Kreeft, 2002. Chapter 9, "Look Out! It's Alive!

Chapter 9, “Look Out! It’s Alive!” (Loc. 1502)

We continue with Socrates’ third meeting of the Christology class. Socrates has read the New Testament as a follow-up to the Old Testament. He has met Jesus. His conclusion is that the Jesus as presented in the New Testament is quite real. While they participants in the class are concerned to learn Socrates’ reaction, maybe a mystical experience, Socrates wishes to discuss Jesus, as that is the goal both of the course and life (Loc. 1520). There were various groups with various reactions. Of them all, Socrates first though the disciples had an unusual reaction because they engaged with a concept of one person with both a divine and human nature. In the New Testament Socrates met this same person whose natures go beyond our reason and logic. The other participants have decided that to believe the two natures in the one person requires blind faith, abandoning reason. Socrates insists that reason can remain intact when contemplating the supernatural.

What Socrates does not understand is where the Christians are, why their lives are not changed by an encounter with Jesus. The class is offended by this question (Loc. 1586). They see Jesus as a good idea, maybe archetypal, but not so much as an historic person. The Bible portrays him as both, which changes the entire paradigm.

Socrates concludes, counter to the professor, that the biblical account is of a real resurrection and real life imparted by the real man who is God, Jesus. He also rejects multiple ways to the same God, a figurative view of the resurrection, and any scenario in which we believe in a falsehood such as an invented resurrection.