MORE THAN A KODAK MOMENT Given the opportunity, would we know an act of God if we saw one?
Tilley, Terrence W
MORE THAN A KODAK MOMENT What to look for in the Resurrection Terrence W. Tilley On 1996, independent filmmaker Beth Harrington produced a wonderful movie, The Blinking Madonna. It focuses on a...
...God raised Jesus from the dead...
...But I know now that I might have made a better response: "My friend, the camera might have recorded an act of God...
...We have to use different, charged metaphorical language...
...Right...
...Or was it just a technical glitch...
...Right...
...I was delighted to see that for the second year in a row we would do the complex eight-voice, two-choir, a cappella "This Is the Day" by Jacobus Gallus (Jacob Handl...
...Such skeptics remind me of those who would explain away love by describing hormones, joy by the action of brain chemicals, the savory taste of chocolate by mere neurological processes...
...Sometimes, if we know the mechanism, we can distinguish bogus from authentic meanings...
...The following week, I was at my parish church for choir practice...
...To "raise" Jesus from the dead-as many theologians have reminded us-is itself to use figurative language...
...Unless he was lying, that was the way it was for Paul and the witnesses...
...It focuses on a video clip from the production of her 1991 film, Moveable Feast, one of her documentaries about the feast of the Madonna del Soc-corso, patroness of fishermen, as celebrated in Boston's North End...
...Of course, we can make an argument for skepticism about the Resurrection based on our views of social psychology or our commitments to allowing only natural explanations of events...
...What will you do...
...How can one understand this...
...Don't be silly...
...Or lack of one...
...The question is whether we dare proclaim, "He is Risen...
...When Toto pulled aside the screen, the grand and glorious Oz was shown to be a fake...
...Dead men don't walk...
...Neither can tell us who might have raised Jesus or who might have made the Madonna blink...
...We can change this if we want, I suppose...
...If we give up metaphors and figures, we give up talking of God and God's acts, because in certain respects we can only talk of God in terms of analogy...
...So did Paul...
...and then he appeared to James and afterwards to all the apostles...
...Alleluia...
...The tape caught it...
...On two occasions, Harrington was present to discuss it...
...They come from God...
...Does that make them impossible...
...That's evidence...
...The agent who performed the Resurrection was divine...
...Or perhaps these are just natural events, fully explicable by physics or psychology without reference to God...
...Perhaps they were deluded...
...A colleague asked me this question recently during a "social" dinner organized for theologians living in and around Dayton...
...However it may have been done, God raising Jesus from the dead was an act of God...
...The late William A. Clebsch, in Christianity in European History, noted that no "available historical method can distinguish the way men and women personally and socially understood their universe from the way their universe actually was then and there....A license to rule out, as illusion or mere apprehension, everything testified to which lies outside the historians' own experience would collapse [historians'] narratives into little more than autobiography...
...As for me, I hope that when I sing "This Is the Day," I will see the risen Lord, eschaton de panton...
...Statues don't blink," goes the gospel according to the more skeptical...
...Now consider the following dialogue from scene 1 of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan: JOAN: I hear voices telling me what to do...
...We sing it only twice, once at the Easter Vigil, and again at the main Sunday Mass-not much "performance time," but enough...
...The earliest is handed on to us by Paul: "For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also had received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised to life on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, and then he appeared to over five hundred disciples at one time, most of whom live, though some have fallen asleep...
...But should we...
...disciples were the witnesses...
...To say one believes in the Resurrection is to state a fact (among other more profound things one does in confessing one's belief...
...The word we received is that God performed the act...
...Scripture records testimony to the risen Lord...
...Alleluia...
...There is no doubt that her camera "recorded" the event of the Madonna blinking...
...Are acts of God outside a twenty-first century historian's experience...
...We have no access to God's view of what God did...
...We picked up our new music on the way to the choir loft...
...was the polite inquiry...
...Perhaps God raised Jesus and has Jesus appear to the others...
...BERTRAND DE] POULENGEY: Checkmate...
...If they're all "events," they're still not events of the same kind...
...Is it the same as "Caesar crossed the Rubicon...
...But for those who have eyes to see, the fact that we don't need God to explain events does not mean that they are not or cannot be God's acts...
...It can't be answered...
...We were enjoying drinks, canapes, and a nice buffet supper in the dining hall of a nearby seminary...
...We could say, for example, that the New Testament testimony must be only "sensible representations" of something insensible or "symbolic vehicles for expressing faith in and asserting the reality of Jesus' Resurrection" or "merely etiological cult legends explaining why we pray to Jesus...
...Whatever the cause, it is a fact that a whole bunch of people, apparently independently, testified that Jesus appeared to them...
...All remind us of- and in a sense help us to reenact-God's own actions in making this day...
...We may explain things away like this more often than we imagine...
...But would a snapshot help us understand what God had done...
...They will recognize an act of God...
...It is a bad question...
...Let us rejoice and be glad in it...
...On what grounds...
...as if to say, "If a camera had been available at the moment of Resurrection, then we'd have proof, right...
...It was a glitch...
...The events of my daughters' births can be explained without reference to God...
...So a certain kind of true believer might insist...
...We can argue that Paul, the disciples, and apostles must have been deluded or self-deluded because social psychology "explains" better what happened than Paul did...
...Others will no doubt continue to say it all can be explained naturally, that the disciples only thought "lovely thoughts...
...Such revisions of the story are possible, even commonplace...
...The real question is, "Can you and I recognize an act of God in the events of our world...
...We will sing again and again, "This is the Day the Lord has made...
...Questions about videotapes from Jesus' tomb are as useless as questions about whether a statue of the Madonna blinking might be a miracle...
...So Christians believe, then and now...
...Well," I said, "I've got a couple of books to write-one on the relationship of theology and history, and another on Christology as rooted in disciples' imaginations...
...Thus goeth the gospel according to my more skeptical friends...
...Don't be silly...
...I have seen the film a number of times...
...Perhaps God had the Madonna blink-whether by manipulating the statue or utilizing a technical glitch in a video camera shutter...
...This "realistic" scene will have statues of angels, a light source in the cave, a discarded crown of thorns, abandoned grave cloths, an empty cross, and other kitsch (including a rock near the pool labeled, "Thou shalt not plunge the candle too deeply," installed after a previous pastor's vigor at the Easter Vigil caused a big leak...
...They will state it as a fact as they speak of it figuratively-since there is no other way to speak of God's presence...
...At the end (eschaton de panton) he appeared to me, one untimely born" (1 Cor 15: 3-8...
...Acts of God may well not be...
...We had spent many months rehearsing the piece last year (we are all amateur singers), and now we could sing it again...
...Or one like "the Madonna blinked...
...The problem is that the true believers and the skeptics think they're talking about the same thing-events that occurred...
...ROBERT [DE BAUDRICOURT]: They come from your imagination...
...We were beginning our preparation for Easter...
...I didn't realize it until a few days later, but preparing for Easter helped hatch the better answer...
...Or perhaps God raised Jesus from the dead and Jesus appeared to a whole bunch of people...
...The agents who performed the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth were human...
...Unfortunately, they're not...
...Perhaps one or more of these are miracles, acts of God...
...While the statue of the Madonna was being carried in procession through the streets, the video camera recorded her blinking...
...The camera can record an event...
...After some more polite talk, the discussion turned again to the litmus-test question: "What would a camera have seen...
...Even the verb "raise" is figurative...
...Videos and pictures will be taken of travelers and parishioners in front of our seasonal grotto...
...At best, any answer would be completely speculative-no shred of evidence is available to warrant any answer to the question...
...We can conclude that such events are illusions...
...Clebsch reminds us "critical history issues no warrant for changing what happened into an apprehension of what happened...
...I continued more or less in this vein: "It's counterfactual-there were no cameras around...
...And for me to see him this or any Easter will take an act of God...
...When we see the mechanism of a Perm & Teller trick, we know the meaning of the act: it is a magician's trick...
...It appears unmistakable...
...Yet is it silly or stupid to recognize the messy and painful joy of new life as not in some way the result of an act of God as well as natural events...
...On Easter Sunday in my church (built in 1905, Romanesque in style, German-American baroque in decoration) there will be a two-story grotto in front of a side altar...
...Perhaps those "with eyes to see" are simply seeing illusions...
...We can explain away acts of God as fantasies...
...Or one like "God became incarnate in the man Jesus who lived in Galilee and Judea in the first third of what we call the first century C.E...
...This way of thinking is misleading...
...This grotto is no less and no more figurative or metaphorical a representation of God's act than an empty-tomb story or a glorious sixteenth-century hymn...
...Specific events occurred and were recorded or reported...
...The conversation had been about future plans-and my upcoming sabbatical...
...Would this not be worse than flatly asserting that the Madonna could not have blinked or that Joan could not have heard voices...
...The camera would have photographed it...
...Jesus did appear to the disciples...
...The question is, "What kind of fact...
...Those who have eyes to see will see the Risen Lord in them...
...The question is, "How do we talk about the fact of the Resurrection...
...There would be nothing for any camera to show...
...Can it record the presence or absence of an act of God...
...It will have a running stream of holy water used in the baptisms at the Easter Vigil...
...Perhaps our contemporary historian's experience is too limited...
...On what grounds should we argue that these events were not also God's acts...
...That's an illegitimate question," was my response...
...Perhaps her universe is different from Paul's...
...Maybe this sort of listing by Paul makes people inclined to think that these events were just like everyday occurrences that might be photographed and put in an album...
...But, of course, the blinking could easily be the result of an anomaly caused by the automatic shutter...
...Magic tricks and deceptions are capable of being explained by historians...
...Did the Madonna blink...
...The root problem is that people on both sides of this question think of the Resurrection as a historical event, one incident in a series of ongoing events-arrest, trial, crucifixion, Resurrection...
...It will be built out of lumber, scaffolding, and lovingly preserved, half-century old, stone-colored canvas...
...What happened is that Paul reported what was handed on to him and what he experienced...
...There will be cameras in our church this Easter...
...In doing so, might we not erase the evidence of God's acts...
...Or we can say that whatever happens in the space-time continuum can be explained in terms of science alone and that what they saw and reported is highly unlikely or impossible...
...Isn't hoping to catch the Resurrection on film reducing the meaning to the mechanism, as though our snapshot of the risen Jesus would mean we knew the meaning of the act...
...The statue blinked...
...They help accommodate the strangeness of the past to our current naturalistic understanding of the cosmos...
...These are all different ways of talking about acts and events...
...Notice, though, that such revisions can speak only of natural events and acts, not of divine acts and the events they cause...
...Perhaps God did these things...
...If there had been a video camera around on Easter morning, what would it have recorded...
...The question is not the event, but the agent...
...I can raise my hand to my mouth or my children to adulthood...
...We cannot say what mechanism God used in raising Jesus...
...It must be real...
...JOAN: Of course: That is how the messages of God come to us...
...Are these not all cases of reducing the meaning to the mechanism, like reducing a miracle to something that can be caught on videotape...
...Would understanding just what happened as if caught by a video camera really enable us to understand the Resurrection...
...So the real question is whether we dare testify that what we "see" is an act of God...
...It was an illusion...
...These are facts: Joan reported she heard voices, Jesus' disciples reported he appeared to them after his death, the camera-glitches or not-recorded the Madonna blinking...
...So a true believer might say...
...They're talking about different things entirely...
...All we have are records of witnesses...
...We cannot talk about it factually "straight" or as one event in a series of related events...
...Take it one step further...
...Perhaps God did use Joan's imagination...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 7
