“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
—Philippians 2:9–11
Easter in America
Were you to walk the streets of many American cities, you would never know that this Sunday is Resurrection Day, more often called "Easter." The most important event in human history, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, is celebrated with great reverence and fanfare by Christians around the world, but on American streets that reality is hard to find. A couple of years ago, Jesse Waters did a "man on the street" Easter quiz in NYC. Some did not even know there was such an event as the resurrection of Christ, let alone a holiday to commemorate it. One woman said Jesus was probably Muslim but that she wasn't sure because she "didn't know him." Another said that Easter Sunday celebrates Jesus' second resurrection. Still a third, when asked what Good Friday means to her said, "Nothing. I don't shop."
Secular America is Resurrection ignorant because all vestiges of the founding principles and the Judeo-Christian ethic have been removed from schools and from the culture. Entire generations only know the name “Jesus Christ” to use it to swear. Secularists are loathe to recognize Christianity and Judaism as legitimate religions and more likely to recognize holidays such as Ramadan and Kwanzaa. This attitude is promoted country-wide by secularists and people of other faiths.
Mainline churches in America are closing or fragmenting. People who identify as having no religion at all (“nones”) are on the increase, which is why American streets are filled with Resurrection ignorance. But there is good news for Christians: Non-denominational churches are on the upswing. Churches in Africa, China and elsewhere are thriving and growing. It seems many Christians are hungry for a more biblical, less woke Christianity. This is a good sign. It reveals a hunger for guard rails, for rules, for some structure in life, for hope, for a place to put their sins. Perhaps people are getting tired of getting their way and doing as they please. Perhaps they want something to worship other than themselves.
The bodily resurrection of Christ is at the core of Christianity. Without it, Christianity is dead. St. Paul told Christians that if Jesus did not rise bodily, "….your faith is in vain." With that in mind, it is interesting to note that atheists are still doing their best to attack the Resurrection. They believe that if they can only find Jesus’ nail-scarred skeleton, they may rid the world of this pesky religion for good. They are whistling in the wind.
People have been trying to kill Jesus and His followers for millennia, but the drop in church attendance is not the death knell atheists hope it is. It was foretold in the Bible in the Gospel of Matthew: "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is narrow and the way is constricted that leads to life, and there are few who find it."
The cultural gate through which the "nones" are flowing is very wide. Millions are rushing through it. The gate through which Christians are going is very narrow. Few will enter. The biblical narrowing of the gate is aligned perfectly with what is supposed to happen -- the reduced presence of the Christian church. When it is all over, the number of wide-gate people will be staggering, the number of narrow gate people will be small. Resurrection is for the few, not the many. Atheists should take no comfort in the decline of the church in America. The reverse should be the case; they should be nervous.
This Resurrection Day, Easter Sunday, is a day of choices for Americans. In America, wide-gate secularism seems to reign supreme right now but that is an illusion. Christians here in America celebrate Resurrection Day with assurance of what is to come. Americans have a choice and our prayers are that they will choose the narrow gate.
Image: PxHere
Liberalism Can Never Accept the Real Christ
The central truth of Christianity is that Christ is not only the Son of God but that he came to suffer and redeem us by his sacrificial atonement. In this world of suffering, the suffering of Christ alleviates ours and heals us of our brokenness. Liberals, however, cannot abide by this Christ because they see the state, not Christ, as the path to redemption.
Christianity asserts that the world is broken, as such the world needed to be healed by a Love that took on this brokenness and wounds of the world. Another central claim of Christianity, one that is now often distorted and twisted for the service of liberal humanitarianism, is that God is love. These two claims intersect with Christ on the Cross. On the cross the incarnate God of love came into the world and offered healing and reconciliation through his sacrificial death, bearing the suffering of the world to himself.
A world that acknowledges reality of suffering and our inability to resolve it ourselves is a world that needs Christ. A world that is blind to suffering and substitutes the reality of the suffering and wounded world for a world of coercive submission, domineering triumph, or the eradication of suffering through the hand of the state, is a world that does not need Christ. That is the impetus of liberalism and why it can never accept the real Christ.
The liberal world, in its dream of eradicating suffering by the works of human hands, is a world that increasingly shuns Christ and pettily transform him into a human image of their own wanton dreams: The Christ who is open and does not rebuke or require any suffering; the Christ who accepts without repentance (because repentance requires some degree of suffering); the Christ who is a humanistic ethics sage preaching a vague and abstract gospel of “love” without any concrete sacrifices to express love. And the dream of creating a world free of harm is the essence of liberalism as anyone who studies liberal political theory knows.
Liberalism accepts certain Christian truths before corrupting and distorting them -- which is the way of Satan. Liberalism accepts that the world is broken and suffering. Liberalism accepts that there is a certain lust for domination that permeates the world. Liberalism accepts that the salvation of man involves overcoming the brokenness and suffering of the world. But that is where the similarities end and the great divergence commences.
Liberalism’s redeemer is the state, rather than Christ, which brings about the harmless utopia that, according to Hobbes, Locke, and Rawls, all men seek. Its saints are militant socialists moved not by a love of other but a self-adulating love of self mixed with self-righteousness and hatred of the wealthy and middle-classes whom they wish to overthrow. Liberalism is hatred disguised as compassion. It is the lust to dominate disguised with the language of love to give it moral and sentimental potency over its rivals who are labelled as cruel, unjust, and not compassionate.
It is the liberal dream of eliminating suffering that causes the Christ of liberal cultures to be transformed from the Suffering Redeemer to something more palatable to the present zeitgeist. Look at the liberal theologies today, widespread in all denominations as they are, where the Christ emphasized by liberal Christianity matches the prevailing liberalism of the times.
Here, Christ is transformed into an open borders prophet who crossed boundaries and turned away no one. Christ is transformed into the “open and affirming” lover who accepts one as they are without the mission to do away with sin. Christ is transformed into the anti-poverty crusader calling to life all up into health and wealth. Christ is even proclaimed as a “socialist.”
The liberal Christ is anything but the Suffering Servant who redeemed the world through his suffering which was the highest expression of love possible and who, in His suffering, fulfilled the promises to the patriarchs and prophets. As stated, the liberal’s Christ -- if they even keep Christ -- is just a figurehead for politics and to advance certain state-sponsored policies. Liberals take an element of Christ’s character and make that the entire essence of who he is.
Liberalism is incompatible with Christianity at every level. But most pernicious is how liberalism infiltrates Christianity and corrupts it from the inside -- transforming the Christian tradition into a new, progressive, and modern puppet for the secular establishment and the dreams of godless liberal philosophers who hated Christianity. When the liberal establishment is threatened it turns to Christianity to hold it up by distorting the gospel and the message of love and service to others; when the liberal establishment is ascendant it seeks to curb and eliminate Christianity from its last vestiges of public life. Christians should be aware of this double-game played by the establishment.
The contemporary world wishes to rid the world of suffering. It seeks to create a harmless world where no sacrifice is necessary because sacrifice would be harmful; sacrifice means one needs to give up something dear to them -- to deny thyself and follow Christ is antithetic to the modern spirit. Because of this, the modern world does not need the real Christ. Insofar that Christ persists in the modern world it is a Christ who is a shallow parody of his true self and the self-created delusion of anti-Christian dreams which is, and must be, an unreality for the Christian.
Christ was the Suffering Servant prophesied by Isaiah and the Psalmists. Christ was the seed that would crush the Serpent and free humanity from the chains of disordered love. Christ was, and is, the Bride of Israel. Christ was he who took away the sins of the world and calls us to follow him. “Pick up your cross and follow me.”
The Christ of Easter is the Christ that so many flee from but is the Christ who calls us to love because love entails suffering -- thus, Christ tells us to pick up our cross and follow him. This Easter, as with every Easter, we must always keep sight of the True Christ, the Christ who hung on the Cross and brought salvation through his sacrificial love. As St. Paul says, “For I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
In this Easter beset by suffering, we are reminded that God came to suffer with us. Christ, not the state, heals us. Christ, not the state, brings our redemption. Insofar that liberalism sees the state as the vehicle of redemption it can never accept the real Christ.
Paul Krause is the editor of VoegelinView. He is the author of The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books, The Politics of Plato, and contributed to The College Lecture Today and the forthcoming book Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters.
Christians Celebrate Easter 2022 – ‘If Christ Has Not Been Raised, Your Faith Is Futile’
“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
—Philippians 2:9–11
Christians celebrate Easter this Sunday, proclaiming the cornerstone of their faith, that Jesus Christ rose from the grave in a bodily resurrection. Alone among the world’s religions, Christians believe that on the third day after his public execution on Good Friday, the founder and focus of their faith rose from the dead.
The Bible contains four Gospels containing this historical narrative outside Jerusalem, Israel, in A.D. 30, but the New Testament is full of additional chapters and passages on the topic of the resurrection.
One chapter is found in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The Apostle Paul – who early in his career went by the name Saul – had been a zealous persecutor of the new church, hunting down Christians. But on the road to Damascus – traveling there in the next stage of his crusade against the early church – Paul experienced a radical conversion to Christianity, claiming that the risen Christ appeared to him and spoke with him, and that Jesus had appeared to five hundred people at once, inviting his readers to go talk to them if those readers doubted his story.
Paul’s message in this chapter is that Christianity is not about becoming a better person. He says that Jesus of Nazareth was not a wise philosopher, great moral example, or inspirational leader. Instead Paul claims that Jesus is divine, that after his crucifixion and burial his body came back to life days later, and that hundreds saw him afterward. Then – in a statement that would shock many today – Paul says that if Jesus did not physically rise from the dead, then Christianity is worthless, and Christians should be pitied because they waste their lives on a lie.
Paul lost his comfortable life in Judaism when he became a Christian, but then became the most prolific of all the New Testament writers, and years later was martyred for his faith – which he said he welcomed, because Jesus’ resurrection meant that one day Paul would be resurrected as well.
From the first epistle of Paul to the church at Corinth:
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the world I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain….
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death… When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.
—1 Corinthians 15:1–28 (ESV).
“Come behold the wondrous mystery, slain by death the God of life;
But no grave could e’er restrain him, praise the Lord, he is alive!
What a foretaste of deliverance, how unwavering our hope;
Christ in power resurrected, as we will be, when he comes!”
—Matt Boswell, Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery (2013)
Ken Klukowski is a Breitbart News contributor.
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