And, yes, I know dead people usually
don’t rise. Rumors of the raising of Lazarus and the widow of Nain’s Son, like
the previous stories of Elijah and the widow of Zarapeth’s boy, are as rare in
the Bible as today’s own resurrection reports continue to be comparatively
rare.
Yet, when I was in Chiapas, Mexico in 2009 a
Presbyterian missionary shared how his experience there had changed what Peter
Berger calls this man’s “plausibility structures.” The idea is that relationships
and fundamental assumptions tend to make something seem more or less plausible. This missionary came to trust a village who
confirmed a mother’s story about her dead two-year-old being raised to life!
This should not be shocking.
Historically such stories have generally seemed quite possible. They come from a variety of religious
traditions, mirroring world-wide archetypal hopes. Earliest Christianity
proclaimed that the mythical dying and rising God had entered history.
Universal aspirations, written on the collective mind for millennia, were acted
out in the history of Israel in a way that unleashed a newly creative power
into the world.
This seems implausible to secular people
because of their mechanistic assumptions
about the world. The church needs to
listen better to contemporary science, but I think some scientists need to
realize that they are using dead metaphors to describe a world which is mysteriously
conscious and open to renewal. Rodney
Brooks, a noted MIT scientist, who works in the field of robotics, for
instance, thinks that human beings are “biochemical robots.”
That’s what I find implausible. Brooks is a smart guy, but I think he suffers
from what is a widespread crisis of imagination that can’t tell human consciousness
apart from a robot because it’s been trained to see what is alive and pervaded
by consciousness as merely a dead, chemical machine. Surely at some level Brooks knows his thoughts
are more than chemical reactions.
Surely he knows the processes he observes are open to surprise, and that
he’s ignoring any testimony that doesn’t give his dead machine-world the last
word.
