FIRST LIGHT

A NEWSLETTER OF FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH
110 SYDENHAM STREET KINGSTON , ON K7L 3H5

(613) 548-7116
fbckgstn@kingston.net
April 2005

A few years ago, William Willimon was acclaimed by Newsweek as one of the ten greatest preachers in the United States . He finished his doctorate at Yale, pastored a few United Methodist churches and has just completed a ministry of about 20 years as Dean of the Chapel at Duke University . He taught there for a number of years as well. He has now become a United Methodist bishop. A prolific writer and scholar, I had the privilege of meeting him and developing a friendship with him back in 1989 when I spent some time at Chautauqua Institute. Later, we met up when he was a Gladstone Festival of Preaching Lecturer in the early 90s. Now I should say that being a friend of William Willimon is like being a friend of former US President, Jimmy Carter. It is not a very exclusive club and probably numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Both are very approachable which, in my mind, speaks well of them. In his Pulpit Resource, Volume 33, Number 2, 2005 edition, Willimon writes:

A Christian is someone who believes that God raised Jesus from the dead.  Never was this belief not in contention.  When the apostle Paul, on Mars Hill, preached Jesus’ resurrection from the dead (Acts 17) he was greeted with hoots of derision.  The pagan world still derides this central Christian belief (page 6).

  Robert W. Funk is not an evangelical by any stretch.  There are perhaps 20% of the members of the Jesus Seminar who are.  But Funk would not consider being or be considered one of them.  However, he was an original member of the Jesus Seminar.  In his book Honest to Jesus, Funk tells about how he once formulated the proposition, “The resurrection was an event in the life of Jesus,” and presented it to members of the Jesus Seminar.  He writes:

My proposition was received with hilarity by several Fellows.  One suggested that it was an oxymoron...Others alleged that the formulation was meaningless, since we all assume, that Jesus’ lifeended with His crucifixion and death.  I was surprised by this response.  I shouldn’t have been.  After all, John Dominic Crossan has confessed, “I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.”  That’s fairly blunt.

 The debate rages on.  Christine Overall’s article in the Kingston Whig-Standard on March 28^th 2005 perhaps reflects the views of some.  She doesn’t believe in miracles including the resurrection.  In fact, she wouldn’t believe in any god whose concept of justice didn’t agree with hers.  When you think of that attitude, it is arrogant.  One can only assume that if she is not deifying herself, she has an extremely high opinion of herself.  Any time, you rule out the possibility of any god because he/she/it doesn’t match up to your expectations, you are really putting yourself on a pedestal.  God speaks through the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 55:8 & 9:

For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, says the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.

Perhaps the problem in our society is that we have too high of an opinion about our opinions and haven’t let God speak to us through His word.  Willimon writes this:

No historian doubts this: without belief in the resurrection there would be no gospels, no Christians...  Here is our Easter faith: we believe, against our natural tendencies to disbelieve in the resurrection of Jesus as a bodily resurrection.  In the Apostle’s Creed we confess that we believe in “the resurrection of the body.”  The ground of this confession is the prior belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (page 6).

Willimon isn’t alone.  St. Augustine in his The Enchiridion of Faith, Hope and Love writes 1600 yearsago in Chapter 84:

Now, as to the resurrection of the body - not a resurrection such as some have had, who came back to life for a time and died again, but a resurrection to eternal life, as the body of Christ Himself rose again - I do not see how I can discuss the matter briefly, and at the same time give a satisfactory answer to all the questions that are ordinarily raised about it.  Yet that the bodies of all humans - both those who have been born and those who shall be born, both those who have died and those who shall die - shall be raised again, no Christian ought to have the shadow of a doubt.

Later in chapter 92, Augustine writes:

But as for those who, out of the mass of perdition caused by the first man’s sin, are not redeemed through the one Mediator between God and humanity, they too shall rise again, each with his own body,but only to be punished with the devil and his angels.  Now, whether they shall arise again with all their diseases and deformities of body, bringing with them the diseased and deformed limbs which they possessed here, it would be labour lost to inquire.  For we need not weary ourselves speculating about their health or their beauty, which are matters uncertain, when their eternal damnation is a matter of certainty.

Gabriel Fackre, long-time Abbott Professor of Theology at Andover Newton Theological School in Boston (Dr. Ron Noble’s alma mater), writes:

In the Christian Story the Good News of salvation from death is bodied forth in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Here is the bold declaration that God has triumphed in him over the power of death!  The Dream did not finally die on Calvary but was reborn in a suffering Love that overcame sin and evil.  Theresurrection of Christ is more than an announcement.  It is an event of triumph itself.  If sin and evil were whipped on Calvary, then the “last enemy, death” met its match on Easter morning.  As death is nothing less than mortality, so the empty tomb declares that finitude is not the last word.  The death of this body, and also of this history and this cosmos, is not the end toward which the world moves.  Our history in time, as self or society or universe, does not conclude as a tale futilely told.  The finish is not the finale.  What shall be given to us in the earnest of the risen Christ.  Here is the Life that overcomes death, the Dawn that defeats the night powers.  About this we have spoken in our christological exploration.  Here we reaffirm Easter as the grounds of liberation from physical death in any form.  (The Christian Story, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1984, pp, 215-216)

When you read the gospel accounts of the resurrection, Matthew 28, Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24, and John 20 and 21 as well as texts such as 1 Corinthians 15, I hope that each of us will know that the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ was not fiction.  It happened as it was declared.   As Bruce Milne wrote:

Three strands of evidence stubbornly refuse to go away, i.e. any skeptical interpretation of them is harder to sustain than the NT explanation that Jesus was raised from death.  These are that the tomb was empty, that Jesus was seen live, and that the disciples were transformed.  It was this third fact (based on the other two) which launched the church upon the world where, for all its weaknesses, it still stands and bears witness to Christ.

Milne, Bruce, Know the Truth: A Handbook of Christian Belief. Revised
Edition.  (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998), p. 170.

FOR THOSE WHO LIKE TO READ

Ronald Sider’s Living Like Jesus: Eleven Essentials for Growing a Genuine Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996) is a wonderful book.  When it was published Christianity Today called it Sider’s ‘mere Christianity.’  Some of you remember when Sider spoke here at First Baptist or at the Charlottetown Canadian Baptist Triennial.  I hope many of you get a chance to read it.

Canada’s marriage laws may change this year if an election doesn’t cause the bill to die.  Daniel Cere and Douglas Farrow have edited a wonderful book on the subject entitled Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers of Canada’s New Social Experiment (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004).  Contributors include Margaret Somerville, Samuel Gale Professor of Law, McGill University.  I highly recommend this title.

You will hear much more about him in the future as he has been booked as our 2^nd George Rawlyk Lecturer scheduled for the weekend of March 5 and 6, 2006.  However, two books by Bruce Milne are very fine and accessible works for the average layperson.  The first is one mentioned above: Know the Truth: A Handbook of Christian Belief.  Revised Edition. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998.  A second is his commentary on John’s gospel: The Message of John.  Leicester, UK: InterVarsity Press, 1993.

BRUCE MILNE

Born & raised in Dundee, Scotland, Bruce was converted in his teens and sensed a call to full-time ministry. He studied at St. Andrews & London universities, then completed his Ph.D. in Edinburgh.

He spent six years as a church planter, then taught on the faculty of Spurgeon’s College, London in the areas of evangelism, pastoral studies and Biblical & Historical Theology. In 1984 he accepted a call as senior pastor to First Baptist Church in Vancouver, a hugely diverse and vibrant congregation.  While the Senior Pastor, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin had their summit in Vancouver.  They worshiped together at First Baptist Church, Vancouver.

Bruce concluded his ministry at the church in 2001 and is currently engaged in writing, an international conference ministry and the encouragement of minister. His best known book, “Know the Truth” (biblical theology) has been translated into fifteen languages. He has written a wonderful work on the Gospel of John entitled: The Message of John.  His newest title, “The Message of Heaven and Hell” was published in 2002 and he is currently working on a new book.

Bruce and his wife, Valerie have two married children and became grandparents in 2003. Bruce is also a Vice-President of the Baptist World Alliance.

We are now in the season known as Eastertide.  May the resurrection continue to impact your life every day.

Blessings,

(Rev.) Kevin Smith

Pastoral Team Leader