When I first read this story, naturally I suspected that it was a creation of Titania McGrath; it all seemed so implausible.
Bishop Joey Royal is a Canadian Anglican bishop who believes in the physical resurrection of Jesus – and he is still employed! The catch is, he was sent to live in the Arctic.
Read the whole thing here, bearing in mind it still could be an elaborate prank:
For all the talk of mystery and meaning, what a non-bodily resurrection offers is ultimately despair. It is a “gospel” emptied of good news, an exhortation to try hard so you too can have powerful, transformative experiences. Stripped bare of its extravagant rhetoric, it arrives at the same place as the so-called Prosperity Gospel. The latter says “have enough faith and God will make you rich”; the former says “have enough faith and God will make you feel good.” The difference is that one promises material comfort and the other psychological comfort. Both are religious philosophies developed by, and for, wealthy people who are searching for some way to transcend the ennui of their secular lives. Unfortunately, it’s all smoke and mirrors, destined to be discarded when disappointment inevitably arrives.
To all that I say, “No thanks.” If the dead aren’t raised, then our faith is in vain, and we may as well find another cause to which we can commit our lives. But if the dead are raised, and Jesus is the forerunner in resurrection life, then our hope is sturdy, because Jesus has defeated Satan and disarmed the powers of death and sin. That means that our bodily existence—with all the accompanying wreckage and failure and vulnerability and unrealized hopes—are caught up in, and find ultimate meaning in, the reality of the empty tomb. Put simply, we don’t have to have powerful religious experiences, because we have new life, available now and to be completed on the Last Day.
Don’t buy the counterfeits. Christ is risen! And because of that we can rise too.
Confusion about the resurrection continues to this day. I think that many of the original chronicles were essentially myths created by the first believers to help them make sense of events beyond human explanation. Their uncertainty is probably best summed up in a comment by one of the men at dinner in Emmaus—“We had hoped,” he said, “that he might have been the one who would redeem Israel.” But at this point, obviously, that hope was fragile.
The definition of Episcopal evangelism—we submit it to anybody else who [needs] another way of understanding evangelism. We worked hard on this, too! There was a whole task force! What we came to was: “Evangelism is a spiritual practice where we seek, name and celebrate Jesus’s loving presence in the stories of all people, then invite everyone to more.”
“The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience,” says the Dalai Lama. “We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we have the ability to create more joy.”