The exposition of reasons for modern People to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus in Hans Kung's book, On Being A Christian comes about three-hundred fifty finely argued pages into the book. This second difficulty assumes you read Kung's discussion of reports of miracles in the Second Testament from the point of view of a person acculturated into an assumption that science is the measure of all such phenomena. This is a series of arguments from that point of view, not from one which assumes the freedom of God in such intervention in the regular operations of the physical universe. While even few scientists of a secular outlook acknowledge the fact, even the methods of modern science, far more than 18th and 19th century science, has to account for a far wider range of possibilities than fit into the confines of scientistic materialism. Outliers are regularly thrown out of the considered data, especially in those sciences which purport to deal with very complex phenomena.
Second difficulty. We tried to understand the numerous miracle stories of the New Testament without assuming a "supernatural" intervention - which cannot be proved - in the laws of nature. It would therefore seem like a dubious retrogression to discredited ideas if we were now suddenly to postulate such a supernatural "intervention" for the miracle of the resurrection; this would contradict all scientific thinking as well as all ordinary convictions and experiences. Understood in this way, the resurrection seems to modern man to be an encumbrance to faith, akin to the virgin birth, the descent into hell or the ascension.
The reverse side. It is possible that the resurrection has a special character preventing it from being placed without more ado on the same plane as other miraculous or even legendary elements of the primitive Christian tradition. Virgin birth, descent into hell and ascension are in fact listed together with the resurrection in the "Apostle's Creed," which stems from the Roman tradition of the fourth century; but in the New Testament itself, in contrast to the resurrection, they appear only in isolated passages and without exception in later literary strata. The earliest New Testament witness, the Apostle Paul, never mentions the virgin birth, descent into hell or ascension, but firmly maintains the resurrection of the Crucified as the center of Christian preaching. The resurrection message is not the special experience of a few enthusiasts, the special teaching of some apostles. On the contrary, it belongs to the oldest strata of the New Testament. It is central to the Christian faith and at the same time the basis of all further statements of faith. The question therefore may at least be raised as to whether in the resurrection we are faced with something absolutely final, an eschaton - something which doesn't not face us in the Virgin birth, descent into hell or the ascension - where it is no longer appropriate to speak of an intervention within the supernatural system against the laws of nature. We shall have to look into this more closely.
The research biologist and scientist, Rupert Sheldrake has pointed out that the modern materialist cosmologist insists on having one free miracle, the Big Bang, before they explain everything in the absences of miracles, or, rather, what such materialists understand miracles to be. I'll deal with that part of this passage, first.
If the stumbling block is "the laws of nature" the assertions of modern cosmologists, especially the atheists among them, are chuck full of violations of such laws, created, explicitly or tacitly unstated, so as to get past the incredible improbability of that "one free miracle" the Big Bang and all of its known consequences in our one and only known universe, including our lives, which would have to have come from incomprehensible and unknowable conditions which cannot be covered by any humanly known "laws of nature," the only such laws that we can consider in any way or even know. At the most fundamental level, almost all of those who invoke such arguments from "the laws of nature" fail to even understand that those "laws of nature" are the product of and entirely dependent on the limits of human imagination. The lay public is even more confused as to that.
As I've pointed out a number of times many if not all of the mutli-universe scenarios which seem to be created at will violate that ban on miracles, the original multi-universe scheme created, explicitly to get past the implications of Big Bang cosmology in relation to the first several verses of Genesis insists on universes being continually generated not singly but in myriads of constantly generated universes with all mathematically expressible alternative universes generated out of nothing but equations. Where Genesis asserts one such miracle, modern science is quite prepared to generate quadrillions if not actual infinities of such miracles, many of them generated by even unconsidered human activity. I would love an explanation of how that squares with the classical laws of nature dealing with the conservation of energy and matter. Though certainly not all multi-verse lords of creation believe that first articulation of the theory, it has not been booted out of science as they come up with even other, as problematic creations of universes based on nothing but equations which they insist be considered as candidates as "laws of nature". In fact, the late Stephen Hawking demanded that inclusion without any possibility of confirmation of them on observations of nature. "Natural law" without nature is considered a respectable concept among such scientistic atheists.
Other currently pursued things within professional science are as unparsimonious with the reproductions of miracles and other things which violate the "laws of nature" even as the same scientists assert those when it suits their purposes.
I have also pointed out how such widely held theories within science such as Hamiltonian claims about something called "altruism" contain in them numerous contradictions which are held to violate what are, at the same time held to be "laws of nature." The example of that which I believe I was the first to notice was in the, then, high priest of scientistic atheism, Richard Dawkin's famous "first bird to call out" fable which would have to violate the very thing it was invented to support, Darwinian natural selection, not to mention such things as the speed of sound and, even more obviously, the properties of the numbers system. You'll have to indulge me, I'm rather proud of that piece.
Such expositions of the "gene selfishness" of as much of "altruism" as such scientist atheists are prepared to comprehend is to try to shoehorn the clearly un-Darwinistic phenomena of unselfish behavior among humans and animals into their claims that the theory of natural selection, based in the allegedly brutal self-interest of organisms, is a universal explanation of the evolution of species (actually the extinction of species) by transforming self-sacrificing generosity into a rather meat-headedly incompetent assertion of selfishness, as I pointed out, sacrificing everything from the properties of numbers up to and including the claims out of which the theory of natural selection was made to seem plausible.
With such clear violations of "laws of nature" the far more durable laws of mathematics and even the foundations of all of those in the rules of logic, their citation of "the laws of nature" in these arguments strike me as them insisting on having it both ways at once. So, it's clear that scientific, modern People are quite willing to accept all kinds of things, even within science, which violate "the laws of nature".
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But as this is a matter of faith, based in the text of the Second Testament the part of this which I find most interesting is Hans Kung pointing out the different status of the accounts of the Resurrection in relation to The Virgin Birth, The Ascension and the descent into hell. His assertion that the Resurrection appears in the earliest strata of the texts is interesting to consider. Kung's several instances of friction with the Vatican have generally included his insistence on distinguishing what the New Testament says as opposed to what later, medieval theology held, when those are in contradiction.
I think the strength with which such obviously brilliant thinkers as Paul and the author of Luke and the Acts insisting on what must have seemed ludicrous to their contemporaries, their reliance on the witness of people alive at the time, some of them named as still being alive when those earliest claims were made, some of them asserted to be credible is some of the strongest evidence that something happened. Paul, who identified himself as a member of the Jewish intellectual class, a Pharisee acknowledged that he was asking people to believe something which neither Jewish nor gentiles, the other ambient intellectual culture, Greeks, would have led them to expect in a risen messianic figure.
For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
1 Corinthians 1: 21-25
That earliest of expositions of the Resurrection of not only the claim that a Jewish peasant had been raised back to life but that a criminal, condemned by authorities both religious and civil who had been put to the most shameful death that the terrorist imperial power could contrive had been raised to a state which was more than that, indeed raised to a status unique in human history. The extreme disinclination to believe that is all something that Paul would have known would inform the minds of those he was trying to convince, both his fellow Jews and the gentiles who would have almost certainly have been far less inclined to believe it. The sheer audacity of such people as Paul and Luke in making those assertions, especially Paul who confessed to being an opponent and oppressor of the earliest believers in the Resurrection and whose continued activity shows every sign of being competent - I doubt any other kind of traveler such as he was would have survived his recorded itinerary.
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