pleasures that his society through its ingenuity and industry provide him.4

Thus, truly, modern man in killing God has unwittingly killed himself as well.

Eiseley does not seem to realize the depth of this tragedy. He seems to regard man’s quest for scientific knowledge as somehow providing significance and value to man’s life. When the Orphan cries, “Why?” it is science who answers back. Science has itself become a sort of religion. Its high priests are the scientists, who speak with the authoritative word to man’s questions. But this will never do. Without God, science itself becomes meaningless. Man’s search to understand himself and the universe is ultimately without significance. Nor can scientific knowledge provide man with moral values. Eiseley is shocked at the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau. But if there is no God, then no moral standard exists to condemn such acts. Nor can science overcome the absurdity of life caused by death. Science cannot prolong life forever. It is noteworthy that Eiseley never returns to the question of death, which was awakened in him as a child, to show how science answers this problem. For it cannot. The religion of science has no answer to man’s deepest questions.

The point is that man’s being the Cosmic Orphan is not an exhilarating adventure. It is the final tragedy. It means that man is the purposeless outcome of matter, time, and chance. He is no more significant than any other animal, and is destined only to die. Therefore we weep for him.

What makes his predicament doubly tragic is that man is in a certain sense naturally oriented toward God and immortality.5 For man alone possesses what anthropologists call “openness to the world.” This means that man is not totally determined by his environment; rather he is free and can create new possibilities that are not immediately at hand in nature. Animals do not have this openness to the world. They do not perceive their environment as fully as man does, but fix their attention on their immediate surroundings. They are also bound to the world by their innate instincts, or drives, which determine how they will perceive the world and how they will act. But in man innate instincts are not so specialized or strong. He can think about the options confronting him and create new alternatives. He considers the whole world, which for him is not just an environment. In fact, man is open beyond the world. Every level he reaches, he surpasses. He strives beyond every finite level towards an unknown goal. Man is oriented toward the infinite, for any lesser goal would not satisfy his endless striving. In this sense, man is oriented toward God. Only in the infinite being of God can man’s fundamental striving be fulfilled. I am reminded of Augustine’s words, “You have made us for Yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in You.”

But not only is man oriented toward God—he is also oriented toward immortality. Only man considers and anticipates the future. Animals live only in the present, but man in his expectations, his fantasies, his dreams looks to the future. He hopes that even if he is not happy now—well, tomorrow may bring better things. But this consciousness of the future brings with it a terrible drawback. He alone, among all living creatures, anticipates his death. This results in an odd paradox: man hopes for the future, yet at the same time he knows that the future brings death one step closer. This paradox suggests that just as it belongs to man’s nature to know of his own coming death, so it belongs to his nature to hope for life beyond death. The hope for immortality thus seems to be as peculiarly characteristic of man as his orientation toward God.

But if there is no God or immortality, then not only is man a Cosmic Orphan, thrown into existence without purpose; he is also the victim of a colossal and cruel joke. His thirst for those realities that he so desperately needs to give significance and value to his life, but which he tragically lacks, is built into his very nature as man. God and immortality—the very realities toward which man is oriented—are precisely the realities that do not exist. The predicament of modern man is not simply that he is an orphan, but that he is an orphan oriented by nature toward the very things he needs but cannot have.