The New Testament barely ever talks about “going to heaven when we die,” but it talks a lot about the hope for bodily resurrection to everlasting life in a renewed and glorified creation. Yet the popular understanding today is that “going to heaven” is the central promise of the Christian Gospel. How did this happen? Well, it was a long and involved process of historical development, but here is a simplified summary: As Christianity spread beyond the Mediterranean to the Franks, Goths, Celts, etc., of Europe, theological attention to the resurrection hope faded in favour of hope for a heavenly afterlife. Unlike the Greeks, Jews, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, etc., who believed that all the dead descended to an underworld of some sort, these peoples tended to believe that at least some people (e.g. brave warriors) would be taken to the heavenly dwellings of the gods. Whether by intentional evangelistic strategy or by steady cultural osmosis, the focus of both theology and popular piety shifted from resurrection by the grace of God in Christ to going to heaven through the grace of God in Christ. This became entrenched in the Middle Ages as the veneration the saints became established and spread, since such veneration and the associated practices only made sense if the saints were both enjoying the full blessedness of heaven and fully aware of events transpiring on earth. After one medieval Pope tried to correct the distortion and earned for himself a whole bunch of infuriated pushback, the next Pope issued an edict that rejected what the previous Pope had taught and instead made it official church teaching that each person after death faces “particular judgement” to determine their fate, upon which they are sent either to hell, purgatory, or (if one was already holy enough) straight to heaven. The Protestant reformers rejected the purgatory element that official Catholic doctrine taught, but most kept the rest of the rest of the framework. (Luther notably rejected the whole thing and instead taught that the dead essentially sleep until the resurrection. However, he was not followed in this by later Lutherans.) Throughout all of this no theologians who were even remotely orthodox ever rejected the hope for resurrection and cosmic transformation when Jesus returns. The problem was rather that the final hope was relegated to the status of a nearly forgotten appendix. As more and more of the theological work that rightly belongs to the resurrection hope was transferred to a hope for a blessed disembodied existence in heaven, preachers and teachers found less and less reason to talk about the resurrection, and so the public came to believe that going to heaven when they died was the entire hope.

On Feb 3, 2017, Jonathan Merritt published “Is AI a Threat to Christianity?” in The Atlantic. Merritt suggests that “AI may be the greatest threat to Christian theology since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.” Merritt’s argument is built on several, not entirely consistent presuppositions, and it is only their confluence that makes AI an alleged potential problem. These presuppositions are: The idea that a soul is a “component” of a human being. The idea that the defining trait of human beings is our intelligence. The idea that a collection of algorithms could become the same sort of being that humans are if we just make the algorithms sophisticated enough. The idea that “salvation” means the preservation of the human soul beyond death. Presuppostion (1) is one possible interpretation of what a soul is in Christian theology, and even the dominant one during the medieval and early modern periods, but hardly the only one. In today’s theology (and more importantly, since we are thinking in terms of futurology here, tomorrow’s theology) that interpretation is considered dubious at best. Presupposition (2) isn’t a Christian notion to begin with. It’s a modern Western notion, born out of and feeding back into our technologically driven cultural narrative. Presupposition (3) presupposes (2) and adds the belief that the human mind is at its root a complex math equation calculating itself. Leaving aside the question of whether there’s any good reason to think that it is true (I don’t think there is), this idea not only makes intellect the defining human trait, but reduces the human being to the human mind. Finally, presupposition (4) is rejected by many Christian theologians, as Merritt himself acknowledges. And as Merritt appears to recognize, if one understands salvation in terms of the redemptive, eschatological transformation of creation as a whole, AI does not pose a grave theological problem. If a self-aware AI ever became a reality, it would simply be another participating component in God’s overall creation that is to be redeemed. It is worth noting that (1) and (2) are actually inconsistent unless and until one adds (3). If the soul (whatever that is) is a component of the human being, then it isn’t what defines a human being any more than a thumb or a vestigial appendix is, for the very simple reason that it’s a part, not the whole. Adding (3) implies that the human being is “really” just the human mind. That makes it possible to reconcile (1) and (2), but only at the cost of treating the human body as superfluous to the definition of the human being and ultimately something that could be set aside without any significant effect on the “real” human being. Of course, the idea that body and spirit are distinguishable and even separable has a long (and fraught) history within Christian theology. If one treats spirit, soul, and (in a further step) mind as synonymous, then one can open the way for the idea that human mind = human being—although just opening the way is still not enough to justify taking the step. But suppose one does think there is reason to take that step. To reduce the human being to only the human mind in this way is, of course, a reduction. Every orthodox Christian theologian, even those medievals most fixated on the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision by disembodied Christians in the afterlife, still insisted that the physical resurrection of the body had to take place in order for the salvation of the complete human being to occur. Indeed, Christian theology has a word for the idea that the human body is ultimately superfluous to the human being: heresy.1 1 To be clear, I am not calling Jonathan Merritt a heretic. He is just being inconsistent in his ideas and presuppositions. I expect that if pressed, Merritt would acknowledge that the human body is integral to the human being. Rejecting any of (1) through (4) would make AI a non-threat to Christian theology. But in the case of presupposition (3), not only can we reject it, but we must reject it. Christian theology insists that human beings are not just human minds. It might be fun to imagine human minds being swapped between bodies, or “digitally copied,” or, reaching further back, reincarnated, but it isn’t a Christian idea. Since the idea that artificial intelligences could become beings commensurate with human beings in religiously significant ways is based on a concept of humanity that Christian theology would reject—and indeed, already explicitly has rejected—it doesn’t seem that any AI development could ever amount to a threat to its consistency the way Merritt supposes it would. Put simply, Christianity would first need to abandon utterly the concept of physical resurrection before the development of AI could even pose a theological conundrum, let alone a threat.

Some posts in reply to the discussion topic, “Strongest skeptical responses to NT Wright?” which discussed Wright’s historical arguments about how the first Christians came to believe that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead. Ooo, this is a fun topic! :) I think part of the problem here is that Wright’s argument is more subtle and robust than the attempted summary you’ve given above, @Daniel L Heck. In The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright argues using a version of the double criterion of similarity and dissimilarity. On the one hand, resurrection was indeed a prevalent concept in Second Temple Judaism and was therefore available to the first Christians as a tool to try to explain what they believed they had experienced regarding Jesus after his death. The dissimilar bit, on the other hand, was the idea that one person might be resurrected in advance of everyone else. That’s the unprecedented and incongruous part, which we see the early church struggling to make sense of in their earliest traditions and writings. So, Wright says, the fact that they used the notion of resurrection makes sense and is not very remarkable—indeed, if that were all that was going on here, the counter-arguments you bring up would be patent. In contrast, the notion of one being resurrected when everyone else has not (yet) been was evidently so disruptive and required so much reconfiguration of the eschatological schema that it strains credulity to suggest that it arose as a development out of pre-existing ideas about the resurrection. Wright does not claim that this proves that the resurrection of Jesus actually happened, but he does demonstrate quite convincingly that “It’s just a permutation of the existing ideas,” doesn’t hold water. To my knowledge there hasn’t been a solid refutation of this argument published yet, although I will confess that I haven’t been actively looking recently. The fact that Wright hasn’t felt the need to write anything more significant than that one essay in order to rebut counter-arguments suggests to me that I am probably safe in this assumption. The questions addressed in that essay all appear to be targeted at ancillary issues or to make attempts to circumvent the core argument, rather than refuting the argument itself. Does that help? There are basically three credible alternative scenarios set forth by sceptics to explain the early Christians’ proclamation that Jesus had risen from the dead: fraud, self-delusion, or miscommunication.1 1 The fourth, that Jesus didn’t exist and so everything is made up, is not normally counted on the list of credible options. The first is that his disciples (or some subset thereof) invented the story for whatever reason: charlatanism, attempting to avoid public shame, or something along those lines. This falls down because what we know of the apostles lives and deaths is inconsistent with their testimony being fraudulent. Fraudsters have the goal of attaining and/or keeping something they desire. Maintaining a fraudulent claim when doing so will cost you your life makes no sense: renounce your claim and you lose whatever that something is, or refuse to renounce it and you still lose it and everything else, too. The second scenario is that his disciples deluded themselves into believing this. The idea that the disciples had visionary experiences which they came to interpret as concrete resurrection fits into this category, though there are other variations. This is generally seen to be the most credible of the sceptical options these days, since it allows one to say that the disciples really did believe Jesus was raised from the dead and acted consistently with that without admitting that they were correct to believe so. As you note, Wright focusses his attention primarily on this objection and has done a pretty good job addressing it. His reply to the objection that this is simply an instance of substantial human creativity is that such creativity is usually deployed in order to resolve problems and questions, whereas this served to create them. The Gospels show us the disciples responding exactly as we would expect humans to respond, variously staying in dejected fellowship or wandering off on their own as they all try to deal with the recognition that “Well, I guess we were wrong to think he was the Messiah.” The introduction of “Wait, he’s alive again,” knocks everything out of whack and puts them into a position where very little makes sense anymore. It doesn’t resolve the tension between their experience and their theological categories. It just deconstructs more of their categories and makes them more confused. Sure, they are happy, but as much if not more terrified and bewildered. It is a solution to their crisis of faith in Jesus as Messiah about as much as a gas explosion is a solution to not being able to squeeze your new couch into your living room. Yes, you can get it into the space now, but is it really a living room anymore, or the tangled remains of a half destroyed house that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up? The third option is that the apostles really only ever meant to teach that Jesus’ was “spiritually raised” in incorporeal form, and that the transmutation of this idea to a physical resurrection was a subsequent development born out of misunderstanding, wishful thinking, aggrandizement, or something of that sort on the part of their hearers. The idea of a split between Pauline Christianity and Jewish Christianity over this matter is one variant of this. This option falls down quite quickly when subjected to historical examination, since the universal attestation of the early Christian documents is to belief in Jesus’ physical resurrection. One has to suggest that Gnostic Christianity (which was certainly not Jewish) preserved the original tradition whereas the rest of the early Christian documents were subject to massive, conspiracy-theory level of revision. While an ardent supporter of the authenticity of the Gospel of Thomas might make a move towards the first part of that, the second part is on par with The DaVinci Code. Not surprisingly, this option has few adherents, and it barely even counts as a credible option. I forgot to mention the option of denying that Jesus died. In this category there’s the old swoon theory, which is based on the notion that both the Romans, who were quite expert at killing people by crucifixion, and the disciples, who prepared and entombed his body, were incompetent to tell the difference between an unconscious man and a dead one. And there’s the theory that Simon the Cyrene or a thief or somebody was crucified in Jesus’ place, which is only an issue if one is engaged in apologetics with Muslims rather than sceptics. Ah, now I see what is going on. I was thinking of this in terms of what Wright is actually trying to do, not in terms of the use some Christian apologists might want to make of his argument to prove that the resurrection is the more probable explanation. Wright isn’t trying to make a probabilistic argument about what happened, and it is an abuse of his arguments to try to press them into such service. Wright is fending off some of the sceptical arguments and instead positing one that seems to do a very good job of accounting for all the historical data available. He is arguing that the Christian claim is historically plausible and coherent, and indeed more so than the alternatives, if one does not rule out the possibility of the resurrection to begin with. If one has already ruled that out, then discussion of the history is moot. At that point, the Christian apologist really needs to be dealing with the Humean argument against the possibility of miracles and go consult the likes of @Jeffrey Koperski. It is only once the philosophical a priori arguments have been cleared away and the possibility that the resurrection is a real option on the table that one can then ask which explanation does the best job of explaining all the data. And that brings us to the main flaw in the sceptic’s probabilistic argument. The issue is not one of probabilities, but of what really happened. The most plausible explanation is the one that does the best job of explaining all the available data. Having a plurality of alternative views, none of which can account for all the data, does not amount to besting the one that does. Neither singly nor together (in the case of ones that are not incompatible) do these alternatives provide a better, fuller explanation for the actual events in the development of early Christianity. One can invent alternative scenarios to any claimed historical event ad infinitum, but their sheer number doesn’t render the truth any less convincing. When one encounters alternative accounts that both seem plausible prima facie, one has to investigate them to see which is best able to account for everything and remains coherent under extended scrutiny. Because as police detectives, border security officers, and insurance adjusters, and other such investigators will tell us, even the best constructed fictions eventually unravel, but the truth is bottomless. Looking at the stories of the apostles and their martyrdoms, for example, reveals that they don’t actually resemble the stories of, say, prisoners maintaining their innocence or people giving up their lives for a “noble lie” (e.g. a national myth) when one gets into the details. It is only by abstracting away from the details that one can build an argument that the cases are similar. The apostles’ actions do not look like those of people protesting that they shouldn’t be in the situation they find themselves in. They didn’t claim that they shouldn’t be in this situation, but fully acknowledged why they were in this situation and refused to recant regardless, which makes them like a political prisoner who candidly and fervently acknowledges her “crime” and insists that she would do it again because it was the right thing to do. Neither do their actions look like those of people sacrificing themselves to protect a greater good that they value from a harmful revelation of truth. A vassal sacrificing himself under false pretences in order to prevent his lord’s honour from being besmirched by an unpleasant revelation of the truth does so because he considers the lordship of said lord to be real and worth preserving, or that having him as lord is better for the nation, which is real and worth preserving. In contrast, whether or not Jesus was had in fact been vindicated by God as the Messiah was precisely the matter at issue in this case. If Jesus was not raised, there was no lordship to sacrifice oneself in order to protect. Neither was there some great ideal from his teaching that required this kind of protection. “Love your neighbour as yourself,” for example, had a long history before Jesus ever came on the scene and hadn’t required such measures to safeguard it. No, the key, driving theme of Jesus’ proclamation was that the kingdom of God was coming in and through his ministry, and if that proved false by his death, there was nothing else in it that required a noble lie to preserve. Neither was the community of disciples itself worth saving in this way. With neither a lord nor an ideal to serve, the community as such had no raison d’être and therefore nothing about it that would warrant lying and then dying to preserve. None of these counter-counter-arguments proves that something along these lines didn’t happen, but to say “or something along these lines” is not to give an explanation. In order to unseat the claim that Jesus really was resurrected from its position as the best possible explanation of the historical data, it will be necessary to find and articulate an alternative scenario that really does a better job than that claim even when the possibility that it is true is taken seriously. It is perhaps worth pointing out that I consider it one of the great strengths of the Christian faith that it is truly susceptible to historical falsification. I really do think it is possible to show Christianity to be false and remain always open to the possibility that someone might one day produce the necessary evidence to falsify it. To date I have not encountered any evidence or argument that has done so, but if someone does produce that one day, I want to know. The fact that no one has yet produced any does lend a weight of credibility to the Christian claim in my mind, and so I acknowledge that if such evidence or argument comes to light I will probably respond with suspicion at first, but I think that I would accept it if it proved true. So for me, the possibility of historical falsification is a real point of vulnerability of the Christian faith. Yet as I said, this is also one of its great strengths. It means that Christianity’s truth claim is not just to be the best interpretive grid to explain reality with, but that it is also a fundamentally factual claim that needs to be explained. This means Christianity can never just be true in our heads, but is also either concretely true or concretely false as part of reality “out there”—and therefore offers a concrete hope for reality out there. Being possibly historically false means it is also possibly historically true. To this, I should add that the Biblical witness itself comes into question among most skeptics, so you can’t unproblematically say that it gives us a clear sense of what really happened. So I think that if you accept the terms of the critical-historical apologetic game, you need to proceed from a more minimal set of facts than you use here. (For example, Wright’s argument has the apologetic virtue of proceeding from nothing but the empty tomb and the post-resurrection sightings, both of which are much more widely accepted than the Biblical narrative as a whole). — Daniel L Heck, December 11, 2014, 09:30:09 PM Perhaps I didn’t communicate clearly enough. I wasn’t building on the biblical testimony here. I was suggesting that human responses to situations where one’s faith is shattered invariably do look like what is described there and so it is reasonable to suppose that something much like it did happen because these are human being we are talking about. I should have tagged @Jeffrey Koperski sooner! :) I suppose I’ve been talking about probability in a fuzzily defined way, and I’m glad to have our resident analytic philosopher improve on that. Returning to the key point about Hume, the arguments our imaginary sceptic keeps deploying here are precisely those of Hume. The argument again and again is that there are other more probable scenarios available and we should always favour the more probable over the less probable. Hume wanted to turn this into a maxim so that miracles were always outside the bounds of credibility. The problem here is that probability on its own is not a sufficient criterion to evaluate a claim by. One should use the criterion of probability in a secondary capacity to judge between claims of equal explanatory power, not as the primary criterion. I’ll grant that our sceptic is not ruling out the possibility of Jesus’ resurrection a priori, but her use of probability as a primary criterion to evaluate truth claims is functionally equivalent. (As an aside, if she were being consistent in her use of criteria above, she should not have granted that a DaVinci Code-style conspiracy was less likely than that a man came back to life, walked through walls, and then flew away; the conspiracy is highly improbable but still less so than the resurrection.) If probability can outweigh explanatory value as she seems to suggest, then one ought always to choose the most probable scenario even if that doesn’t explain our actual experience well. But that’s absurd. Followed through consistently, it would lead to the conclusion that one ought to expect a homogeneous reality and that one should reject as incredible any experience that disturbed our expectations that actual events will always be the most probable events. Returning to Wright, my recollection is that somewhere in Resurrection he briefly addresses this subject, just enough to contextualize his own argument as taking place within the assumption that the occurrence of Jesus’ resurrection as a historical event is a valid option not already ruled out by its improbability. Assuming my memory is correct, then it is fair to assume that when Wright makes comments about the relative strengths of the various alternatives, he means them within that context even if he doesn’t spell it out every time. I think his vacillation between caution and confidence can be explained fairly consistently within that context: cautious when facing the fact that a more powerful explanation could appear, confident when arguing that none of the currently available alternatives are so.

When my daughter was three years old, I realized that it was time to start explaining the gospel to her. But how does one explain the gospel well to a child that young in a way that will actually make sense to them? It isn’t easy! But I recognized that if I, with all my years of studying theology, could not explain the gospel to a preschooler, then I didn’t really understand myself. So I set my mind to it and thought a long time about how I could express it in a way that made sense to her. In the end, I came up with this formulation, which I like to call “the gospel for the preschooler”: Jesus died and came alive again, so that one day he can make everyone who dies come alive again. He is going to make the whole world good, and he wants us to help! That’s what the gospel really is, once you get right down to it. Everything else is elaboration, implication, and details. And the gospel for the preschooler seems to have worked. When I told my daughter the gospel this way, she understood it. It took hold in her and has continued to grip her soul to this day. She gets it. But let’s look a little more closely at the gospel here, and take notice of what its foundation is. “Jesus died and came alive again so that…” The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus are the basis for all the gospel. Everything depends on them. This is a holy night. It is a strange and terrible holy night. On Easter Sunday we will gather here again to celebrate the holiest day of the year, the day of Resurrection, the day when hope and joy arise victorious. But it is not yet Sunday. This is Good Friday. And it is indeed Good. But not Good like we usually think of good. This is a Good whose goodness runs too deep and too strangely for any of us to grasp fully even after a lifetime of contemplation. For the goodness of Good Friday is the goodness of the Cross. When I was a young Christian, I was presented with two ways of thinking about the Cross and what it meant that didn’t always seem to fit well together. Sometimes the focus would be on the awfulness of the Cross. This might involve concentration on the physical agony, or on the profound irony that this was happening to the Son of God. Other times the focus was on how the Cross was good news for us, because it was done in order to make our salvation possible. So far, so good; all of this is true. But where things went off the rails was when people treated the Cross as happy news, joyful news, straight-up reason to smile and laugh, like the Resurrection. In fact, it often seemed like the Cross was the whole gospel, that the sum of the gospel was “Jesus died for me, therefore I’ve been set free.” You’ll notice how something has dropped out in that version of the gospel. There is no Resurrection in it. And because of that, the Cross has been forced to do the job that belongs to the Resurrection. And when that happens, we can no longer understand the Cross for what it really means. “Jesus died and came alive again,” is the foundation of the gospel, and when we remember all of that, we will begin to be able to understand the true, full, terrible, and wonderous meaning of the Cross. Let’s take a moment and imagine two alternative possibilities. First, imagine the Cross without the Resurrection. Imagine if Jesus had died and had not been raised. Then the Cross would have been nothing more than one more example of meaningless suffering, just some bad thing that happened. It would have been the death of the Son of God, true enough, but it would only mean that God had lost and death had won. And we wouldn’t even know about it, anyway. Jesus would have been forgotten, except maybe in some footnote in some massive dusty tome on the history of the Roman Empire. God would have failed, and we wouldn’t even notice. Now imagine the Resurrection without the Cross. Suppose Jesus had lived to a ripe old age and then died reclining on a couch, talking and drinking wine with his disciples until he slipped off into sleep, and had then been resurrected. That would still be a source of hope, because it would still be God overcoming death with life. But it would be a very different hope. That would mean nothing more than that life goes on, and sure, sometimes some bad things happen, but it’ll all work out okay in the end. There would be no hope in that for the restoration of the broken. “It’ll all work out okay in the end,” is not much of a gospel. “Jesus died and came alive again” is the foundation of the gospel, and we need both parts to understand the gospel properly. The Resurrection is the source of the hope, while the Cross is what shapes and forms that hope. The Cross is what gives the Resurrection hope its character. The Cross tells us how the Resurrection hope works. The Cross is why we can trust that the Resurrection really will be a hope for the healing and transformation of even the worst. So then, if we want to understand the Cross, we need to see in it the ultimate expression of how God deals with evil, with suffering, with pain and violence and fear and cruelty and hate. We often ask ourselves, when faced with some evil thing, “Why?” We try to deal with evil by explaining it. If we can just make sense of it, we think, then it’ll be okay. We try to turn evil into a philosophical problem, because philosophical problems are abstract and take our minds away from the concrete. This doesn’t really help, of course, but it is what we keep trying to do. But God does not treat evil like a philosophical problem to figure out. God treats evil as a practical problem to solve. The Cross is the ultimate demonstration how God deals with all that is wrong in this world. The Cross shows us the answer to the question: “In what way is God present in the midst of this suffering and evil?” Or better, “How is God acting in the midst of this suffering and evil?” You see, the Cross requires us to see God himself nailed to it, God himself surrendered to death and submitted to it. Our God does not negate evil. He does not make it as if it never were. No, he takes it, goes into it, and from the depths, he changes it! He rises from the grave not as a negation of death, but as the subversion and transformation of death. He rises with the nail scars in his hands and the gash in his side, but now they are wounds of glory. They have not disappeared; they have not ceased to be wounds inflicted on him by nails and spear. But they no longer hold the power of death, for they have been transformed into wellsprings of life. The life that flowed out of those wounds into the void, the chaos, the darkness has proven to be inexhaustible, and now the void is changed. Resurrection life arises where there was only death, new life where there was only destruction, because God is there, too. This is why the Cross is good news. Suffering begins as meaningless. It has no ultimate reason behind it. It doesn’t belong in this world. But the Cross shows us that God will take our suffering and make sense out of it, literally make sense where there was none before, by creating good out of it. The Cross, that unspeakable horror that we ourselves inflicted on the Son of God, is, thanks to the Resurrection, now the sign to us that all the suffering, evil, fear, hate, cruelty and pain that afflict us in this world will be changed and transformed. Your suffering will become a wellspring of new life. Nothing is beyond hope. Our pains will not be washed away as if they had never happened. The Cross signifies that we, in all our brokenness, will be made whole.

The resurrection is the main event and the ultimate point of the gospel. The crucifixion functions as the qualifier that shapes the meaning of the resurrection. By itself, the crucifixion would be meaningless. It would amount to nothing but the unpleasant but forgettable death of some wandering preacher long ago at the hands of the powerful. Jesus of Nazareth would appear in fewer footnotes than Bar Kochba. It is only because of the resurrection that the crucifixion becomes meaningful. Thus the crucifixion is dependent on the resurrection for its meaning. The resurrection is fundamentally meaningful, though its meaning is contextually qualified by the crucifixion. Resurrection requires death in order to become possible, and so its meaning is necessarily qualified by death; however, to require death is not to require crucifixion. If Jesus had lived to an old age and died with dignity reclining on a couch conversing with his followers (as Socrates did) and had then been resurrected by God, his resurrection would still be meaningful as Good News and therefore worthy of proclamation. But its meaning would have a different quality. Thus the relation between resurrection and crucifixion is like that between noun and adjective. The resurrection is the locus of meaning, and the crucifixion is the quality of the meaning. The resurrection is the sine qua non of Christian faith; the crucifixion is the sine qua aliter.