Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter by Timothy Kel

Description: Hope in Times of Fear by Timothy Keller The Resurrection accounts of Jesus in the Gospels are the most dramatic and impactful stories ever told. One similarity unites each testimony--that none of his most loyal and steadfast followers could "see" it was him, back from the dead. The reason for this is at the very foundation of the Christian faith.She turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. (John 20:14) Hope in the Time of Fear is a book that unlocks the meaning of Jesuss resurrection for readers. Easter is considered the most solemn and important holiday for Christians. It is a time of spiritual rebirth and a time of celebrating the physical rebirth of Jesus after three days in the tomb. For his devoted followers, nothing could prepare them for the moment they met the resurrected Jesus. Each failed to recognize him. All of them physically saw him and yet did not spiritually truly see him. It was only when Jesus reached out and invited them to see who he truly was that their eyes were open. Here the central message of the Christian faith is revealed in a way only Timothy Keller could do it--filled with unshakable belief, piercing insight, and a profound new way to look at a story you think you know. After reading this book, the true meaning of Easter will no longer be unseen. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Timothy Keller was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and educated at Bucknell University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary. He was first a pastor in Hopewell, Virginia. In 1989 he started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, with his wife, Kathy, and their three sons. Today, Redeemer has more than five thousand regular Sunday attendees and has helped to start over 250 new churches around the world. Also the author of Every Good Endeavor, The Meaning of Marriage, Generous Justice, Counterfeit Gods, The Prodigal God, Jesus the King, and The Reason for God, Timothy Keller lives in New York City with his family. Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 Certain Hope Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you. . . . For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them-yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. -1 Corinthians 15:1,3-10 The heart of the Christian faith is the gospel. "It is the power of God that brings salvation," Paul says in Romans 1:16. The gospel is infinitely rich and can be expounded at great length, as we see in the books of Galatians and Romans. But the value of this passage in 1 Corinthians is that Paul gives us the gospel briefly, and this enables us to get a clearer view of all of its constituent aspects and points. The passage tells us that Christianity is a historical, reasonable, and gracious faith. A Historical Faith The gospel begins with the reporting of certain historical events. Christianity is rightly seen as a life-changing experience, but it will transform you only if you accept as facts that certain events occurred in history. When I was in college I took courses studying the religions of the world. Looking back on my studies, it became clear than no other faith started by saying, "Above all and before everything else, you must believe that these historical events happened." Certainly all the religions had origin stories and accounts of various heroes of the faith. But such stories were provided primarily as examples to emulate. The main message was "Live in this way and find the path of wisdom and you will find unity with the infinite." Christianity opens not with "Heres how you have to live," but "Heres what Jesus did for you in history." First, he died for our sins and was buried, and second, he was raised to life on the third day and he appeared to many eyewitnesses. An Ahistorical Faith? One reason to stress the historicity of the crucifixion and resurrection is to provide a note of caution about the ongoing effort that started two centuries ago to create a liberal Christianity that is more like other religions. In the early part of the nineteenth century there was a movement to remove the supernatural elements from Christianity in order to align it more with modern sensibilities. Friedrich Schleiermacher taught that Christianity was not a matter of faith in historical events but rather an internal feeling of dependence on God. Albrecht Ritschl taught that we could no longer believe in miracles, and so we had to reread the reports of Jesuss incarnate birth, death, and resurrection not as historical events but as legends and parables and examples of how to live. The basic reasoning of this movement went something like this: "There are many superstitious, miraculous elements in the Christian faith. Modern people cant believe these things actually happened. So if we are going to appeal to the modern world, we will have to reinterpret them as fiction, but fiction that preserves the essential principles of living that are in the Christian faith." How did this program of modernization treat Easter, the doctrine that Christ was raised bodily from the dead? The new account went like this: "We cant believe in a literal, physical, historical resurrection anymore. Ah, but we still have the idea of Easter. Doesnt nature itself teach you that after winter comes spring? That even in a disaster and after death there can be new beginnings? That even in our misfortunes we can discover lessons and we can grow and we can begin afresh? Thats the principle of Easter." Liberal Christianity has taught that it doesnt matter whether these events in the story of Jesuss life actually happened. All that matters is that Christians be good, ethical people who love others and make the world a better place. This is an effort to create a non-historical faith, one that isnt grounded in what God has actually done in history, but only in what we do and how we live. Liberal Christianity even tries to read itself back into history as the original, true Christianity. It claims that the original Jesus was simply a human teacher of justice and love. Only decades later did these miraculous, supernatural elements get introduced into the legends about his life, and only then was he presented as a Son of God who rose from the dead. In this telling, the original faith was not about miraculous historical events but rather was simply an ethic of love. This narrative, however, is not actually an updated version of Christianity. Rather, it is the creation of a different religion altogether. Christianitys unique message-that you are saved not by what you have to do but by what God has done-is swept away. The crushing weight of self-salvation is put squarely back onto the believer, whereas the historical gospel took that burden off of us. The stark difference between liberal Christianity and the original faith was put famously by H. Richard Niebuhr. He described liberalism thus: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of Christ without a Cross." And, he could have added, without a resurrection. Liberal Christianity-a message of simple ethical love and hope-could never have turned anyones life, much less the entire Roman world, upside down. The electrifying original message was this: Gods power has come from outside of history into this world. Jesus died for our sins in our place so that through faith we can know his love and receive a guarantee of eternal life-all by grace, as a gift. He also rose from the dead to bring into history the powers of the age to come, in which we will all be resurrected and every tear will be wiped away (Hebrews 6:5; 2 Peter 3:13; Romans 8:18-25). Because Jesuss death for sin and resurrection happened in history, everything has changed. Everything. In 1 Corinthians 15:14 Paul says, "If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless," and the Greek word for useless is kenos, without power. Paul is saying that mere ethical exhortations-that "we need to work against injustice" or "we need to keep up hope in the face of anxiety"-as right as they are, are nonetheless impotent if Jesus hasnt been raised from the dead in history. If he was raised, we have not only every reason in the world to work for the good, but also the actual inward power to do so. But if he was not raised, then, both the ancient philosophers and modern scientists agree, the world will eventually burn up, and no one will be around to mourn for it, and nothing anyone does will in the end make any difference. Liberal Christianity, though now in steep demographic decline among believers, is nonetheless highly popular with the modern media, which sees it as the only viable version of the faith. But a non-historical faith-a non-supernatural faith-simply wont do. It did not change lives and the world at the beginning, and it wont do so now. As John Updike wrote: Make no mistake: if He rose at all It was as His body; If the cells dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, each soft spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh; ours. The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose. Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence, making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door. The stone is rolled back, not papier-m%chZ not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day. And if we have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Plancks quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom. Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance. A Reasonable Faith Because Christianity is a historical faith, it is also a reasonable one, and 1 Corinthians 15 is brimming with reasons to believe. Many modern theories have been developed to explain away the claim of the resurrection, but these verses provide answers to them all. One of the oldest theories is that the legends of Jesuss resu Details ISBN0525560815 Author Timothy Keller Short Title Hope in Times of Fear Pages 272 Language English Year 2022 ISBN-10 0525560815 ISBN-13 9780525560814 Format Paperback Publication Date 2022-03-01 Subtitle The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Penguin USA Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2022-03-01 NZ Release Date 2022-03-01 US Release Date 2022-03-01 UK Release Date 2022-03-01 DEWEY 232.97 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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