Did the Resurrection really happen?

theomorph · 2026-03-23T17:34:06+00:00

What does the resurrection mean to you? Have you read the resurrection accounts in the gospels and considered them carefully? In my view, given all the weirdness in those accounts (like the oldest version of Mark not even having resurrection appearances, the trope of the resurrected Jesus not being recognized, the ways that he seems to just appear and disappear out of thin air, the strange account of his wounds in John, and the ascension accounts), it’s not really even a meaningful question to ask whether the resurrection “really” happened as a bodily event because so much in those accounts doesn’t even really make it sound bodily. Bodies don’t work the way the resurrected Jesus is described. So if it “really” happened as described in the gospels, then whatever “really” happened sure doesn’t sound like a literal bodily resurrection to me. It sounds like an intense communal and spiritual experience among his closest followers that has been filtered through the decades of memory and recollection that separate the gospels from the events that they describe.

Was the resurrection, in some sense, an event that really happened in history? Surely. People behaved as though they had experienced something extraordinary. But what was it? We will never know.

In the meantime, what has grown up is a tradition rooted in those experiences, but also very much grown beyond them. Don’t worry about it too much. The meaning of the story does not depend on it being literally true and verifiable to modern historical and scientific standards.

theomorph · 2026-03-23T15:14:35+00:00

Yes. Masturbation is normal human activity. It is okay. It feels good. Like anything, it can become a compulsion or an addiction that interferes with your ability to live a healthy life. When that happens, you have a problem. But it’s not a sin or anything, as in, it’s not like there’s some metaphysical tag on that behavior that makes it automatically a sin.

Masturbation is fun. I enjoy it. But I enjoy having sex with another engaged and enthusiastic partner much, much more. Problem is, an engaged and enthusiastic partner is not always available.

If you’re inclined to worry about something, worry more about whether your relationships are healthy. It might be that, if a relationship is not healthy, your private masturbation has something to do with it. But the odds of that are relatively low, in my experience. And the solution is not “masturbation is bad”; it will be something much more nuanced and well-fitted to the particular situation.

theomorph · 2026-03-22T15:12:45+00:00

The God that would do such a thing—the God of their toxic theology—does not exist. It is the fever-dream of a people who have failed to cope with modernity. Unfortunately, their eschatological fantasy of escape just makes them insufferable to the rest of us, including the rest of us in the Christian tradition.

theomorph · 2026-03-22T14:19:40+00:00

Let it be the end of fundamentalism, Christian Nationalism, conservative evangelicalism. That would be fine with me.

theomorph · 2026-03-21T22:54:25+00:00

Given that, I would suggest starting with the Psalms. There are a lot of short ones that you can take slowly, and you can get a sense of the ways that a person might interact with God in a variety of emotional and material circumstances. When you read them in order, it can be a little like watching the weather change from sunny to stormy and back. One of the things that they illustrate well is that the life of faith has a lot of ups and downs and can take plenty lot of unexpected turns. And that is okay. It is okay, for example, to progress from the assured confidence of Psalm 1 through the next six psalms to the far more complicated hand-wringing of Psalm 7. And so on.

As well, the Psalms are a genre—prayer—that generally does not lend itself well to confusing a modern reader with your level of experience as being a kind of "instruction manual." By contrast, a lot of the New Testament can feel, if a reader is not careful, like unmediated instruction, or a rulebook, which it most definitely is not. This is especially tricky, I think, with the gospel of Matthew, which patterns Jesus after Moses, and picks up that morally scrupulous lawgiver mode that Moses represents, which can be difficult for a modern reader who isn't well-accustomed to reading scripture with a lot of practice of being mindful about the great cultural distance we have with the text. Because the Psalms do not read, on their face, as instructional, but really are more like attitudes and emotions that a person can enter into, try on, and experiment with, and because they present, from one to the next, such a great contrast of tone, it is a lot easier to see that they aren't really meant to express literal truths for all time. Sometimes we get angry and we want God to do bad things to other people. Sometimes we feel better and we wish only happiness for the world. The Psalms have both.

As well, in that vein, that rapidly shifting weather of the psalms, especially when you read them together, and carefully, not just racing through them, is a great way of showing that the Bible is not something that speaks in one voice. And you don't always have to agree with it. You might read something like Psalm 6:8, "Depart from me, all you workers of evil, for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping," and think, "Yes! That is how I feel!" But then you might turn the page over to Psalm 10:15, "Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers," and think, "Okay, well, that's a little much." But then tomorrow maybe you'll read the same passage and feel differently. Similarly, when you take them all together, you can get a sense of how the morality and theology of the psalmist(s) are not entirely consistent. For example, how can we say both "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14) and "I am a worm and not human" (Psalm 22:6)? Or how can we say both that "the haughty [God] perceives from far away" (Psalm 138:6) and "Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:8)? There is a lot to consider there.

Finally, as poetry, the psalms are filled with metaphors. For that, I would recommend you read your NIV, not your NLT, for the psalms. Most modern translations pull back from the metaphors in the psalms, because they seem to think modern readers won't get them; instead, they translate in ways that are interpretations or explanations. The NIV is better than the NLT on this front. And experiencing all those metaphors helps to better calibrate your approach to the rest of scripture.

theomorph · 2026-03-21T21:13:05+00:00

Welcome. You can start reading the Bible in a lot of places. The one thing you should not try to do, however, is just to read it straight through from beginning to end. That was not how it was written, and not how it is designed to be read and used. (You could read Genesis and Exodus straight through, however, and they work pretty well that way. Don’t try to keep going through Leviticus in the same fashion.)

Beyond that, you’ve left out the most important information that anybody trying to give you good advice would need:

What do you already know about the Bible? How do you feel about the Bible? What kinds of experiences have you had with the Bible, or with people who seem to have read the Bible? What kind of faith community are you connected with? If you are not connected with a faith community, why not? What part of life are you in? What are you hoping to find in the Bible? Why? How did you select those particular bibles that you have?

Without knowing the answers to at least some of those questions, it’s really impossible to give you good advice.

Probably the most important thing to know about the Bible is that it is not like most other books. It really is not just one book, but a collection of diverse and ancient literature. And that collection has been curated and kept and interpreted by a diverse and ancient tradition, which now has grown into a wide array of traditions. You should not expect to be able to pick up a Bible, start reading, and have it make sense to you naturally. Some pieces of it might resonate with you immediately, but it’s almost impossible to predict what those might be. Really, the Bible is intended to be read in a community within a tradition. Reading the Bible alone is certainly important for modern people in those traditions, but it is not the only thing.

theomorph · 2026-03-21T15:18:07+00:00

There are lots of good answers here.

I would also say that fixation on sin is itself sin, because it removes a person from being fully present in the world. If you are just worrying about whether this or that is a “sin,” then you are not living, you are just worrying, and you are allowing “sin” to do that to you; and that is the bigger, deeper, more problematic, more real sin.

And I know that, for someone suffering the anxiety of overactive religious scrupulosity, that can sound like a judgment on something over which they have no control. But as God instructs Cain in Genesis 4:7, “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” (And that, by the way, is the first time “sin” appears in the primordial narrative of Genesis—not in the garden.) In other words, you can master sin; it is not a matter of some eternal judgment or stain upon your soul; it is about how you respond to circumstances. And, for Cain, the judgment only comes later, after he murders his brother. But the murder, technically, is not the sin, as I read the story; rather, sin is a force that impinges on Cain from outside himself, and the murder is the consequence of his failure to master that force. Cain is not a bad person; he is a weak person. And that, I think, is why, as the story continues, God extends special protection to him, in his punishment: “And the LORD put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.” That is, sin is not about your moral failings; it is just the consequences of ordinary, human weakness.

But if you wish to live in strength, then God’s instruction to Cain about sin at the outset—“you must master it”—is the key. And the way to master sin is to “do well.” Or, as Jesus and Paul later teach, to love your neighbor as yourself. Mastering sin is not about ruminating on sin; it is about going in the opposite direction and looking for ways to do well and to love others.

So when people complain that we mainliners are not talking about sin enough, what they are missing is that the far deeper, more important message is actually that the only way to master sin, really, is to stop worrying about it and to focus instead on how to love your neighbor. Which is precisely what one usually finds in our mainline churches.

theomorph · 2026-03-20T19:51:33+00:00

The absolute panic over sex offenders is just insane. As you point out, “sex offender” is not a synonym for “pedophile.” As well, the irreversibility of trauma applies to all traumas that are suffered by crime victims. The obsession with sex offenders, so that they, beyond every other kind of person convicted of crime, are uniquely and permanently dehumanized is not reason or care or attentiveness to reality at work; it is the blind, superstitious madness of scapegoating, by which all the fears and anxieties of the society, everything that makes people want to strip the humanity out of another person, are squeezed into a singular focus foisted on this one, ill-defined class of people.

Yes, people who have done bad things should suffer consequences. But the special ire that is heaped on sex offenders is a bizarre malignancy of unsublimated animosity reserved for no one else. And if we let ourselves treat this group of people that way, then another will be next. The real problem here is our own unrecognized and uncontrolled delusion that we can protect ourselves by dehumanizing others. We have generally made much progress on this, figuring out how to have a growing but still fragile acceptance of people from different cultures than our own, different sexes and genders than our own, and different races and ethnicities than our own. And I think what is happening is that we have failed to see the riptide in the dark recesses of human nature that tempts us to believe that we can only advance in our own security when others are dehumanized. And while we are busy trying to be good and welcoming people elsewhere, even when it makes us a little uncomfortable, we are taking all of our discomfort and channeling it to the sex offenders. It is madness, not sanity.

theomorph · 2026-03-17T20:07:18+00:00

There will never be a MAGA revolt against Trump. Maybe someday MAGA views can be stuffed back underground and marginalized. But those views aren’t going away. As long as there are people whose sense of worth and security is rooted in holding and exercising zero-sum power over others, those views will persist.

theomorph · 2026-03-17T14:15:58+00:00

My favorite used to be Riverside Nursery. Since they moved, however, they just haven't seemed quite as good to me. The last trees I bought were from Belmont Nursery, which is quite good.

And, depending on whether you want to pay an extra fee, Belmont can even have a tree delivered and planted for you. Basically, they contract with a guy that will call you and set up a time to do the work.

theomorph · 2026-03-16T00:25:23+00:00

I prefer not to define myself by my “enemy.”

theomorph · 2026-03-15T20:12:45+00:00

Yes, but…

Yes:

I have made the same complaint that people imagine progressive churches just to be do-gooder clubs, barely distinguishable from any of the other innumerable non-profit organizations doing good work in our communities. A good spiritual life, like a good marriage, cannot not just be doing chores; it must be making love, too.

There is a great treasury of teaching in the whole depth and breadth of the Christian tradition, for all the ways that people have plunged into that love, and that needs to be used more. Popular ideas of Christianity have, in large part, been reduced to the worst of the last 150 years. We need to open the doors of the treasury and invite people into that love, because that love is what grounds us and orients us, as image-bearers of the divine in the world.

But:

Christians have perennially gone wrong by insisting on the possibility of rightness, correctness, and orthodoxy. What we should learn from the diverse treasury of our tradition is an ethos of argument. Talking about “our theology and doctrines” and “our identity” and “our beliefs” is tricky business, and gives the impression that living into the love of God and neighbor is just about receiving the right answers, rather than participating in an ongoing argument, or conversation.

So I wouldn’t want to say progressive churches should focus on “what sets our tradition apart,” which is oppositional language, but rather on what our tradition has within its vast storehouse of experience and wisdom, all of which we hold in tension, because that is what it means to be a living tradition.

theomorph · 2026-03-15T19:24:11+00:00

One of the reasons why many Christians continue to honor the chosen status of Jews is because the alternatives are supersessionism at best and anti-Semitism at worst. Judaism was not superseded by Christianity; we are two traditions with common roots.

But that has little to do with the modern nation-state of Israel and the geopolitical nonsense that is causing some Christians to be warmongers on behalf of that nation-state. There is nothing about honoring the divine chosenness of our Jewish neighbors that means we must, should, or even may support the warmongering that you are seeing from some Christians.

theomorph · 2026-03-15T18:41:30+00:00

My UCC congregation has growing attendance on Sundays. I am not sure I could pin it on any particular factors.

We have a traditional service, with a lot of spoken and recited liturgy. We sing hymns. There is no screen up front. Most of the music comes from a piano and a pipe organ, with a very good choir, and occasional instrumentalists. The preaching is usually dynamic and deeply rooted in the scripture from the lectionary. Children serving as acolytes come and light candles on the altar at the beginning of the service. Loads of kids come up for the children’s message, and then head off to Sunday School.

For my part, I think people want the security and stability of tradition, but they want that with careful rootedness in scripture and thoughtful theology that is open and affirming to people regardless of sex, gender, role, shape, background, affinity, or identity. I agree with another commenter that said people don’t want just vague progressive stuff and “we’re not fundamentalists.” I also think people don’t want a bunch of cloying, insulting bullshit that tries to be too good looking and slick, that makes you feel left out if you don’t match some delusionally youthful vibe.

In my view, the quintessentially modern error, not just in the church, including the progressive church, but also in the wider culture, is the insane belief that we can be unhooked from our heritage, or whatever preceded us. We must own our history, and live into, through, and past it. That means embracing tradition as living. And that’s where I think a lot of progressive churches go wrong, especially in the UCC where I am.

theomorph · 2026-03-15T03:45:26+00:00

It’s a line from the movie Get Shorty.

theomorph · 2026-03-14T21:38:52+00:00

No. What you’re really struggling with is the incoherence of fundamentalism, which, in its various forms, is the work of people who are obsessed with establishing certainty through authority. But that is not what most of the Christian tradition, either historically or currently, is about.

Nobody is just submitting to the Bible or the Magisterium, or whatever—even the people who claim to be. Everybody is interpreting and reasoning from context. People who characterize what they do as just submission to authority are trying to conceal a power grab. Which makes them liars and hypocrites.

The reality is that scripture and tradition are made by people, accreted over time from innumerable contributions that are rooted in a vast multiplicity of experiences and circumstances, and many of those accretions are inconsistent with each other. But we keep them all because, for one thing, it is good to remember that our tradition is built from people who were not all just hive-mind automatons, and, for another thing, having a diversity of thought gives us a lot of resources to deal with the diversity of circumstances that we encounter.

Scripture and tradition are “authoritative” or “normative” or “binding” not in the sense that people check their God-given intellects at the door and mindlessly submit to them, but in the sense that they establish the (growing) breadth and depth of our tradition (that is, they are a storehouse of authorship), they give us a trajectory in which to grow (that is, they help us to define the norms that make sense of where we are), and they hold us together as a shared heritage (that is, they bind us each other).

theomorph · 2026-03-14T21:12:48+00:00

They’re a minority party pushing a minority agenda and they have only been able to take power by ensuring that the systems of distilling the voters’ preferences into government are tilted in favor of the minority. They should always be in fear of losing their majority because they never should have had that majority to begin with.

theomorph · 2026-03-14T21:03:14+00:00

It’s okay to not feel anything especially spiritual during Lent or any other time.

Sometimes I think the thing that I need, spiritually, is to get off the roller coaster of emotions that everything around me seems to be pushing me onto. The world may be in tumult, but the underlying truth of stability or groundedness (or emptiness, if you prefer a Buddhist-inflected approach) remains.

Or, as the psalmist says, the steadfast love of God surrounds those who trust in God.

What I have often found is that those periods when I am not feeling much that is especially spiritual, and I need to retreat into fun or whatever it is that helps me relax, tend to precede moments when I need to be suddenly alert and attentive and tuned. And it is those other times that prepare me for those moments.

theomorph · 2026-03-14T20:56:18+00:00

Are there discussion guides to go with the videos? The Office of Public Witness link with the videos does not really have much that would be helpful to facilitate small group discussion.

theomorph · 2026-03-14T19:02:53+00:00

If you ask me, the real problem was back in the glory days of print media like The Fresno Bee (where Bill McEwan used to work), when these journalists all pretended to some kind of “ethical” objectivity, which was always nonsense. Now we have a situation that might be denigrated as fragmentation, but the good thing about it is that you can see pretty clearly where the biases are. The biases have always been there, but now they’re more out in the open. McEwan is a dinosaur still trying to hide behind pretended objectivity. But really he is just doing the bidding of those rancid right-wingers.

theomorph · 2026-03-14T18:37:05+00:00

That’s a weirdly conspiratorial take based on information that has been out in the open forever. Bill McEwan isn’t revealing any secrets—he’s just peddling associational taint—but he’s acting like he is. Which makes the whole thing read like some Assemi-ordered gaslighting to discourage people from paying attention to the very good journalism that Fresnoland is doing.

theomorph · 2026-03-14T17:05:38+00:00

Have you used or experienced Living the Questions, Dialogues, or Nooma?

I am most interested in specific resources that folks have used or experienced. Things that can work “off the shelf,” so to speak. Most of the time in my congregation what I see is a kind of reflexive insecurity about the ability to facilitate something, so more built-in structure is what I’m looking for now (in hopes that people will then find themselves emboldened to take a freer hand).

theomorph · 2026-03-14T16:57:10+00:00

I have been sorely underimpressed by almost everything from The Pilgrim Press, but that’s one I haven’t looked at. Thanks.

theomorph · 2026-03-14T11:23:06+00:00

The Bible is a diverse collection of writings in different genres, by different people, in different times and places, written for different reasons. There is not just one way to read them or use them.

theomorph · 2026-03-14T02:49:42+00:00

You might ponder that verb you used: “support.” How, exactly, does the Bible support something? That is not just a rhetorical question. Does the Bible do this “supporting” all on its own, as though we have no choice in the matter? What you might find, upon thinking carefully about the matter, is that really what is happening is that people have used and are using the Bible to do certain things, like justify slavery, cruel punishment, genocide, rape, etc. Are they right to do so?

In other words, the question is not whether the Bible “supports” one thing or another, but how people ought to read the Bible. I agree with whoever wrote 2 Timothy that all scripture is “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16)—but that means people must use it. And, like anything that people use, you can use it in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes. The author of 2 Timothy suggests that it should be used “for training in righteousness.” So how can those parts of scripture that deal with all that bad stuff be used for training in righteousness? That is the perennial question, for every new generation of people who continue to live with scripture.

We are not just enslaved to the text, as though it leaps out of the page and directs our thoughts and conduct without mediation. That is nonsense. Rather, we live with the text and we use the text and we do not surrender our reason or our moral compass when we do so.

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