Avoiding the Real Issue

Tony Snow writes about Easter and our modern society over at Townhall:

Europe has fallen more deeply for this hooey than we have, but the contagion has begun to spread. We express our vanity through such things as the self-help movement, which in its endless lose-weight, have-sex, purge-guilt, be-happy manifestations promises that one doesn’t need God. The Self can do it all. Find a diet. Buy new clothes. Exercise. And bingo! Happiness (along with a trim waistline and a heart-shredding sex life) is yours. Who needs resurrection when you’ve got the South Beach diet?

Over time, however, the self-improvement movement manages only to mangle the brittle psyches of the poor saps who keep Oprah and the how-to authors in business. The fads come and go, but the anomie persists. Not even firm-bellied swingers can fend off the yearning for something better and the quiet suspicion that somewhere beyond the Self lies something more liberating and refined — the Truth.

This is where Easter enters the picture again. The story of Easter is one of renewal against all rules and odds. It describes the life of an unknown man who preached in a forlorn and forgotten corner of the globe, who lived humbly and died in humiliation, whose votaries fought with words and not swords, and who somehow became the source of the world’s greatest and most influential religion. Death begat life, and life begat hope, and hope begat liberation.

Brilliant stuff. His final paragraph really struck a nerver for me, though:

Most of us hate being forced to think about things that really matter — such as whether God or Christ exist. We would much rather cavil over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the advisability of permitting illegal aliens to petition for citizenship … anything but the ultimate question.

I think of this as well in regards to a lot of theological debates by Atheists. The resurrection is debated, that’s true, but you notice a certain lack of focus by most Atheists. There are a whole list of things most would rather debate such as the Old Testament stories of the Canaanites, the exact details of creation or Noah’s Ark. J.P. Holding has produced an amazingly dizzing body of work responding to all this stuff, but really there’s only one issue.

If Christ rose from the dead, everything else can be explained and answered. If not, we’re all what Paul calls “men most miserable.” Sadly, most of the professional critics of Christianity like the bob and weave approach to apologetics, as they spend a lot of time on side roads rather than dealing with the main issue.

Apologetics

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