The day after I posted last week I received my author copies of the new book Armageddon at the Door: An Insider’s Guide to the Book of Revelation. So you should be able to get copies from Amazon or at www.adventistbookcenter.com. This book is the sequel to The Deep Things of God (2004) which lays out an approach to the interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Armageddon carries out that approach for chapters 16 and 17 of Revelation and includes a number of pieces that can be found on the main web site (http://www.thebattleofarmageddon.com/).

Last week I communicated my excitement over the new book by N. T. Wright called Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I promised to share some thoughts on the resurrection of Christ and its crucial relationship to the New Testament understanding of the end of the world, which includes the Battle of Armageddon.

For Wright the old idea that all religions are basically the same is nonsense. There is a world of difference between a Muslim who believes that a boy killed by Israeli soldiers goes straight to heaven and a Hindu who expects to return to earth after death to work out another stage of his or her destiny. There is a world of difference between an Orthodox Jew who believes in a bodily resurrection of the righteous and a Buddhist who hopes to disappear like a drop of water into an ocean. And for Christian faith, death is not just a transition into a new form of existence, it is an enemy, but an enemy that has been defeated in the resurrection of Christ and will ultimately be abolished forever from the universe. This is substantively different than all other views of death and its relation to human existence.

At this point the skeptic chimes in and says, "So what? Everybody believes what they want to believe. But why should we take the Christian claim any more seriously than any other?" Wright would respond along the lines of Karl Barth and a famous children’s song: "The Bible tells me so." This is of interest to visitors to this web site, because if the Bible is not true then all discussion of a Battle of Armageddon at the end of time (which is based on the Bible’s account of the End in the Book of Revelation) is a waste of time. So we, like the skeptic, are interested in Wright’s answer to the question: Why? Why should we take the Bible seriously?

Wright believes the validity of the Bible stands or falls on the validity of its testimony regarding the resurrection of Jesus. It is not just modern skeptics, but also ancient skeptics who mocked the idea of resurrection (Acts 17:18, 31-32). Resurrection from the dead was no more a common experience for the ancients than it is for scientifically-oriented people today. What caused early Christians to believe something that made no sense at all in everyday experience? Something must have happened. Did the disciples have hallucinations? Were they deliberate deceivers? Did they make up stories based on their Old Testament expectations? Wright rules these options out as not worthy of historical rigor (you’ll have to read the book for the details on that). Instead he argues that the only credible historical approach to the New Testament texts is that the disciples had overwhelming evidence that Jesus was raised from the dead. Wright offers four arguments that he believes would make sense to a historian. I will summarize those arguments for you next week. In my mind they place Christian faith in the resurrection on solid historical ground.