One good thing I can say about James Cameron’s Lost Tomb of Jesus media blitz: It pays Christianity a great compliment by accepting the religion’s claim to be about something real. The basic idea motivating Cameron’s project is that if somebody finds the body of Jesus Christ, the whole Christian thing is over, finished, based on a mistake. Christians claim Jesus came back from the dead with a new kind of life, and that’s a claim that’s either right or wrong. Bring me an ossuary filled with Jesus’ physical remains, and I’m looking for a new religion. (Aside from the theological blow, this would cause lots of family tension too: I’d probably become a Nietzschean humanist, but my wife would just worship the sun, and how on earth would we raise the children? As Coppertoned Übermenschen?)

So even though this particular “bones of Jesus” thing will likely be over before it’s started because it overreaches so desperately on such a slender evidential basis, it’s nice to have truth claims taken so seriously. There are always wooly-minded folks out there who are capable of believing Christianity is true even with a permanently dead Savior. Yes, you read that right: some people have faith in a dead man to save them. You either have to be very dumb or very smart for that to make sense to you; those of us somewhere in the middle recognize it as nonsense.

As an example of a very smart person who talked himself into this, take the German theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who spent much of his life teaching in America.
(more… )

No, seriously! I was just walking through this graveyard near Los Angeles, and I look up, and there it was: Clear as day, “Jesús” written right on a grave stone. And as if that’s not enough to let you know that I of all people have found the very grave of Jesus himself, look at the top: The grave stone has a cross right there on it! How much more obvious could this be? In fact, I think whoever buried Jesus here (no doubt his wife Mary Magdalene and their son, li’l Judas) felt a bit guilty and left a clue about what they were up to: Notice in the middle of the cross, the letters I. H. S. What do you think that stands for, written in the middle of a cross here on the grave of Jesus in Los Angeles?

I’m. Hiding. Something.

Yep.

And get this: Not only did I find a grave that said Jesús, but I looked around at some other graves nearby, and I found a José and lots of Marias. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how much proof do you people need? It is so clearly the grave of Jesus that I don’t care what anybody says.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an archaeologist. I’m also not a theologist, a dig-up-stuffologist, a scholarologist or even a symbologist. I’m just a humble movieologist and the KING OF THE WORLD!!!

And by the by, this is absolutely not a publicity stunt. Ab-so-lute-ly.

There is one place in scripture where the sheer greatness of the gospel is most profusely described: the blessing with which Paul opens the epistle to the Ephesians.

Paul begins by praising God for the gift of the gospel, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ,” and then he takes a deep breath and starts counting out those blessings, one after another, in a 202-word avalanche of praise without pause or punctuation from verses 3-14. Paul speaks here from the fullness of his heart as well as the keenness of his insight. The theme of “blessing” overwhelms him, and pushes him to compose a correspondingly overwhelming sentence. It runs from heaven to earth, taking sudden turns and detours as it doubles and triples back on itself, oscillating between God and man, and circling its subject to view it from every angle. For all this wildness, the blessing has also a stateliness and coherence which reflects the wisdom which it praises. No translation or paraphrase can capture it all definitively, but here is one of the possibilities:

God chose us in Christ
before the ground of the world was laid
to be holy and blameless before him;
In his love he determined us in advance
for adoption into sonship through Jesus Christ
through the good pleasure of his will
to the praise of his glorious grace
(more… )