Interview with John Haught in Salon

"Q: So if a camera was at the Resurrection, it would have recorded nothing?

"A: If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it."

What is he saying?

Let's take this seriously and see what we can make of it. Haught either thinks a bodily resurrected Jesus came into the room or not. Suppose he thinks a bodily resurrected Jesus came into the room. What do the above claims commit Haught to?

Well, either light doesn't bounce off the resurrected body, or else God would have miraculously prevented a camera from recording the light. I doubt Haught wants to say that God miraculously would prevent cameras from recording.

So, light doesn't bounce off the resurrected body. This isn't crazy. Indeed, the Christian tradition talks of the resurrected body as having all sorts of powers that our bodies do not have, including subtility, the ability to interpenetrate other forms of matter. (The standard view of how Jesus came in through a closed door involved such interpenetration.) And it is quite plausible that a body that can interpenetrate other forms of matter could also fail to reflect light. However, it also seems likely that if the body had the ability to interpenetrate other forms of matter, Christ could turn this ability on and off at will. Otherwise, the body would be unable to interact with ordinary physical reality in the ordinary way, and appendages like hands, feet, etc., would seem to be be mere decoration. This wouldn't do justice to the bodiliness of the resurrection.

But the disciples saw Jesus. So, what happened? Well, either light bounced off the body of Jesus in their direction, or images formed in their nervous system or their soul through some other process. The latter seems an unduly complex explanation. Why would Jesus first make his body interpenetrable to light, thereby making himself invisible, and then stimulate the nervous systems or souls of his disciples to compensate for this invisibility? That would be a silly kind of miracle, and we shouldn't posit silly miracles.

Or is it that the disciples saw Jesus via light reflected off his body (or emitted by his body--that seems not unlikely, too), but the light was directed only at them. Photons going at other angles would go straight through the body, but the ones that would "normally" bounce into their eyes were reflected.

There is nothing absurd about this view. But it seems rather incredible. Why this care that light not bounce off the body and hit hypothetical cameras? It seems, once again, kind of silly, and we have no reason to suppose.

So is Haught proposing something weird like one of the above stories, either with Christ being fully penetrated by photons, but stimulating the nervous systems or souls directly, or with him carefully controlling the direction that photons bounce?

Or is he denying the bodily nature of the resurrection?

Another alternative is that he does not actually think Christ was bodily present there in the usual way. Perhaps he was present in the unusual way in which he is present in the Eucharist. Most Catholic theologians--including Aquinas--deny that Christ is spatially present in the Eucharist, preferring to say that he is sacramentally or substantially present, which entails being really present, but does not entail being located spatially. If that were the case, then the view would make perfect sense. The kind of non-spatial presence that Christ according to these theologians has in the Eucharist is not a presence that would be expected to reflect light.

But on the probably still best account of this non-spatial presence, Christ's presence in the Eucharist is mediated by the accidents of bread and wine, which remain even after the bread and wine is no more. The accidents have location, and Christ is present through their location.

This could be extended to Christ's bodily presence among the disciples. Maybe he is located there through the location of air molecules or something like that. It would be a somewhat odd story, but no odder than the Thomistic account of the Eucharist.

Still, I wonder what would be the point of such a complex story about Christ's presence when there is a much simpler one avilable in the case of the resurrection: he was present spatially, in the same sense in which you and I are present spatially where we are. In the case of the Eucharist, there is some reason to posit a different kind of real presence from spatial presence (e.g., avoiding problems of multilocation), but in this case it's not clear that the reasons are present.

(For the record, I myself prefer to suppose that Christ is present in the Eucharist spatially. Multilocation doesn't bother me.)

Conclusion: One can make quite orthodox sense of this response of Haught, but at the cost of a lot of unnecessary complexity.

One can make unorthodox sense of it, too, but that would be uncharitable.

I was under the impression Huckabee was fairly liberal theologically for a Southern Baptist. When anyone questions anything about any of the various things someone might mean by the slippery terms 'Darwinism' or 'evolution', you end up with an assumption that it's six-day literalism.

It's interesting that Haught even points out that this is a false dichotomy before going on to express worries as if it's not. It's like saying, "I know it's probably immoral for me to treat him as if he's on the far extreme of the people who say things like what he says, because there are other positions in between, but I'm going to do it anyway."

"Q: Let's take the example of prayer. You are a Christian. Do you believe God answers your prayers?

A: ... I also have to think of what Jesus said when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray. What he told them, in effect, was to pray for something really big."

Yes, something really big, like, I don't know, say, one's daily bread.

This is like the thirteenth chime of a clock, which calls into question everything that went before it.

To be fair to him, there is the matter of that mysterious hapax "epiousion", which has been translated as "supersubstantial" in the Vulgate.

...amd what is meant by "six-day literalism"? On one level it's self-contradictory to have a literal day before the sun is created, but thence one concludes that the literality is at another level; and since these are divine propositions mediated via ancient Hebrew, there are probably more of those levels than there are kinds of secular metaphor (it suddenly occurred to me today:-)

Enigman, it's not contradictory on any level, unless you artificially define 'day' as the actual movement of the earth with respect to the sun. But that's not what the word means. We've defined the word because of how long it happens to take the earth to spin on its axis, and we measure that by what the sun looks like in the sky, but a day is just a period of time, and time occurred before there was a sun on any of the views under consideration.

Now there is a way that you can insist that the days are literal. They're literal days within the account, but the account itself isn't even a chronological ordering. This is like recognizing that the tree in chs. 2-3 is a literal tree within the account even if you take the events reported to be making a spiritual point rather than a historical one. I wouldn't recommend the latter view, but it's analogous to what I would recommend for ch.1.

Hi Jeremy, I was thinking of how we might speak of Martian days, for example (since I read much SciFi), and there's also Gen.1.v, where daylight is called "Day" (I've posted my thought here); but I should've said "apparently self-contradictory."

...although if a day is just a period of time, then it would be a variable period, because of how the Earth's rotation is slowly slowing down, whence it is implausible that the Biblical "day" was literally (what we now mean by) a day. (Not to mention why Creation should've taken so long as six days, or why it would've been divided up into six equal periods, etc.) Basically (to digress further) just as, within Physicalism, it makes sense to regard the physics as fixed, and the phenomena as potentially variable (between minds), so it may make sense, given Creationism, to regard the phenomena (e.g. the Biblical descriptions) as fixed and the physics as potentially variable (?)

...incidentally, re your non-chronological ordering, if the days are literally days (which are chronological entities) then presumably the third day, for example, would be the chronologically third day, unless otherwise stated (?)

The days are chronological within the account. They refer to literal days in sequence. They don't refer to an actual chronology, however. The real chronology isn't revealed in Gen 1:1-2:3. It's a theologically-organized chronology rather than one reflecting the actual order and timing of creation.

A Martian day isn't a day, not the way the so-called six-day literalist is using the term. A Martian day is almost 40 minutes longer than a day. The apparent contradiction requires equivocating between that sense of 'day' and the sense in which a Martian day is a day.

If creation is to take any time, it's pointless to ask why a long or short time. If it took millions of years, we can ask why it took so long. If it was six days, we can ask the same question. But we can also ask why it was so short in either case. No matter how long or short, we can always ask why that long or why that short. That kind of question doesn't really favor any particular account.

Thanks for the clarifications (and Merry Christmas)... although are you saying that literalism might regard the days as literal days within a non-actual chronology? To me that sounds like regarding Holmes as a literal man (as opposed to some other sort, such as the generic man) within the fictional account; which is just to say that Holmes was fictional!

What I'm saying is that the view often called literalism isn't really about whether the words in the account are to be taken literally. Both views take the words literally rather than metaphorically. The difference is over whether the account as a whole presents what happened in its actual chronological order or whether it's making theological points more poetically. Even in the latter case the words are being used literally rather than metaphorically.

Yeah, that's what I thought.