INTRODUCTION
What is the scope of this Study? In this age of scientific and technological advances, who is going to be interested in faith in someone who died and returned to life fully transformed with a view to transforming the entire universe including the human beings? It is essentially an invitation to all people of good will to just stop in their tracks and consider the message of Good News extended to all. No one can be forced to accept this message as it is essentially an invitation like for participating in a wedding feast. The invitation specifies that everything has been prepared and the invitees only need to attend it in good taste. The minimum requirement that need not be specified is to present oneself fittingly in the common celebration(mentioned as 'wedding garments' in the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew, 22: 2-14). Would anyone say that this invitation and the expected minimum requirement to attend it worthily is unreasonable? The same is the case with the message of Good News (Gospel) proclaimed by Jesus Christ and continued by the Apostles and the disciples of Christ and later on by the Church. What is the connection of the Good News with the resurrection of Jesus Christ?
Jesus announced the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven (Kingdom of God) as the substance of the Good News that started in his person with his resurrection from the dead. As there are innumerable studies on the historicity and credibility of the fact of resurrection of Jesus, we shall not go into it directly. Our method here is to inquire into the rationality of the belief in the resurrection of Jesus in the atmosphere created by the scientific spirit of the age, denigrating thereby anything outside its purview as rationally suspect. We want to examine this premise on rational grounds that cannot be shaken off by any reasonable person. We shall be using the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his analysis of language as the use of language cannot be avoided by anyone wishing to express something. Wittgenstein himself ended his book on the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" with the famous observation: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent".
In order to follow Wittgenstein, one has to be patient in reading through his observations without preconceived ideas about reality, way of knowing and ways of expression etc. with a view to seeing things as they are by closely looking at what is presented before us. In his 'Philosophical Investigations', No.104 Wittgenstein says: "We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state of affairs of the highest generality." In order to forestall the possibility of a dispute of what constitutes a language,Wittgenstein makes the following observation in P.I., No. 494: "I want to say: It is 'primarily' the apparatus of our ordinary language, of our word-language, that we call language; and then other things by analogy or comparability with this". What is more, we need not bother about theories and explanations as they do it in empirical sciences since everything is open to view and nothing is hidden from us. We only have to look closely at phenomena and describe them as they are presented to us as everything is open to an open mind, without preconceived notions. Here one feels a bell ringing from what St. Paul said in Romans, 1: 18-25 about our refusal to see what is plainly before our eyes for revelation of truth resulting in our wickedness and self-deceit.
In the Gospels we see how Jesus uses ordinary language to expound the mysteries of the Kingdom of God through parables, analogies, stories, comparisons etc. validating our everyday language as capable of communicating the highest mysteries. This observation is all the more relevant in the context of highly developed scientific and mathematical languages for special purposes. While this is legitimate in itself, the underlying and unspoken disdain shown to our everyday ordinary language by at least a few of the experts is not only unwarranted, but also self-defeating. Wittgenstein has shown how it is self-destructive by showing that any expression of ideas must at its base be supported by our ordinary language for its verification and meaningfulness. So, back to the everyday ordinary language as at the root for meaningful use of any language. The conclusion is that what we want to say about the resurrection of Jesus Christ too should be able to be communicated in our everyday ordinary language. The best way to do it is to look at Jesus himself how he prepared his disciples for the event of his resurrection, although at the time they hardly understood what he meant. We shall try to delineate in the following Posts the point Jesus wanted his disciples to learn about his resurrection from the dead and the new life concomitant with it, that is divine life itself.
What is the scope of this Study? In this age of scientific and technological advances, who is going to be interested in faith in someone who died and returned to life fully transformed with a view to transforming the entire universe including the human beings? It is essentially an invitation to all people of good will to just stop in their tracks and consider the message of Good News extended to all. No one can be forced to accept this message as it is essentially an invitation like for participating in a wedding feast. The invitation specifies that everything has been prepared and the invitees only need to attend it in good taste. The minimum requirement that need not be specified is to present oneself fittingly in the common celebration(mentioned as 'wedding garments' in the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew, 22: 2-14). Would anyone say that this invitation and the expected minimum requirement to attend it worthily is unreasonable? The same is the case with the message of Good News (Gospel) proclaimed by Jesus Christ and continued by the Apostles and the disciples of Christ and later on by the Church. What is the connection of the Good News with the resurrection of Jesus Christ?
Jesus announced the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven (Kingdom of God) as the substance of the Good News that started in his person with his resurrection from the dead. As there are innumerable studies on the historicity and credibility of the fact of resurrection of Jesus, we shall not go into it directly. Our method here is to inquire into the rationality of the belief in the resurrection of Jesus in the atmosphere created by the scientific spirit of the age, denigrating thereby anything outside its purview as rationally suspect. We want to examine this premise on rational grounds that cannot be shaken off by any reasonable person. We shall be using the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his analysis of language as the use of language cannot be avoided by anyone wishing to express something. Wittgenstein himself ended his book on the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" with the famous observation: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent".
In order to follow Wittgenstein, one has to be patient in reading through his observations without preconceived ideas about reality, way of knowing and ways of expression etc. with a view to seeing things as they are by closely looking at what is presented before us. In his 'Philosophical Investigations', No.104 Wittgenstein says: "We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state of affairs of the highest generality." In order to forestall the possibility of a dispute of what constitutes a language,Wittgenstein makes the following observation in P.I., No. 494: "I want to say: It is 'primarily' the apparatus of our ordinary language, of our word-language, that we call language; and then other things by analogy or comparability with this". What is more, we need not bother about theories and explanations as they do it in empirical sciences since everything is open to view and nothing is hidden from us. We only have to look closely at phenomena and describe them as they are presented to us as everything is open to an open mind, without preconceived notions. Here one feels a bell ringing from what St. Paul said in Romans, 1: 18-25 about our refusal to see what is plainly before our eyes for revelation of truth resulting in our wickedness and self-deceit.
In the Gospels we see how Jesus uses ordinary language to expound the mysteries of the Kingdom of God through parables, analogies, stories, comparisons etc. validating our everyday language as capable of communicating the highest mysteries. This observation is all the more relevant in the context of highly developed scientific and mathematical languages for special purposes. While this is legitimate in itself, the underlying and unspoken disdain shown to our everyday ordinary language by at least a few of the experts is not only unwarranted, but also self-defeating. Wittgenstein has shown how it is self-destructive by showing that any expression of ideas must at its base be supported by our ordinary language for its verification and meaningfulness. So, back to the everyday ordinary language as at the root for meaningful use of any language. The conclusion is that what we want to say about the resurrection of Jesus Christ too should be able to be communicated in our everyday ordinary language. The best way to do it is to look at Jesus himself how he prepared his disciples for the event of his resurrection, although at the time they hardly understood what he meant. We shall try to delineate in the following Posts the point Jesus wanted his disciples to learn about his resurrection from the dead and the new life concomitant with it, that is divine life itself.
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