David Levin - Class 2: Resurrection as a Worldview Statement

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

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   Study Day, 2017, Five Facets of the Resurrection. This is the second class by brother David Levin. The title is Resurrection as a Worldview Statement.

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   Amen. And that he was raised on the third day in accordance with scriptures. And that he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time. Most of whom are still alive, but some have fallen asleep. And he appeared to James. Then to Paul the Apostles. Last of all, as to one timely...

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   Just one minute, Dave. Did it run out of power, Bob? Oh, try now. Okay. Yeah, it's okay. Somehow, somehow that... Okay. Sorry about that. Okay. You read the first eight verses of 1 Corinthians.

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   It's 15. You want me to read those? Yeah. Okay. You do it again. 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verses 1 through 8. Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved. If you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.

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   For I delivered to you, as of first importance, what I also received. That Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures. That he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures. And that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time.

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   Most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. Thank you. So I ended the first lecture talking about the three different generations of belief. That is, the original witnesses who saw the resurrection, who saw the resurrected Christ, who saw the empty tomb.

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   Their task was, can we believe our eyes? Did this really happen? Second generation were those who were, heard the preaching of the original witnesses in the first century. So as Paul is writing to the Corinthians, or as we're about to see, is he speaking to the Athenians? Their task is, can we believe Paul?

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   We didn't see all this happen, but Paul is giving us evidence that it did happen. He's talking about all the witnesses that he did see. And now we read Corinthians, and we're yet one more step removed. So we're third generation believers. That is, can we believe the documents written by and about the people who were the witnesses?

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   And it's that thing. So there's the resurrection, the people who preach the resurrection, and the recording of those documents, which we call the Bible, and what we read. So when we are in Acts 17, Paul is now taking, Paul is taking the preaching from the immediate area where the resurrection occurred, in Jerusalem.

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    And as Jesus said, to preach Judah, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And now he is in Athens, figuratively at that point, from Jerusalem. He's gone way out. He is taking the preaching of the resurrection into an area of the world where, to them, as they heard him, they said, as we read, he seems to be preaching foreign divinities.

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    Now that's what we consider the resurrection. If you take this and import it into the Greek-speaking world, it is now a foreign divinity. It's something other. It's a strange thing he's talking about. Our immediate impression would be to think, well, it's different. They call it foreign because it's something that, well, this is not about the Greek gods.

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    This is about some Jewish prophecy or something. This is, you know, Messiah. This is just not our stuff. This is totally different. There's another layer here, too, that I'm going to explore in this lecture as to what it means to present a different worldview. And I'll explain what I mean by worldview here momentarily.

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    That Paul was not only preaching something that, to them, would be a foreign divinity, like if somebody were to come here and talk about Hinduism or something and say, we've heard this before. Who are these gods with these strange names? But he was preaching a perspective on the universe that would have been entirely unprecedented to anything they'd ever heard before.

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    Their whole system of belief and thinking about just what kind of universe do we live in, that was the real foreignness of about what Paul was preaching. It was a unique worldview, something that had not ever been heard before, something that the Bible worldview about the universe would have... What? No, no, no, no, no, no.

15. 7:39

    Yes, this is what happened. A bodily resurrection of Jesus. That's not just some dead man becoming alive. This was the integration of the divine element into the physical world. When you have a bodily resurrection, that is a physical body, as Paul went on to say in 1 Corinthians 15, we didn't read it, what kind of body did this happen?

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    It's a physical body. It's material. And this is unified in an immortal sense. So God becomes part of a physical world. That's the completely bizarre, unprecedented concept. Because in the Greek world, the various philosophies and religions would never put those two things together.

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    You would have either a material world, and that's all there was. There was no spiritual world or anything like that. Or you had the world of the perfect realm of the spirit, the intangible, the soul. And the physical world was considered bad or evil or unfitting. It was a different sort of place.

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    And you kept these realms separate. So when Paul talks about uniting and creating God coming to earth and bringing a physical thing and making that immortal, this was an entirely different concept. So that's where we're going right now. So what is a worldview? A worldview is really maybe more accurately described as a universal view.

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    It's like, what type of universe do we live in? When people say, what kind of worldview do you have? Are you theistic or atheistic? That would be a one sorting question. We're all theistic, of course. We believe in a theistic world. Many people don't. Their worldview is, there's no God. Or some people might be, well, there's a God, but God is just some kind of spiritual power out there and doesn't really interact with people.

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    What we used to call the deistical world. Still extant in some denominations. That's another worldview. That's another worldview. People might believe, no, there's nothing but material stuff. There's this. You know. No spirit. There's no God. There's no anything. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Just energy and matter and motion. That's it.

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    That's a worldview. So these are types of things we call worldview. Things like pain or evil. We have different worldviews that these are part of life, or no, they are punishments from God. That would be a type of worldview. So a worldview involves a large-scale take on the whole frame of life we live in.

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    Let's say randomness versus order. Somebody might think, no, the world, whatever happens, happens. There's no order. Events happen. They don't happen. Can't predict anything. And other people, they know everything's ordered by God. Believers might believe very much in a distant God. Yeah, God oversees what we do, but he's not involved in our daily affairs of every little thing.

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    And somebody else might believe. No, I believe that God guides every step of my life every way. Those are worldviews. Big pictures of how we view the universe and where we live. But the worldview we want to look in today is the one that has to do with the material versus the immaterial aspects of life.

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    So look in, back in verse 7, excuse me, Acts 17 and verse 18. Acts 17, verse 18. Can you read that? Yeah. Here we are introduced to two groups of people who would have worldviews different than Paul. the Epicureans and the Stoic philosophers. These were two leading schools of thought for contemporary and for some centuries preceding.

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    The Epicureans from roughly, I think, the mid-5th century B.C. or so. Epicurean gets its name from a chap named, of all things, Epicurus. They considered the founder of the school of the Epicureans. And their worldview was, this is it. The material here and now life. That's all there is. There's no afterlife. There's no God.

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    If there is anything, it's just another form of physical world. But they were what were called materialist or physicalist. And the proper way of life was the way of life that conduced towards seeking happiness and avoiding pain or pleasure. These days, the word Epicurean means somebody enjoys the finer things of life. The hundred dollar bottles of wine and the cheeses you have flown in special for your brunch and so forth.

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    But they were really not really excessive in their pursuit of pleasure. They had a school called the Garden in Athens. Has anybody ever been there to Athens? Did you visit the place? Okay, I don't know. But it's evident, I don't know this firsthand, but evidently there was an elevated area above Mars, and it was called the Garden.

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    And that's where the Epicureans lived. But they felt that because pain was not fitting in nature, in other words, you know, obviously if an animal gets pain, you want to escape pain. That's just not the natural way to do it. If you get caught in a thorn bush, you get the thorn out.

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    So the right way of life, because we're only dealing with the physical world, was to get rid of pain and live in pleasure. So that was their pursuit. It wasn't a pursuit of the maximum enjoyment, but it was a lifestyle that conduced towards taking care of the physical body and good intercourse in their small community.

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    Oddly enough, they believed in celibacy, which is not a good way to continue a community. But nonetheless, they did persist for a few centuries. But that was who Epicureans were. And they did have a lot of followers. Now, Stoics, you may have heard of Stoics. The word, the name Stoic, does not come from a person like Epicurus.

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    There's nobody named Stoic. The word Stoic comes from a, the Greek word Stoic, which was a colonnade. And they had an area, around the area, because I believe, where they would meet to discourse and walk about and teach. And so they became known as the Stoic philosophers because they met in this, and actually named after an architectural feature school of philosophy.

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    Now, like the Epicureans, the Stoics shared in a material worldview. They weren't really theistic at all. Although if you read their writings, you will hear them make references to God. But by God, they mean just some kind of force out there. But the Stoic worldview was distinctly opposite from the Epicurean. That is, pain is part of life.

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    Don't avoid it. Embrace it. You know, whatever is, is. Don't try to fight things. Accept what you have, and you'll be happier that way. And the goal of life was to live in accord with nature. Whatever life brought you, that's what life brought you. Don't try to fight it. You'll make yourself more miserable.

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    Help other people. Don't assume that, you know, there was no striving towards, towards living in any kind of immortal sense. You know, this is it. Life is here and now. Live according to nature. Be happy in what you have. I think the Stoics would have been most in tune with the Christians and vice versa at that time because of their acceptance of life view.

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    And there's a lot of good teachings in Stoicism. I'll read you a few. Just a few quotes. These are kind of like one-liners from a Stoic philosopher named Seneca. You may or may not have ever heard of Seneca, but you've heard of his brother, whose name is in Acts chapter 18. And if Duncan will read Acts 18 verse 12.

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    But when Galio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal. Okay. Galio here, the Roman official, was the brother of Seneca. So Seneca is a first century philosopher. He was a member of a very powerful, very wealthy man and belonged to a powerful Roman family.

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    But he was a Stoic philosopher. I'm just going to read you a few things. He read this. This is from a collection of letters he wrote to a younger friend called Lucilius. Or Lucilius.

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    The book is called Letters from a Stoic. It's absolutely terrific reading. You're familiar with it? Do you know what I mean? If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place, but to be a different person. If you live in harmony with nature, you will never be poor.

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    If you live according to what others think, you will never be rich. It is not the man who has too little that is poor, but the one who hankers after more.

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    Of this one thing, make sure against your dying day that your faults die before you do. Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long. Although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long. So there's a lot of good things to say about life and accepting life.

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    If you read the other, Marcus Aurelius, one of the Roman emperors, a little while later, collected, actually I don't think he personally collected, no he didn't, but somebody collected his writings to himself called Meditations, and there's a volume called Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, that's just terrific advice about living a simple life, accepting what is there, not trying to fight or pretend, you know, if some of the things out there is adverse to you, well that's the way nature is.

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    It's all the changes within you. You learn to accept things, don't expect the world to change to make you happy, you become the kind of person that can accept things and therefore you have power. We only become distressed when we judge things as harmful to us rather than understanding that whatever's out there is out there, but I have the power within myself to remain free from that stress.

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    I'm a psychotherapist by trade, I'm quoting this stuff all the time to my clients and then working out, well how do you actually do that? when people are complaining about how evil the world is to them and this person did this and this happened, this happened, and all the stress, and I say, well yeah, that's all there, but all that stress you're talking about is really from your own mental perceptions of how you judge and evaluate those things.

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    So it's terrifically good advice. So there's the Stoics, but the Stoics would say we're not religious people, they were content to live a good life here. There's a couple other Greek schools of thought that Paul doesn't mention here. that would have been the Aristotelians and the Neoplatonists, you've certainly heard of Aristotelian, Plato.

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    And now you're getting into two schools of thought that would have been more what we normally consider philosophical, that is thinking about the world and the nature of matter and the nature of justice. because the Epicureans and the Stoics were more about just how do you live. They were pragmatic. How do you live here now?

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    So Aristotelians weren't, you would say would be a, it would be a school of thought but not like a colony or a, or people who, you know, if you're a Stoic, you're a Stoic. That was it. You subscribed to that and that's definitely, you lived the way, you preached. But other philosophies would be different.

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    But the point we want to make is in all these systems of thought, they had a distinct worldview. Meaning, if you were Epicurean or Stoic, there was no spiritual world that is a realm of God. You would hear them write about God but again, their conception of God was the force of nature and it was still a material force.

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    So don't let that confuse you if you're reading the Stoic philosopher and he talks about what God is assigned for you or not. It's like, what nature? When you get into Aristotelianism or Platonism or the version of Platonism at that point, you're talking about people who absolutely believed in layers of material and more godly and in Platonism, of course, you have the complete and pure realm of just the mental, the spiritual, nothing at all physical, totally separate.

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    I'm going to read some, Duncan's going to read some quotes from that shortly. But in these conceptions, the idea was that the real perfect world had nothing physical about it at all. Whereas the Stoics and the Epicureans, you know, that's all there is is the physical world, you know, of what we're experiencing now.

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    So other people would say, no, this world here, yeah, it's there, but that's just a second-class world. It's just the shadow of reality. Remember the famous parable of the caves in Book 7 of Plato's Republic? You know, what this world we see here, it's just a shadowy representation of that perfect world of thought, completely abstract world, completely non-material, that was separate, that was better, that was different.

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    So that's what I mean by world views. The big one was, was there even a world beyond what we can sense? And if there was, it was totally separate from this world. They didn't come together. I'll give you a little bit of flavor of that. Duncan's going to read a few passages from one of Plato's dialogues.

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    This one's called The Phaedo, which is the recording of the death of Socrates. Socrates. So this, you're talking about several centuries B.C. here. Mid-middle, fourth century B.C.

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    The ideas expressed are spoken by Socrates. They're probably Plato's ideas spoken by Socrates. But what he's trying to do here, this is, in this dialogue, this is the day of his death. You know, Socrates died by, execution. He had to drink the poison. And the day before he died, he gathered all his friends to his cell and he was explaining to them why he was not afraid of death, why he actually looked forward to this, because now his soul would be released from his body, this body that was nothing but evil and corruption and tended towards bad, you know, I need to feed myself and be good and my soul can now be free to go to this pure, you know, dwell among the gods and just live in a world of pure thought and disembodiment.

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    And that was the conception of the standard Greek platonic thought. So I want to read those, yeah. Do we believe that there is such a thing as death? To be sure, replied Simeas, is it not the separation of soul and body and to be dead is the completion of this? When the soul exists in herself and is released from the body and the body is released from the soul, what is this but death?

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    Just so, he replied. Then you want me to read number two and three? read all three. Okay. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being. It fills us full of loves and lusts and fears and fancies of all kinds and endless foolery and in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all.

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    Whence come wars and fightings and factions? Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? Wars are occasioned by the love of money and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body and by reason of all these impediments we have no time to give to philosophy and last and worst of all, even if we are at leisure and betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is always breaking in upon us causing turmoil and confusion in our inquiries and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the truth.

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    It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure knowledge of anything, we must be quit of the body. The soul in herself must behold things in themselves and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire and of which we say that we are lovers, not while we live, but after death.

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    For if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows, either knowledge is not to be attained at all or, if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body and are not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us.

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    And then the third reading is, And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body? As I was saying before, the habit of the soul gathering and collecting herself into herself from all sides out of the body, the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life, so also in this, as far as she can, the release of the soul from the chains of the body.

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    Very true, he said. And this separation and release of the soul from the body is not termed death, to be sure, he said. And the true philosophers, and they only, are ever seeking to release the soul. Is not the separation and release of the soul from the body there a special study? That is true.

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    And as I was saying at first, there would be a ridiculous contradiction in men studying to live as nearly as they can in a state of death, and yet repining when it comes upon them. the soul Socrates is discoursing with one of his younger friends, Simeas, about the state of death and saying is, as long as our soul is inside of our body, it's hampered because the body creates impediments towards pure knowledge.

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    The body has lust, the body has illnesses, the body has problems, the body causes this and that. He says, no, in order for our minds to be perfectly pure, it has to be released from the body and go to the realm of the pure souls, which Socrates he's anticipated upon his death. And he said, inasmuch as the work of philosophy is to be doing that even while we live, then it doesn't make sense to be afraid of death.

63. 32:54

    It's just the continuation. So that was the Greek, more formal Greek perspective on this. Now, for a full analysis of that whole, I wrote a chapter in a book about the mortality of the soul published by Brother Thomas Gaston, which I believe is available at lulu.com.

64. 33:22

    Tom has edited and published a few books of good apologetics. So if you go to Lulu and look up Thomas Gaston, he's a brother in the UK, and you'll see some books. One's called The Mortality, The Soul. He has one on the Trinity, and he has one on the problem of evil, and I think there's one more.

65. 33:50

    But I've written some chapters to these. But anyway, I wrote a chapter called A Soul Without a Brain. That's a no-brainer. And if you want to read that, I have a copy if you can't. But the whole idea is to think of a separated soul without a brain and it makes no sense.

66. 34:11

    But that's exactly what the Greeks believe. And Socrates' experience, of course, is completely the opposite of the resurrection of Jesus. What Socrates is saying is when the body dies, the soul is released to the perfect place. What the Bible is saying is when the body dies, the soul dies too because the soul is the body.

67. 34:33

    The soul means the life. and when they come together, they both come to life together. That's the resurrection. But this is the point I'm trying to make. That worldview to have a unity of the perfection and the physical world is unique because every other ancient philosophy either completely discarded the concept of God or a spiritual world or it believed that the material world was some sort of evil or second class kind of place which is just a hindrance.

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    So if you look at any of the Greek philosophies the Gnostics of course the Gnostics believed that everything about the body is evil. We have to not give our bodies any pleasure at all. Manichaeans were the same kind of thing.

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    So many religions were it's only about the body and many were it's nothing to do with the body and the physical world. Christianity comes along and says there is a God in a heavenly realm and there's a physical realm and it's the intention of God to actually unite those and make the physical the spiritual and that was the unique world view that the bodily resurrection of Jesus presented to the first century to have a bodily see when Socrates died after spending all day trying to convince his disciples that his soul was going to go off to blissful thought they look at this body there all is gathered and they look at this guy and finally he takes the poison doesn't ever actually say it was headlocked but that's what they used and it says he could feel the numbness coming up and the jailer poked him and they said when it hits the heart it will be over and Socrates last thing he says is I owe a cock to a sleepiest please make sure that the debt is paid and then nothing and I think it was Echichriser those the phaedo closed his eyes and that was that so they're looking at him so how do they know whether his soul is gone any place they're just seeing this corpse they see there's no verification of that it's completely opposite of the resurrection of Jesus where there is verification that a dead person had become alive but to look at a corpse and say well was he right or not I don't know all we see is this cold corpse we don't know what

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    happened to his soul so 2300 years later well what happened to Socrates his soul I don't know no way of proving it one way or the other no we don't believe him in any place he died and that was the end of that but the nature of how this was set up is say it's it's just totally different than the way the bodily resurrection of Jesus set up so people could believe where the alleged release of the soul of Socrates was just cast to history an argument with no verification whatsoever so this was the unique perspective of Christianity that a physical body could also be a spiritual body this is what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 15 with what body are the dead raised so that they can now become spiritual bodies the idea of a spiritual body putting those two words together is unique to Christianity so how do we know that the material world is or can become good where does that idea come from in the first place well like where most things come from in the first place in Genesis so go back to Genesis 1 and you will read verse 4 I think it is well actually read read the 3, 4 and 5 yeah Genesis 1 verses 3 and 5 and God said let there be light and there was light and God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness God called the light day and the darkness he called night and there was evening and there was morning the first day now as you go through Genesis 1 and read the

71. 40:01

    account of the creation there are numerous statements you can categorize statements of what God said he was going to do and God saw that was done but there's they all carry forth the neighbor the narrative except there are a handful of statements that have nothing to do with the narrative whatsoever and they're actually gratuitous they don't need to be there but they change everything about our world view because they are there and the first of those statements is the one in verse 4 and God saw the light was good God saw that the light was good now you don't need that the point is you don't need that statement to carry forth the narrative of creation God made the light God separated the light evening and morning day one God made the ferment God made the dry land God separated that was you know that's the narrative but why does it keep saying that God saw something was good you don't need that to describe God's creation these are what are called value judgments it's raising the level of the narrative from strictly like a production report God did this God did this it's adding something called value to it moral it's adding a moral level goodness is not a material object say light and water and plants and dry land those are all material physical things but goodness is a value a value is not material of value it's just an idea it's abstract so Genesis introduced to us God not only of a creator of a physical realm but also one who's saying that the physical realm is valuable it is divine even though

72. 42:39

    it's physical and see this is what was radically different about Christianity when it preached the resurrection of Jesus saying God has taken something materially and it's okay to do that because the material world is a good world unlike all your philosophies that either deny this or deny that or say they're always separate yeah there's this and there's this but they never come together Christianity says no they do come together and they come together for good because God made it and it's good and not just don't let God make it but God interacts with it in a positive nurturing way again unique among any ancient or probably philosophy or religion that's ever been so not only does Christianity come on the scene with a verifiable way of demonstrating itself through the say the witnessed documented resurrection of Christ but it's presenting to people a channel and say this is totally different whoever heard of making the physical world part of the divine realm of God interacting in a positive way not like the Olympian gods who are just a bunch of characters and brawlers jealous but a nurturing fatherly way of raising his son from the dead and saying here's perfection this is my son perfected not perfected as a soul that no one could know whether he existed or not but perfected as a human being touch me feel me touch me that I'm not a spirit it's amazing we don't appreciate this stuff unless you can look at this in a bigger context just how extraordinary what an extraordinary witness of Christianity that is to even present those ideas let's go to Ephesians chapter 1

73. 44:47

    I'm just going to close this lecture or Duncan's going to go yeah right just read Duncan's going to read a few verses from Ephesians 1 starting at verse verse 9 it's 9 to 10 Ephesians 1 verses 9 and 10 making note to us the mystery of his will according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him things in heaven and things on earth I think that is the divine and the physical come together not just in the resurrection of Christ but in all of God's plan if you take the resurrection of Jesus as the first completed instance of the joining of things divine and things on earth not just God's purpose or plan but this reality this really happened that now gets fulfilled in the kingdom which is like the resurrection of a human now becomes the resurrection of the earth so you have a tangible material earth being elevated to divine status also so the doctrine of the kingdom on earth presents the same idea it's not like the earth is disposable because it's material or there can't be a kingdom because there's no God which is the way people think there actually is a God God interacts with the physical and those two bringing those together give us a complete picture lastly Revelation 21 and the first four verses Revelation 21 verses 1 through 4 then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth passed away and the sea was no more and I saw the holy city new

74. 47:18

    Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying behold the dwelling place of God is with man he will dwell with them and they will be his people God himself will be with them as their God he will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away so this would be the last statement of the unity of heaven and earth the dwelling place of God is here the unity of the divine and the material physical together not just a good idea not just a fundamental Christian doctrine but a way that separates Christianity from anything that anybody would have ever imagined in the first century this was not only a unique teaching but a unique world view that presented people with on the one hand a challenge how can we accommodate these ideas we've never never been put these two together but combined with the resurrection of Christ their minds were now open to this is how God works that God will not discard the earth but perfect the earth because God made it in the first place it's a wonderfully enlightening and unique world view statement so resurrection the bodily resurrection of Jesus introduces the world view of God and on earth and the perfect kingdom and to to !

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    to