Two years ago, I looked out over my first Christian Ethics classroom in Saskatchewan. I was excited, even more so than I had been in my 11 years of teaching in Catholic schools in British Columbia. I was excited because, unlike in BC, almost all my students were not Catholic. And who they were instead blew my mind.
While that semester went on to be a challenging one, it wasn't because of the diversity of faith. |
almost all my students were not Catholic |
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I've been working on my historical-critical method for the past bit now, and I've still reached the startling conclusion. It does not make sense for the Resurrection not to have happened. There's lots of reasons why. I'm going to stick with just the witness argument: how else can a reasonable historian explain why hundreds of backwoods peasants traveled thousands of miles to give testimony on pain of humiliating and painful death, except that they had really seen a dead body come to life in a glorified way? Even more convincing for me is that these witnesses, with no textual, physical, or authoritative evidence but their own word, managed to convince peoples throughout the Ancient Mediterranean, just by their own testimony. Before the Gospels were written, philosophers and slaves and merchants and military believed that the God of all creation - the only god, mind you - came as a human being to... What? Get nailed naked to wood as a disgusting billboard of brutal Imperial violence? What a ridiculous story! Imagine hearing it for the first time, maybe having seen crucified bodies on your way into town. What could have possibly convinced you that it were true, to such a point that you'd die rather than deny it? |
AuthorRyan LeBlanc, B.A., B.Ed., M.A, is a career classroom teacher, learning leader, and workshop facilitator. Now, his cutting-edge educational methods and years of practical experience with thousands of learners are available through his comprehensive online courses. Categories
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