Encountering the Risen Christ

The following outline is meant to be succinct, but I hope to convey the crucial points effectively. What I am going to summarize and categorize is literally half a lifetime of experience, so the task will not be easy. In previous posts I have tried to establish in a more or less objective terms the different sorts of knowledge and provability, the reality of a transcendent Creator, the historicity of the man Jesus of Nazareth, and the unbroken historical and present claim of Christians that the same man claimed to be God-in-Human-Flesh. I now set out from objective argumentation about how Christianity is possible, into the much more dangerous waters of my personal experience with the Christ, who is at the center of Christianity. In my lifetime, I have myself encountered this Jesus, and seen Him to be the Living God. I do not pretend that these experiences prove Jesus to be God – that cannot be proved, but only that the experiences do not contradict reason, and for that reason can be said to be reason. And they are reason enough for me.

There will be five brief installments, each briefly shining on one of these categories of experience in which I have come to meet the living God, Jesus Christ. Those categories are: community, sacraments, scripture, prayer, and suffering. The first follows immediately, and the remainder hopefully will all be up within a couple weeks.