Today is Easter and I wanted to touch on a couple of things this morning. First, I finished Dave Shifflett's book "Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity" a couple of weeks ago. I hate to ruin the ending for everyone, but the answer is in an old Aaron Tippin song: "You've got to stand for something (or you'll fall for anything)." Shifflett interviews a variety of people who have left "mainline" churches for churches that follow a far stricter interpretation of the Bible. You can pick the book up for cheap, and it's well worth a read.

Which brings me to this "conversation on religion" over at Newsweek which poses this question:

If the remains of Jesus had been definitively found, how would that change your view of Christianity?

Setting aside the two Muslims and the atheists, the responses from quite a few of the "Christians" are troubling to say the least. Let's start by ignoring John Shelby Spong, and look at the first answer by a panelist, Marcus Borg, former president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. The Anglicans are one of the "mainline" denominations Shifflett identifies as dwindling -- and it should come as no real surprise that one of the first "qualifications" Borg lists is that he is a member of the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar is little more than a group of Thomas Jefferson wannabe navel gazers who decide what parts of the Bible should be believed based on... well, whatever's convenient to them.

It takes three paragraphs, but the answer you get from Borg is this:

Were the skeletal remains of Jesus to be indisputably identified, it would not matter to me. To think that the central meaning of Easter depends upon something spectacular happening to Jesus’ corpse misses the point of the Easter message and risks trivializing the story. To link Easter primarily to our hope for an afterlife, as if our post-death existence depends upon God having transformed the corpse of Jesus, is to reduce the story to a politically-domesticated yearning for our survival beyond death.

I give you Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15 verses 12-19 (NIV version):

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

I pity Marcus Borg. The man's faith -- if it can even be called that -- is useless. Borg argues that Jesus' resurrection is a peripheral issue. It is the issue. Borg has minimized Jesus Christ and he has minimized God.

This Easter Sunday, remember that nearly 2,000 years ago a miracle happened and everything changed. He is risen!